Mike Watt, along with his compadres in the late, great Minutemen, helped forge the American indie scene with his own bare hands. Bravely fusing jazz, funk and hardcore, the Minutemen were outspokenly political and unapologetically idiosyncratic. Above all, they were one of the finest post-punk bands ever. To the current generation of the American rock underground, which proudly wears its influences on its T-shirts, Watt has become a belovedly eccentric elder statesman.

Hence the joyous musical Festschrift that is Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, with a guest list that features modern-rock superheroes like Eddie Vedder, Nirvana's Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, Beastie Boys Adam Horovitz and Mike D, Flea, Lemonhead Evan Dando and Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner. The album's credits are designed to look like a boxing score card, but there's no ego sparring here. Watt's presence on Ball-Hog would appear to be strangely minimal – while he plays bass on all of the album's 17 songs and wrote 14 of them, he sings on only the opening and closing tracks. But Watt's playful, poignant persona pervades the record as the rest of the musicians, especially the singers, inhabit a musical universe he has created, unifying Ball-Hog's eclectic wanderings. The only element missing is Watt's close friend and Minutemen singer-guitarist D. Boon, who died in a van accident in December of '85, depriving the band of a longer and even more distinguished career. The stellar cast seems somehow to function as Boon's stand-in.

This album might as well have been subtitled Mike Watt, This Is Your Life. Besides the adoring musical progeny, there's also a host of the Minutemen's old SST label mates – three-quarters of Sonic Youth play on a cover of their own "Tuff Gnarl," and other alumni of the fabled SoCal indie label include J Mascis, members of the Meat Puppets, Screaming Trees and Saccharine Trust and even SST house producer Spot.

"Drove Up From Pedro" vividly recalls the night Watt discovered punk rock at a Germs show in Los Angeles; sure enough, former Germ Pat Smear sings "Forever – One Reporter's Opinion," which is, in turn, a remake of a Minutemen tune about Watt himself. Evan Dando turns in a wonderful, smoky foghorn of a vocal on the irresistibly Who-ish "Piss-Bottle Man," a surprisingly touching song about how Watt pees in the same bottle that his dad used on long-distance van drives. All the vocalists assume the Watt persona except Henry Rollins, who wrote the lyrics for "Sexual Military Dynamics," a typical Psych 101 rant that sticks out like a sore, muscle-bound thumb.

Watt's self-referential approach extends to the making of the album itself. In a blistering answering-machine message to Watt explaining why she won't appear on the album, Kathleen Hanna of the brilliant riot-grrrl band Bikini Kill decries the alt-rock boys' club that populates the record but undermines her argument with her obnoxious petulance (not to mention a grating Valley-girl-from-hell accent). Although Carla Bozulich from the excellent L.A. band the Geraldine Fibbers plays Watt on three songs, Hanna has a point, and to Watt's credit, he allows it to be made.

Still, the boys' club shines on the rocking "Against the '70s," which pinpoints '70s nostalgia as an insidious opiate of the slacker masses: "The kids of today should defend themselves against the '70s/It's not reality/It's someone else's sentimentality." Pairing Eddie Vedder's intense sincerity with Dave Grohl's unmistakable rotor-blade wallop, Watt blames his own generation for "forcing youth away from the truth of what's real today."

Watt's previous band fIREHOSE couldn't handle something like the instrumental "Intense Song for Madonna to Sing" or the exquisite acoustic grace of "Chinese Firedrill," elegantly sung by Charles "Frank Black" Thompson. But Watt isn't the only one rediscovering his range. The jazzy flavor of the album gives the players the rare chance to escape the rigid confines of alternative rock – for instance, listen to an almost unrecognizable Dave Pirner outdo himself on the squawking guitar funk of "Tell 'Em, Boy."

This album's title wonders aloud whether Watt is a self-indulgent narcissist or a humble leader guiding an ungainly ship to port. But in recent years the Minutemen's massive influence and inspiration had been overlooked. So if no one was going to pay tribute to their importance, Mike Watt followed the edict dear to the heart of all good punks: Do it yourself. (RS 704)

MICHAEL AZERRAD