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Last April, Mike Watt took his new trio, the Secondmen, out for a harried set of tour dates -- fifty-four stops in fifty-eight days -- that echoed the travel habits of his original band, the Minutemen. The group was showcasing a new set of songs it began recording in early January in Watt's home base of San Pedro, California, with plans for an April release.
As with Watt's previous release (1997's Contemplating the Engine Room, a song cycle focused on Watt's relationship with his father and his band), The Secondman's Middle Stand will be a thematic set of songs; this time out he's focused on the illness that nearly killed him in early 2000.
Having initially displayed flu-like symptoms in January 2000, Watt, 42 at the time, was misdiagnosed by physicians, who missed an internal abscess in his pelvic region. After thirty-eight days of fever, vomiting and shakes, the abscess ruptured and sent him to the hospital for emergency surgery. "The infection had me bad," he says. "Healing up, they had to cut three huge holes in me and clean me out, and I had to heal from the inside out. My sister would put this gauze stuff in me and yank it out; she's a saint. I didn't sleep for months. But I learned from it: Doctors are like mechanics, some are shitty. In fact, it was an intern, not even thirty-years-old, who saved my life."
His health stabilized, Watt had to go back and relearn his trade. "It was the first time I had to stop playing bass since I'd started playing with [late Minutemen singer/guitarist] D. Boon when I was thirteen," he says. "When I started playing again, I found I'd lost everything. No rhythm, and I'd atrophied. I couldn't make scales and notes."
In an odd bit of foreshadowing, Watt relearned his instrument by playing Stooges songs. "Not a lot of chord changes," he says, "but they're a lot about feel." Three years later, Iggy Pop would snag Watt's services as bassist for his resurrected Stooges, who played several shows last year, with some dates set for this spring in Japan.
The slow recovery offered the narrative framework for Middle Stand, as Watt likened the process to Dante's Divine Comedy. "It impressed on me that the middle years are kind of drippy," he says with a chuckle. "Nobody talks about them when you're younger. There's old, but no one thinks about middle and then here you are in the middle. You're not a beginner, but you're not old. So I kind of paralleled it to Dante about going through these three worlds. The sickness is the inferno, and the healing purgatory and then there's getting to ride my bicycle, play my bass and paddle my kayak. That fucking illness took so much from me that I thought I should at least be able to take a record from it."
Watt's Stooges work over the summer put recording sessions for Middle Stand on hold, which seemed to heighten Watt's eagerness to get in the studio with his fellow Secondmen, keyboardist Pete Mazich and drummer Jerry Trebotic -- both local longshoremen by day. "I couldn't have a better bunch of guys," he says. "They've never recorded an album before, so it's exciting to them." As for the unorthodox lineup, Watt says, "I added the organ to put myself in a different place. To me one of the biggest threats is I Love Lucy rerun syndrome. I try to put myself in situations where I have to improvise and not do the same old same old."
ANDREW DANSBY
(February 6, 2004)