Stage Blow

Well, Mike Watt shit his pants on stage last week.

It's no secret that I have a long-standing idolatry of Mike Watt that dates back to roughly 1987. He's my guardo camino. Since fIREHOSE disbanded in '94, he hasn't had an official band in the traditional sense of the word; he's been doing one-off projects. First was the so-called "wrestling record," where Watt enlisted a cast of (ahem!) alt-rock notables on kind of a free-for-all record. Then he did his punk rock opera record, a concept record that served as a valentine to his old band the Minutemen (and their contemporaries), and to his father, a navy lifer. Then, about three years ago, Watt came very close to death when he discovered a golf-ball sized abscess in his choad area (or "perineum" for you doctors). That ordeal served as the inspiration for his latest band, the Secondmen, a bass-drums-organ setup. The album is loosely based on Dante's "Inferno" and revisits some of the emotional turmoil that comes along with almost dying.

The Secondmen have been on a US tour lately, and I always look forward to Watt tours because he puts his tour journals online and it is absolutely fascinating reading. Part of what makes it so captivating is that Watt himself is such a peculiar fellow, but he's very insightful too, and never short for words in these journals.

Anyway, in this latest round of tour journals, Watt recounts how they were playing a cover of Blue Oyster Cult's "The Red and the Black," as they do every show. This was in Northampton, MA, an in attendance that night was Murph, formerly the drummer of Dinosaur Jr and an old friend of Watt's. This song features a short bass solo, and right before Watt went into it, he yelled "Murph" into the microphone. Then I guess the abdominal torque he exerted while yelling caused him to shit his pants. Part of what made that story so amusing to me is how he just mentions shitting his pants in passing, like it happens all the time. And then after the show he was selling shirts and stuff from the stage, never bothering to clean himself up first.

There was an article Watt wrote for some 'zine a few years back, recalling funny anecdotes from old fIREHOSE and Minutemen tours (this is Watt's 50th tour, for god's sake). I guess on one fIREHOSE tour, Watt had a major stomach flu and found himself essentially incontinent. This is a horrible situation for anyone, but especially for someone who has to ride in a van all day every day. In this article, Watt recalls how he got so tired of having to pull over every ten minutes to take a dump, so he tied some twine around the ankles of his pants and just let it rip.

The first time I saw that article, I could hardly believe what I was reading. For one thing, Watt is a notorious free-baller, so his pants must've become severely stained, almost like wearing waders, only these ones are full of turd. For another thing, he was so nonchalant about this episode, almost like it's just an everyday thing.

My friend Rusty had a stage blow himself about seven or eight years ago. Our band Humpy was playing in Spokane in the basement of a huge church with the band Schlong. I can't remember the circumstances, but I guess Rusty went for a big scream at some point during our set and had a blowout. He didn't report this to the rest of us until much later in the night, but I remember that he didn't have a chance to do a hose-off either. I remember him doing some fairly extensive post-show schmoozing that night, even though he was carrying a load.

See, that just goes to show you that you can be carrying on a conversation with a person and never realize that they've shit their pants!

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On a completely unrelated topic, do any of you have jobs that entail having to interview prospective employees? I had to do four of them last week, and I can't describe how much I disliked it. In every case, it was four of us interviewing one person. As someone who has been the interviewee on more occasions that I care to remember, it's strange as hell to me to be on the interviewing end of things.

One thing I remember from all the times I've had to be interviewee is that the people do the interviewing typically talk a long time about their job, and it never makes any sense to me. People are typically so wrapped up into their jobs that they speak in acronyms and refer to arcane processes that are specific to their job, and it doesn't occur to them that someone on the outside has no clue what they're talking about.

And it seemed like certain of my co-workers were taking delight in making the candidates squirm, and I wanted no part of that. It was really painful to watch. Actually, before the interviews, I entertained a perverse fantasy where, since I was finally the one asking the questions instead of answering them, I would ask the person some of the classic annoying interview questions, like "what are your biggest weaknesses?" or "describe a difficult situation and how you rectified it." But when it came down to it, I couldn't bring myself to go through with it.

There was one guy who we interviewed that was just completely clueless. He seemed like a spoiled rich kid, and I don't think he had done many job interviews before. We'd tell him about the position, and he just seemed completely uninterested, and would turn the conversation back onto himself and ramble on about his biodiesel business. And whenever we'd ask him questions, he'd respond with these rehearsed bullshit lines that you get out of a book in a guidance counselor's office. He actually uttered a sentence that contained the words "leverage" and "vertical skill sets." It was like listening to the keynote speaker at a corporate retreat.

Then we had this lady that was so incredibly boisterous and rude, I couldn't imagine her ever getting a job anywhere. Ironically, this lady was the most qualified skill-wise, and we all figured her for a shoe-in before the interview. But within five minutes, I knew there was no way I would be able to stand working with her; she was a total energy vampire. I'm pretty much terrified of loud obnoxious people; I usually just clam up in their presence because they make me so uneasy, and plus I can't stand having to compete to talk, and can't stand people that have a pathological need to interrupt. And that's what this lady was like. There was no point in even starting to talk, because she would immediately bogart the whole conversation. In my review to my colleagues, I wrote, "although this woman's qualifications were impressive, she seemed quite boisterous, and my personal experience has been that this personality type is typically less amenable to learning new things."

You'll be relieved to know that neither of these people got the job.

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Finally, in the Carefully Considered Rock T-shirt category, Matt Hayes (who has a starring role in next week's Yalestar.com installment) sent in this specimen:

This is a band called Buchanan, and let their rock pedigree never be called into question.

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Album of the Week: Big Boys- The Fat Elvis

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