Prague Rock

God damn, did I ever have a crisis of conscience surrounding the latest Mike Watt album, "The Secondman's Middle Stand"! I'm sure it's no secret to readers of this thang that I fancy myself among the most exalted and erudite fans of Mike Watt. It's more than just a hobby for me; it's more of an all-encompassing thing for me, a full-featured life philosophy that transcends mere music. Moreover, it had been something like seven years since the last time he put out an album, so I had built up a fair amount of anticipation about it. So imagine my utter chagrin and mortification when, upon first listen, I was all, "I think this album might kinda... s-s-suck!" I felt like I was giving it as fair a shake as I could, and yet I just was not digging it at all.

A bit about this record: in 2000, Mr. Watt had discovered a very large abscess in his choad area and almost died as a result of it, and had something like 40 days of fever and was bedridden for eight weeks. I may have those numbers wrong, but in any case, it sounded like a horrendous ordeal. Following that, Watt worked up an album-length opera about this near-death experience based loosely on Dante's The Divine Comedy. And he enlisted a Mr. Pete Mazich to play Hammond organ on this album, the first album to deviate from the guitar-Watt-drums lineup.

The organ was part of the problem for me initially. My feeble brain isn't really conditioned to appreciate the finer points of organ playing, and to me, the album just sounded like a wash of loud, trebly organ, like something you'd hear at a baseball game or ice-skating rink. Having spend the last almost 20 years of my life playing and listening to guitars, basses and drums to some extent, I've been able to build up a fairly shrewd listening acumen for those particular instruments. But when I start hearing keyboards, I start feeling pretty helpless and and dumb, like someone just dropped me off stark naked in downtown Pyongyang. Not having ever played a keyboard, I don't have any idea of the tactile requirements of playing one, I can't really relate to the instrument.

Luckily, upon repeated listenings, I was able to appreciate the album more and more, to the point where I now think that Pete's organ playing is balls-out cool. With all the stops and starts and other weird shit that Watt puts into his songs, the presence of the organ lends an undeniable prog feel to the whole record. And the baroque feel of the organ juxtaposed with all that off-kilter Watt stuff is pretty unusual; this is probably the most peculiar album I've heard in several years. But now it's got me in its grip, and I can't stop listening to it.

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My old friend Charlie got him a scanner recently and has been laying photos on me lately from the early 90s. What some crazy, indolent youths were we! In the following photos from about the fall of 1990, Charlie and I and some other dudes were having some sort of beard-growing contest. When the contest was settled (I don't recall who won or how it was judged), we decided that before we shaved our beards off, we'd reconfigure them into ridiculous beards such as the Confederate-era job you see me sporting. I think I even went to work at the ice cream store for a day with this beard going. Man, I can't believe what a dirtbag I looked like back then. I really looked like fuck pie, to borrow a term from Saint Bob Goldthwait. I was a slovenly son of a bitch, too; I wasn't going to school yet, and I was working maybe 20 hours a week for $3.35 an hour, and spent most of my free time doing shit like what you see in the photos here.

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The P.E.A.R.T. drum machine (via Rick S.)

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