TS: Minutemen vs. Wire

The Minutemen had all the depth, but very little breadth.

(Did I put words in anybody's mouth? Sorry)

I'm going to have to go with Wire, although I have to admit to being hopelessly biased in their favour because of where and when I first heard them.

I'm not at all sure about "apples and oranges" 'though: The Minutemen were a great band and I reckon this is a very good question / comparison.

Minutemen have the best album between the two, Double Nickels. But Wire have the consistency. A split decision for...Wire

A very appropriate matchup though.

for bettering their inspirations, the Minutemen have mine

Equally classic Minutemen: The Punch Line and Paranoid Time. Everything through Project Mersh should be heard before deciding...

I did like Project: Mersh though.

And they weren't "pretending" to be funky. I don't see how their "funky" stuff is any less "funky" than most other post-punk bands' "funky" stuff.

As far as funkiness, I dunno, I just find the post-punk funk of Wire or, say, Pylon, preferable. More tightly coiled.

Buzz & Howl... fuckin' roxoroxorox, tho'.

-- Zack Richardson

Heh heh, my point exactly!

In fact, I would say it's a hell of a lot more funky than most other post-punk bands attempt at a similar sound.

Party with me, punker!

A more valid ts might be Minutemen vs. Gof4, or even vs. Pop Group, since those bands were less studio-based (yeah pop group ok, but not as much as Wire) and also from a lyrical stadpoint more overtly left-political (with its obligatory white-funk corollary). If I absolutely had to, I'd sacrifice both those bands for the Minutemen. And I'm not even that into "Double Nickels".

Sure, they had some sucky stuff, but only 'cause they were willing to try something new, and thank fuck they did, or there'd be nothing like 'Drill' in '85 or the Read & Burns in '02 & '03.

This might be a fair comparison if you compared Minutemen to the first three Wire albums, but taking into account the whole Wire back catalogue puts them way in front.

FWIW, I saw Wire two years ago and it was one of the heaviest and most intense shows I've ever seen. Not bad for guys mostly in their 50's.

caught most of we jam econo today, luv to d boon 4vr
never really listened to wire, seems like that window closed for some unknown reason

I'm the opposite, I'd never heard the Minutemen till about 2 years ago, I don't remember them ever being a band people talked about or were into... imagine my surprise when I became an ILXor. Actually I did see Firehose play, supporting Sonic Youth I suppose, and I knew that Mike Watt had been in some band before who'd broken up when one of them died.

My brain tells me Wire but my heart says Minutemen. Probably because I was eagerly following them when they were active and saw them live shortly before Boon died. I didn't get into Wire until years later.

"No, it's 2:30 — whew. It's our opus."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hkDZvsewlM

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This just makes me smile — and makes me a little sad as well. I love Wire, but they don't stir up the same emotions.

Wire. Because no band in rock history has covered more ground in 18 months than Wire did with Pink Flag/Chairs Missing/154.

My brain tells me Wire but my heart says Minutemen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t85LgK7cgMY

sometimes i feel like the minutemen are the only punk band i care about

They - and Wire - are indeed two more of my Platonic ideals.

They are hard to compare for a few reasons for me. Wire just kept going for years and more records. The Minutemen ended sudden, mutated into another band then was gone. Wire is also part of the Minutemen's song writing "BIOS" as they took the zenith for getting to the good part without being repetitive to another level. Without Wire, the Minutemen would have happened but it might have come out a bit different. Myself I came into Wire a few years of heavy listening to The Minutemen and in all, I have listened to way more Minutemen and fIREHOSE than Wire.

With the usual reservations I'd side, just, with the Minutemen. For their humanity, which isn't something I say often.

― Jetlag Willy (noodle vague), Wednesday, June 1, 2005 7:32 AM (10 years ago)

still OTM, for me only "Mannequin" and maybe "Fragile" come close to the level of direct emotion on display in like a dozen MM songs

love them both though

That's a good way to distill the difference between the two. Head vs. heart. I'm not sure Wire did anything "direct" - everything has an angle, an intellectual context, a subversive element, even stuff as seemingly outwardly emotional as the tracks you cite (Outdoor Miner, Used To, Heartbeat, Kidney Bingos, etc.) - but the MInutemen were as direct as it gets.

Would have been interested to see the results if this had been done as a poll.
At a pinch I'd probably go with Wire - have been binging on them lately after stumbling across that 'Wire On The Box' film of 1979 German TV concert and being pretty much floored by it.

I mean how can you not love this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIeOzY4NQPA

eah, that whole rockpalast '79 show is so, so good. saw it once and i can never forget it.

i guess i need to give some more time to the minutemen. or more specifically, more LOUD time. i think every time i listen to them i'm always in a circumstance that demands low-to-moderate volume, and that's just wrong.

but i don't know what could ever top the early run of wire. they're one of my top all-time favorites.

Didn't know this existed until recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g55U11h7dUI

the MInutemen were as direct as it gets.

I'm not certain that the lyrics on a record like The Punch Line are direct at all. They strike me as being, if not abstract, then very sort of skeletal and poetic in how they address themes.

feel like the Minutemen could really benefit from a well-curated, chronological 2CD best-of kind of thing, but b/c SST is a disaster that will probably never happen until Ginn dies

The albums as they appear on Spotify are copyright-attributed to "tHUNDERsPIELS," so maybe the SST affiliation is past.

I meant musically direct, I guess. Ragin', full on, to coin a phrase. Anyway, there was poetry and stuff obv., but here are the lyrics to Wire's "Kidney Bingos:"

Natural splits sunburn jets price marks smart bets
Strikers luck pitch backs heap tips pit slacks
Dressed pints demon shrinks bread drunk dead drinks
Stretch clubs models box draw skin black shocks

Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun
Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun

Flag stunt rock stone dole axe crash dive
Breathe thrift take speed double take weekends
Skull row drugs hall colour bars sex calls
Sparkle finds rented rings pretty things clipped wings

Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun
Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun

Gold street spy fleet scandal food poor treat
Fire run club gun rule mob burn some
Bomb time pop crime stock frame steady climb
Fresh name donor game fair meat all the same

Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun
Money spines paper lung kidney bingos organ fun

Nothing the Minutemen do is that cut-up nuts.

a well-curated, chronological 2CD best-of kind of thing

They sort of have a couple, don't they? Post-Mersh collections, or Introducing the Minutemen, or Ballot Result? Like Husker Du (take that, Huskers!), they don't really need the comp treatment, since everything is more or less worthwhile, there isn't a ton of it, and the songs are, you know, usually pretty short.

oh I was not aware that there was an Introducing The Minutemen comp, that looks pretty solid

I guess I meant "released now, on a real label, with hype"

"Nothing the Minutemen do is that cut-up nuts."

force-fed sifted tin can turn handle puppet pull toy.

https://twitter.com/wattfrompedro/status/634642202602418176

The albums as they appear on Spotify are copyright-attributed to "tHUNDERsPIELS," so maybe the SST affiliation is past.

tHUNDERsPIELS has always been their publishing arm, it's on all the SST stuff I have, so I'm not sure that means anything. Guaranteed if Watt and Hurley had the rights to shop around, as it were, we'd know all about it.

xpost Ha, got me. Though that's mostly an instrumental with a half dozen words blurted out in the middle.

pullllll toyeeeeeee

TS: Wire's Rockpalast performance vs. Minutemen's 'Acoustic Blowout' set done for public access TV in 1985 (and heavily featured in the 'We Jam Econo' movie):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxeg5a4-epw

Love D Boon's ultra-deadpan delivery on the version of History Lesson Part II.

the Minutemen (like a lot of SST bands and LA bands generally) never had a producer who really seemed to give a shit about sonics. Like they're competently recorded but in the hands of somebody great it's hard to even imagine how incredible that band might have been; live, they were astonishing. (I saw them on my 16th birthday, they were like 3rd on the bill, they just showed up and kicked ass for 30 minutes.) it's weird, given how much studio talent there was in LA, that LA punk & post-punk generally sounds so shitty, but it's true.

Wire on the other hand seemed to get from the minute they stepped into a studio that there's a reason you're not just releasing a tape of your set.

but you have to put some of that on the band, too! they were listening to some of the most incredible studio productions ever -- great funk albums, Steely Dan -- but in the studio, it's all bread and butter, no "how'd they get it to sound that way?"

I think you are missing, because perhaps you weren't around, how contrarily "shitty" all those "most incredible studio productions ever" sounded to so many of us in the early 80s. We had mass allergic reaction from overexposure to them.....conspicuous consumption, white elephant art. Just the sound of a Dan Fogelberg record used to make me wretch. They sounded like blockbuster movie soundtracks, not rock music.

I think the fever passed generally, but to not do it lush meant something serious to the ears of the time. And yeah, lots of 80s sound has not held up as real good sounding, but I'd also include a lot of the very popular music of that time period in that estimation too.

It was a reaction, generations react. People in their 20s & 30s do obvious reactionary/revisionary moves on this board every day, when they talk about any old music.

How have we gotten this deep into the thread without mentioning Mike Watt's cover of "The 15th"?!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytq-gMUcHJk

minutemen cause theyre the greatest

That's a metacommentary on Michael Stipe's love of Wire if I ever heard one.

btw, really have never cared too much for Minutemen. I like fIREHOSE and some of Watt's own material, but Minutemen are too...dunno, something...for me to ever take them seriously.

Wire all the way.

Squaring off Minutemen and Wire makes zero sense but they are both in the heavens as Great Originals of what can be accomplished in a rock group.

"it's weird, given how much studio talent there was in LA, that LA punk & post-punk generally sounds so shitty, but it's true."

everyone should have hired joan jett. then everything would have sounded as good as the germs album. or they should have gotten that guy from The Middle Class who produced the first Adolescents album cuz that album sounds cool too.

now i wonder if being in LA meant even shitty little studios charged a lot of money to record and punks just had to make do with what they could find. anywhere else in the world you could have found some cheap little studio to make a record.

this guy engineered some good stuff along with that adolescents record:

http://www.discogs.com/artist/260019-Thom-Wilson

i don't know why i never loved minutemen like everyone else my age loves minutemen. i really liked project:mersh when it came out. i like them in small doses. i don't think i've ever been able to listen to double nickels all the way through. but i've listened to zen arcade a million times. in 2015, i'd rather just hear up on the sun. i was never a big mission of burma fan either and they seem even more closely related to wire to me. i could live with just revolver by burma and little man with a gun in his hand by minutemen on a mix tape and be happy with that. wire though...man, they hit me so friggin' hard. i even like colin newman solo more than minutemen.

but see diff between single version of "Lexicon Devil" and the version on the album,

and the Adolescents whose sound is a bit overloaded, like "Amoeba" could be better without the overdubs. For that sound done well see The Undertones. Adolescents sound NEARLY as good as the first singles by Crime and Flesheaters and Negative Trend and Skulls and Electric Eels and Bats and etc., and etc.

Husker Du actually don't travel well sonically - have you ever stuck a HD song on a mix and suddenly they sound diminished and kind of annoyingly trebly in the context? They demand isolated attention, played loud. Meanwhile I've stuck that "Lexicon Devil" single into numerous mix tapes and people tap their feet.

i'm so used to the husker sound that it has just become another member of the band at this point. certainly not ideal by any means. if i had a time machine i would put husker in southern studios with john loder and yikes! the very thought of that makes me jump.

and in general i like the sound of anywhere but LA punk more than LA punk sound. though i agree the late 70's were another thing all together. nice and spikey for the most part. adolescents album not perfect but the guitar is the star and it also makes me jump appropriately. it's way more put together than a lot of same-era stuff. so, if you like crudeness/loudness it's not that.

i like Spot's photography...

hey, Adolescents sound fine to me, I was only objecting to them as sounding better than The Minutemen. Also, I insist, good punk production is not "crude" any more than the musicianship is crude. Wait, everybody hasn't yet agreed the musicianship in punk is not crude. I'm on chapter 7 of my argument when I need to be doing chapter 3....

i wasn't comparing adolescents sound to minutemen really. just using them as an example of LA punk sound that i enjoy. because in general i tend to like early 80's punk sound from east coast/midwest/texas/u.k./the rest of the world more than the sound that those early 80's LA bands got. which someone else was also mentioning. i do kinda wish all early black flag sounded as good to me as early minor threat or early bad brains. and i love early black flag and all that. don't get me wrong. i really do.

(even a band like the dickies. everyone loves the first two dickies albums and they sound cool but they can't compare sound-wise to a MILLION records coming out of the u.k. in 1979. and a lot of those million records were on major labels and they sounded amazing and some were made in a shoebox in a garden shed and THOSE sound amazing.)

Oh yeah, Ohio and Texas made better noise than LA, and I already mentioned a couple SF bands too.

(but there was an indigenous folk sound in the u.s. that i never tire of and somehow thousands of people here tapped into it at the same time and then it went away and then it came back again forever and ever.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnBIhrJo11Y

this may just be a long-winded way for me to say that one gang of four single sound-wise kinda shits on most LA punk from a very great height. to be alex in nyc about it.

i also prefer gang of four to minutemen.

I think you are missing, because perhaps you weren't around, how contrarily "shitty" all those "most incredible studio productions ever" sounded to so many of us in the early 80s. We had mass allergic reaction from overexposure to them.....conspicuous consumption, white elephant art. Just the sound of a Dan Fogelberg record used to make me wretch. They sounded like blockbuster movie soundtracks, not rock music.

I think the fever passed generally, but to not do it lush meant something serious to the ears of the time. And yeah, lots of 80s sound has not held up as real good sounding, but I'd also include a lot of the very popular music of that time period in that estimation too.

I know that -- I was there, too; I think I mentioned that I saw the Minutemen on my 16th birthday -- but I think that was a collectively infantile response, one we should all be a little embarrassed about. people with good ideas & good instincts couldn't separate "I don't like Dan Fogelberg's music" from "fuck, this sounds incredible, whatever bullshit Dan F is on musically his producers are about their fucking business." that's to their/our lasting shame; it's an immature, genuinely bullshit way of listening.

I get it, but it's a shame, because there are many great bands of the period (and region, specifically -- pretty much nobody on SST ever made a record that sounds good) whose records are a shadow of what they ought to have been -- and all because of some silly generational/Oedipal "oh no, we don't wanna be like the olds" laziness. Wire didn't have this problem, they knew if you wanted to make records people wouldn't later say "you really had to've been there" about then you gotta actually book more than 48 hours in a studio.

I take back the SST remark for Mirage, Mirage sounds rad.

3 bands I was really into, that I didn't stay into & that I can't believe are still regarded as so much better than everybody else in their comparative time period:

Gang of Four, Joy Division, Television.

If Gang of Four had ceased to exist in 1982, the legacy would've been unimpeachable. Joy Division is fine, New Order is better. I dngaf about Television and never have.

i like television's nerd free birds a lot but other than those two songs i don't really care about them much. gang of four's early stuff - and SOUND - is good enough to ignore anything sub-par later. though i also like shriekback actually. joy division are still better than almost everybody in their comparative time period.

Gang of Four

their records do not hold up well for me. my peer group was pretty fuckin gaga for these guys, I like them fine but honestly I think Shriekback was more fun to listen to

Joy Division

I am too reactionary about their canonization to judge whether they're any good. I hate how my peers are basically "there was never anything like BEATLEMANIA" about this fuckin band, like I desperately need fellow grandpas to stfu about Joy Division forever

Television

1st two albums are fucking phenomenal to me, but I didn't hear them until long after the fact.

pere ubu shit on television from a very great height. IMHAINYCO.

ubu never had a guitarist who Verlaine couldn't shit on from the fucking moon, c'mon man

great great band.... pere ubu "I Will Wait" predicts the Minutemen composition style pretty effectively

I think that was a collectively infantile response, one we should all be a little embarrassed about. people with good ideas & good instincts couldn't separate "I don't like Dan Fogelberg's music" from "fuck, this sounds incredible, whatever bullshit Dan F is on musically his producers are about their fucking business." that's to their/our lasting shame; it's an immature, genuinely bullshit way of listening.

eh, I don't know. That kind of production is just one way of doing things, not THE WAY. Lindsey Buckingham obviously wasn't satisfied with the best that money could buy, and obviously didn't think all the punk sound 'sucked'

they STILL make good music too. there is 21st century ubu and thomas music that is awesome.

70's american punks didn't really care who they went into the studio with. you got more random results because of this. i kinda like that. there were some odd pairings.

eh, I don't know. That kind of production is just one way of doing things, not THE WAY. Lindsey Buckingham obviously wasn't satisfied with the best that money could buy, and obviously didn't think all the punk sound 'sucked'

no, of course that's true, which is exactly why LA punk was so ridiculous on this point. there is no "THE WAY." there's just "what serves your music best, what presents it in the way that most honors it?" almost nobody in LA got that, because they were too busy reacting to LA studio culture. it's understandable -- they hated the SoCal rock culture, what self-respecting punk wouldn't. except that they then chose to just make their albums sound like garbage in protest. cool, guys, you "win," great legacy, nobody who didn't hear it when it was new will ever know what the big deal was about "double nickels"!

there's a million ways to record music. "I don't wanna be like those guys, so I'm going to reject their methods" is the worst one.

pere ubu also better than minutemen. for the record.

I think I'm in the old bro minority in that Pere Ubu always seemed like a better idea than actual band to me. like, I prefer Peter Murphy's version of "The Final Solution" to Ubu's. ubu could really bring the pain live but I don't give a shit about their records, really.

that's sad.

i mean speaking of production, ubu final solution 45 is up on top of some friggin' mountain to me.

nobody who didn't hear it when it was new will ever know what the big deal was about "double nickels"!

You're out of it as far as what has continued to attract new listeners.

Minutemen doc on Netflix. Where's the Dan Fogelberg doc?

FUCK YOU I'M HIGH AS A KITE

https://thissfest.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/danfogelberg.jpg

You're out of it as far as what has continued to attract new listeners.

dude literally everybody knows the CD mastering job of Double Nickels was a catastrophe. it's terrible. nobody at SST gave enough of a shit to keep track of the original reels so who even knows where they are (in a warehouse in Tyler, TX, most likely, where they'll be when Ginn's estate goes into probate) but that thing sounds awful. it attracts new listeners despite the pedestrian, embarrassing production. the Minutemen deserved about a million times better than they ever got in the studio, as anybody who ever saw them live can attest.

like you're arguing "the minutemen were good, these people whose records sound great are not" -- most folks age out of the punk mindset enough to know which values (make great music, never rest on your laurels) were good and which (pay no attention to whether your music sounds like shit, be bad at business) weren't. I hate plutocrats but I don't pretend that the food they eat tastes shitty, because it probably tastes great.

i love that i had no idea who you were until this thread. cuz this thread is like a fingerprint! hahaha! #onelove

I yam who I yam!! and I'll always be mad that one of the most vibrant scenes in the history of music erased itself by entrusting all its sonic documentation to people who were like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Elbow_coude.JPG hey Watt is this my ass? if it's not my ass what is it? I can't really tell man I'm all upside down. anyway I guess I'll pan the guitars right and just send the tapes wherever for mastering??? idk w/e at least we're not HIPPIES right

Interesting discussion - fwiw I find the production on most of the Minutemen's records a lot less of an issue than then production on most other SST records from the same timeframe. E.g. Zen Arcade I think is almost ruined by the production at times, just how tinny it sounds, but Buzz or Howl, What Makes A Man.., Double Nickels mostly sound fine to me?
People on here with actual experience of recording music please correct me if I'm wrong but - I'm wondering if this is because the type of music the Minutemen were making was less 'heavy' than some of the other SST bands, like there's not many sonic layers to it, not much going on in terms of processing or effects on the guitars, so recording it just becomes about capturing each instrument with some degree of clarity - which I feel like they did OK at?

they were so stoned. they didn't know. what are you gonna do?

lou barlow is playing solo at my store tonight. i hope he does some acoustic deep wound songs.

There's no real desire for Watt and Hurley for Minutemen to get the Meat Puppets Ryko treatment is there?

great great band.... pere ubu "I Will Wait" predicts the Minutemen composition style pretty effectively

― Vic Perry, Sunday, 6 September 2015 20:23 (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Totally.

land speed record is my favorite sounding husker album. i actually love how recurring dreams sounds on zen arcade. dub metal. to quote an ilm thread. probably my favorite song on the album too.

Minutemen music was made for small clubs. Husker Du you can imagine getting away with going a bit bigger - bigger sound, distortion heavy, longer tunes.

I'm wondering if this is because the type of music the Minutemen were making was less 'heavy' than some of the other SST bands, like there's not many sonic layers to it, not much going on in terms of processing or effects on the guitars, so recording it just becomes about capturing each instrument with some degree of clarity - which I feel like they did OK at?

yeah, some of it is that the Minutemen's aesthetic was largely "record it, document it." but Double Nickels was mixed at Radio Tokyo in a single eight-hour session. That's just stupid, really. Most mixers, if they're working with anything at all, will mix two to four songs in a day. I once made somebody mix seventeen songs in two days, but there were no drums on the tracks. I do think, as Vic says, there was a reaction against perceived excesses of the LA industry -- coupled with mythmaking about Never Mind the Bollocks (which cost plenty to make and is beautifully recorded and had an entire pre-production run at the whole album) being a just-play-your-tunes record. Also, economically, punks and post-punks couldn't afford proper LA studios, which were then some of the most sought-after spots in the world and priced accordingly. So if it came out of LA, there was a good chance it was a guy who'd gotten some equipment and built himself a space. You can make good-sounding records in those spaces for sure, but not on 200 bucks all-in from SST.

that's what i said above. about LA studios. they had to be pricey for even a shitty one.

"Good Sound" is no objective entity, but an opinion. Punk records sound great. 50s records like "Book of Love" and "Get a Job" sound great. Jamaican dub records from the 70s sound great. Early 80s hip hop records sound great. Old 78s of all sorts sound great - especially over a gramophone, wow, ever heard that? so loud, so clear.

And Slanted & Enchanted sounds great, and Swordfishtrombones sounds great. They sound great because they have sounds you don't get anyplace else. I put my ear out the window, what do I hear? Plenty of good stuff. Just not that.

High fidelity to what exactly? It's Platonism run amuck. Super produced records are creations, not mirrors, and the values they embody do not come free.

I love Steely Dan, love them deeply, and accept their bizarre sense of what "sounds good" as a necessary spur to their own art. Wishing it on everybody else is quite another thing.

Cheers for the response JCLC - I do find the details about this sort of thing fascinating.

how do we feel about bob clearmountain's take on the dead boys?

was listening to the Homosexuals box set the other day and man oh man it just sounds so friggin' cool! and they made that stuff for what a dollar? something in the water in the u.k. 1979 to 1984 is just...there are few comparisons in the states at that time. so many VARIED sounds and techniques and engineering jobs. we had mitch easter in his garage...

(really really glad that chris blackwell made that first B-52's album. it's a work of genius. some cali stoner would have made it sound like the manhattan transfer...)

everyone from cali should have gone to ohio to make their records.

"Good Sound" is no objective entity, but an opinion.

this is totally true -- pretty much nobody would cast me as a sound nerd. I made my bones on fuckin direct-to-cassette! but LA punk records sound pretty crappy by punk standards imo. listen to the shit coming out of SF during the same period - the music's not as good, but the producers seem to have been listening to the bands, trying to capture the energy. LA punk records just sound two-dimensional and drab imo. not universally, there's decent ones, but for whatever reason LA punk & post-punk producers are just profoundly uncurious. but it's not any "there's a right way and there's a wrong" way schtick I'm on. it's "some producers are curious and engaged, others are pretty bad at their jobs." it's not about money, it's about talent.

Swordfishtrombones is an expensive ass record though fwiw. Sunset Sound. That's a costly, costly studio, and Waits wasn't there for a day-and-a-half like a lot of the SST bands got at Radio Tokyo

Well those are not typical audiophile statements, so, no further quarreling and quibbling from me.

The Clean are the best sounding band that belongs to the energy of that era. By the way.

yeah I consider the whole New Zealand scene an example of how to do zero-budget, make-your-own-rules recording the right way - or a right way. people really tinkering and exploring, making much out of little.

doses. i don't think i've ever been able to listen to double nickels all the way through. but i've listened to zen arcade a million times. in 2015, i'd rather just hear up on the sun.

I love the Minutemen forever but up on the sun is by far the winner of SST for me today too. It's a good sounding record too. Better sounding than mirage IMO. Though not by miles.

I always liked the songs on Up on the Sun better but there's something about the Mirage sound that's so pristine. Those staccato bits on the title track under the vocal harmonies. So great.

Joanie otm. I do like double nickels but its practically in spite of the dry, thin sound.

Scott also otm about the jett germs record, which sounds great.

i love the dry sound of double nickels
not that familiar with the last 3 bands mentioned itt but after sampling the clean, the germs and meat puppets doesn't sound that great to my ears

How much of the perceived thinness of the Minutemen studio sound is due to d boons deliberate cutting of all the bass and mid frequencies from his guitar sound in order to leave watt with his own sonic real estate. That telecaster sounds like an am radio but it is on purpose.

I prefer Curt Kirkwood's tone, that sparkly sound with his bro's tone is q special

Oh god curts guitar sound 84-86 is like the home of my spirit

Jon not Jon is on the right tack. The Punch Line sounds like Trout Mask Replica (another record recorded in 15-20 hours or whatever it was) to me except I think I'm just not as wild about the sound coming out of the amps (or like Watt's ringing round wound strings vs. Mark Boston who I'm sure had flatwounds).

the weirdos were the best recorded la punk band by a mile. kudos to the dude who produced "we got the neutron bomb", it still sounds amazing.

ubu never had a guitarist who Verlaine couldn't shit on

Who knows who plays what on the first two singles. Laughner, Wright, and Herman are all credited with guitar and bass.

They made one more stab at being a two guitar band in the early days with a brief stint by a guy named Alan Greenblatt. I believe he only plays on one song, "Untitled," but that is a totally great track.

after sampling the clean, the germs and meat puppets doesn't sound that great to my ears

penetrating analysis after thoughtful examination of the catalogues of these unimportant artists, deeply charitable of you

kudos to the dude who produced "we got the neutron bomb", it still sounds amazing.

Geza X btw! still produces. did some DKs stuff back then, and the Germs. (and pre-Rollins Black Flag, which sounds terrible to me, but I don't like Black Flag so I would say that.)

i was gonna mention Weirdos! always sounds great.

had a nice chat with lou barlow tonight about hardcore. he used to play shows with Deep Wound at the grange hall here in Greenfield. he saw Flipper there! everybody played the grange hall back then. they had amazing bills. he mentioned reflex from pain and i mentioned 76% Uncertain ( both CT hardcore and connected to each other) and the young band from CT that opened up Lou's show tonight had a kid in it whose dad was in 76% Uncertain! which was funny. the New England circle game. (also the young band played music that totally sounded like 90's indie rock a la sebadoh, etc.)

I have never heard minutemen on cd, and I think the records and cassettes sound fine. I have heard really bad things about the cds from people I trust, though.

was listening to the Homosexuals box set the other day and man oh man it just sounds so friggin' cool! and they made that stuff for what a dollar?

yeah but those records were all recorded in a "real" studio during the off-hours, and they spent a lot of time on them, it was some kind of sweet backdoor deal iirc

Studio where the Police recorded, right?

man i love the sound of the minutemen records, especially "what makes a man start fires?" i mean i dont think there has ever been a more brootal bass tone ever. seriously. pere ubu are like a dad band.