Minutemen
We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen [2DVD]

San Pedro, California, 1980-85. 

The Minutemen were a band of ordinary guys.
Mike Watt and Dennes Boon, who met as kids, had played for years the songs of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Van Halen, Blue Öyster Cult, and other stadium superheroes and oceanic crowds.
At that time, the independent scene didn't exist. Mike and D. were aware that nobody would ever "sign" them. There wasn't the idea that anyone could create their own music: the best band around was the one that could play "Smoke On The Water" most faithfully to the original.

Well, here is the story of how the spark ignited, of how some American kids invented a new world, a new way of thinking about rock music.
The trick was simple: if there's no one who wants to sign you, print your records, organize a promotional campaign, find places for you to play, then do it YOURSELF!

The DIY (Do It Yourself) became a philosophy of life for thousands of young guys, from one coast to the other of the States. A dense network of connections began to form, venues where to play, independent family-managed friendly labels; new bands sprouted like mushrooms and traveled from city to city in broken-down vans to play in front of thirty people.

But the most beautiful and saddest story remains that of the Minutemen. Three young men who, with minimal means, invented an inimitable style, embodying a new ideal: it doesn't matter if you're a star, the important thing is to be yourself. Their mottos were phrases like "our band could be your life": we are like you listener, you could be us; or "we jam econo": we play what we can, take us as we are. Minutemen = modest, minute men.

And the beauty is that their sound was something very personal and sublime, proletarian and intellectual at the same time. Influenced by funk, certain English new-wave (Pop Group, Wire), the primitivism of Beefheart, and classic stadium bands, they coined their language, unique and unmatched.
D. Boon literally invented a style out of nowhere on the guitar: jagged, minimal, sharp, nervous. Mike Watt was one of the most talented bass players in all of punk; Gorge Hurley, raised on beaches surfing and playing bongos, had rhythm in his blood.

They almost immediately landed at SST of fellow citizen Greg Ginn (their first EP "Paranoid Time" was the second release of the label after the debut of Black Flag), they remained a niche group within a niche, understood by few. Musicians for musicians.
Their music was too original, intelligent, different from the usual angry outbursts of hardcore to be appreciated by the very young Californian punks, and so they passed through the indifference of the early '80s American underground sky, bearers of a message destined to leave a mark in rock history.

Their dream crashed to the ground on Christmas 1985, when D. lost his life in a car accident, asleep in the back of the van. The end of a friendship, of a project. The end of one of the greatest groups remembered, just when word was spreading that they were to transition to a major, gaining a larger audience. A leap that their friends/competitors Hüsker Dü chose to make and that they could not.

The double DVD, released for the twentieth anniversary of the death, consists of a documentary that narrates their story through the words of Mike Watt and many other names of the scene at the time (Greg Ginn, Ian MacKaye, Grant Hart, etc.), and is accompanied by three concerts in their entirety.
Indispensable for nostalgics and fans of the SST and T&G catalogs, dedicated to those who believe that rock lost importance after '77.