The Minutemen’s 3-Way Tie for Last, 40 years later

You don’t understand punk rock if you don’t like this album.

“Everybody should do it. There should be a rock band on every block, because it can happen.”

-D. Boon

Dennes Dale “D.” Boon, the lead singer and guitarist for California band The Minutemen, died on December 22, 1985, when the rear axle of the band’s touring van broke, throwing Boon out the back door and breaking his neck. He was twenty-seven years old. His bandmates and longtime friends, bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley, immediately disbanded the Minutemen.

When people talk about D. Boon, they talk about 1984’s Double Nickels on the Dime. The album very literally towers over their discography, a behemoth 45-song double-album that dwarfs their three other studio LPs combined and has secured a place in the indie-rock canon in a way those albums simply haven’t. It’s the only Minutemen album that has received a Pitchfork retrospective review, and on YouTube Music, nineteen of the twenty most-streamed Minutemen songs are tracks from Double Nickels. It produced both their most popular and well-known song in “Corona” (made famous as the Jackass theme song) and all two of their music videos. According to famed punk tome Our Band Could Be Your Life (itself named from a Double Nickels lyric), the album sold fifteen thousand copies in 1984 alone, which is of course small potatoes by the standards of the mainstream recording industry, but for an act whose whole deal was being as uncompromisingly outside the mainstream as possible, it was, and still is, an accomplishment worthy of deep pride. Those sales represented half a decade of grueling effort as a band on the road, honing their craft and preaching the gospel of punk rock. You try convincing fifteen thousand people to pay eight 1984 dollars for an album without any friends in high places! They hadn’t even quit their day jobs, and still blasted out enough mindbending bass grooves and cockeyed musings on empire to become any anti-establishment mixtape-maker’s greatest secret weapon.

It’s easy to believe that Double Nickels, and by extension the legacy of D. Boon and the Minutemen, is lightning in a bottle. It’s easy to treat their two 1985 releases, Project: Mersh and 3-Way Tie (for Last), as afterthoughts. If you want to be mean, it’s easy to hear those releases as watered-down, misguided attempts to streamline the rapid-fire experimentalism of Double Nickels. If you want to be nice, it’s easy to hear an awkward transition towards a new sound that could have been great had it not been tragically prevented from reaching full fruition. It’s easy to believe that the band had, in some sense, already peaked by the time Boon died. It’s considerably harder to confront the truth, which is that Boon’s death, in a real sense, extinguished the fire of the 80s punk rock revolution once and for all, and froze the political awareness he embodied in a time and place ruled by an overwhelmingly popular conservative president.

Watching and reading interviews of the band from this time, they seem pretty frustrated by all the listeners who don’t get their message. Watt complained that “[the media] like the idea of us more than the tunes”. I think they wanted to make the message unignorable. The cover art for Project: Mersh snidely exclaims “I got it! We’ll have them write hit songs,” and the music features a slightly less spartan production sound and more identifiable verse-chorus structures. The lyrics are, despite being arguably more direct and polemical than the band had been since Paranoid Time, still quite clearly of a piece with their preexisting oeuvre. Both the band’s offbeat sense of humor and their impressive technical chops shine in a totally different light on the more fleshed-out compositions than on the bite-size skits and sketches of earlier releases. Hurley and Watt’s engine room grooves are still focal, but that focus is mellowed away from the frantic hardcore of their origins and towards the more melodious regions of post-punk, cowpunk, jangle pop and, dare I say it, power pop.

I’ll give the haters this much: the band was clearly in the midst of rethinking their approach in light of Double Nickels’ success when D. Boon died. Rethinking their approach had already been at the core of the Minutemen ethos from their earliest days, though, ever since the punk explosion inspired them to try their hands at songwriting in the first place. Across their discography, they are a strikingly dynamic unit, each release building on what came before. Double Nickels is largely about how punk rock changed the lives of some average dudes from San Pedro. Project: Mersh and 3-Way Tie are about those three dudes struggling to make that change actually matter. That’s anything but an afterthought.

Minutemen superfans may note that, while Double Nickels titled one side of vinyl for each band member (Side D, Side Mike, Side George), with a fourth “Chaff” side for the leftovers, 3-Way Tie (for Last), being a mere everyday single LP, has only two sides: a Side D, and a side Mike. Quite a conspicuous decision, for such a famously democratic creative team to leave George out of things like that! Maybe it’s one of their in-jokes. After all, Boon and Watt’s childhood friendship was the heart of the Minutemen. While George was out surfing, they were arguing with each other about politics and hashing out crude classic rock covers. The album artwork, a painting by D., mounts their three heads on a wall above a folded American flag; George’s is labeled “DUDE/LOCAL 357”. Maybe the joke is that democracy is a sham, and union Joe is the one who gets shafted.

Side Mike is a winsome, quintessentially Minutemen hodgepodge: a pretty bit of acoustic fingerpicking, a ditty recorded on an answering machine, a spoken word piece about the two-party system, a gutsy Blue Öyster Cult cover. Side D., though, displays a deep and invigorating commitment to and focus on Boon’s favored political causes, namely anti-militarism and Latin American self-determination. Opener “The Price of Paradise” offers his raw testimony as a boy growing up in the shadow of Vietnam, his older brother returning from the jungle to tell him how the war took soldiers’ souls long before it took their lives. “The Big Stick” is a desperate plea for collective resistance to imperialism, for solidarity with Guatemala and Nicaragua— “These bombs are made by people like me and you,” after all. The referential poetry and layered metaphors of Double Nickels are nowhere to be found; the situations at hand are simply too dire for that. The wonderful cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” that closes the side highlights Boon’s mission: a peace-and-love protest record for punks and corndogs everywhere, in the mold of the great rock bands of the late 60s and early 70s. Boon’s singing voice animates the album, ragged and weary, immediately and unmistakably human, and at a few points he truly soars with it (TO HEAL THE SCARS WE’VE CAUSED!!! WOKE UP, SCREAMINNNNNNN!!!).

3-Way Tie is not “scattershot” or “unfocused” by any stretch of the imagination— it’s the most thematically cohesive project they ever released. It’s not “too commercial” or “overproduced” either, you just want it to be Double Nickels again. It just doesn’t make you feel cool and counterculture-y enough for listening to it. Get over yourself. The amount of kvetching I’ve seen over this album having “too many covers”? I am sick to goddamn death of music nerds acting like performing someone else’s song is a fundamentally lesser art form than writing your own. You don’t have to love it, or think it’s their best work like I do, I’m not going to call the thought police. What I’m saying is that the reasons I’ve seen people give for disliking it feel like excuses. “Too many covers” is not a real criticism! You didn’t use your ears for that, you used your snobby little preconceived notions about cover bands and pop singers. Just listen to their rendition of the Meat Puppets’ “Lost”- transformed from a breezy, countryfied jaunt across rolling exurban hills to a chugging, smog-choked rumination on car dependence, released to the world mere weeks before the man singing was killed in a car accident. If that transformation doesn’t stir anything in you, well, consider yourself GATEKEPT.

I originally wanted to publish this on the 40th anniversary of Boon’s death. The piece wasn’t really coming together the way I wanted, I missed the anniversary, and I figured that was that. On January 3, however, the United States military dropped four bombs on Caracas, Venezuela, and abducted Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. This is what D. Boon was singing about— the race war that America supports. As my country stumbles into yet another barbaric attempt to dominate and slaughter our southern neighbors, all I can think about is how long this kind of thing has been going on, how little has actually changed since 1985. I’m thinking about how brave and how principled Boon was for using his platform as an artist to speak out so unambiguously about this shit in the thick of the Reagan era. I’m thinking about what forty more years of this kind of advocacy could have accomplished— hell, what two more years could have accomplished. The Iran-Contra scandal was less than twelve months from making international headlines when Boon died. I keep hearing about how punk is so valuable because it speaks out against injustice, and yet the most direct and unmistakably political album-statement from one of the greatest punk bands of all time languishes in relative obscurity. And, well, that’s just a damn shame. Rest in power, Boon. I wish you were still here to sing some sense into everyone.