In the documentary about the Minutemen, We Jam Econo, Mike Watt spends a lot of time driving around San Pedro, telling stories about the band.  At one point he explains the album Double Nickels On the Dime as being a reference to Sammy Hagar’s “I can’t drive 55”.  He said they saw Hagar as a person that talks a big game of living on the edge and being all extreme (in a pre-extreme society), and yet really safe, bland music, not daring at all.  That’s how I interpreted it.  The Minutemen, with their bizarre punk rock double album, were going to live safely, driving exactly fifty-five miles, exactly exactly.  Double nickels- on the dime.  I didn’t understand the album title until then.  I thought that was cool, and I didn’t think much more of it.

Tonight I am reading the newest issue of Stop Smiling, a magazine I mentioned briefly earlier this week.  It’s still awesome.   That’s not the point.  In a review of a book called The Vain Art of the Fugue, the reviewer spends a lot of time talking about Bach.  It doesn’t matter why he was talking about Bach right now, but you should still go buy the magazine.  Anyhow, he says “Bach lives Flaubert’s advice – ‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your work’ “.  I don’t know the first thing about Flaubert (despite having a copy of his Sentimental Education sitting on my desk right now), and what I know of Bach comes from a weird cassette I listened to when I was a kid.  I do know a bit about Watt, and it never occurred to me that he and the other Minutemen, while sitting around talking about album covers, would hit on the ideas of Flaubert as an inspiration for how they’d name their album and go about their art.  I think of all the legendary guys from that scene, the Minutemen were the closest to regular and orderly in their lives, and also the most original- though perhaps not the most violent.  I’m not really saying that Watt and D. Boon and Hurley were all sitting around quoting Flaubert- it’s more likely a situation of great minds thinking alike.  It is still awesome though.  Gosh I love the Minutemen.