pedro bound! (2)
Posted 27 January, 2005 in music
our friends M & M were in town this weekend. after brunch with my da, we decided to journey down to san pedro to find watt.
mike watt is a bassist who founded the bands the minutemen and fireHOSE. since fireHOSE broke up, he’s been touring north america with various bands. as he says on his site, he jams econo, which means he drives the “boat” (his big white van) from gig to gig. he is a brilliant bass player.
watt has a language all his own, which is part of the reason my friends and i love him so. he keeps an online diary whenever he goes on tour. in the morning he “pops,” (wakes up) and either hoses off or soaks. in the afternoon, he konks in the van pre-gig, wearing his trusty konk mask. then he goes on stage where if he isn’t having a good night, he might blow some clams onstage. this does not mean he is fellating shellfish, it means he has screwed up the song he’s playing.
i have seen watt play several times. he used to play around the corner from my old apartment in santa monica, at a bar called 14 Below. i’ve hung out in the pool room there while watt sits a few feet away. i’ve also seen him in toronto with M & M. and when i was 16 i also saw him play with fireHOSE. he rocks the house every time.
so off we went in search of watt. pedro is a nice town. the ports and crazy seafaring equipment are pretty in an industrial kind of way. we took pictures on a bench that said SAN PEDRO on it, because this, after all, is the home of watt, and we were there, and that is worth recording for posterity. we got coffee at sacred grounds, in among people like: a weird twitchy young dude on his cell phone talking to someone he was ordering some food for??”you can have one or two SIDES! which SIDES do you want? one or two SIDES?”; a fifty-year-old couple in head-to-toe leather; and several people who seemed like they could be homeless but probably were just skanky that way. everyone seemed to know each other, which was really unusual and nice.
after hanging out there for a while, checking out the kickass surplus store down the street and walking in a park overlooking the shoreline, it got cold and we bailed. we were looking for land’s end, where watt says he checks out the sunrise. maybe he would be there checking out the sunset too! we couldn’t find land’s end, so we contented ourselves with shouting “watt!” at random vans we saw.
back at home, i checked out watt’s pedalin’ path, to see if he bikes down to land’s end. instead i found the words to his song “pedro bound.” “went south on pacific/till i hit land’s end,” he sang. now we know! if we’re ever in pedro and up at the crack of dawn, we know where to find watt.
m & m also discovered that watt had played at sacred grounds that very night??about four hours after we left. so close, yet so very far away.