1984. The year of George Orwell. The Apple Macintosh computer is introduced. Ronald Regan defeats Walter Mondale to win a second term as President of the United States. In the city of Bohpol, India, a chemical leak from a Union Carbide plant kills more than 8,000 people overnight and injures over half a million people (with more dying from their injuries over time, the death toll is now over 23,000) in the worst industrial disaster in history.
And I Just Called To Say I Love You won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Somewhere in the midst of that doleful year a little known trio from San Pedro, California released a double album called "Double Nickels on the Dime", their fourth studio effort.
The Minutemen were punk. They were not punk in they way the Sex Pistols were punk, with some Svengali manipulating the fashionable strings of manufactured chaos. They sure as hell weren't punk the way groups like Green Day define punk these days. GOD IN HEAVEN, it hurts my eyes to even see the words "Green", "Day", and "punk" in the same paragraph.
No, The Minutemen were punk. Honest to God and Man punk. Don't Give A Shit Punk. With song titles like "Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?", "The Roar of the Masses Could be Farts" and "God Bows To Math", The Minutemen were funny and furious, epic and exact, smart and scathing, wanting to change the world for better and party down with a brewski in each hand while doing it. The lead singer was the gruff, chubby, disheveled D.Boon, who was killed in 1985 when the van he was riding was ran off the road and Boon was thrown out the back door, dying on impact.
Double Nickels on the Dime is, again, a double album: 43 tracks clocking in at around 74 minutes. It has elements of funk, jazz, hardore, folk, acid rock, all wrapped up in glorious bites of life seldom longer than three minutes long. Slogans like "Arena rock is the new wave" and "Punk rock is the new nostalgia" (!!!) were carved into the very vinyl of the record. DNotD is an unequivocal masterpiece. A masterpiece of simplicity and experimentation, of power and insight, of everything that makes music cool.
In the movie High Fidelity, a customer asks record store employee and general layabout Jack Black if he has a copy of I Just Called To Say I Love You. Black says that, yes, they have a copy in stock.
"Great, Great, can I have it?"
"No, no, you can't."
"Why not?"
"Well, it's sentimental tacky crap. Do we look like the kind of store that sells I Just Called to Say I Love You? Go to the mall."
That's the kind of store that would sell copies of Double Nickels on the Dime. Good luck trying to find stores like that anymore.
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