Bass playing legend Mike Watt is wearing a neon green rain jacket, light blue jeans, and beach sandals, while leaning on a forearm crutch, standing in the bright cool winter sun on Pacific Coast Highway in Hermosa Beach. The venue where he’s about to be on a panel spilling spiels about South Bay punk rock has not yet opened doors. The 67-year-old starts our on-the-sidewalk chat bellowing with deep pride, “I’m about to go on my 72nd tour!”
He’s heading out for 52 gigs in 52 nights across America and back with guitarist Mike Baggetta and drummer Steven Hodges as the band Main Steam Stop Valve (mostly written as mssv), a name Watt tells us he got from a line in the Steve McQueen movie The Sand Pebbles. The trio are touring for their experimental but accessible new album On and On (out March 7 on Big Ego Records). Attendees can expect to hear that album, but also the seedling songs of a new album that will be recorded immediately after the nonstop tour. As they did with On and On, they intend to once again play unrecorded songs while on tour, then immediately jump in the studio and lay them down for posterity.
Speaking with Baggetta via Zoom, a couple days after talking with Watt, he tells us he writes the songs and then the trio lets them grow on tour: “I think if you’re playing a song for one, two, or three months, it’s healthy to have it evolve and let it turn into whatever it wants to be. That’s one of the reasons I like making the record at the end of the tour, because I can put put this music together and it sounds a certain way in my head, but the beauty of playing with other people is letting them bring stuff into the mix with the music…”
“I write their parts to start with their sound in my ear. I’ve listened to both of those guys so much that I have an idea of the qualities of their sound and things that they’ve inspired me with over the years from all their different recordings. I’m not trying to recreate anything, but I’m trying to think about what would be cool to have them try to do that maybe I haven’t heard them do before, but I can hear it in my head just from knowing the way they play a little bit. Then, inevitably, they’re going to change it. They’re going to come up with better ideas, and then it turns into something else, which is awesome.”
Hot off the road makes for a tight record. Like lightning experimental jams caught in a record bottle. Watt says he’s never had anyone write songs for him before, joking “I usually play the dead guy’s parts if it’s not my own work.” But Watt trusts people if they know people he already trusts, and Baggetta knew (and is also clearly musically inspired by) polymath guitarist Nels Cline, who played on some of Watt’s solo albums.
“And the man did ten years on the scene in NYC!” Watt emphasizes. He also remembers Baggetta “came in with charts of written songs, but pretty soon said, ‘Fuck this, let’s improvise.’” A bond and a band were born.
“I like the post-genre thing, too,” says Watt of Baggetta’s self-description of his sound. “[Nels] Cline and D. Boon were like that without calling it that. But it was that. Punk rock the way we played it when we started, it wasn’t a sound. Wasn’t a genre. It didn’t have to sound a way. Punk rock was anti-arena rock. That’s all.”
Baggetta explains post-genre, “I think every great artist is in a way, unless they’re really specifically trying to create some impact in a specific legacy of music, culturally speaking. But just in terms of music, I listen to all kinds of things…People’s artistic choices, I think, subliminally are made up of what they expose themselves to a lot. If you expose yourself to a lot of things, I think it’s a little disingenuous to say you only do one specific thing. Then, I just want to make it a little more confusing for people to not really know what to expect when they come to hear us.”
You can mention other bands as hints or signposts that are like the mssv sound. More than their previous records, On and On has thoughtful complimentary contemplation between guitar and quiet vocals a-la Lee Ranaldo, and Moon beams of Tom Verlaine’s voyager spirit, but it’s music that would elevate a mood in any coffee shop with mics in the corner, warehouse experimental club, or dark saloon with a stage. Perhaps it’s post-venue type, too.
Bookended by an uplifting alt-pop title track opener and a frenzied cool freak out closing track (“OK to Change”), both of which could have been huge college radio hits in the 90s (and should be today, DJs!), many of the middle songs from On and On don’t have traditional structure beyond a quiet-loud-quiet playground that allows for Hodges to roll around with Watt’s bubbling bass while Bagetta sounds like anything from wind chimes to electric warrior wildflower soul shreds.
Back to that upcoming tour, and that relentless touring schedule. I assumed Watt booked the tour, because no days off is his way. “He gets the Jam Econo vibe too!” Watt proclaims of Baggetta. This – the Minutemen-perfected blue-collar workingman ethos of doing every part of being in a band fully for the good of the band, full bore, full spirit, and always DIY – probably more than anything else, endears Watt to his mssv guitarist.
Bagetta tells, “Well, I book all these tours myself, and there’s things I really like about it. I like playing every day, especially when it gets long. Then, of course, I meet [Watt] and I learn about this whole thing, and I’m like, Oh, yeah, this is the way to do it. He’s already on that tip – playing every day. Then I met Greg Norton when we played in Saint Paul, and he told me Hüsker Dü used to do tours where they would only do the new music that they were going to record at the end of the tour. They wouldn’t play anything from the album that just came out. It’s really gratifying to meet these guys that give me a lot of confidence. Like, oh, I thought these ideas were nuts. But here I meet these guys that have been doing it their whole life. So I go like, ‘Oh, I’m not crazy. This is the right way to do it.'”
“But I like playing every day. I think it really helps the music. When you’re trying to record at the end of the tour, any wasted opportunity would be foolish. The other thing about it that a lot of people don’t realize is once you’ve been playing every night for three or four or five weeks, if you take a day off then, no way. It’s twice as hard to start up again. So at a certain point, the momentum kicks in, and you’re just in this daily thing, and you’ve been in this daily thing for 30, 40 days. Then if you get a day off, it’d be super weird. It’d be really uncomfortable to have to start up and play. I think once you get the momentum going, if you can do it, just keep it going.”
I tell him it simply looks exhausting, and Baggetta hits me with the most Jam Econo comeback there is “Well, it looks like a lot. I know it looks like a lot when you see it, but we’re not digging ditches out in the sun by the side of the road. We’re just playing guitar every night.”
See and hear the work being done in a town near you – trust us, they’ll work in any venue.
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