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The Minutemen’s legacy looms so large over formative American punk that telling their tale is a daunting task. The San Pedro trio were a complicated band living in complicated times. Punk had yet to be codified; misconceptions abounded; ideology clashed with genre as disparate artists were thrown together with little but their outsider status as a bond. And the Minutemen — guitarist D. Boon, singer Mike Watt, drummer George Hurley — were unusually enigmatic, with a palette that fused explosive funk, country twang, politicized punk, and avant jazz in kinetic bursts studded with subtle refrains and lyrics as direct as they were cryptic. As Watt suggests in Tim Irwin’s respectful We Jam Econo, nobody got what they were doing because so much of it was so inside. Irwin does his best to convey what made the trio (who disbanded after Boon died in ’85) so special. No fewer than 51 persons are interviewed, their recollections peppered with footage of several Minutemen performances. Irwin gets the basics of the story across, but he sacrifices a lot of context by not identifying his subjects’ relation to the band or the chronological details of the various performances. That won’t be a problem for insiders. But it’s precisely those who don’t know the Minutemen intimately, never mind the relevance of Dez Cadena, Joe Carducci, and Raymond Pettibon, who would benefit most from a coherent Minutemen bio-pic. . . if such a thing is possible.
BY MATT ASHARE
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