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Spot's Watching Time Has Come

F5 • Wichita, KS
august 4, 2005 • issue #31, vol. 3
by Jedd Beaudoin

Spot, onetime producer of legendary acts such as Hüsker Dü and Minutemen,
is about to kick off a tour that will bring him to Kirby's Beer Store on Tuesday, Aug. 9.

Spot has in recent years amassed a reputation as a fascinating solo performer,
skilled in both popular and Celtic music, and is as likely to burst out the banjo and
tear into the theme from American Bandstand as he is to rip up Chuck Berry's
"Memphis Tennessee" on the electric guitar.

He's just finished an album that contains both band and solo work made especially
for this current road trek. Well, almost finished. He realized, on the morning that
the final artwork was due, that the end of one of the tracks had been cut off.

The album's so new, he said, that it doesn't even have a proper title. "The working
title that I'd given the whole project was Watching Time. Or Watching Time Die or
Watching The Time Die. There was an instrumental piece by that name, but now
I don't know what I'm going to call it," he said.

"One thing I realized last night was that I won't have any problem selling it at Celtic
festivals," he said. "One of the tunes has Jean-Michel Veillon, who's probably the
premiere Breton flute player in the world, he plays an old wooden flute. Breton music
is like the Captain Beefheart of Celtic music.

Working in the digital medium, he added, has made some things easier for this new
recording, though he said that there's plenty of tedious work involved.

"It took me a long time to like digital," he said. "Everyone was talking about digital
in the early '80s, and most of the early attempts are pretty lamentable. But for a long
time there was this tendency for people to think that just because something was
digital that it was better than anything."

Although many of the projects he worked on had less-than-astronomical budgets he
did get his hands on some 100100 equipment from Sony in the dimming days of the
'70s.

"I was impressed with the fact that you had no tape hiss and, yeah, you really did have
a clean recording. But it really wasn't that good on your ears. It's improved gradually
over the years, and now I think it's pretty good. My big frustration with digital is the
fact that there's really nothing that I can put my hands on. With analog recording you
were handling tape, and sometimes you had to physically force things to work. With
digital and computers you can't do that. About the closest you get is your finger on the
mouse.

"But as I told someone last night, if you don't make mistakes, you don't learn anything.
I have been learning a hell of a lot," he continued with a chuckle. "But the big thing is
that with analog you used to have to rewind the tape before you could listen to it,
whereas with digital you just push a button and there it is. It's a difference in how you
work. Sometimes that time that you spend waiting for something to rewind is some of
the most valuable time you have and some of the best things happen during that time.
I miss that sense of, 'We'll stop and breathe now and consider the next thought.'"

Speaking with the Austin-based musician a few weeks after Magnet magazine
published a large retrospective article on the Minneapolis music scene, of which
Hüsker Dü was an integral part, and as a Minutemen documentary is making the
rounds, it's hard not to ask his feelings on that era.

Some members of the early '80s punk scene have gone to great lengths to divorce
themselves from that life and lifestyle—former Replacements drummer Chris Mars is
now a high-profile visual artist who refuses to speak about his former band; former
Hüsker bassist Greg Norton has become an acclaimed restaurant owner—others,
such as Bob Mould and Paul Westerberg seem keen to raise awareness about their
contributions.

Spot said that he's thankful that more people today recognize his name for his
contributions to Celtic music than punk rock and also acknowledged that those early
years are over.

"Your old punk rocker becomes the old hippie—they're the guys who still have the long
hair and still listen to Jefferson Airplane and really haven't advanced past the early
'70s in terms of how they view culture and its artifacts," he said.

Most of all, he noted, he hates misconceptions that arise from his affiliation with
certain acts or movements: that he knows the second cousin of the bass player of
some obscure band from Redondo Beach or can recall the title of every song on the
Minutemen's Double Nickels On The Dime album or the name of the third single from
that lousy anonymous surf punk unit from West Covina. "When I say, 'No, sorry, I
don't know anything about that,' they just don't leave you alone."

That said, he admitted that he does understand the tendency of one generation to
romanticize a predecessor.

"I remember that when I was about 15 or 16 I read a Newsweek article about the
Roaring '20s and I got depressed and kind of melancholy thinking about how I didn't
live in that era," he said.

"You always long for what you never had, and sometimes you miss what you already
have. And maybe the problem is that people don't make the most of what they've
already got. I think maybe a lot of us look at life as more of what it could be as opposed
to what it is and then what you can do with it," Spot said. "It was like,'There's the wave
and here's this board and I'm gonna take this ride and when the ride's over, well, maybe
I'll go home or look for another wave.'"