Watt Prevails
“Jumpstart is a slang we’ve got here: Your car’s battery is dead, you use a buddy’s car battery to jumpstart yours. And then Plowhard, a plow’s a thing you use to dig up the earth to get ready for planting, and it’s once you point it in the right direction, you go to work. That was the whole idea of this thing.”
These are the words of the punk bass titan Mike Watt, best known for ‘going to work’ with the Minutemen, Firehose, and about a dozen other bands and projects, when asked about his new band, Jumpstarted Plowhards. A bassist whose drive to create exceeds that of almost anyone you or I know, Watt put in a solid decade alongside Iggy Pop when the Stooges reunited from 2003 to 2013, as well as playing alongside his former wife Kira Roessler, sometime of Black Flag, in the two-bass duo Dos. Then there’s Banyan, with Jane’s Addiction drummer Stephen Perkins; the supergroup Big Walnuts Yonder; and much more.
The Minutemen remain his best-known artistic vehicle, though, a ferocious punk act which burned briefly but brightly from 1980, only ending five years later with the premature death in a car accident of the
