My friends never believe me when i say that i can't remember anything before 1987. But its largely true. I think it might have something to do with the fact that i grew up in a small town (Visalia, CA), where never much of anything seemed to happen and so there wasn't much to remember. One day that i do remember though, is the day Matt Suggs came to my door to announce the death of D. Boon.
You see, D. (Dennes) Boon was the singer/guitarist of what i now feel to be the best band of the 80's. Better than the Clash, the Dream Syndicate (great debut album), and although Matt will probably disagree with me on this, better than the Replacements. D. Boon's band was the Minutemen and his message was the real deal.
So one day during high school X-mas vacation 1985 i hear a knock on the door and look out to see Matt standing there. I open it and Matt says straight out "D. Boon is dead". That's all i remember. He probably told me how D. had died (car accident near Tuscon) and i probably said something like "that sucks".
I guess i remember this partly because music was so important to us back then. It was all we had really, to keep us from having our creativity, our passion, basically our whole life sucked out of us by small-town-America, what i called in our case "the Visalia vacuum". We might not have know it then, but when D. Boon died on Dec. 23. 1985 real, independent, meaningful American rock-n-roll died with him. To quote just about the only true things i've ever read in a music magazine: When " In 'History Lesson(part 2)', D. Boon sang 'Our band could be your life, real names will be proof. Me and Mike Watt played for years, but punk rock changed our lives', it was the last time you could ever believe **** like that.." and when "Dennes Boon died on Dec. 23, 1985...American underground rock stopped mattering right about then."
But probably i remember this day also because of the way the death was announced to me: like the death of a family member. It was similar to X-mas '92 when i was back (from working in) Japan visiting my family and my dad calls the house and says "Uncle Bill died this morning. He fell of the roof of the Holiday Inn". He died and before he was in the ground i was behind the wheel of his car, headed for San Francisco. Call it insensitive if you like, but my aunt didn't want to see his car in the garage and, hey, i wanted to go to San Francisco, so i picked up the car, stuck a tape in the deck, and hit the road.
The only other death i remember being announced to me was when (about '82) the crazy kids from across the street, Jerry and Waite, came over to tell me and my next door neighbor Rodney (as we swam in his pool) that Rick from down the block had blown himself up with explosives in his backyard. We never believed a word Jerry and Waite said, but this time it turned out to be true. I didn't know Rick well, but he was on my baseball team one year and we hung out together at Blackbeards in Fresno one day, riding the waterslides and trying to git a hit off of the 'smoke' speed at the batting cages. But Jerry and Waite didn't announce Rick's death straight out -- like Matt did D. Boon's. No they gave a big build up. You know, the "You'll never guess what happened... I saw it with my own eyes...I swear to God," type of thing.
D. Boon wasn't a family member or a kid from the neighborhood. He was a star. (to us anyway). I've learned of lots of death of famous people, but these were never announced to me like D. Boon's was. I just kind of found out: picture and words in the Japan Times reporting the death of Dizzy Gillespie, ditto Kurt Kobain and Jackie O.; turn on the tv late one Saturday night, after stumbling back to John Kealy's apartment drunk off my ass, just in time to see Public Enemy, fists raised and heads lowered in a moment of silence for Miles Davis before launching into their performance on SNL; a letter from Marc Brown says " i hear something about Charles Bukowski being dead but it might be a rumor".
After some years had gone by and I had re-discovered the Minutemen, i could understand why Matt felt i should be told that D. Boon had died. Matt probably felt that I, as perhaps he did himself, would have felt that connection to D. that one feels toward a family member. I didn't feel that way at the time, 'cause for some reason i had never really "listened" to the Minutemen. Sure, i had "heard" them lots of times, but i had never really listened.
But as the years past i listened. And i understood. And although Matt has surely moved on to feel sadness at other deaths, i am stuck back in the past today, sitting here listening to the Minutemen, mourning the loss of someone very special, and the death of rock-n-roll.
Written in Yokohama, 1994.
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the Minutemen documentary.
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