Mike Watt

Mike Watt, born Michael David Watt (20 December 1957) is a punk rock musician and songwriter with The Minutemen, fIREHOSE, and Iggy Pop & The Stooges.

Quotes

 * hurts I have are my fault but I'm sure gonna learn from it and hopefully anyone reading this will too. the lesson: stay aware on a bicycle and look up the road in front of you at all times to make sure you can deal w/what's coming and the condition of the road you're gonna be rolling down!
 * Statement on bicycling safety after an accident, on his blog "a hoot and a holler" (20 December 2003).

watt bio (2005)

 * Quotes of Watt from "watt bio" by Karen Schoemer (October 2005) at hootpage


 * Navy housing is like tract homes. … All the houses look the same. Everybody's pop was the same rank. There's a lot of negative to the military — like, most of it. But one good thing was I lived with all kinds of people, as far as ethnic background or whatever. Because the navy was integrated. That was kind of neat. And with everybody's pop being chiefs, you could see that no one was above or below anyone else. You know how neighborhoods get all caught up in different things? Well, in the military you're not like that. You're all together. So I will say that was one positive thing that came out of it.
 * On his childhood experiences of living on military bases.


 * The 'minute' meant more like minute … Like we were small compared to a big arena rock band. And the other reason for the name — I had a bunch of names on a paper, and D. Boon picked that one. He liked it because there was some right-wing group who used the name. We thought, we'll call ourselves the same thing — there goes their power! It'll dilute it and confuse things.
 * On the name of The Minutemen


 * What's obvious to me isn't always obvious to other people.


 * If it's some style, especially some shrink-wrapped thing hanging on a wall at Toys 'R' Us, then it won't live, it won't be dynamic … It becomes exactly what the marketing people want — a genre, something to make their job easier. But if it's something like, "Everybody's telling me the wall's over there, but I'm going to push against it and see if it's really there" — to me, that's what punk is. An idealistic attitude.