PIERRE de GAILLANDE

Minutemen / Watt Chronicles Part 6

In January of 2023, I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite musicians, Mike Watt, on my Pierre Pressure Podcast. That conversation sparked the idea for a musical collaboration. Now, after two years of hard work with many brilliant collaborators, the result is finally here. Working Batterie Volume One drops on April 4 via Clearly Records, and you can preorder the vinyl on Bandcamp today.

The idea for this album emerged during my interview with Watt when he noted…

As a culmination of the incredible generosity and open-heartedness of Mike Watt, he has graciously offered to play bass on a medley of Minutemen songs with my band on April 5th at Tubby’s in Kingston NY. He will be headlining the show with his phenomenal jazz-punk project MSSV (with the astonishing Mike Baggetta on guitar and Stephen Hodges on drums), as well as opening band #beechcreeps (with members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Guided by Voices.) Big thanks to Cory from Tubby’s and #mssv for adding us on the…

After interviewing Mike Watt for Pierre Pressure, it occurred to me to follow up on something he had mentioned about wanting to create music starting from the drums, not always from the guitar or “songs.” So I pitched him the idea of creating a whole album by starting with individual drum tracks from an array of drummers, which I would send to Watt and he would play bass on, then send back to me to flesh out in whatever way I saw fit. He agreed, and the “Working Batterie” album was born. 

Now, two years…

In 2019 I made an album of a selection of my favorite punk/indie songs translated and sung in French, called “Bad Reputation - franglais.” I covered the Minutemen song “Fascist” and I reached out to Mike Watt to get publishing info and permission and got a positive response. 

In 2022, out of the blue, I got an email from Mike Watt saying he had played a song from my other band Body Kite called “Amazingishly Gracefullistical” on his Watt from Pedro show. I was beside myself. I reached back out to Watt to…

In 1993, my friend and fellow film student at UCSD, Nathan Wilson, decided to make a documentary about his favorite band, the Minutemen. He asked me and fellow Minutemen fan and film student Paolo Davanzo to help him interview Mike Watt. So the three of us drove up to San Pedro, spent a few hours at Watt’s house, then drove in his van around San Pedro to all the sites of his history, including the park where he met D. Boon, and George Hurley’s house to say hello. Then later that afternoon we went to the…

I just found this website that lists pretty much every show the Minutemen ever played, and I found the one I went to on 9/6/85 at the Golden Bear in Long Beach, CA. I was just shy of my 15th birthday, it was the end of the summer before my sophomore year of high school. My friend Pat Feller brought me up to this club in Long Beach, about a 30 minute drive from where I lived in Costa Mesa. I had been listening to the Minutemen for a while and was excited and a little scared. 

We got to the show as the opening…