"I got it! We'll have them write hit songs!" some nameless record company executive says in the cover painting to
the Minutemen
's 1985 EP
Project Mersh
, and that joke covers about half of the record's formula. While
had been writing more melodic and approachable songs with each release, the massive barrage of 90-to-180-second songs on the epic
Double Nickels on the Dime
was at once an embarrassment of riches and a bit much for a casual listener to chew on. So for this tongue-in-cheek experiment in making a "commercial" (or "mersh") recording,
D. Boon
and
Mike Watt
wrote a few actual three-minute-plus rock tunes, complete with verses and choruses and melodic hooks. On top of that, the band made a game stab at cleaning up their act in the studio; while hardly on the level of something
Bob Ezrin
or
Richard Perry
would come up with,
boasts a good bit more polish than anything the band had released up to that point and even featured horn overdubs and keyboards on a few tracks. But the punch line was that
had used all this fancy window dressing on songs that weren't all that different from what they'd been doing all along --
"The Cheerleaders"
"King of the Hill"
are typically intelligent, clear-eyed polemics from
Boon
, and
Watt
's
"Tour-Spiel"
is one punker's bitterly funny ode to life on the road (it stands comfortably beside their cover of
Steppenwolf
's variation on the same theme,
"Hey Lawdy Mama"
). While
were a band that followed their own creative path from the beginning to the end,
made clear they could have followed a more easily traveled road and still made good music with plenty to say. ~ Mark Deming