Mike Watt - “ring spiel” tour ’95

Pitchfork 80

“ring spiel” tour ’95 captures one night in a superstar tour that assembled in support of the legendary Mike Watt’s first solo album, Ball-Hog or Tugboat? The former-Minutemen bass player turned fIREHOSE band leader gathered an insane and unlikely roster of alternative-rock superstars to not only support his album, but follow him on tour. Evan Dando, Kathleen Hanna, Ad-Rock and Mike D, Eddie Vedder, the Kirkwood brothers, Dave Pirner, Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, J Mascis, Nels Cline, half of Sonic Youth, and Mark Lanegan— these are just a few of the names in the long, long credits list. The title of the live record, recorded at the Metro in Chicago on May 6, 1995, references Watt’s concept of Ball-Hog or Tugboat? as being a wrestling match, where each group of musicians “got in the ring” with Watt.

The touring band for “ring spiel” would end up being Grohl, Vedder, Pat Smear, and William Goldsmith, freshly ex-Sunny Day Real Estate and newly christened Foo Fighter. Opening were Hovercraft, the multi-media project helmed by Beth Liebling (whose husband happened to be Vedder) and the then-fledgling Foo Fighters. The tour was run according to Watt’s ‘we jam econo’ ethos from back in the Minutemen days; there were no fancy tour buses, no blacked-out windows; everyone was in a van, driving themselves to gigs, 31 shows in 42 days, the kind of thing that Watt could do in his sleep. The kids, although they were more famous, needed to keep up.

The tickets were sold as a Mike Watt show, and as the liner notes (written by Michael Azerrad) point out, promoters were under strict instructions to not use Grohl or Vedder to promote the tour. But the jig was up, not because of local promoters trying to sell tickets, but because of fan networks on the internet. The Nirvana, Pearl Jam and even Foo Fighters fan bases were already well-entrenched, and word travelled fast, via Usenet and BBS and listserv. Then MTV showed up to a gig and poked their nose around, and any pretense of subterfuge was gone. Vedder could wear a floppy hat and drum in back of Hovercraft’s video projections all he wanted to, but the remaining shows, all in theaters and clubs, far below Pearl Jam or Nirvana capacities, sold out quickly. This was undoubtedly bittersweet: on the one hand, getting Watt in front of a larger audience was surely part of the point of the parade of stars on the record; on the other, the star power's ability to hang back in the shadows was gone, the Halloween costume (in the case of Vedder, a wig) removed.

But the newfound attention didn’t distract the band from the task at hand: the show. “ring spiel” tour ’95 catches the band about halfway through the outing, and they’re tight and cohesive: for all of the econo ethic of the tour, it’s their hard-earned experience of the musicians that makes them tremendous. As a concert package, it was a great lineup: Hovercraft’s psychedelic shimmer as an amuse-bouche, followed by the explosive energy of the early Foo Fighters, and then the journeyman punk rock stylings of Mr. Watt and his group. The set, as represented here on the live album, was constructed from eight of the 17 songs on the record, along with well-chosen covers of songs by the Minutemen, fIREHOSE, Madonna, Blue Oyster Cult, Daniel Johnston, and others.

The 16-song set veers around punk and country and country-punk, as well as flat-out pop (“Piss-Bottle Man,” improbably enough), and it’s tight and well-sequenced and varied in texture, just like a package-tour set needs to be. Watt had fIREHOSE fans and his credentials from his days in Minutemen were unquestionable, but you don’t assemble a roster of high-powered guests for your record to fade into oblivion. Hopefully, a kid who liked the Lemonheads or the Red Hot Chili Peppers, or never got to see Nirvana would come check out the album or the tour, and become a fan of Mike Watt. Or so that was the thought.

The songs from Ball-Hog… absolutely hold their own against the rest of the material. “Forever...One Reporter’s Opinion” maintains the urgency of the Minutemen original, Pat Smear on lead vocals sounding like he wrote it himself. “Chinese Firedrill” pulls straight from the Flying Burrito heart of California folk rock with no irony. “E-Ticket Ride” has a jazz-like energy, with both Grohl and Goldsmith on drums, complementing each other seamlessly as though they’d been playing together forever.

“Against the ’70s” would end up being the most well-known song from the record, because it was a duet with the then-reclusive Eddie Vedder. Later in the set, Vedder has a solo turn where he breaks out what would become a new Pearl Jam song: “Habit” would see the light of day on 1996’s No Code. Stripped down to essentials and anchored by Watt’s fat, fluid notes, “Habit” feels like it belongs here as much as anything else in the set.

The encores are fun: “The Red and the Black” by Blue Oyster Cult, who were kissing cousins on the edge of punk, and an old Watt/Minutemen love, becomes a pneumatic drill when in the hands of these guys, with Grohl taking lead guitar. But the real esoteric number is the Madonna cover, a Ciccone Youth special interpretation of “Secret Garden” from Erotica, sung with love and camp by Pat Smear, powered only by Watt and Goldsmith, not that far away from the original arrangement.

At their best, live albums capture not just a concert performance, but also document the energy and the context around the music. “ring spiel” tour ’95 manages to accomplish all of the above; it’s a nice time capsule if you were there, and it’s a great document to have if you weren’t, commemorating early years of musicians who are now canonic. At one point, Watt admonishes what were undoubtedly a disproportionate amount of amateur crowd-surfers: “Do you like those people rolling all over your heads?” (The crowd responds with a unanimous “No.”) “Then why don’t we give it a rest. Have to have your old man come up here and act like a fucking cop, to tell you that shit,” Watt says, the disgust obvious in his voice. If nothing else, this tour is a tribute to his instincts as a band leader, and a scene elder. He might have had some trepidation on starting over after ending fIREHOSE, but this record proves that he never should have doubted his instincts onstage.