What Makes a Man Start Fires?

1983’s What Makes a Man Start Fires? codified Minutemen’s unique methodology, which bassist Mike Watt once summarized as “Little songs, high-end guitar, melodic bass, lots of toms.” Each composition seems to go in six directions at once. The antsy and colorful instrumental lines are mirrored by lyrics that are at once urgent and cryptic. The first words spoken set the album's tone: “I'm waiting/And diversing/I'm collecting/Dispersing/Information/Liberation.” Though Minutemen were still very much a punk band in ethos, their instrumental interplay outreaches all genre constraints on “Fake Contest,” “Life as a Rehearsal," and “Pure Joy.” George Hurley’s oil-drum solo on “East Wind/Faith” seems just as essential to what the group was trying to say. Clocking in at two and a half minutes, “The Anchor” was the trio’s first epic. The song’s optimistic riff belies one of D. Boon’s saddest (and most hilarious) lines, about the harsh reality that follows a lovely sex dream: “Wake up!/Heart yanked out/Anchor dragging behind.”