The other day, I came across an interesting story behind the cover art on the Minutemen album “Double Nickels on the Dime,” released on SST in 1984.
If you haven’t seen it before, here it is:
Although it might be hard to see it clearly, the photo features Minutemen bassist Mike Watt driving towards his hometown of San Pedro, California in his Volkswagen Beetle.
More importantly, he is driving ever-so-carefully at an exact (“on the dime”) clip of 55 miles per hour (“double nickels” in trucker slang, apparently). As the smirk on his face should indicate, there is a reason for this. The scene is set to mock former Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar’s album “I Can’t Drive 55,” itself a self-purported protest against the introduction of speed limits (of 55 miles per hour) on U.S. highways.
Watt recounted the story behind the album cover during interviews with Michael Fournier for his book, The Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime. He claims that the band felt driving fast “wasn’t terribly defiant” and that “the big rebellion thing was writing your own fuckin’ songs and trying to come up with your own story, your own picture, your own book, whatever.”
Incidentally, the shot apparently took three passes of the highway into San Pedro until it satisfied Watt’s vision.
Although as a Diamond D fan I am, of course, welcome to anything that attempts to rag on Sammy Hagar, I wonder if the story about the title is correct or was conceived after the fact. According to Amazon, the single “I can’t drive 55” was originally released on July 23, 1984… same date that the VOA album containing it was reportedly released. Billboard’s website puts the single as having peaked at #26 on November 24, 1984, with 16 weeks on their chart (unclear whether this means 16 weeks before that date or 16 weeks on their charts in total, including after its peak). The only info I could find on the release date of the Minutemen album was on Wikipedia, which indicates an unspecific “July 1984” release date.
Presuming all this info is accurate (a gargantuan presumption, admittedly), the Minutemen would have set the cover art and title and sent everything to print a fair while before July, certainly in advance of the release of the Hagar tune (even if their album was released on, say, July 31 and had a small pressing). And if the Hagar tune’s popularity didn’t actually peak until late November of that year, it makes it all the less likely there was any actual connection intended at the time.
Anyway, apparently I have wayyy too much time on my hands.
Well, Double Nickels came out in July 1984, around the same time as Sammy Hagar’s album VOA.
I suspect there are two possibilities.
One is, as you suggest, that Mike Watt was joking and/or using it as a convenient reference.
Another is that Hagar’s song was being performed and was known about (particularly in California) before the album was actually released. Given that the Minutemen were a punk band working on a shoestring budget, it is well within the realm of possibility that they did the photo and sent it on to SST for the pressing of the album within the time period between first knowledge of Hagar’s song and the release date of the album.
I suppose only Mike Watt knows the truth!
Hmm… in yet a further twist, I note that the Minutemen apparently covered “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love” on that album, classic Diamond-D era Van Halen… though Hagar didn’t join VH until the following year… a transition perhaps best described by Nerf Herder.