Five reasons Mike Watt rules (the YouTube version)

Mike Watt is a bass player, philosopher, and cool dude who’s been making music since the early '70s, when he became smitten with a fellow San Pedro, Calif., kid named D. Boon and formed the Minutemen. Over the last 30 years, Watt has played on dozens of tours as a member of Firehose, Dos, The Stooges, and others, as well as performing in a handful of his own projects (like The Missingmen, who headline the Larimer Lounge tonight). But it’s not just Watt’s ability to jam epically that makes him so captivating. In the videos below, Watt’s quiet, inspirational intelligence and laidback nature illustrate one of the man's mantras: Everyone on this planet could benefit from being in a band.

In this trailer from what might be the greatest love story in modern rock history, Watt tells how he and band/soul-mate D. Boon met as 13-year-old San Pedro kids when Boon fell out of a tree and landed on his bass player. Expressing the Minutemen’s desire to “make our life into art,” this clip shows the hidden brilliance in Watt’s simple genius. Boon and Watt would remain inseparable until Boon’s death in 1985, their relationship inspiring future bands to be as explosive yet grounded as the Minutemen:

Only Thurston Moore could turn a simple question like “How did you meet Mike Watt?” into an mini-dissertation on the balance between Watt’s eating habits (seeing the man shovel both squid and nachos into his mouth) and a mutual interest and respect for punk poet Richard Hell. Here, Moore does a barbaric impression of Watt while reminiscing about Watt’s enthusiasm for Sonic Youth—Moore's own band that still abides by the same ethics and integrity the Minutemen helped institute:

Here, alongside a pre-Wilco Nels Cline, Watt discusses the love fest that was his 1995 tour with a band featuring Eddie Vedder and the members of Foo Fighters—which Watt saw as a general test of the legitimacy of the burgeoning alternative music scene as a whole. Being under the gentle but scrutinizing eye of Watt seems intense, but Watt passes Vedder, Dave Grohl, and Pat Smear with flying colors. Acknowledging Smear, then a member of Foo Fighters, as more of a contemporary, Watt draws a keen visual of Smear’s career beginning with The Germs, describing it as coming around "full blue circle"—a reference to The Germs' iconic logo. How clever:

The best Watt clips are the ones that show the reason he's famous in the first place: his phenomenal bass playing. Growing up on T. Rex and Creedence Clearwater Revival, Watt taught himself how to play rock then successfully transcending the confines of the genre to create a whole new style that put the bass at the forefront. Here, he takes the low end to another level in some lucky kid's backyard:

This performance and interview shows Watt, Boon, and Minutemen drummer George Hurley explaining the primitive nature of punk rock and why everyone should be in a band. Watt illustrates how the traditional rock 'n' roll records that influenced the band’s sound had to become obsolete in order for the Minutemen to be completely original, purging their music of ego-driven playing and the self-indulgent chorus. Watt's sunny California attitude comes out as he giggles, "When we heard these other lame dudes writing songs, we thought, 'Oh man. We can do this.'" And they did: