What began as an experimental live session in 2019 evolved through live play into an experiment-driven project called Main Steam Stop Valve, or mssv. The recording band and live band are currently the same group, including multi-genre songwriter and guitarist Mike Baggetta, mike watt (MINUTEMEN, fIREHOSE, Stooges), and Stephen Hodges (Tom Waits, Mavis Staples, David Lynch). They are about to release their third album, On and On, on March 7th, and their extensive Haru Tour starts less than a week later, spanning the USA. In May and June, they will also take their show to the UK and Ireland for the first time.
Today, Glide is excited to offer an exclusive premiere of the On and On.
Extensive live play has become part of the group’s DNA and also plays a major role in their studio recordings, but with their own twist of using tours to prepare for the following album sessions. Improvisation also plays a role for them in the studio, and openness to new ideas that arise within a group of players is part of the identity of mssv. I spoke with both Mike Baggetta and mike watt about their pretty epic touring history and schedule, how songs get written and shaped, and how On and On was recorded.
The current work that mssv is creating right now has a lot to do with the touring group that you all created, and Stephen Hodges joining. Did his vibe bring something different, so that you were creating in a different way?
Mike Watt: Of course! Every musician does, unless you’re a fucking rubber stamp, cookie-cutter! [Laughs] You’re going to bring your own thing. Jim Keltner had his way, and I think Mike Baggetta reads the cats, because he writes for them. I’ve got to tell you, this is a unique situation. Usually when I help somebody else, I learn the parts of someone who is usually dead. Maybe gone, but usually dead. This is the first time that someone has written me parts. Mike Baggetta writes bass parts for me. Now, for the two records with Jim Keltner, not so much. Those were improvised things, coming in. But the ones with “Hodge”, Baggetta wrote the parts. He got a drum machine, and instead of putting in drum samples, he put in bass notes. He played them with his hands, like a drum, and then I got the parts, and I’d learn them. I think that’s interesting. In all the years I’ve been playing, nobody’s ever really written me parts.
Would you get those before you went into a studio together?
Watt: Yeah! I’m not that good! He’d give them to me ahead of time and we’d practice. He’s got a bitching way of making records, with these two mssv albums. The tour is before the recording! In fact, this album, On and On, was recorded the day after the last gig of the tour for Everywhere We Go. And that was recorded at the end of the live album tour. I’m on five albums now with Mike Baggetta, and a bunch of 7 inches.
When you play something 45 times in a row, like this tour is going to be 52 gigs in 52 days, and then record, it’s all one take. All my stuff was done, for both of the tours I was on, when I was in the studio for one day! It’s an excellent idea. I’m going to do that for my projects.
Can you tell me more about the pattern of touring for one album, but meanwhile playing the songs for the next album, then immediately recording them post-tour?
Mike Baggetta: We did a 48-show tour in Spring of 2022. When Main Steam Stop Valve’s self-titled first album came out, we played that music on tour, and then I’d written the songs that would become Human Reaction, and we played those songs on tour, and then recorded that album. So, yes, it’s kind of a pattern. I used to live in New York City and I got to play with a lot of great musicians, in what they call “Creative Music”, with a capital C and M. That included improvised music, and Jazz adjacent, with elements of all kinds of music. That was a lot of little short-lived projects, and what would happen was somebody would write a bunch of amazing music, we’d rehearse it a lot, and then we’d make a record.
Then, the record would come out about a year later, and we’d have to relearn the music to do seven or ten gigs when the record came out. I remember, at the end of those runs of shows, thinking, “Man, we should have recorded the album now. This music sounds so much more fresh and alive than having just done a couple practices.” I always filed that away in my mind for if I ever made my own music, that I wanted to do it that way. Now, I see the music to turn into something that I couldn’t imagine ever doing by myself, and I’m lucky enough to do with these guys, now.
That makes a lot of sense. I’m not sure how it ended up being the wrong way around, but it’s probably a commercial reason.
Baggetta: It’s probably somebody’s bright idea in commercial history. An album comes out, and you go play out in order to sell it. But, artistically, I think if you don’t ever put the time into the music that you’re going to record, you’ll never know what it could have sounded like.
Is the next tour going to set up a follow-up album session?
Watt: Yes, that’s for the next album! Of course, we’re going to play all the On and On songs, but in between, we’re going to play all the songs for the next album.
And you have your parts already for those new songs?
Watt: No, Baggetta ain’t sent them to us! Because Baggetta’s got a new plan. He don’t want to make the same record each time, so he says that the next batch, all six of them, have big parts of improvisation on them. So they aren’t going to be written.
So, Mike, you’re the main writer, and you’re thinking of that music ahead of time, then you’re sharing it with the guys, then you’re rehearsing it some before you go on tour. Will a song significantly change for you between the beginning and the end of the tour?
Baggetta: They can. I don’t know that there has been what I would call “significant change.” But yes, I provide the basic music in some way. I always tell the guys, “Your ideas are going to be better than mine, so if you want to change the bass part, or if you want to change the drum part, of if you think some part is going to mesh together better if you change it, please do it.” That has happened a number of times, like tweaking some drum parts to coalesce with bass parts. Something that we’ve worked a lot on are the dynamics in the songs, like how can we make the quiet parts more quiet, or the dramatic parts more dramatic.
There’s a lot of stuff that we can learn from every gig that goes into shaping the songs. That potential is definitely there, and I like that. I don’t bring in music and say, “This is the way it has to be, otherwise it’s incorrect!” That’s not my ethos about music at all. [Laughs] The unintended things about music are usually the most magical because they are things that you can’t come up with on your own. The reason that I like playing in a band is that you have input from other people who you trust, musically. When you make music together, you will end up with something bigger and more exciting than the work of one man.
There are also a few improvised tracks on the vinyl for On and On, I think.
Watt: That’s mainly Baggetta, but this is the band who is going to improvise in the studio. He heard that I was just on a tour where there was not one song! We made the whole thing up every night! It was scary. When I first with Hodge in 1996, he told me that I said I was scared. He said, “Look, being a little bit scared, is like being a little bit excited.”
When you went to record On and On, afterwards, did you take those recording sessions, and do further work on them?
Baggetta: The mssv albums are mostly done at Chris Schlarb’s studio, Big Ego, in Long Beach, and by the time I leave, we have two days in the studio. And it’s pretty much done. The only thing I’ll do is I’ll add some guitar overdubs. I’ll add a 12-string. I tend to add maybe some lap steel parts, some acoustic parts. It’s mostly some guitar things. There’s one song on this album called “One Its Face” which comes from me asking watt and Hodge to improvise for a while based on the themes of some of the songs on the record that we’d already made. They each kind of improvised in the studio for about 30 minutes, taking ideas from the seven or eight songs that we’d been working on.
I had these two long 30-minute tracks, and then I went through and started chopping them up and using them. So that’s a song that comes out of the ether. Then, on the vinyl version of this album, but not on the streaming, there are a bunch of interludes that connect all the songs on the album, making them one long, continuous piece. And all those interludes were taken from those separate improvised portions, and I wrote guitar parts for them on top of that.
This is a lot of touring for anybody, even for a hardened musician. How do you all manage it?
Watt: I’ve been doing this a long time. The biggest tour was in 1991, it was 71 gigs in 73 days, with 56 in a row. But Black Flag did 100 gig tours! That’s who we learned from. I’m telling you, it goes back to vaudeville, this stuff. I’ve got this book here, Nick Tosche’s Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock and Roll, and he’s talking about the fact that the roots of all this shit is actually the minstrel show. There’s some inconvenient truth there, but the idea of playing for people live, even through some terrible economic situations, is stuff that I’m using now. Right now, we’re talking a 200-year-old way of doing things.
Do you think it goes back further, even to medieval times?
Watt: Well, the cross-over is, like, the troubadour. That’s kind of like touring. They were not really in bands, and that was mixed with poetry. They had to visit courts. And they think that tradition actually comes from Persia. The idea of verses and choruses actually comes from Persia.
Is this like Ghazal love poetry? I’ve heard a little bit about that.
Watt: Yeah! Humans influence each other. Don’t tell anybody! [Laughs] Humans get culturally expressive and use art for expression.
How has touring so much impacted your life? Do you like to travel?
Watt: My pop was a sailor. He was born in 1957, so he only knew the Vietnam War. He was gone a lot. So when he’d come home from tour, he’d tell me all these stories. I wanted to see that shit. He’d drive me around for three days and tell me these things. I think, with the first Minutemen tours with Black Flag, D. Boon said, “People pay money, and this thing’s a vacation!” He was into it, too. He loved history and we could actually physically go places. He had to go every Civil War and Revolutionary War battle spot. He was way into that. It was this idea of going around, and then the price you pay is to play, which you like, too. People cry you a river about how they are hurting on tour, and then we’ll tell them about someone who works in a salt mine. There’s some discomfort, but I’ll tell you what helped, air mattresses! Man, I wish they’d had those 40 years ago! You could conk on rocks! I always carry one, now.
What’s the most important thing to keeping a tour on track?
Watt: You’ve got to keep the morale up. If you don’t got that, it’s worse than anything.
Do you three guys get along in a natural way, and that’s what makes it possible? Do you have banter that keeps the morale?
Watt: Well, one good thing about Mike Baggetta being younger is that he don’t know all the old stories! He’s getting a butt-load of this shit. He don’t know about this stuff from when I was a young Punk Rocker and he don’t get bored of this shit. He’s got some stories, too, and that’s what you do. Sometimes, you’ve got to be quiet, because everybody’s conked. I also drive [us], and he’s another set of eyes and ears. I don’t use ego to drive, and the more eyes the better. I lost D. Boon from a wreck, so I’m really careful about this shit.
Mike, what do you think makes it possible for the three of you to tour so closely together for so many shows? Clearly it works for you, since you keep coming back. Is that a personality thing, or a banter thing?
Baggetta: I think, firstly, everybody’s excited about doing the music. But secondly, we’re all friends. We have a really good relationship that’s developed over the years, and I haven’t counted, but it’s been at least 100 shows now. You get to know people, and I learn so much from both of those guys on tour, just talking about stuff in the van. Whether that’s bands that I wasn’t around for. Then there are things that have changed, that I can offer perspective on.
But the main thing is the work, and we’re all out there to do the work, and we’re all excited about that. We’re all excited about the music. It’s not really that hard, I think. [Laughs] It is a lot of work, don’t get me wrong! It’s a lot of work to make sure that you’re there every night to get to music to the people. But, we’re not there, on the side of the road in the sun, digging ditches for ten hours a day. And even the amount of shows, I think the secret is not to think about them all at once. You do the best you can for that day. There’s preparation that goes into it, but once you’ve done the preparation, you just have to get up every day, and stay healthy, and deliver the music 100% every night. Before you know it, you’re looking back, and it’s the 51st gig, and it’s almost over.
The context for this question, that I want to make sure that readers know, is that you all are totally independent. So, that can be weighty, to carry all the booking, all the planning, and you’re picking the venues. That’s a different life than someone doing it all for you, and then handing you your itinerary.
MB: Yes, but the difference is that I have the opportunity to do all that. I have the opportunity to figure out the routing. Someone isn’t telling me, “Tonight, you’re going to play in Portland, Oregon, and tomorrow, you’re going to play in Portland, Maine. Figure it out!” I’ve got the opportunity to make the route make sense for everybody. I’ve got the opportunity to play at some clubs where I know the owners are good people, and we’re not going to get screwed on some deal.
I have the opportunity to get to know who I’m working with, and have a say in it. So, yes, it’s more work, but the trade-off is that I can be a lot more confident that I can bring the music in a positive way for everybody, including us. It’s not always what it’s cracked up to be when you have someone else doing it for you. That’s how I learn best, by making mistakes, and I’ve learned a lot by now.
