MidKnight, SST and Spot: The Oral History of Carducci Bros. 

To trace the deep lineage of the Carducci Bros. — the San Pedro, California/Wyoming union of SST Records legend Joe Carducci and his guitarist brother Mark alongside Minutemen/fIREHOSE/Stooges bass king Mike Watt and his Missingmen bandmate/drummer Jerry Trebotic — you’ll have to travel back some five decades.

The roots of this “proj” (in Watt’s trademark lingo) were planted, however indirectly, in early-to-mid-seventies Chicago when a fledgling teenage Mark and some pals formed MidKnight, a primal all-instrumental stoner prog-psych group that turned out to be far more technically advanced beyond the members’ high school-aged years. Lots of prac’ (more Watt-speak) and unofficial gigs in the form of school functions followed. That culminated with Mark’s brother Joe manning the so-called boards as producer for a couple of recording sessions.

Fast forward about 50 years later. Thought to be long-lost, Joe unearthed those low-budget session tapes which then caught the ear of Byron Coley, who went on to issue the archival recordings via his Feeding Tube label in 2020. 

With that, the wheels were set in motion for the eponymous debut of the Carducci Bros., released late in 2024.

Carducci Bros. is an improbable alliance on a multitude of levels. First off, it was Watt’s gut that told him he could make a record with Mark, a guitarist he never played with, let along met in real life and having only heard MidKnight 1975. On top of that, Joe, who indelibly penned the words for “Jesus and Tequila” with D Boon for the Minutemen and hadn’t written lyrics since “Chinese Firedrill” for Watt’s 1995 Ballhog and Tugboat? record, wrote words for four songs for Carducci Bros. Furthermore, the album marks Joe’s debut on vocals with stellar spoken word performances, specifically a darkly comedic tune about him losing his voice as he battled COVID. 

What manifests on Carducci Bros. is something SST might have put out during its seminal glory years, or as Mark Carducci puts it when describing his wah-wah-driven guitar heroics, “one song is like John Cage with effects” and another “sounds like John McLaughlin.”

A masterstroke of trippy yet totally locked-in jazz-centric and punk-ified jammage, Carducci Bros. is true testament to the art of collaboration. That is despite the four of them never being in the same room together as Mark recorded his guitar parts at home in Wyoming, Watt doing his bass and vocals at his apartment in San Pedro and Joe recording his words and Trebotic laying down his drum tracks with Secondmen organist Pete Mazich in his California studio. As it turns out, the vibe is unmistakably organic that homes in on a sublime live feel.

Carducci Bros. can be filed under spoken word, jazz and punk and even heavy 70’s metal as Watt pushed Trebotic towards channeling Bill Ward of Black Sabbbath behind the drum kit, evidenced by his sick fills. Crucially, the album also serves as a de facto homage to Spot, the legendary producer of much of the early seminal SST catalog, who passed away in 2023. Watt pays tribute to his pal and Minutemen producer by using words borrowed from old notebooks of Spot’s on two of the tracks.

 

The Globe had the pleasure of talking with Joe, Mark and Watt as each waxed about MidKnight, Carducci Bros., the late great Spot, Bill Ward and more.   

Carducci Bros. is out now via Org Music. 

 

History Lesson: On MidKnight 1975

Joe Carducci: Mark just got into the guitar at the right time. He’s probably in eighth grade and took lessons, was in a couple of bands as a kid and then took music theory and really pursued it for a short intense period.  Then they all graduated from high school and without intending to break up the band, they just got involved in different things, college or work and stuff like that. 

Mark Carducci: In the ’70s, we did it the old grinding way, like Rush, you sit in a room, you argue and you throw ideas around and you finally coalesce with something that’s hopefully got some commercial potential or at least appeal from the mass ear. Usually that’s the case so it was nice to do it without any restrictions.

Joe Carducci: In MidKnight what I hear is a kind of a trebly Robert Fripp sort of sound. There’s a second guitarist who has a fuller electric strumming sound approach and the arrangements…at their craziest, they’re like Gentle Giant, where there’s these starts and stops. You’d be at, essentially a high school dance and the only people dancing were girls and the time signatures meant that they had to keep stopping and then starting up again because it wasn’t 4/4 and a simple dance tune. 

You’re talking ‘74, ’75, I moved to Hollywood in ’76 so at the very end of the band, I’m in Hollywood and I’m trying to convince them to move to Hollywood, not that I knew anything. We had no idea of recording ourselves. They were put in the studio for one song by somebody who was trying to put together a compilation album — that was probably in ’76. They went in and recorded it but the record never came out. It’s a shame because that would have probably been the best representation that they could have had. 

Mark Carducci: I would say Hendrix shaped me more than anybody just because he was playing guitar. Gilmour and Pink Floyd, I listened to’em and the bass player was totally into that and was sporadically tripping and listening to Pink Floyd. Then my keyboard player got into a Moog and he’s a natural keyboard player. He plays piano, Moog synthesizer and he’s creative. I was kind of into Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix for guitar. 

To this day, and I’ve already told my siblings, when I die, you got to play “Midnight” and “Still Raining, Still Dreaming” from Jimi Hendrix.

Joe Carducci: One side is a practice tape, it probably went to a quarter-inch four-track and I used to man his four-track at gigs when I was around so there’s a live thing that they did at the high school in Naperville. It’s not much for all the work they put into it. They were instrumental and prog, kind of difficult arrangements, hard music to master.  

Mark Carducci: I’m always big on tightness and that comes from just playing. We played six, seven days a week for our band for MIDknight 1975 and if you listen to some of that, there’s a couple of errors in there but for the most part, it’s fucking tight as ever.

The Product: MIDknight 1975, The Feeding Tube Years

Joe Carducci: Byron Coley remembered that I had said my brother had a band in the early 70’s so at some point he asked whether there were tapes. It reminded me of what Mike always stressed about the Minutemen and the Reactionaries, just being a kid in high school playing music with your friends. In the 70’s, you had no conception of taking 100 dollars, find a recording studio and put your stuff and get it to sound good.

Mike Watt: I played it on my Watt from Pedro show. I remember when it came out! But I know about this from him talking, young Joe Carducci days, sometimes some lore would be shared. There was some lore, you know!

Mark Carducci: Joe said, “Well, Mike Watt likes your MIDknight 1975 (record) and of course, I thought it was a pretty cool piece, too, for back then, complexity-wise. So, when he liked it, I’m like, “That’s cool because he can appreciate whatever we did.” We had two guitars there at the time and there was another Italian guy that we had playing guitar and we had a lot of fun and went through a couple of different drummers and the keyboard player had a MOOG synthesizer and all that stuff. So, when Watt liked that, I thought, “I would like to play with this guy because he’s like fifty years or forty years into it. 

Joe Carducci: My brother is from the psychedelic era of the early seventies and not conversant with punk rock, really. Once he picked up the guitar again, he started listening to music again but it’s contemporary music and not stuff that even I don’t know anything about (laughs). 

 

The Process: From MIDknight to Carducci Bros.

Joe Carducci: I think Mike was toying with the idea, and right away, just on the word of my having a brother who played guitar. He was gonna make a leap of faith that he (Mark) would be an interesting player. I sent him a CD-R of the MIDknight record and that just gave him a sense that, “Oh yeah. This guy knows how to play” even though it’s an archival release of practice tapes; it’s nothing like this new record. 

Mark Carducci: We were always quoting Frank Zappa and were like, “Is there any commercial potential to this?” We would try to cross the bridge, have something not all 4/4 time but something that people… like Joe, I think he joked “Nobody can dance to your music.” And we were like, “We don’t really give a shit but we can just have some fun and have a little commercial appeal.”

Mike Watt: MIDknight…I don’t think this band ever even did a gig; guy became a doctor or something. So what? In some ways, a parallel thing where you ain’t worried about audience and stuff. It’s like that thing about, “Why does the dog lick his balls? ‘Cuz he can.” 

Mark Carducci: Joe was pretty instrumental in having the material in reel-to-reel tape form. Joe had reel-to-reel tapes because he would record us and then I had some cassette tapes and some other reel-to-reel tapes. About maybe four or five years ago, we were at my music studio here in Laramie, just kind of drilling down on what we had and all of a sudden he’s like, “You should put this on an album.” Joe gets credit for holding on to half of it and then I had the other half of it because I had the reel-to-reel. We just put all of our archives together. We lucked out.

From ‘75, it was pretty intense instrumental shit. 

 

Black Sheep: Piecing Together Carducci Bros. 

Mike Watt: It’s kind of a new way, actually, not a new way for me. I actually did it this way with the first dos album. K (Kira), she gets out of Black Flag, she graduates from UCLA, she gets an internship in Yale. We do the first dos album by trading…it’s not over a wire with files, it’s actual four-track cassettes. Some of the stuff she did first dOS was reading to her fuckin’ little nephews, story tapes, then us jamming behind that and shit. But we’re tradin’ the tapes, so whatever you want to call it, giving people time, proxy, whatever the fuck, At the end of the day, you’re not in the same room but you end up, well, that’s kind of how we did this. This is the most practical and, whatever the fuck, I have a history with it. 

Joe Carducci: All I did was mention (to Watt) that my brother picked the guitar up again and had been pretty good player in the seventies up until ’76. Mike immediately begins writing eight songs for bass and drums. He’s never met Mark but he liked working with me at SST (laughs).

Mike Watt: And then the same thing went with Joe’s brother, Mark, who’s never, I think, recorded. He had this little machine, his own machine. I love this idea: guy who’s not a professional dude can make music!

Mark Carducci: At the time, I had a studio, it was a live music studio, basically a gig place. But I built it all up and it was perfect for recording. I used that (place) to lay the tracks on my guitar. I was like, “Well, I’m not going to L.A.” but if I really have to I could do it in a day or two. So, I said, “Hey, this will work if you just send me the tracks.”

Joe Carducci: Mike’s idea made it easy. I went out there (to L.A.) but Mark did his own recording at his house. He managed to pull the tracks into his system and I think he could play very easily to it once he learned. I don’t think Mike knew what to expect. They left all these extra tracks but Mark basically only used a single track.

It’s essentially three musicians responding to each other. Even though it’s not like the old days, it could have been. Mike probably thought Mark would play more hard rock but it sounds really nice. 

It’s very unusual and I think Mike liked each track as it came in.

Mike Watt: I can record in my pad, not drums and shit, of course, it’s an apartment. But I sent him the bass. They made songs just with bass! Jer’ could let his freak flag fly, you know. okay, Bill Ward. What was his name? Elliott Randall. Who’s “Reeling in the Years?” Don Fagan just said to him “feel the blues.” But, well that’s all Don Fagan said to him was “feel the blues.” 

So, you know, same kind of…Bill Ward. So that’s what Jer’ did, to my bass. And then we flowed that over to Joe Carducci’s brother Mark in Wyoming. He plays to that, we send it all of it over to Pete to mix it with spiel and Joe Carducci actually comes into the booth with him, sat with him. Interesting. I did my spiel here. 

Spoken Word Piece: Joe Carducci’s first lyrics since “Chinese Firedrill” and speak-sing debut

Joe Carducci: When I left SST, I was writing a few song lyrics and sent them to the Meat Puppets or to Joe Baiza when Saccharine Trust was still going, or maybe it was Universal Congress Of but they didn’t use them. That’s the period when I was closer to the music and had some ideas. I had written three (songs) for D Boon in ’82. He was staying at SST and we were brainstorming, I was listening to country radio and he obviously was really familiar with country music from his childhood and his family. We started thinking about a D Boon solo album, almost just leading ourselves on jokingly. But it gave me a chance to try to write the perfect country lyric and he just grabbed “Jesus and Tequila” when the Minutemen decided to make a double album instead of a single album. Some half of Double Nickels would have been their next record but they heard that Husker Du’s Zen Arcade was going to be a double and the first thing Mike said was, “We could do that.” They were so fertile coming up with music that it didn’t take them long.

Mark Carducci: In the beginning, I didn’t really know if Joe was going to do spoken word lyrics and then it just came to be because Mike Watt had a good bass part for eight different tunes. I did my thing and basically just laid it out. Then Joe basically structured the lyrics or spoken word to the structure of the song. So, the instrumental part got priority, which of course I liked. 

Mike Watt: The spiel came last. So, the spiel, the titles, none of that informs the music—Joe Carducci’s kind of decision. That’s why I think he’s kind of the producer. He gave some credit to Pete ‘cuz he’s the knobman. You need that kind of thing: you need a big picture guy or ya get lost in the thing. It’s like part of a boat: it’s not so much hierarchy, it’s just taking care of certain business so you don’t turn turtle.

Joe Carducci: I don’t think I’ve ever put my voice on a record. I guess Mike just daring me in some way and it’s what the punk M.O. was in the old days was, especially when he was doing New Alliance with D Boon, they would put the call out and all these people they knew and they were painters or writers or just musos from the neighborhoods. They would fill out the Feeble Efforts compilation album or one of these Cracks in the Sidewalk. It’s just Mike’s M.O., which is to take the interesting people he knows and make them produce something for a record. 

As we went along, I just figured I couldn’t be worse than Raymond Pettibon on the vocals (laughs). I just walked into it and came up with a few. Luckily, I only had to do four (tunes). I didn’t see myself actually trying to sing. The engineer, Pete, made me do it a few times and then he could tell it wasn’t gonna get any better so we just lived with it (laughs). I tried to keep it minimal, a few couplets that, if they don’t rhyme, they at least, are interesting and leave a lot of room for the music to go by before you come back in with some more things and you try to liven it up somewhat. 

 

Remembering Spot: Shit from an Old Notebook 

Joe Carducci: When I’m in Naperville, I was near Spot in Sheboygan so I was a little bit more in touch. He didn’t let on how bad his condition was or how bad the prognosis was going to be so I was surprised but I was in touch with him, whereas, I think it hit Mike and other people out of the blue. Mike would invite Spot to get up on stage for a jam when he played in Milwaukee or Austin, once Spot was in Austin so that’s every year or two. They might see each other. 

Mike Watt: You can tell what Joe Carducci picked for the spiel, that I had no idea about that. We lost Spotski right before so he brought up the thing, “Watt, why don’t you read some of his spiels?” So, to my dear friend, I can’t thank Joe enough. 

Joe Carducci: I had all of Spot’s notebooks and stuff so I just searched through and found something that was poetic in some way and made sense together. I sent Mike that stuff and he picked out what he used. On the mic, he’s really good now. I used to tell him, “Don’t have D Boon sing all the songs” and then he did even more so in fIREHOSE; he almost never sang. So, I started writing him lyrics to for him to sing and that ended up on his solo record and Frank Black sang the lyric I gave him. So, it didn’t really work but ultimately he started singing again. 

 

Epilogue: The Big Foist

Mike Watt: Dreaming by committee. In some ways, we’re playing roles, here’s the role of the live band. I think in a lot of ways, since it wasn’t a band that did gigs, everybody’s really listening to each other–all they got to go by. I’ve never played with his brother, Mark, he never played with me and I’ve played with Jer,’ of course. But I’m telling him, this ain’t about me almost dying from the sickness, this is about Bill Ward (laughing)!

Mark Carducci: In the ’70s, my band was totally instrumental, no lyrics, all instrumental, all original material. We did a lot of jamming but we didn’t do jamming to waste time; we did jamming to produce or extract from the ether, ideas. That album, the Carducci Brothers, is the kind of the way I like doing things.

Mike Watt: Joe Carducci goes in there and does his spiel. I send my spiel, Pete mixes and sends to Joe Carducci, they work on those kinds of little changes there and edits and then it goes to Andrew (Rossiter) at Org Music, he gets it mastered. It’s that fuckin’ straightforward, that kind of transparent and lack of fucking drama weird bullshit that lames honest expression. Just shows to go ya: it’s how people conduct yourself. You can put all kinds of labels or whatever, but at the end of the day, it’s how are people conducting themselves and treating each other.

Joe’s not the guy who gets in the band but he’s got the younger brothers in a band and then he does all kinds of stuff to make things happen, like, Slip It In, Zen Arcade, Up On The Sun, Double Nickels on the Dime. 

People don’t really know about that kind of thing so much but maybe a little bit here. It’s Joe Carducci’s turn and his brother Mark. I just felt I owed him (Joe Carducci). It was my idea; maybe it was a foist. I thought the world deserved it. I thought he deserved it and his brother.