Mike Watt

“I was almost killed by the sickness,” Mike Watt says. In February, 2000, an abscess on the San Pedro, California resident’s perineum (the area between the anus and the genitals), burst. A longtime bicycling enthusiast, Watt had developed a saddle sore from constant riding. Then the sore grew worse. When he complained of pain, fatigue and fever, doctors took a less-than-aggressive approach to treating the problem. (In fact, one hospital physician who attended to Watt was surprised to find out that the 46-year-old bassist had been under a doctor’s care at all.).

Watt underwent emergency surgery at L.A. County Hospital. In total, he suffered a thirty-eight-day fever, a dangerously-low red blood cell count, a bladder infection, nightmares and the shakes. He then faced a long recovery period during which he wasn’t able to do much more than read. During that time, he revisited a classic that he’d loved in the early days of his youth, Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), which chronicles the poet’s journey through hell, purgatory and then paradise. “It was trippy reading that again,” he says, “Same words. 700-year-old words, but they were completely different. Or maybe they were the same. Maybe I was different.”

“ I saw striking parallels to my hell-ride,” he says with some hint of a laugh. “It was intense.” It wasn’t the first time that Watt had knocked on death’s door. As a younger man, in the early days of the Minutemen, he fought a near-fatal bout with pneumonia that left him sapped of energy and, temporarily, of creativity. The experiences he had in 2000, however, provided him with inspiration. “A week after I pulled out of that bout with pneumonia, I didn’t want to write any songs, but twenty years later, at forty-two, I got this sickness and decided that I wanted to write a whole opera about it.”