META-SPIEL: What it means to SPIEL

In early 1995 I was in my second semester of college. A few of us were in the dorm back lounge all the time, as we apparently had no clue where else to spend our time. We played a lot of euchre and hearts, ate a lot of pizza, and watched a lot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and a lot of crap on MTV and god knows what else.

One thing I watched every week was 120 Minutes. For those of you who have forgotten or have never heard of this, 120 Minutes was broadcast Sunday nights on MTV. Episodes around then were usually hosted by Matt Pinfield (!) and featured guest indie-rock luminaries. All of the videos, more or less, were from the indie-rock / college rock realm. This being years before YouTube, it was the only way to see a video from, say, Guided By Voices. It was must-see, for me at least.

One week in April, the entire episode was hosted by Mike Watt. I knew about Watt some, from hearing some stuff from his solo album Ball-Hog or Tugboat?, and from knowing a little about his old band the Minutemen. Now, you need to understand that the Minutemen are one of the greatest bands of all time. But, back in April 1995, I didn’t know that. I was just a goofball hanging out in a dorm lounge all the time. It was a long time before that finally truly sunk in.

Watt’s hosting turn was mesmerizing. He did not convey as a rock star in any traditional sense and had no pretensions as such. There was nothing ironic or detached about the man. Instead, he was warm, even tender. They played a Minutemen video that night and it was somehow unlike anything else I’d heard before. I still didn’t get how good the Minutemen were, but I did come away thinking how important they must have been.

Some time in the near future, I bought a copy of the Minutemen’s Post-Mersh, Vol. 3. I suspect this was in Madison, and I probably just bought whatever I first found in some used bin. Post-Mersh, Vol. 3 is a compilation of EPs and singles, somehow jamming 46 songs onto a single CD. I listened to that thing a lot.

One of the inclusions was a 1984 EP called Tour-Spiel. The four songs from Tour-Spiel are live versions of punk send-ups of decidedly non-punk songs, like Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love”. They are fast, and they bear only passing resemblance to the original. And yet they seem to be played with absolute seriousness.

For whatever reason, it was the name that stuck with me. They went on tour, and what came of it? Spiel.

Spiel is an interesting word. Its meanings are somewhat contradictory. If someone is giving you a spiel, it’s a fast but still long-winded story that you may not believe, like something a olde-timey quack might give to promote his elixir. But a spiel can also just be like an outright listing of things. And in German, spiel means game. But it can also mean match or performance. So is it serious? Is it a con? Is it a game? Is it a performance?

Eventually I came to understand that the Minutemen had their own lingo for things. Watt famously declared “We jam econo” to describe the band’s ethos. Spiel might well have meant anything and everything.

Anyway, the word stuck with me. And then that fall as we crashed back onto campus, the word was hanging overhead as I launched into a couple of ridiculous ventures.

The shortest-lived one was NET-SPIEL.

That summer I had worked at Best Buy, and I had bought a strange device, a telephone line splitter. In our dorm rooms we couldn’t add extra phone lines, and I had wanted to run my own BBS (Bulletin Board System), but there wasn’t a good way to get it to work.

(An aside. Oversimplifying, BBSs were pre-Internet ways of “going online”. Most BBSs were single line, meaning you could call somebody else’s computer from your computer, and download files or maybe play text-based games. I can’t possibly do justice to the whole thing in an aside paragraph. Let’s just say we were computer dorks before the rest of the world caught up to us.)

So, the splitter allowed for running a BBS, because people could call our number and the phone would ring, or they could call with their computers and include pauses and the buttons #11, and the splitter would route the call to the computer. (So instead of dialing 556-9999, you’d have to have your computer dial the bizarre number 556-9999,,#11,,#11 to get it to work.)

And so because I could, I set up a BBS, ihop, unofficially short for “international house of phear”, because, because. And ihop became the central node for a forum sharing network. This network was NET-SPIEL. For a while there had been an old-school forum sharing network called FidoNet, and the idea was that you could download messages from a BBS, read them, respond to them, upload responses, and then that BBS would upload packets to some hub, and this way - not in real-time, of course - you could converse in forums with people from around the world. All of this occurred online, but technically not on the Internet itself. So we used a similar forum messaging system for NET-SPIEL and just exchanged packets among a handful of BBSs.

Yes, the whole thing was ridiculous. But so what? (For the record, there’s one happily married couple in Central Illinois today who got together in large part thanks to ihop.)

Anyway, NET-SPIEL didn’t last long.

GOAT-SPIEL did.

GOAT-SPIEL was our radio show. WESN being open format college radio, it was pretty much anything goes, and we were up for pretty much anything.

Most of the guys who cycled through were actually in high school in Normal. We knew each other from local BBSs. Our combined tastes were… broad.

Mostly, indie-rock was my thing, with leans toward classic rock and a bit toward punk. But GOAT-SPIEL was far more than that. We played a lot of deth metal and industrial. We played polka. We played bands like XTC and A-Ha. Our signature song was “Aa-shuu Dekei-oo” by Huun-Huur-Tu, a band of Tuvan throat singers.

The name GOAT-SPIEL meant absolutely nothing. We weren’t talking about livestock or attempting to call ourselves the Greatest of All Time. The word GOAT simply fit really well in front of -SPIEL, wouldn’t you agree?

GOAT-SPIEL ran for three years, including some summer sessions. At the end of my sophomore year, I was named Music Director at WESN, which paid nothing but it still the best job I’ve ever had, and so I was listening to dozens and dozens of discs and throwing a lot of that into the mix along with all of the other craziness. Most of the other guys went off to the University of Illinois around there, so the people who were around the studio kind of ebbed and flowed, and the show became a lot more of me playing things like Red Krayola, or Gastr del Sol, or - toward the end - an almost weekly song from Mike Watt’s first rock opera, Contemplating the Engine Room.

I was even able to revive GOAT-SPIEL a few years later when I moved back to Normal after grad school. GOAT-SPIEL’s second run actually lasted for more years than the first run, with an evening time slot on Mondays and then Thursdays. At this point I was mostly playing a mix of new music and stuff from 10 years earlier. I loved being able to do it. I finally stopped in 2006, when I was running for State Representative a second time and I was incredibly deeply involved in Green Party work and had a girlfriend in Chicago on top of it all.

I miss GOAT-SPIEL greatly. I miss all of those guys from the early days too. I haven’t seen most of them for over 15 years. That’s a real shame.

During my sojourn at grad school, I had the opportunity to see Mike Watt twice, both times touring on Contemplating the Engine Room, the first time with one of the great living guitarists Nels Cline as part of the touring band. Watt was amazing. He was lively. He seemed irrepressible. I’ve seen him three more times since, and these five times are not hardly enough.

I could write so much more about Watt. It was, absurdly, years after GOAT-SPIEL began that I actually bought a copy of the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime. I consider it an all-time top 10 album, and it’s one of the few on my list which I know would make a lot of your lists as well. I’ve listened to hours of the Watt from Pedro Show, which is kind of a three-hour radio show as podcast, except that he’s been doing it for something like 18 years, which is way earlier than podcasts began.

Mike Watt is one of the very few people I consider a personal hero. In him, I see a man who lives a life of kindness, decency, collaboration, and artistic pursuit. I see an incredibly genuine and thoughtful person, someone who wouldn’t hesitate to help a stranger. I’ve seen hundreds of bands. I’ve met dozens of great people from those bands. It’s not a matter of disrespect to any of them when I say that Watt is unique and special. Yes, he’s a great bassist. But there’s a quality to him that I can best sum up as: He makes me feel better about being a human being.

Watt’s second rock opera, The Secondman’s Middle Stand, is about his near-deth experience from an infection in his perineum in 2000. The first song, “Boilin’ Blazes”, features Watt defiantly exclaiming, “I’m gonna make it through this hell ride!”

There’s another musician who sang about hell rides. He happens to be one of my few other personal heroes. Wesley Willis deserves a long post unto himself. Wes and Watt might not seem like they have a lot in common, and might seem like unusual choices for personal heroes. But the idea of making it through this hell ride - that was Wes while he was with us, and he was inspirational just for keeping on keeping on, for fighting the demons. I’m not saying that everything, for everyone, is just one big hell ride. But we all wind up on a hell ride from time to time. Sometimes we’ve simply got to fight the demons, the infections, whatever else gets thrown at us. We’ve got to hang on. Wes hung on for as long as he could. Watt, thank goodness, made it through his hell ride, and remains a beacon of inspiration.

If you visit Watt’s Hoot Page today - a website which has looked pretty much the same for 20 years and suffers not at all for it - and you search for the word “spiel”, it shows up twelve times on the main page. He pretty much uses it just to mean him talking - especially when he’s been interviewed - but of course it means something more as well, because spiel isn’t just spiel. Talking, especially in an interview, is an act of performance, after all. So spieling is performing. But while it’s an act, it doesn’t have to be a put-on. It’s a performance but it’s not a role being assumed. It’s just performing in the act of living. It’s all part of how one makes it through this great big ride, and sometimes, it’s a hell ride.

META-SPIEL then is truly spiel - it’s this stream of consciousness stuff you’re reading here - but it’s a meta form of spiel too. How much more meta do you want me to get than spieling about spiel? Ahh, but see, the spiel here isn’t simply the writing. It’s the broader performance, the greater act of it all. And what is the purpose of all this? What is the point of the spiel? Well, the spiel is the game play, and the game is the act of living. I don’t mean game in a trivial sense, but rather in the sense of us all performing on the grand stage. And so the spiel is about itself as much as anything else. The spiel is an ultimate act of the meta. The spiel is the meta, and the meta is the spiel.

As it so happens, tonight, October 2, I’m seeing Watt again. He’s playing at Schubas, a place I find so nice that we got married there, and right before the actual ceremony, standing on stage, I was able to say, I’m standing where Mike Watt has stood, and that’s pretty cool.

Perhaps I will seek Watt out after the show and try to tell him about this. If I succeed in getting him to read this madness - this Watt-spiel - he may well be at this point here at the end, where the meta is stacked tall like a plate of silver dollar pancakes, and think this is the craziest bullshit he’s ever read. But he’s such a sweet guy that I’m sure he wouldn’t say such a thing.

I love the guy. I’m so happy to be seeing him again. And it’s never too late to get on the Watt bandwagon, friends. He’s got room for all of us. Hitch a ride already!