Imagery
The album was named Double Nickels on the Dime as a reaction to the Sammy Hagar song "I Can't Drive 55," a protest against the federally-imposed speed limit of 55 miles per hour on all U.S. highways. Minutemen decided that driving fast "wasn't terribly defiant"; Watt later commented that "the big rebellion thing was writing your own fuckin' songs and trying to come up with your own story, your own picture, your own book, whatever. So he can't drive 55, because that was the national speed limit? Okay, we'll drive 55, but we'll make crazy music."
The band illustrated the theme on the cover of Double Nickels on the Dime, which depicts Watt driving his Volkswagen Beetle at exactly 55 miles per hour ("double nickels" in trucker slang) on Interstate Highway 10, which is sometimes called "The Dime" in trucker slang. "The title means fifty-five miles per hour on the button, like we were Johnny Conservative." Dirk Vandenberg, the band's "buddy/contributor," took photos from the backseat as Watt drove under the sign to San Pedro, the band's home town; it took three circuits of the highway and two days of photography before Minutemen were happy with the cover. Vandenberg later commented on the cover art: "There were three elements that Mike wanted in the photo: a natural kind of glint in his eyes reflected in the rearview mirror, the speedometer pinned exactly at 55mph, and, of course, the San Pedro sign guiding us home". However, when the cover was presented to SST, "someone botched the cropping for the print and cut off the end of the word Pedro."
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Famous quotes containing the word imagery:
“Poetry presents indivisible wholes of human consciousness, modified and ordered by the stringent requirements of form. Prose, aiming at a definite and concrete goal, generally suppresses everything inessential to its purpose; poetry, existing only to exhibit itself as an aesthetic object, aims only at completeness and perfection of form.”
—Richard Harter Fogle, U.S. critic, educator. The Imagery of Keats and Shelley, ch. 1, University of North Carolina Press (1949)
“The Dada object reflected an ironic posture before the consecrated forms of art. The surrealist object differs significantly in this respect. It stands for a mysterious relationship with the outer world established by man’s sensibility in a way that involves concrete forms in projecting the artist’s inner model.”
—J.H. Matthews. “Object Lessons,” The Imagery of Surrealism, Syracuse University Press (1977)