On my bedroom wall hangs a painting. Although, to say it’s a painting is not quite right. It’s the textured print of a painting. Mass produced and aging badly, yellowing since the day it was made sometime back in the 1970’s. To be precise, it’s an “Art Product.” I know this because of the peeling label on the back: “A Windsor Art Product, made in Pico Rivera, California, IBM Number: 469144245.” Two faces, a man and a woman. Her hand grazes his cheek, and his hand, her chin. Their lips barley touch, not quite kissing. We should imagine that they tremble. It’s drafted in a style usually associated with hand drawn cigarette advertisements found in popular magazines from the 1960’s. It’s cheesy, dangerously close to kitsch—and would be considered downright ironic by anyone under thirty. It’s signed Sandy, and I think it’s beautiful. It’s not there for a laugh. It’s not a piece of some Salvation Army evidence that I, too, am capable of hipster sardonic aesthetics. No, I actually like it. And I like to think of Sandy doing her very best in a very ugly world, while painting for a living. Cranking them out, yes, but painting. And I wonder what does a “real” Sandy look like? When she’s not taking her place in an assembly line of easels, when she’s painting for herself, when she’s high on turpentine and spilling red wine and there’s paint in her hair. Does Sandy still paint? I hope so.

On the back of the painting hanging on my wall, below the label, is the title: “Love Story.”

The first week I met my wife I said something very, very embarrassing—something I’d like to think was brought on by one too many mint juleps—but no, I meant it. I still mean it. We were naming all of the things that we loved, a game we played while we listened to the stereo playing through the porch screen door. I love bourbon. I love dogwoods. I love Lambchop, she said, and we clinked our glasses. I said, I love the Minutemen. Minutes later, who knows why, high on the blue Georgia sky, high on the rush of new butterflies in my throat, every smell, every sound, her every look my way—I said, I love “love.”

I know. It does NOT get any cheesier that that, yes, BUT I meant it. And I still mean it. And that might very well be one of the simplest reasons why I love the Minutemen. Like Kerouac’s On the Road, We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen is a grand and singular love story. Strange, unlike anything else, and unflinchingly honest. This is not the stuff of romantic love. No trappings we tend to cling to. This is a story of love at its truest—plain, real and overwhelming. First, We Jam Econo is nothing less than a “love letter” to the Minutemen, directed and produced on behalf of the tastefully adoring Tim Irwin and Keith Schieron, respectively. More importantly, We Jam Econo is about the ineffable thing that that we oh so wish to believe makes the world turn. The invisible thing that feeds two people, hooks into their bellies, and fills one of the many, many voids we are born with. It is often the thing that makes us marry. For others it is the complex intensity that makes for very best friends. Like Sal and Dean on Kerouac’s road. Like Mike Watt and D. Boon. Friends we would die for. More, We Jam Econo is the story of the ghost that remains long after love is gone.

I will not list the many reasons why I love the Minutemen. These can be found among the countless websites of Minutemen devotees, or more difficult, among the liner notes of innumerable bands who thank them for their art. I share these same reasons. And I will not recount the inspiring and tragic tale that Tim Irwin and Keith Schieron tell so well. To do so would be redundant, and surely in a manner not nearly as eloquent, absorbing and poetic. Simply put, the first time I listened to the Minutemen something happened, and clearly this is the case for Schieron as well. “Every sound was new and exciting yet there was something so familiar like it was already a part of me,” he writes in his liner notes. And We Jam Econo moves through time much like this. From contemporary interviews with Mike Watt and George Hurley to posthumous interviews with D. Boon that date back to the band’s beginning, the film consistently feels fresh and familiar. There are copious reels of live footage, and a slew of faces—both obscure and well known—remembering the Minutemen, and remembering Boon. Jello Biafra, Saccharine Trust’s Jack Brewer, Flea, Richard Hell, Ian MacKaye, J. Mascis, Mike Mills, Thurston Moore, Henry Rollins, Lee Renaldo, Raymond Pettibon, and far too many others to include them all. The two-disc set is jam-packed with the documentary itself, a handsome information booklet, plus two bonus concerts in their entirety and the famously traded in mixed-tape circles “Minutemen Acoustic Blowout.” Over all, We Jam Econo is a respectfully crafted celebration of one of the greatest bands of all time. The film is both an elegy and a blowout. One can’t help but smile as the stage shakes beneath a dancing D. Boon, and share in their exuberance, the pure joy of the Minutemen’s music. And all of this mixed with the tragic sadness of D. Boon’s early death and the profound loss evident in the life of his remaining best friend Mike Watt.

Another embarrassing story: Two years ago, on the day my wife—my girlfriend then—turned thirty-two, I took her out to dinner. We went for Korean BBQ and got tipsy on sake. Toward the end of the meal, I gathered my nerves, threw back my last sip and wiped my cotton-dry mouth. I got down on one knee. I remember she covered her face with her hands. She said, “Stop kidding around.” This isn’t funny. I fumbled around in my right coat pocket, and found the velvet ring box. I opened it up, took her hand in mine and asked her if she would marry me. She started crying. She said yes.

Now, in my heart I know that in some small way (one that, I believe, remained oblivious to her until the excitement waned), I asked Kate that day to marry me so as I might soften the fact that on her day—turning thirty-two years old—we had two tickets to see the only showing of We Jam Econo: The Story of the Minutemen.

The Minutemen have made my life better, and Mike Watt continues to do just that. Years back, I found myself in a very bad way. I was unhappy with my job and my relationship. My days were spent in traffic. My nights were broken-hearted and sullen, full of self-pity. Then I saw Watt perform at Atlanta’s long-gone venue the Point in support of his second solo record, Contemplating the Engine Room. It was only one night; one night of, likely, fifty or so consecutive nights that he would perform. It was just one night in Atlanta, and the next would be in Athens, or Charlotte, or New York, or any one of the hundreds of cities Watt travels to each year to perform. Anyone of the hundreds cities he traveled to as a Minuteman. But before leaving the stage Watt shouted, as he often does at the close of a show, he implored the audience—Everybody! Do something! Paint a picture! Write a poem! Make a movie! Start a band and love your life!

Cheesy maybe, for some, but he means it. And that’s what counts. About this time I should return to the opening metaphor, only, I don’t know how. So we will leave it at this: Before beginning this piece I found myself staring at the painting on my wall, and I asked myself why it was there. I thought of art and its place in a world driven by cash. I thought of love, and how easy it seems but how hard it is when the world is so hateful. And I thought of the Minutemen.

We Jam Econo tells the story of three young men who were bursting with love—for life, for music, for art, for each other. So much so that they took to the road with a mission no less than to make this ugly world more beautiful.

Only two came back. Now that is love.

Scott Cheshire is a writer who lives and works in New York.