Former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt will perform a mix of songs from throughout his career at the Domino Room on Wednesday. (Submitted photo)

Halfway through an hour-long interview with GO! Magazine, Mike Watt suddenly went quiet.

The famously talkative bassist and punk-rock renaissance man was trying to remember the first time he performed a Minutemen song live without guitarist/vocalist D. Boon, his erstwhile partner in the seminal punk band who died in a van accident in 1985. Watt had been going full-tear before the question, flipping from his upcoming West Coast tour with his trio the Missingmen — the band makes its Bend debut Wednesday at the Domino Room — to the early days of the Minutemen in an almost stream-of-consciousness rant (or, in Watt/Minutemen-lingo, “spiel”).

Boon’s death clearly still affects Watt deeply. The two were inseparable from the time they met as kids, delving into music together, discovering punk rock together and, with Minutemen, redefining what the genre could be. For many years, Watt couldn’t even listen to Minutemen, much less play his old band’s songs. Though he and Minutemen drummer George Hurley got back to work quickly after Boon’s death, forming fIREHOSE with Ohio guitarist Ed Crawford in 1986, at that time their old band stayed in the past.

“I might have showed Edward one or two (Minutemen songs), but we didn’t do much; I don’t remember fIREHOSE doing much Minutemen at all,” he said from his home in San Pedro, California, where he has lived for 50 years and where his journey with the Minutemen, and punk rock, began. “It was just too hard. … Edward, he really helped me. It was a hard time.”

Last year’s live album “Ring Spiel Tour ’95,” which documents Watt’s 1995 tour behind his first solo album, “Ball-Hog or Tugboat,” does feature Minutemen songs, including a fiery version of “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing” from the band’s 1984 double-album opus “Double Nickels on the Dime.” But Watt said he really didn’t start diving into the catalog again until the early 2000s, when an infection almost killed him (he documented the illness and his recovery on his 2004 rock opera “The Secondman’s Middle Stand”).

“I had a $36,000 (hospital bill) and I had to do a lot of touring to pay off that — they saved my life, so. And I remember, I think we tried like ‘Toadies,’ or some stuff I wrote for the band on (the 1984 double album) ‘Double Nickels on the Dime,’” Watt said. “And then there was a gig, 2004 on the Queen Mary, and actually The Stooges played too. And me and Georgie, just as a duet, did a whole set of (Minutemen) songs like that, with no guitarist. And the kids, the gig-goers, they would fill in — like for example, a song like ‘Toadies,’ where it’s just the rhythm guitar, you could hear their voices: ‘Chik, chik, chik.’ It was trippy. But it was hard, it was very difficult.”

Perhaps even more importantly, at about the same time Watt was approached by director Tim Irwin and producer Keith Schieron, who wanted to make a documentary about the Minutemen. That film, “We Jam Econo,” was released in 2005, and the extensive interviews Watt gave for the film required him to go back to those early records.

The Missingmen — guitarist Tom Watson and drummer Raul Morales — enter the picture here too. Watt was touring with The Stooges in Madrid — he played bass throughout that band’s recent reunions — when he saw a painting by Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch would become a major inspiration for Watt’s Minutemen-like third rock opera, 2010’s “Hyphenated-man,” for which he convened the Missingmen.

“It kind of happened at the same time,” Watt said. “I’ve loved that Bosch stuff since I was a boy and saw him in encyclopedias. … When you see them in real life, they’re nothing like pictures in a book or on a computer monitor. That, combined with just listening to this and driving around on the boat and talking to Keith and Tim about the band and the old days, I get the idea for the third opera, but I also get a little more — I don’t know, able to deal with it, more together, so that I could listen to that music, let alone try and play some of them tunes again.”

Watt and the Missingmen did five tours behind “Hyphenated-man,” playing the album straight through at each show. The band also would play Minutemen songs that Watt wrote during the encores.

The Bend crowd can expect Minutemen songs, for sure. But despite this, and recent projects that have found Watt looking back on his legacy, he’s careful to avoid leaning on nostalgia. His myriad original projects — including recording with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns later this year, and ongoing work with Italian band Il Sogna del Marinaio — bear this out.

“I am always gonna be a Minuteman,” Watt said. “In a weird way I’ve gotta accept that. At the same time, yeah, don’t be a f—— shill of yourself or of the guys you played with who helped you so, so much. It’s a weird dangling duality.”

The Missingmen have now been together for 12 years, outliving the specific mission the band was formed for. It’s a similar situation for Watt’s organ trio the Secondmen, which was formed specifically to record “The Secondman’s Middle Stand” but continues to gig today (Watt has even combined the two bands at gigs as the Secondmissingmen). Watt said he’s working on new material for both bands, as well — though no more rock operas.

Watson and Morales are natural fits with Watt. Both are veterans of the San Pedro punk scene, which Watt, Boon and Hurley practically founded with the Minutemen.

For this tour, Watt said he’ll play “a bunch of stuff from throughout my musical journey.” He said he may even include Stooges and Blue Oyster Cult songs (Watt and BOC lyricist/rock critic Richard Meltzer collaborated on 2012’s “Spielgusher,” an album nearly two decades in the making), as well as some old Minutemen songs that never saw the light of day.

“I showed Tom and Raul songs I wrote for Minutemen like 35, 36 years ago — some of ’em never even got recorded or played; they didn’t pass muster,” Watt said. “But they are trippy, playing them back again all these years later. These are the first songs I really — well, after the Reactionaires (the predecessor to Minutemen), but that s— was terrible — but these are like the first songs I wrote where I’m not ashamed.”

Watt still jams econo — another of his and Boon’s slang terms, referring to the band’s philosophy of recording and touring as affordably as possible. Part of that philosophy is efficiency. The Missingmen’s West Coast tour, with fellow San Pedro band Toys That Kill, kicks off Thursday in Santa Rosa, California, and goes straight through March 4 with no breaks. Then in late March, Watt will travel to China for the first time, playing nine shows in nine days. In May, Watt, Watson and Secondmen drummer Jerry Terbotic (as Mike Watt and the Jom and Terry Show) will tour with the Meat Puppets.

“Really, the physical act of sallying forth, you’re kind of like Don Quixote, you know, and then the bungee cord snaps back to Pedro,” Watt said. “But then, by doing that, you get to appreciate a little more. To cats I know that have never left here, born here, ‘Ah, it’s just a town.’ No it ain’t; it’s Pedro. But to know that, I have to see how righteous all the other towns are too.”

What: Mike Watt & The Missingmen, with Toys That Kill

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Domino Room, 51 NW Greenwood Ave., Bend

Cost: $15 plus fees

Contact: redlightpro.com or 541-408-4329