Boilin' Blazes

"Boilin' Blazes" is the opening song of Mike Watt's third solo album "The Secondman's Middle Stand". It is the first part of the "Inferno" section of the album, referencing and describing how Watt fell ill with an infection in his perineum not long after performing a benefit gig with Banyan in Utah.

The lyric "Abandon all hope? No!" is a direct paraphrase from the line in Dante's "The Divine Comedy", "Abandon hope all ye who enter here", while the title "Boilin' Blazes" is a reference to both the Inferno in "The Diving Comedy", the fever that accompanied Watt's illness, and a character from James Joyce's "Ulysses" named Blazes Boylan, the lover of Molly Bloom.

Musically, Watt used progressive rock-influenced music for this track, as he considered prog-rock to be a good musical description of Hell itself.