Our Band Could Be Your Life

PEOPLE ARE LIVING IN THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED, THE 60’S HAVE HAPPENED, YOUR PARENTS HAVE TAKEN ALL THE DRUGS THEY CAN TAKE, YOU’VE HAD THE 70’S, YOU HAD HEAVY METAL—GET WITH IT, IT’S OVER WITH, WAKE UP. KIDS ARE LIVING RE-RUNS, THE SAME CRAP OVER AND OVER AND THEIR MINDS GET CLOSED TIGHTER AND TIGHTER, IT’S SUCH A WASTE. THE SAME POLITICAL CRAP, THE RADIO IS DEAD. I THINK THE WHOLE THING IS GONNA FALL DOWN TO THIS LOWER LEVEL, CAUSE I KNOW KIDS ARE GETTING INTO IT, THEY DON’T HAVE ANYTHING ELSE. WHAT WE HAVE AT THESE SHOWS, AND WITH THESE RECORDS—THIS IS OUR BATTLEFIELD, THIS IS WHERE WE’LL BE FIGHTING ABOUT WHAT WE’RE FOR. WE DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO ALL THE THINGS PEOPLE IN THE 60’S HAD, WE HAVE TO DO IT ALL OURSELVES, WHICH MEANS WE HAVE TO GET HAPPENING, WE HAVE TO GET WITH IT.

—GUY PICCIOTTO, FLIPSIDE #47 (1985)

Fugazi was a vital force in the indie scene throughout the Nineties and beyond, but the late Eighties were when the band earned a reputation for righteousness and integrity, which are among the indie nation’s best and most distinguishing attributes.

If Dinosaur Jr represented the apathetic “slacker” style that began appearing in the late Eighties, Fugazi embodied its polar opposite. No band was more engaged with its own business, its own audience, and the outside world than Fugazi. In response not only to a corrupt music industry but to an entire economic and political system they felt was fraught with greed for money and power, the band developed a well-reasoned ethical code. In the process, Fugazi staked out the indie scene as the moral high ground of the music industry; from then on, indie wasn’t just do-it-yourself, it was Do the Right Thing.

Perhaps it just came down to the fact that the band’s leader, former Minor Threat frontman Ian MacKaye, had watched the movie Woodstock so many times, but Fugazi held dear the old idea that a rock band can be a vital, inspiring part of a community of people looking to improve society. Not only did the band accomplish this is on a local scale, but they inspired a lot of others to do the same all over the world.

Fugazi has sold nearly 2 million records to date. That’s a remarkable figure for any band, even one on a major label. While indie bands were now routinely defecting to major labels, Fugazi proved that a defiantly, exclusively independent route, taken without a shred of compromise, could succeed by anybody’s yardstick. What other people see as limitations, they hold as virtues.

The band was also a remarkable second act for MacKaye, who had already led one crucial and influential band; the continuing success of Dischord Records was yet another validation of MacKaye’s approach—in an era where most prominent indie labels were signing bands from all over the country, Dischord remained a bastion of regionalism. And musically, Fugazi’s Eighties output also played an important stylistic role in modern rock music, being extremely instrumental in fostering the rock-funk fusion that eventually dominated Nineties alternative rock.

Like great gospel singers, it almost seems as if moral rectitude is what fuels Fugazi’s immense musical power, as if rocking that hard requires a vast reservoir of righteousness. Their live shows have always been electrifying outbursts of passion and energy punctuated by unique, thoughtful improvisation, either musical or in the form of exchanges with the crowd. And as it does for the downtrodden members of society, the band sticks up for the literally downtrodden people in their concert audiences. If any band since the Minutemen embodies the idea that “our band could be your life,” it’s Fugazi.

Throughout 1984 Washington, D.C., punk bands were forming and then quickly dissolving at a furious rate. The D.C. scene had always suffered a lot of turnover, partly because much of the government workforce changed over with each new administration. Besides, most of the Dischord scene’s denizens were in their late teens and early twenties, and a lot of them were going off to college or simply felt they’d outgrown the punk lifestyle.

But not Ian MacKaye. For MacKaye the Sixties counterculture and the early punk underground had furnished the blueprints for a better existence. Punk was not something to grow out of; it was something to grow with—it was a valid, sustainable way to live one’s life. “That’s when I started to focus on the idea of what we were doing as being real, of being a working model of a real community, an alternative community that could continue to exist outside of the mainstream—and legitimately, and self-supporting,” says MacKaye. “I’m talking about working, paying rent, eating food, having relationships, having families, whatever. I saw a counterculture that I thought could exist.”

After Minor Threat, MacKaye continued to help foster that community, doing everything from producing records to hauling amplifiers for virtually every band on Dischord, the label he worked day and night to sustain. A constant parade of musicians trooped through the Dischord House living room down to the basement to rehearse.

There were still plenty of D.C. punks who shared MacKaye’s dedication, who were so deeply wedded to the scene that they either skipped college or attended a nearby school just so they could stay involved. MacKaye obliged by releasing their bands on Dischord or giving them jobs at the label or even a room in Dischord House. But it was such a tight, socially inbred community that when so many bands broke up at the same time, the ensuing strains and social awkwardnesses put the whole scene in limbo.

Also, the skinhead phenomenon was rampant and D.C. was not spared its mindless violence. “Every show,” as MacKaye puts it, “sucked.” Fighting and other idiotic macho behavior were spoiling the entire scene. It was particularly dispiriting for MacKaye, who had spent so much of his young life on his bands, his label, and his community, only to see outside forces come in and almost ruin it all.

The Dischord crowd was clearly not going to win the scene back, so they simply decided to cede it to the skinheads and develop a whole new scene. They would develop a new ethos for punk, what Dischord House resident Tomas Squip described as “the heartfelt thing” as opposed to the “aggressive thing.”

They set October ’84 for the debut of the new movement that they dubbed “The Good Food Revival” in honor of the celebratory feast they would hold. A sign on the wall in Dischord House read “Good Food October Is Coming. Get Your Bands Together.”

But October came and went and precious little happened, partly because nobody wanted to start a band that didn’t include MacKaye or his former Minor Threat bandmate Jeff Nelson and partly because nobody could quite agree on what direction to take. “There was a lot of really heavy conversation,” MacKaye says. “We’d get together and talk and get into fights and argue about things.”

That winter they held a big meeting at Dischord House. “OK, this summer we’re going to do it, summer ’85, Revolution Summer,” blurted out Dischord employee Amy Pickering. And the phrase stuck. Soon an anonymously posted sign began appearing around town: “Be on your toes… This is Revolution Summer.”

One of the main spearheads of the D.C. punk renaissance was Rites of Spring, whose singer-guitarist was Guy (pronounced the French way) Picciotto. Wiry and intense, Picciotto had attended the upscale Georgetown Day School and was at the same 1979 Cramps show that had introduced MacKaye to the communal power of punk rock. As it had with MacKaye, the experience changed Picciotto’s life forever. “From thirteen on,” says Picciotto, “there wasn’t a single fucking thing that existed that I didn’t want to undercut or question in some way.”

Picciotto was soon playing in a punk band that appeared at his school’s annual talent show sporting shaved heads and party dresses. He’d frequently get hassled at school by older jocks, who liked to drag him down the hall by the dog chain around his neck.

A couple of years later he joined Insurrection, which also featured drummer Brendan Canty, a wild-haired problem child who had bounced from school to school around the D.C. area. The two became best friends, but Picciotto says Insurrection was “lamentably terrible, one of the worst bands in town,” and a demo they did with MacKaye was so bad that only MacKaye, ever the archivist, kept a copy. Picciotto’s next band, he resolved, would be “meaningful to me and to a lot of other people.”

To that end, Canty, Picciotto, bassist Mike Fellows, and D.C. hardcore mainstay Eddie Janney (Faith, the Untouchables) formed Rites of Spring in the spring of ’84. The band was named after the plangent Stravinsky masterpiece that caused a riot at its 1913 premiere; even better, the symphony’s theme of death and rebirth had special meaning for the D.C. scene.

Picciotto told Flipside that what animated Rites of Spring was “a constant friction between what you see, and what you want to achieve and things that you know are right. That rub is what creates the pain and the emotion and then there’s the hope that maybe you can overcome it, make it happen. It’s the same politically and personally—to me it’s all one issue because the same problems keep coming up over and over again—lack of commitment, lack of caring.”

Rites of Spring had commitment and caring in spades, playing deeply earnest, impassioned music that burst out of the claustrophobic hardcore format and into a more wide-screen, epic sound; Picciotto sang with melodramatic desperation, as if he were being martyred for every word. Lyrically, Rites of Spring was about extreme emotion and shying from no feeling or experience. The style was soon dubbed “emo-core,” a term everyone involved bitterly detested, although the term and the approach thrived for at least another fifteen years, spawning countless bands.

Picciotto rarely sang at Rites of Spring practices, preferring to save up all his feelings for shows and recordings. The outpouring of emotion was so intense that people actually wept at their shows. “[If] it looks like we’re playing with a lot of despair or emotion or frustration,” said Picciotto, “we’re at the same time joyful—it’s the greatest moment of relief, our playing time, the moving, the music, everything about it—there’s so much joy.”

Modesty, though, was not the band’s strong suit. “We’ve come to realize that this is real and it matters,” Picciotto said. “And this separates us from everything that has gone before—total, utter commitment and belief.”

As he was for so many D.C. punk bands, Ian MacKaye was one of Rites of Spring’s earliest and most fervent supporters, attending all their shows, spreading the word, and even roadying for them. MacKaye recorded a Rites of Spring album in February ’85 and a (typical of D.C.) posthumously recorded seven-inch EP the following January.

Rites of Spring played only fourteen shows, partly because they simply couldn’t afford to play very often—they were always smashing equipment. “We were breaking shit in practice—it was getting ridiculous,” says Picciotto. MacKaye once recalled seeing Rites of Spring’s second show: “They were dirt fucking poor, and Guy smashes a guitar and Eddie turns around and smashes his guitar and runs it through his speaker cabinet. Then Brendan kicks the drums, punches holes through all of them. Then they were totally out of equipment. It was kind of tragic.”

As Picciotto said at the time, “To hurt yourself playing guitar while falling around onstage is far more noble than to be sitting weeping to yourself somewhere.”

Back in the hardcore days, MacKaye and his friends were mad about the things all teenagers are mad about. And they lashed out at the first thing they saw, which was the forces oppressing them from within and without their immediate social circle. But as they got older, their perspective naturally broadened, and by 1985 Dischord had started donating modest amounts of money to progressive organizations such as Handgun Control, Planned Parenthood, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as local homeless shelters, homes for battered women, soup kitchens, and so on.

They had grown up in what is basically a company town, and the Dischord crowd’s newfound activism was largely a product of the city they lived in, much as the cinematic aspirations of so many L.A. punks were a product of theirs. And, as the mostly well-educated, privileged children of dedicated civil servants and journalists, they were in a better position than most to make a difference, or at least feel like they could. After all, these were the children of dutiful, good-hearted people dedicated to making the world a better place; the fruit had not fallen far from the tree.

The antiapartheid movement was a big part of the Dischord crowd’s new political consciousness. Revolution Summer began with the Punk Percussion Protests Against Apartheid on June 21, the summer solstice of 1985. Outside the South African embassy, punks banged on drums, scrap metal, bits of wood, whatever they could find, for hours on end. “We want to show that we give a fuck about something that we think is totally wrong,” MacKaye said at the time. “And just like the civil rights movement in the Sixties, this is a chance for us to all band together.”

Fittingly, Rites of Spring played the Kickoff show of Revolution Summer that night. “Punk is about building things,” Picciotto told a packed 9:30 Club, “not destroying them.” The band closed with “End on End,” and the audience kept singing the song’s refrain and clapping in time for a long, long time after the band left the stage, which was covered in flowers and, of course, broken equipment.

Wise, respected, and enthusiastically supportive, MacKaye was the spiritual center of his community. “He was the cheerleader, he really supported the bands,” says Picciotto. And yet MacKaye himself didn’t have a band.

Then MacKaye cofounded Embrace that summer of ’85. After half a dozen or so membership changes, the lineup wound up being MacKaye, bassist Chris Bald, guitarist Michael Hampton, and drummer Ivor Hanson: the same as the late lamented D.C. hardcore band Faith (minus Eddie Janney), except now MacKaye was singing instead of his own brother Alec.

MacKaye’s lyrical approach had changed dramatically in the two years since Minor Threat. He wasn’t railing against teenage hypocrites, bullies, and poseurs anymore—the subject of his songs was often himself. MacKaye was hollering lines like “I’m a failure” and “I am the fuck-up that I can’t forgive” against the anthemic music, as if to counter the personality cult that had sprung up around him by showing that he was his own harshest critic.

Like Picciotto, MacKaye felt the personal was political. “Personal purifying is the beginning of everything,” MacKaye said. “Once you get your own shit together, once you get your own mind together, it makes life for you and the people around you so much more agreeable and understandable as opposed to constant fucking problems.” But mostly, MacKaye’s Embrace lyrics were activist manifestos that were just a little too strident for their own good—“No more lying down,” MacKaye hollers in “No More Pain,” “We’ve got to speak and move.”

Musically, Embrace went even further down the trail blazed by Rites of Spring; far more melodic than hardcore, Embrace borrowed from mid-Seventies hard rock and metal as well as from Empire, an extremely obscure English band whose only album caught on wildly with the Dischord crowd. “It seemed like this weird lost link between what happened with [early English punk band] Generation X,” MacKaye explains, “and where punk could go.”

With a new music that packed a wider palette of emotions, musical devices, and lyrical approaches than hardcore, the Dischord crowd actually accomplished what they had set out to do: establish a whole new scene. “The more thuggish kids would come and they just hated it, because it was nothing like the kind of music they wanted to hear,” says MacKaye. Their strategy of musical passive resistance had worked like a charm.

Rites of Spring played only two out-of-town shows—the band members were so deeply obsessed with the local scene that it barely occurred to them to play outside of D.C. One away gig was a summer of ’85 show in Detroit opening for Sonic Youth (naturally, Picciotto broke a guitar at that show). Watching Sonic Youth play, Picciotto recalls, “I kind of had my mind blown.” Being in a touring band and taking your music all over the country suddenly seemed like a fantastic idea. But Rites of Spring dissolved that winter and never got the chance.

A few months after Rites of Spring’s demise, Embrace broke up, having lasted only nine months and never having toured. As it turned out, the tensions that had ripped apart Bald, Hampton, and Hanson back when they were in Faith had never been resolved. “So basically I’d just formed a band that had a giant bomb strapped to its chest,” MacKaye says. “But the desire to be in a band was so great that we just decided not to see the bomb.”

After that experience MacKaye resolved that his next band wouldn’t be so hastily convened.

In the summer of ’86, the musical chairs continued when Canty, Picciotto, and Janney joined Michael Hampton to form the melodic One Last Wish, who promptly broke up that fall; the following spring Canty, Picciotto, and Janney reunited with Michael Fellows and reprised the Rites of Spring lineup as Happy Go Licky. Although the personnel was identical, the approach was not. “We barely ever practiced,” says Picciotto. “We just kind of would get onstage and things would just develop.”

But the D.C. punk scene—and indeed the national punk scene—was eagerly awaiting MacKaye’s next band. Thankfully, Happy Go Licky was becoming popular, which took some of the pressure off MacKaye locally. But strife within Happy Go Licky was constant; the band members had never dealt with the frictions that had done in Rites of Spring, and everyone in the band knew it wouldn’t last long. Canty began casting about for another band.

Quiet, good-natured Joe Lally was a metal fan from Rockville, Maryland, well outside the D.C. Beltway. Sometimes he’d visit the Yesterday and Today record store in Rockville decked out like a member of the Obsessed, a local metal band he worshiped. “The first time I saw him,” Canty recalls, “he came into our record store, he had long blond hair like Iggy Pop and fishnet stockings on. He went straight to the heavy metal section.”

Soon afterward Lally saw the Dead Kennedys and the Teen Idles, became hooked on hardcore, and cut his hair and changed his wardobe. His metalhead buddies didn’t quite understand. “Since I was the punk amongst them,” Lally recalls, “they always felt like they had to come over and punch me in the head once in a while to keep me happy while I was watching the band.”

After seeing an early Rites of Spring/Beefeater show in D.C., Lally found his way into the Dischord community. He’d been doing various drugs since his early teens, but the Dischord bands inspired him to reconsider. “They may not have even necessarily been talking about drugs,” says Lally, “but seeing those bands, it was like, ‘So what are you going to do? What are you going to do with your life?’ ”

Those questions made such an impact on Lally that he quit his lucrative NASA computer job, moved out of Rockville, and went on tour with Beefeater as a roadie in the summer of ’86. He was a hard worker and even went vegetarian and straight edge with the rest of the band.

Lally often stopped by the Dischord House, where Beefeater rehearsed, and he and MacKaye hit it off, talking endlessly about their favorite bands: the Obsessed, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the MC5, James Brown and the Stooges, as well as Jamaican dub reggae.

MacKaye had been looking for musicians for a new project that would be “like the Stooges with reggae.” But, mindful of his bitter experiences with both Minor Threat and Embrace, he didn’t want to call it a band. “My interests were not necessarily to be in a band [per se],” MacKaye says, “but to be with people who wanted to play music with me.”

MacKaye had been mightily impressed when he saw Lally sing a flawless version of the Bad Brains’ frantic “Pay to Cum” with Beefeater at the band’s homecoming show. Shortly afterward Beefeater’s Tomas Squip mentioned to MacKaye that Lally wanted to play bass in a band. MacKaye reasoned that anyone who could sing “Pay to Cum” had more than enough rhythm to play bass and soon asked Lally if he was interested in playing together.

MacKaye also invited drummer Colin Sears of the D.C. hardcore band Dag Nasty, and the trio’s first get-together was on September 24, 1986, in the Dischord House basement. “We practice til ten o’clock,” MacKaye wrote in his journal. “It sounds pretty potentialful [sic].” Partly inspired by the up-front, melodic bass lines of Joy Division, Lally began writing tuneful, dub-style parts behind the thundering guitar riffs MacKaye was playing. A sound was born.

After a few months, Sears left and Brendan Canty began dropping by in February ’87. But Lally and MacKaye’s music was far from the jammy Happy Go Licky. MacKaye knew exactly what he wanted and playing with him was a matter of hewing to that vision. Canty relished the challenge, although it was difficult at first to rein in his flashy tendencies and make the music groove.

The music was a bit unusual, but that was fine with Canty. Working at Yesterday and Today, where he had discovered countless obscure but great bands from the MC5 to Funkadelic, he’d learned a valuable lesson: “No matter what you do, you’re probably going to be lost in the annals of music,” says Canty, “so you might as well play what you feel like.”

Guy Picciotto dropped by one day to check out his close friend Canty’s new band, secretly harboring the idea that maybe he could find a place for himself in it. But he was bitterly disappointed. “I didn’t see an entry, I couldn’t see a point where I could play with the band,” says Picciotto. “It seemed really completed already, the way Ian was playing guitar, the way it worked with Joe. They’d already written a bunch of songs. It had a completely different feel from what I’d been doing with Brendan. It seemed just solid and done.”

Picciotto left the practice room despondent. His band was breaking up and his longtime friend and bandmate was playing with someone else. He and Canty even had to move out of the punk rock house they lived in. “I didn’t know what the fuck to do,” says Picciotto. So, after graduating from Georgetown University with a B.A. in English, he did what so many directionless people do—he hit the road, taking a bus to Texas with little besides a knapsack. He sold Halloween pumpkins in Amarillo for a few days, then met up with some friends and spent a couple of months driving all over the country in a used Cadillac, returning to D.C. thoroughly refreshed.

In the meantime, Canty also decided he wanted to figure out what he wanted to do with his life and went out west to think it over. When he returned to D.C., Lally and MacKaye asked him if he wanted to rejoin the project. Canty accepted and the new band booked its first show, at the Wilson Center in early September ’87.

But the group was still unnamed, and they had to come up with something quickly. “Otherwise people would probably call it ‘Ian’s new band,’ ” MacKaye says. “And I don’t think anybody wanted that.”

MacKaye found the word “fugazi” in Nam, author Mark Baker’s compilation of war stories from Vietnam veterans; the term is military slang for “a fucked-up situation.” “It applies to the band,” MacKaye explained in an early interview, “in the way that we view the world.”

“It kind of lets you cuss without actually cussing,” MacKaye says now. “It was ambiguous enough that it didn’t have any particular taste or color or flavor to it. It wasn’t immediately suggestive, like Jackhammer or Pussywillow. It didn’t have any overtly leading connotations to it. It was left to people’s imagination.”

Live, the band was a fairly open entity, too. They’d always leave a space onstage for their unofficial dancer Charlie—a PETA accountant by day, Charlie would jump up onstage wearing little more than a short skirt with nothing underneath, gyrating wildly to the amusement (or disgust) of the assembled multitudes. Others would come up and play trumpet or bang a drum or dance. There were people all over the stage, dancing and carrying on like it was a gospel revival.

It was in that spirit of openness that Fugazi entertained the idea of Picciotto’s contributing somehow. Also, Lally and MacKaye knew that Canty and Picciotto were best friends; they both were huge fans of Picciotto’s music, too. “We didn’t know how it would fit,” says MacKaye, “but it seemed like it should include Guy.”

So they began inviting him to practices; at first Picciotto had resisted the idea, feeling that bands should be self-contained units, but gradually warmed to the thought of being back with Canty, not to mention finding a new outlet for his demonstrative stage presence. Inspired by hip-hop’s (particularly Public Enemy’s) revival of the age-old showbiz concept of the foil, Picciotto began singing backup vocals. He’d found an entry after all.

After Happy Go Licky broke up, on New Year’s Day 1988, Picciotto became more and more involved with Fugazi, doing everything from roadie work to singing lead on his own song “Break-in,” and soon MacKaye asked him to join as a full member. He accepted.

Still, MacKaye felt the band was informal enough that he could take on some side projects. After producing the searing Rollins Band album Life Time in Leeds, England, in November ’87, MacKaye stopped off in London, where he was introduced to Chicago musician Al Jourgensen. MacKaye remembered selling records by Jourgensen’s synthetic dance-pop band Ministry at Yesterday and Today and was a bit dubious when Jourgensen said he had recently discovered hardcore. But MacKaye agreed to listen to an instrumental track Jourgensen was working on.

MacKaye liked what he heard—an ominous, spacey groove that exploded into a repetitive, mechanistic hardcore-style riff more than a little reminiscent of Big Black—and Jourgensen invited him to do a vocal for it. MacKaye recalled a conversation they’d had about Jourgensen’s wrestling with signing to a major label and wrote the elliptically anticorporate “I Will Refuse” in an hour and recorded the vocal. He later recorded five more tracks with Jourgensen, and the results were split among a 1988 single and the excellent Trait EP under the name Pailhead, both on Chicago’s seminal Wax Trax label, helping to initiate a hardcore-industrial synthesis that lives on to this day. (Jourgensen signed to a major label within the year.)

Once MacKaye was back, Fugazi kicked into high gear. In January ’88, they did their first tour—a quick trip to benighted Michigan cities like Flint, Lansing, and Ypsilanti. The trip up was a twelve-hour drive just to play someone’s basement; everyone in the van was miserable. Then Picciotto passed a Queen compilation tape up front. “We were rocking out to the Queen tape,” says MacKaye. “And that’s when I knew we were a band.”

A one-month U.S. tour that spring inspired further bonding. A week or so in, the van’s radiator conked out and the band was stranded for three days in Miles City, Montana, waiting for a replacement part to arrive. After checking into a motel, all they could do was walk around town, killing time. After a day or so the locals would even stop and ask them how the repairs were going. And the experience united the band. “We were all living in this one motel room together,” says MacKaye. “That was a great galvanizer, I always thought, that experience.”

But they were still getting to know each other, and conversations in the van tended toward what Canty calls “true confessional type stuff.” MacKaye and Picciotto, the most outspoken members of the band, would get into heated exchanges about any number of topics. While they were both strongly principled, they also had very different temperaments—MacKaye could be maddeningly stubborn but just as maddeningly well reasoned; Picciotto was more volatile and happy to play devil’s advocate. The voluble Canty often put his two cents in, too, although Lally was usually content to let the others do the arguing.

FUGAZI PLAYING A BENEFIT FOR POSITIVE FORCE AT LAFAYETTE PARK; GUY PICCIOTTO HAS NOT YET BEGUN PLAYING GUITAR WITH THE BAND. AT EXTREME RIGHT IS CHARLIE THE DANCER.

On one seemingly interminable drive from Olympia down the coast, Canty happened to mention that he wasn’t sure whether playing in a band was the right thing to do with his life. No one else could understand his indecision—he was in a great band and he was on tour—what else could he possibly want? Picciotto, who was little more than a backup singer/roadie, was particularly incensed. Things quickly escalated from an offhand remark to a discussion, to a heated discussion, to a full-blown argument.

It was a tense moment, but an essential one. “It was about commitment,” MacKaye says. “And when the call for commitment comes up, that’s when stuff comes on the table. If you’re going to jump in with someone, then you better know about each other. And I think that was really what was going on.” Canty decided to throw his chips in with the band.

But perhaps he’d already made up his mind. On that first mini-tour up north, the band made about $250 at a show in Flint. Afterward Canty did a little math. “ ‘If I make fifty bucks out of this and we can do this five, six nights a week, I can quit my day job,’ ” Canty thought to himself. “Immediately, it was like, ‘Awesome!’ ”

On those long drives, they worked up some novel ideas about how they were going to conduct their business: they wouldn’t do interviews with magazines they themselves wouldn’t read; they would play only all-ages shows and tickets would be $5.

Five dollars, they reasoned, was cheap, and it meant the box office wouldn’t have to deal with making change. It also freed them to play a lousy show and not feel bad that people had paid a lot of money to see it. It wasn’t a hard-and-fast policy at first, although it soon became that way. “It just became perverse to make it five,” says Picciotto. “And that’s always been my attraction to it—the perversity of it, insisting on this thing…. The idea that we could undercut it and make it work was comic and it was also kind of a statement.” That kind of thinking was the impetus behind everything the band did.

Due to poor communication, their first show in L.A. was actually $7—“much to our horror,” MacKaye says—and they never did get below $6 in Los Angeles. Still, the precise dollar amount wasn’t important. “It’s about putting on music for a reasonable price,” MacKaye says.

But they had to be very frugal to be able to offer the $5 admission, sleeping in motels only when absolutely necessary, routing tours efficiently so they wouldn’t waste gas and time, taking along one roadie at most, and, says Picciotto, “not eating a whole lot.” They also observed Mike Watt’s famous dictum “If you’re not playin’, you’re payin’ ” and rarely took days off. Luckily, they didn’t pay any percentages to middlemen—MacKaye was both the band’s booking agent and its manager.

But over time Fugazi made up for the low ticket price in volume—more people came to a show that cost so little, and pretty soon Fugazi shows began to be consistent sellouts, although this wasn’t necessarily due to the band’s popularity so much as MacKaye’s shrewd assessment of what size venue they could fill in a given town. The low ticket price didn’t come without some challenges, however. “When it’s five bucks, you get every jackass on the street who has five bucks and nothing to do that night,” says Picciotto. “And if he wants to throw some cans at the band, it’s open to him, too. But it makes it interesting, man.”

The all-ages admission policy was also key. “Everyone has to be able to come in,” said MacKaye. “We don’t play shows that discriminate against people.” The whole band had bitter memories of being underage and standing outside clubs while their favorite bands played inside. “If you were fourteen, somehow your musical taste was considered rotten and you weren’t allowed to go into a place to enjoy bands,” Picciotto says. “So we just vowed in blood that we would never do the same thing to other kids.”

They even did their best to personally answer all their fan mail. Picciotto recalled when he was a teenager writing to obscure English punk bands like Rudimentary Peni, Dead Wretched, and Blitz. “Those fuckers wrote us back, and it blew my mind,” recalls Picciotto. “It was so cool to feel that connection. I’ve always kept that in mind. If someone writes you, you send them a letter back. It’s just a cool thing to do.”

“It was all stuff that was already part of us because it was just punk,” MacKaye says. “It was just the way we were.” Of course, plenty of others had come up with different interpretations of punk, just like various Christian denominations come up with different interpretations of the Bible. Fugazi’s particularly dogmatic slant emphasized pragmatism, modesty, and fair play—not the first concepts to come to mind when discussing the indisputably punk rock Sex Pistols, for example.

Far from complicating their lives, Fugazi’s conditions actually simplified things. If no club in a particular city could agree to Fugazi’s terms, the band would simply skip that town. Occasionally the band would pull up to a club and learn that their conditions had not been met. And they’d start packing the van back up. Sometimes the promoter would relent, sometimes not. If not, he or she would get a good, long look at the band van’s taillights.

“The power of ‘No,’ man, that’s the biggest bat we’ve ever wielded,” says Picciotto. “If it makes you uncomfortable, just fuckin’ say no. It’s made life so much easier for us, man. I think bands are fragile, particularly our band—we’re super fragile, we’re control freaks—if things upset us, we can’t deliver…. That’s what it’s about—all this shit, just setting it up so we can go out and play without cares, man. It eliminates everything. It just slashes through all that crap.”

Another unorthodox decision was not to sell things like T-shirts, posters, or even recordings on the road. They felt it turned their music into a mere merchandising vehicle; besides, it was a pain to lug all that stuff around, and they’d have to pay, transport, and house someone to sell it for them. So they just jettisoned it.

They also jettisoned the trappings (and traps) of hardcore. The band strove to avoid what MacKaye called “established ritualistic patterns,” which portend the imminent demise of any movement. Hardcore’s fate was particularly fresh in their minds. Insisting on all-ages admission and $5 tickets largely kept them out of even the hardcore circuit; most Fugazi shows were promoted by punk kids at impromptu venues—people’s basements, community centers, vegetarian restaurants, even dorm rooms. “That’s the thing about underground organization,” says Picciotto. “You find the Elks Lodge, you find the guy who’s got a space in the back of his pizzeria, you find the guy who has a gallery. Kids will do that stuff because they want to make stuff happen in their town.” In Omaha they played a show in an abandoned supermarket that local punk kids had turned into a venue by renting a PA system and making a stage out of plywood and milk crates.

Playing unusual venues also had a potentially big payoff—not in financial terms but in terms of how much more fun and rewarding it could be. “There are times when it’s a disaster,” acknowledges MacKaye, “but there’s other times when it’s the best—you can’t imagine how good it is.” And not only did playing unusual places break up the monotony of touring; it also sent a clear message to the audience: “It gives them an idea,” said Picciotto, “that this band is moving in a different kind of network and that things can happen in a different fashion.”

Operating outside the mainstream music business, and even the now-established indie scene, afforded the band a unique amount of freedom. As MacKaye sang it in “Merchandise,” “We owe you nothing / you have no control.”

The idea of avoiding established patterns also extended to the band’s music itself. Even though many of the songs built up to hearty sing-alongs with clear roots in second-generation English punks like U.K. Subs and Sham 69, the music’s sinuous funk and reggae beats defied the notoriously inbred punk sound; the hulking but catchy riffs recalled traditional punk rock nemeses like Led Zeppelin and Queen. Even Fugazi’s trademark startling stops and starts kept listeners on their toes. The implicit message, as with the Minutemen, was to stay alert, keep an open mind, don’t be afraid of change, question things.

Since Rites of Spring and Embrace had virtually never made it out of town, the hardcore crowd wasn’t at all prepared for Fugazi. “People were baffled by it—‘What is this, reggae music? Funk? What the fuck is it?’ ” says MacKaye. Of course, reggae and punk had a long mutual history. “But the kids who were going to these shows were not educated about the past,” MacKaye explains. “Their deep roots were Minor Threat.”

Besides constant jackhammer tempos, another hardcore relic that had to go was slam dancing. For one thing, it made life miserable for anyone who didn’t want to join in, but it also seemed that people were slamming almost sheerly out of habit, since violent dancing simply did not go with the music. Knee-jerk slamming bespoke an entire mind-set that extended far past the dance floor; if people were that conditioned, it probably pertained to most aspects of their lives. And Fugazi, for one, wasn’t going to be a party to it.

Famously, MacKaye would single out specific members of the audience and in witheringly formal terms ask them not to hurt people. “Sir, I hate to belabor the point” went one typical MacKaye rebuke, “but why don’t you think about the fact that you are consistently kicking the same people in the head every time.”

The politeness was key. “See, they have one form of communication: violence,” MacKaye explains. “So to disorient them, you don’t give them violence. I’d say, ‘Excuse me, sir…’—I mean, it freaks them out—‘Excuse me, sir, would you please cut that crap out?’ ” His admonitions seemed preachy to some, but most were deeply grateful. And by and large, people would obey—it wasn’t cool to disrespect Ian MacKaye.

Of course, MacKaye’s quest for audience civility was quixotic at best, which made the gesture all the more meaningful—he’d never back down, even though everyone knew he’d never completely succeed. “Built into the band very early on was not shrinking from confrontation,” says Picciotto. “There was just a really open thing going on between the crowd and the band.” Consequently, there were two kinds of Fugazi shows—the show where there was a delirious, transcendent uplift as the band, the music, and the crowd all seemed to surge and heave as one, and the adversarial show where the band and the more obnoxious element of the audience were at odds, MacKaye and Picciotto unhesitatingly killing the momentum of the set by scolding the knuckleheads in the crowd.

Often one of the band would haul an offending audience member onto the stage and ask him to apologize on mike; sometimes Picciotto would hug and kiss any man who climbed onto the stage, which proved to be a very effective deterrent. The unrepentant would be hustled out of the venue and handed an envelope with a five-dollar bill in it—the band kept a stack in an equipment box for just such occasions.

At one early gig in Spokane, Washington, a handful of merciless slam dancers were ruining the show for everybody else. “Put your hands in the air if these guys are bugging you,” Picciotto told the crowd. Immediately the place was a forest of hands. So the band told everybody but the slam dancers to get up onstage, while Lally, MacKaye, and Picciotto came down to the floor and played as the slammers did a circle dance around them. “It was great,” Picciotto said afterward, “the whole thing was like a celebration of life.”

People in concert crowds were not used to being noticed and singled out by a band—it was as if the television set had started talking back to them. “It’s almost like some kind of code has been violated that really makes people feel weird,” says Picciotto. “And I’m into that. I’m into that kind of weirdness. Really, the ultimate concept is we are human beings just the same as anyone else. If we see something on the street that we think is fucked up, we would testify about it. If we see something going on in the room, just because we’re the jukebox doesn’t mean that we give up our power of speech or our power of observation—those things are still operating. And so we used them.”

The fact that the people onstage spoke out against injustices in the audience not only diminished the barrier between audience and performer; it also forced people to be responsible for their actions. According to Picciotto, “It was really about the moment and seizing the moment and making it happen, not letting bullshit dictate things, which is what was happening. The violence and stuff that is attached to it and the weird misogyny of a lot of punk rock, the way the room breaks down, that stuff sucks, it’s a drag and I think it’s really important to work against it and try to make something different—if only because it’s interesting, if only because it’s not boring. But also because it will be better.”

They had deliberately done the first U.S. tour without having a record out. MacKaye even asked promoters not to mention his name in flyers for the shows—he knew well that much of the interest in Fugazi would be based on the fact that the band included “the dude from Minor Threat.” They’d have to show the world—and themselves—that Fugazi wasn’t just “Ian’s new band.” With no record out and thus no advance hoopla, people would take Fugazi at face value.

But Minor Threat’s formidable legacy still loomed large. Fugazi audiences fully expected some Minor Threat songs and heckled the band if they didn’t get them—and this went on through the band’s first few years. The sharp-witted MacKaye gave as good as he got, though. “People were punk rock so they had a lot of smart-ass shit to say,” MacKaye says. “But I’m a punk rock kid, too, so they’re tangling with the wrong guy. I’m good with that, too—I can be a smart ass and I’ll confront people, too—I’m not worried about it…. A lot of this stuff is about confrontation and there was also a lot of intimidation. There was a lot of kids who wanted to kill me.”

Fortunately, Fugazi was more than good enough to win over crowds who were expecting Minor Threat II. “Some nights when we play, I walk into a club and think, “This is going to be fucking hell on earth!’ ” said MacKaye early in the band’s existence. “Then we go in, and at some point we establish a rapport, it’s amazing, things start happening, the crowd is transformed, all of a sudden they look like a bunch of angels! And they don’t see Minor Threat anymore, they see Fugazi, and they love it.”

The band’s connection to the audience was heightened by the fact that many of the songs were consciously written with the thought of the crowd singing along like a congregation. “I was just really interested in having people sing,” MacKaye says. “Singing is an inclusive thing. It gives somebody something to do at a concert—they feel like they’re a part of it…. When I see people singing, it makes me feel like I’m getting something back.”

The members of the socially conscious Reno hardcore band 7 Seconds were inveterate networkers, and their Positive Force Records was the impetus for a clutch of Positive Force political action groups to form all around the country. However, none of them ultimately survived except for the Washington, D.C., chapter, which was started around Revolution Summer by, as Picciotto puts it, “a bunch of punk rock kids.” Although the group had no defined leader, its main organizer was (and remains) Mark Andersen. Positive Force promoted Fugazi’s local shows, found offbeat places for the band to play, and generally acted as a liaison between the band and the organizations it was aiding. If the band played a local show, it was a benefit and it was organized by Positive Force.

Realizing they’d be raising relatively small amounts of money, the members of Fugazi reasoned it would be more effective to funnel funds to small organizations for whom even a few hundred dollars would be a significant windfall. And they were local organizations because, as Picciotto puts it, “we’re all serious hometowners.” (In fact, MacKaye is a sixth-generation Washingtonian.) With D.C. swiftly becoming the drug and murder capital of the nation, corruption rife within the city’s government, and residents deprived of voting representation in Congress, social services were sketchy at best and the town was falling into disrepair; there was a lot that needed help. The band decided to focus on helping the downtrodden, donating to prison reform organizations, free clinics, homeless shelters, and AIDS clinics. One of their favorite concerns was the venerable Washington Free Clinic, which provides medical services for the poor and uninsured; MacKaye’s father had been involved with the organization for decades.

Like MacKaye’s family, Canty’s parents were veterans of the civil rights movement of the Sixties and would often put up demonstrators who came through town. “So for us,” says Canty, “to me at least, it feels like a continuation from that spirit—to give back to the community that wrought you.”

Positive Force hooked up the band with some unorthodox venues, such as the Sacred Heart Church in the racially mixed Mount Pleasant neighborhood and the Lorton Correctional Facility in Virginia, where they played a Boxing Day 1990 show to a few dozen inmates. “They were pretty freaked out,” said MacKaye. “They’d never heard anything remotely like us before.” Footage of the show from director Jem Cohen’s Fugazi documentary Instrument reveals that the audience was more amused than “freaked out” by the earnest Fugazi, but the gig was still a bold move.

MacKaye may have been the instigator of the band and exerted a strong pull on its aesthetics in the early stages, but he had learned from bitter experience with Minor Threat to make sure there was band unanimity every step of the way. “He’d sing every lyric to us to make sure we were cool with the sentiment,” says Canty. “He’d realized the importance of that, of making sure everybody was in on every decision and being on the same page aesthetically with him—and behind the sentiment of the song.”

Recalling another sticking point with Minor Threat, MacKaye even suggested to the others that they record for his friend Corey Rusk on Touch & Go instead of Dischord so as to avoid any conflict of interest. “We were like, ‘Fuck that, man,’ ” says Canty, “because part of the thing that we were trying to grow was with Dischord—it was a huge part of our community.”

In June ’88 they recorded a self-titled seven-song EP at perennial Dischord favorite Inner Ear Studios; local musician Ted Nicely, another Yesterday and Today alumnus, produced the sessions. The EP kicks off with one of Fugazi’s most enduring anthems. The way the tense, reggae-inflected verses of “Waiting Room” explode into a heavy metallic chorus, one would assume the song is an impatient call to action. But actually, it is about carefully getting all one’s ducks in a row—just like MacKaye had done with Fugazi. “I won’t make the same mistakes,” MacKaye sings, “Because I know how much time that wastes.”

Picciotto sings lead on “Bulldog Front,” another tense, subdued verse erupting into a fist-pumping chorus, about tearing down the walls of stubborn apathy and willful ignorance. Like most of Picciotto’s lyrics, the words aren’t overtly political, but lines like “Ahistorical—you think this shit just dropped right out of the sky” had far-reaching implications—be aware, the song seems to say, that ignorance is slavery. Picciotto’s AIDS meditation “Give Me the Cure” takes a different tack, the arty dissonances and novel structure building more and more tension with every change.

MacKaye’s “Suggestion” goes in for Gang of Four–ish herky-jerky punk-funk, veering off into false crescendos that ratchet up the verses mercilessly. “Why can’t I walk down the street / Free of suggestion?” MacKaye sings, assuming the persona of a sexually harassed woman. (The song was based on the real-life experiences of Dischord scenester Amy Pickering, but some felt MacKaye had no right to sing about a woman’s experience. “That’s nonsense,” MacKaye said. “It’s a human issue that we should and will continue to have to deal with.” The power of “Suggestion” is undeniable and it has remained a staple of Fugazi live shows ever since.)

After completing the EP, Fugazi set out on a long European tour. Despite MacKaye’s renown, lining up a European tour for a band without a record was quite a feat. But no one had anticipated the draining effects of a lengthy European tour, with its constantly shifting cultures, food, currencies, language, and time zones. The three-month trek was the “hardest thing I’d ever done up to that point,” Picciotto says, “just a really harsh tour.”

Then again, Picciotto hardly made it easy on himself. He made up for not having a guitar in his hands by running all over the stage like a crazy man. He would get completely carried away, flinging himself about the stage, rolling on the floor, and twisting himself into tortured shapes. At one legendary show at a gym in Philadelphia, he sang a song while hanging upside down from a basketball hoop, then fell in a heap onto Canty’s drums. Invariably he’d be a mass of aches and pains the next day, and yet he couldn’t help but get up and do it again at the next show. After just a few nights in a row of this, Picciotto was a wreck. And Europe was more than a few nights—it was a few months.

Then there were the accommodations, which were mostly squats. Squats were a legacy of late Sixties underground culture, when unkempt European youths began occupying abandoned buildings in search of cheap housing and a different way of life. Typically squats were run like communes and deeply involved in radical left-wing politics. Many of them made much of their money hosting rock shows.

Squats meant “a series of stinky rooms,” says Canty, “and/or a series of rooms where people are staying up all night, smoking hash next to you while you’re trying to sleep. Or waking up to Black Flag playing at eight o’clock in the morning.”

“There was plenty of times being in Germany and you’re playing in some shitty, really awful squat with German punks passed out on the stage in front of you and the whole place reeking because nobody cleaned up all night—somebody vomits on the stage, total squalor,” Canty continues. “And then at the end of the night, we say, ‘You promised us a place to stay,’ and they go, ‘Oh yeah, here it is.’ And you look over and it’s your dressing room, which is right off the stage. So you go and you set up your sleeping bag in a room [where] you just got offstage about an hour before and it still stinks, there’s still vomit on the stage right next to where you’re sleeping. So you get in your sleeping bag, there are some mattresses back there but they’re totally disgusting so you lay them out and you get in your sleeping bag.

“And you get up to go to the bathroom—this is all true—and the toilet is smashed and there are rats running around the toilet. So there’s no place to shit or piss. And there’s no running water. And you’re locked in because they want to lock the place. So we had to piss out the mail slot. And there’s rats running around, so we all get in our sleeping bags and we just pull the drawstrings up as close as possible so the rats won’t get in.”

D.C.’s straight edge reputation dogged the band everywhere they went, especially in the squats, where the hippie drug legacy had never faded. “I’d actually already ingested everything any of these people had ever thought of when they were nine,” says Lally. “Not to mention that we weren’t flying any flags. We weren’t saying anything. And we were getting all this… stuff.”

Canty recalls plenty of times when “somebody in a group house brings you there to sleep and the other members in the group house hate you for Minor Threat or whatever reason.” “Or they write things on your bananas,” Lally chips in. “Your banana says, ‘You guys are assholes.’ ”

Fugazi had arranged to record their debut album at the end of the tour, in December ’88, with John Loder at Southern Studios in London. Unfortunately they hadn’t realized the implications of recording first thing in the morning after the final night of the tour. The band was spent. They tracked an album’s worth of material, but in the end the performances weren’t up to snuff so they trimmed it down to an EP.

Fatigue may have bogged down the performances, but recent events back home were also troubling the band. That November former CIA chief George Bush had won the presidential election, ensuring yet four more years of a Republican in the White House. “That was horrible,” Picciotto recalls. “The nausea so many felt when Bush got in, we’d already been through eight years of Reagan and then Bush goes in and he was so creepy, so fucked up. Man, that was terrible.”

The dread and anger are all over Margin Walker. On the title track, Picciotto reinvents Cupid as a Lee Harvey Oswald–style sniper, riding just ahead of a MacKaye guitar onslaught denser than anything he’d done before. On “Provisional,” Picciotto takes to task both a complacent public “Secured under the weight of watchful eyes, lulled to sleep under clear expansive skies” and irresponsible politicos (“We hope we don’t get what we deserve, hide behind the targets in front of the people we serve”). And Picciotto’s “Lockdown,” hectic and teeming, is a typically abstruse indictment of one of his favorite targets, the deplorable U.S. prison system.

MacKaye’s lyrics are more direct, more anthemic than Picciotto’s sometimes precious verbiage, but they are still largely metaphorical and elliptical. If, as MacKaye says, Minor Threat’s lyrics were like one-size-fits-all clothes, Fugazi was more like uncut cloth. “If they want to make some clothes, they can use this fabric,” says MacKaye. So although MacKaye skirts overt political statements on the PiL-ish “And the Same,” a loosely sketched condemnation of force as an instrument of policy, it is still, as MacKaye bluntly puts it, “An attempt to thoughtfully affect / Your way of thinking.” On the spitfire reggae verses of the ecological protest “Burning Too,” MacKaye warns, “We are consumed by society / We are obsessed with variety / We are all filled with anxiety / That this world will not survive.”

Though he was singing more and more, Picciotto was dissatisfied with his role in the band. “I was used to a much more open, democratic musical thing happening,” says Picciotto. “I wanted to play.” So upon returning from the European tour, they all agreed that Picciotto should start playing guitar. The problem was MacKaye’s sturdy, rhythmic style meshed seamlessly with Lally’s supple, dub-influenced bass; Picciotto couldn’t find a way in. Then he realized there was a wide patch of sonic real estate available in the upper frequencies. Using a Rickenbacker, the trebly, chiming guitar made famous by the Byrds, Picciotto could cut through MacKaye’s chunky chording like a laser beam. And he did.

Picciotto’s move to guitar changed the band profoundly, and not just because two guitars filled out the sound. In the past the band would play MacKaye’s songs pretty much as he wrote and arranged them. It was awkward to jam and experiment in rehearsal because the instrumentless Picciotto couldn’t participate. But now that Picciotto had a guitar, everyone felt free to improvise; ideas were tossed around as a group, and the band started delving much further into ensemble passages full of startling guitar textures, dissonant chords, and novel approaches to phenomena like feedback and harmonics.

And MacKaye and Picciotto created all those effects without benefit of distortion pedals; MacKaye never varied his equipment: a Gibson SG guitar and a Marshall amplifier. “Even though I know that there’s a lot of options, I’m not interested in options,” he says. “I’m interested in how far I can take this simple equation, which is an amp, a cord, and a guitar, and how much I can do with it.”

The band’s less-is-better approach even extended to their diet; they had gone vegetarian, which was a pretty tricky thing to be on the road in the U.S.—the interstates held nothing but meat-intensive fast-food joints. Eventually they discovered that one chain had a veggie cheese melt, but for a long time they would fill up a cooler with decent food from grocery stores and simply picnic in their van.

Like most bands, Fugazi learned the lessons of touring the hard way. For instance, there was the constant matter of where to sleep after the gig. MacKaye had punk rock friends in most towns, but sometimes they were a little too punk rock for the rest of the band. “A place where there’s cat piss where you lay down your head to sleep, don’t go back,” advises Lally. “Do not return to that place.”

But after a tour or two, the band rarely had a problem finding nice, urine-free places to stay and were always asked back. “We washed our dishes,” Canty explains. “That’s the key: when you go to somebody’s house, wash your dishes. And then they’ll ask you back.”

On their first U.S. tour, the summer of ’88, they played Olympia’s Evergreen State University. Show promoter Calvin Johnson passed a hat so the band could get paid. “It just seemed like paradise being out there,” says Picciotto. “It’s such a weird sleepy small town and yet there was so much action there—there were so many great bands, so much energy. It was one of the first places we played where we really felt at home, where the kids were dancing and the vibe was just so incredible.”

Maybe it was the affinity between two capital cities that were cultural wastelands, but there was also a surprisingly high degree of cross-pollination—Calvin Johnson had lived in the D.C. area in his teens, and Canty’s sister had moved to Olympia; Dave Grohl would eventually leave the D.C.-based hardcore band Scream for the Olympia-based Nirvana, and Olympia punk maven Lois Maffeo soon moved to D.C.

The two towns formed a strong cross-continental bond, not only making musical connections but exchanging useful ideas and information, forging a consensus about the way things ought to be in the indie world and beyond. The D.C.-Olympia axis would prove to be an influential force in the years to come. “When we went there, we locked in really hard with those people,” says Picciotto. “It was always a really good spot for us.”

In September ’89 they recorded their first album, once again at Inner Ear with Ted Nicely producing. Nicely was studying to be a chef at the time and had limited time to record the album, so the sessions took place between the decidedly un–rock & roll hours of 9 A.M. and 1 P.M.

It was a pivotal time for Fugazi. By now Canty and Picciotto were contributing substantial musical ideas; the multitalented Canty even wrote some bass lines and choruses. “That’s when we all threw ourselves into it really earnestly,” says Canty. “It was the first time that both Guy and I could say, ‘This is our band.’ ”

Better recorded than the two EPs and played with the awesome power of a first-class rock band, Repeater is a post-punk classic.

The band members’ thorough knowledge of rock music compelled them to be as original as possible. When something sounded clichéd, “then comes five hours of trying to put the parts where they’re not supposed to go,” says Lally. So the songs on Repeater veered in all sorts of unexpected directions: squalling noise, tense rhythm breakdowns, static guitar reveries, or a mighty, wall-rattling unison clang. The mix of influences was also unique: a more aggressive take on the reggae-punk fusion that bands like the Ruts had explored, infused with the righteous fervor of the Clash, and driven home with foot-stomping guitar riffs à la MacKaye’s old favorites Queen and Ted Nugent. They were also clearly paying a lot of attention to hip-hop; the catchy call-and-response hollering recalls Run-D.M.C. while the repeating guitar squeal on the title track owes much to Public Enemy’s epochal “Rebel without a Pause.”

The Canty-Lally rhythm section was now red-hot—Canty hits with the force and precision of karate chops, Lally’s nimble lines could induce vertigo—and their hectic interplay recedes only for the band’s trademark whiplash silences. As ever, pensive passages would suddenly erupt into glorious choruses, as in “Merchandise,” where MacKaye thunders, “You are not what you own!” while an heraldic ascending guitar riff raises the roof.

As six-string adventurists, the band was in a league with Sonic Youth, but most people fixated on the band’s politics and policies. And there’s no denying that their politics, sharply expressed on Repeater, were provocative. The leadoff track, Picciotto’s “Turnover,” is an extended metaphor about ignoring social ills—to “turn off the alarm” and go back to sleep. Next, the kinetic title track illustrates the effects of that approach—a chilling monologue told from the point of view of a career criminal, it jump-cuts to the point of view of someone hearing gunshots outside. Then the song shifts narrators once again: “We don’t have to try it and we don’t have to buy it,” MacKaye roars.

That last line is echoed throughout the album. Repeater is practically a concept album about the notion that one can effect social change by carefully considering the things one buys—and Fugazi extended that idea well beyond the material sense. “Never mind what’s been selling / It’s what you’re buying,” sings Picciotto in “Blueprint,” echoing a think-for-yourself line at least as old as Black Flag. “Merchandise, it keeps us in line / Common sense says it’s by design,” MacKaye sings in “Merchandise.” Even MacKaye’s harrowing OD nightmare “Shut the Door” is a heated meditation on the perils of consumption. “She’s not moving! She’s not coming back!” he hollers with more rage than terror.

The thing was Fugazi not only talked the talk; they walked the walk. The band had quickly become an ethical lodestar for bands and fans alike, revered bastions of integrity in an increasingly compromised and corrupt world, an impeccable benchmark for everything that pioneering bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen stood for: pragmatism, community, independence, and engagement.

Fugazi existed in an entirely separate realm from what MacKaye calls “college rock”—Dinosaur Jr, Camper van Beethoven, Mudhoney, and the like—which was then in its heyday. They didn’t socialize with the SST bands or the so-called “pigfuck” bands on Homestead and Touch & Go. MacKaye even fell out of touch with his old friend Corey Rusk during the late Eighties. “That whole Chicago [scene]—Naked Raygun, Big Black, that crew,” MacKaye says dismissively, “were the guys who smoke cigars and eat ribs.

“That whole world, those guys, I think they just were not into punk rock,” MacKaye continues. “They grew up on it and then they were growing out of it.”

The band toured Repeater for virtually all of 1990: after a few local shows in January, they toured the South from February until April, then the rest of the U.S. from May through July; from September through November they were in Europe. Hard touring was not only the crucible in which the band’s basic tenets had been formed; it was the main way it won fans. But it was also tough on a band that very much enjoyed their local scene, not to mention their personal lives. “We wanted to play,” says MacKaye. “It was rough, physically, but it’s like, why do people jog or why do people do anything that involves discipline? I don’t know. Bands play music.” (MacKaye’s sole advice for surviving the rigors of the road: “Drink a lot of water.”)

Because they kept playing unconventional venues, touring never stopped being an adventure. In May ’90 they played a Dallas warehouse that local punks had converted into a living space. In the ground floor’s huge lobby, they had built a stage on top of a crumpled car they had dragged through the front door. The show was packed with about eight hundred people.

Before the show a street fight between two rival skinhead gangs—a Nazi white power outfit and an anti-Nazi group who wore Star of David patches—threatened to spill over into the show. To cool things down, MacKaye went out and met with the leaders of the two groups. “One guy was wearing a Nazi uniform with a swagger stick,” MacKaye recalls. “And I swear he was wearing a monocle.” MacKaye brokered a peace agreement, pointing out that the warehouse punks had been nice enough to put on the show and it wasn’t right to make it into a battlefield.

Finally the first band went on. But then the police showed up and called the fire marshal, who obligingly pointed out various violations. For nearly an hour Fugazi and the show’s promoters made exit signs and put lights on them, taped off exit lanes, and cleared exit doors as the crowd grew increasingly restless.

After all the work was completed and Fugazi was getting ready to take to the stage, the fire marshal told MacKaye the place still wasn’t up to code. A cop told MacKaye to tell the crowd the show was off. “I’m not going to tell them no show,” MacKaye replied. “You’re going to pull the plug on this, you go tell them.”

“Sir, I’m not trying to start any trouble with you,” MacKaye said firmly. “I’m just telling you that if you’re going to stop the show, you can go tell them. Because I have worked hard to make it happen.”

They discussed the situation some more and finally reached a compromise. MacKaye got onstage and, to loud cheering, announced that the police had decided to let them play. There was only one catch: the audience had to go outside. “They’ve closed the street off and we’ll have the doors open and we’ll play as loud as we can and we’ll sing as hard as we can,” MacKaye told the crowd.

After an initial uproar, everyone filed out onto the street and Fugazi played to an empty warehouse, with the open doors blocked by a chain-link fence. “Between songs we would run up and look out the chain-link fence,” MacKaye says, “making sure the police weren’t hitting anybody.”

By this point there was a raging bonfire in a vacant lot across the way and hundreds of kids were dancing in the street and stage-diving off parked cars. “That kind of stuff,” MacKaye notes, “is just not going to happen at a rock club.”

After Repeater the band was routinely selling out 1,000-capacity shows and yet still hauled their own equipment, booked their own shows, and slept on people’s floors (and they still do). “I love staying with people,” says MacKaye. “I love doing the driving. I love having to load equipment. The experiences are things that a lot of people never have.”

From the very beginning, MacKaye had done pretty much all the administrative work for Fugazi—and wouldn’t have it any other way. “He basically had experience at having done A, B, C, D, E, F, and G,” says Lally. “And he was good at it. And he was pretty insistent on doing it.” MacKaye managed the band, booked the tours, got the money at the end of the night. He even insisted on driving the van at all times (which he does to this day). Cutting out managers, booking agents, lawyers, publicists, and road managers is a lot different from the way most bands go about things. “Yeah, but that’s because we stopped to think about it,” Canty says. “We stopped to think about that because it’s self-preservation.”

But a lot of bands don’t even think about self-preservation. Canty replies with an analogy about how most people don’t think twice about eating meat, mainly because most food stores don’t offer many other options. “Waaaaay in the back, by the scallions, is some tofu,” Canty says.

So Fugazi simply went to the back of the store? “We went to a different store,” Canty says, proudly.

Both MacKaye and Picciotto are extremely uncomfortable with connecting the band’s business style with something as personal as vegetarianism, but the same sensibility is at work in both cases. MacKaye constantly evaluates every aspect of his life, cutting out unnecessary things that most people unthinkingly accept. “This is what I am trying to do across the board,” says MacKaye. “If you’re going to see me play music, that’s the way it will manifest. If you came over to my house, you’d see the way I live. If I make you dinner, you’ll see the food I eat. After trying to be thoughtful about my life and to consider what I’ve inherited and what I need and what I don’t need and what I’ll discard and what I want to gain, what’s important, what’s not important. By going through this checklist and trying to figure all these things out, this is what I’ve arrived at. And if I’m in a band, it’s going to manifest in that presentation.”

Fugazi simply cut out the needless clutter in their lives, things most bands accept without ever questioning why. If Walden author Henry David Thoreau were to have managed a rock band, it probably would have been run a lot like Fugazi.

Same with Dischord itself. The label almost completely dispensed with promotion to press and radio—the outlay was more trouble and expense than it was worth. Dischord employees “recovered” all the paper they needed from other people’s trash. In 1989 a friend got a huge supply of stationery from a marketing company that was throwing it out; it all bore letterheads, but the label simply used the other side of the paper. Dischord was still using the paper ten years later and has never bought an envelope in its entire existence. And the savings got passed on to the consumer: Dischord albums were never more than $10, even on CD.

On January 12, 1991, Fugazi played in the freezing cold rain at Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, on the day Congress gave the OK to begin bombing Iraq. “When Operation Desert Storm happened,” says Picciotto, “people were petrified in this town.” Two thousand people showed up and pogoed so hard that they sent up clouds of steam drifting over the stage. Four days later the bombs began falling on Baghdad.

By the summer, Repeater had sold well over a hundred thousand copies, an astounding number for a small indie label, especially one with such minimal promotion. Word of mouth about the band had spread widely through the indie community, and the record was selling far beyond just the hardcore crowd. Unswerving integrity was one thing, but it was their live shows that made Fugazi an underground legend. Already masters of tension and release, they could mesmerize a crowd with a tightly coiled rhythm vamp, add in some fraught guitar interplay, and then blow it all away with gale-force explosions of thunderous volume. A song like “Shut the Door” might get stretched out to nine minutes or more as the band leaned into extended but riveting improvisations, showing off an uncanny musical telepathy honed by endless roadwork. Fugazi never worked with a set list, which meant they could vibe off the crowd and each other in perfect synchrony.

Studious-looking in his nerdy glasses, Canty slapped out the band’s funkified rhythms as Lally paced around by his amp, casually eyeing the crowd from under the brim of his watch cap. But it was Picciotto and MacKaye’s show, the two of them lunging and lurching around the stage, twisting their bodies like wet washcloths, violently swinging the necks of their guitars as if to knock the previous chord unconscious.

The two frontmen were a study in contrasts: while MacKaye would go in for anything from a knock-kneed Lindy hop to Townshendian guitar leaps, Picciotto chewed the scenery—he fell all over the place, humped the stage, climbed the amps, contorted his body like a Gumby doll. MacKaye dressed in drab, baggy clothes; Picciotto would sport tight black jeans and, invariably, a red shirt. MacKaye’s sober athleticism found its polar opposite in Picciotto’s almost hammy sensuality, a formidable yin and yang that powered the band’s galvanic performances.

By this time even the Meat Puppets and Mike Watt’s band fIREHOSE had signed to majors, and about half a dozen major labels wanted to sign Fugazi. But the band felt their music was already being distributed adequately. Sales bore that out. And with Dischord, they definitely knew who they were dealing with. Of course, there were also the inevitable noble reasons. “Big bands that stay independent lend weight to the indie movement,” MacKaye said. “People are forced to deal with indies to get big names. That gives a lot of other bands access, it spreads the wealth.”

Spreading the wealth was important to Fugazi—the band always gave opening slots on tours to independent bands who didn’t necessarily draw crowds but merited the high-profile gig. And even on longer tours, they usually kept an opening band on the bill for no more than a half dozen shows or so, in order to give exposure to as many bands as possible.

The band was now routinely committing rock & roll heresy by turning down big interviews with major national music magazines like Rolling Stone, Details, and Spin, partly because they carried tobacco and alcohol advertising. “Some magazines just make us uncomfortable,” MacKaye explained to the zine Noiseworks. “As we’ve gotten bigger, there’s choices we’ve had to make, and we don’t like things out of our control. We’re trying to maintain that right.” “I don’t trust those mags to reflect us accurately or honestly,” Picciotto added. “I certainly don’t need a mag that puts ‘for men’ on the cover like Details.” But Picciotto singled out Rolling Stone for the most opprobrium: “I can’t see,” he said, “what in God’s name they have to do with rock & roll.”

The old “belly of the beast” argument didn’t wash, either—“I can see there’s a point to getting good ideas into Rolling Stone,” Picciotto added, “but when you’re sandwiched between a thousand bad ideas, I don’t think it translates.”

For their second album, they again requested the services of Ted Nicely, but Nicely was now a full-time chef and treasured his free time, so he reluctantly turned down the job. Then the band figured that since they did everything else themselves, they might as well do their own recordings as well.

The approach had another benefit. None of them, not even the veteran MacKaye, had ever been in a band that had stuck together this long. “We were kind of hitting a plateau,” says Picciotto, “where we needed to find a way to keep pushing it so it didn’t feel static.” Making their own record seemed to be one way of doing that. So in January ’91, they enlisted the trusty Don Zientara as engineer and went to it.

But the timing wasn’t right. The band had been on the road constantly that year and it showed. “Within the band, our communication at that point was kind of weird,” Picciotto says. “I think it had to do with that we’d been around each other a fuck of a lot.”

Many bands would snipe at each other under such circumstances, but the members of Fugazi did something else almost as deadly to creativity—they treated each other with kid gloves. “Here’s four people who have a fairly good idea of how to make a salad,” says MacKaye, “and yet everybody was so concerned about insulting other people’s taste that no one dared to pick up a head of lettuce or chop a tomato or anything. We all just sat there and let it sit in the middle of the room. No one wanted to take control because it seemed like it would be offending someone else.”

On top of it all, the band had little grasp of the full capabilities of a recording studio. So they simply decided to make a very straightforwardly recorded album, an unadorned document of the songs so people could sing along by the time the band came to town. “Our position was that the records were the menu and the shows were the meal,” MacKaye says, echoing the Minutemen’s earlier “flyers and gigs” philosophy. Nevertheless, it wound up to be a very powerful record.

Steady Diet of Nothing continues in the vein of Repeater, with tense, sinuous rhythms, novel guitar textures, big sing-along choruses, and dramatic dynamic contrasts, but this time with more sense of space—and darkness. All the roadwork had not only strained relations within the band, but they felt out of touch with their beloved local scene. All this took place in the midst of the Gulf War, when yellow ribbons, “I Support Our Troops” bumper stickers, and breathless media coverage of so-called smart bombs all signaled overwhelming public approval of the U.S.’s gunboat diplomacy. “I think we all started to feel that America was just becoming a madhouse,” says Picciotto, “and it depressed us a lot.”

Picciotto’s “Exeunt” starts things off with a great rotating bee-hum of feedback that lapses into a slow-galloping reggae-fied groove topped off with angular caterwauling guitar. The song is about as elliptical as it gets, but then MacKaye follows it up with another classic Fugazi anthem. “Reclamation” declares its intentions in direct terms: “Here are our demands: We want control of our bodies,” MacKaye announces amidst pointillistic guitar harmonics. “You will do what looks good to you on paper / We will do what we must.” In a singsong roar, MacKaye chants the word “reclamation” over a guitar hyperstrum at once frenetic and grand.

In pointed opposition to the “Reagan Sucks” approach of hardcore, Steady Diet addresses charged politics in oblique ways; this fact spoke nearly as many volumes as the lyrics themselves. Picciotto’s chant-along “Nice New Outfit” neatly limns the West’s “Might makes right” philosophy: “You can pinpoint your chimney and drop one down its length / In your nice new outfit, sorry about the mess.” He addresses “Dear Justice Letter” to famed liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, bemoaning the fact that the great judge had retired the previous year, leaving the Court stacked with conservative Reagan/Bush–era appointees.

It wasn’t all political, though—MacKaye’s forlorn “Long Division” examines the slow, no-fault disintegration of a friendship; in “Latin Roots” Picciotto comes to terms with his Italian ancestry, and on “Runaway Return” he recasts the age-old prodigal son story in a modern context. But the last words on the album, from MacKaye’s “KYEO” (“keep your eyes open”) leave no doubt as to the band’s focus: “The tools, they will be swinging,” MacKaye defiantly hollers, “but we will not be beaten down.”

The album enjoyed some fortuitous timing. Because Steady Diet of Nothing came out in 1991, the Year That Punk Broke, it emerged as a big seller and the first Fugazi record that most people heard.

Fugazi went on to release three more albums in the Nineties, and although the crowds at their shows fell off a bit as the alternative rock phenomenon waned, Fugazi never failed to sell out the rooms they played, continuing to make challenging, exciting music and progressing even further as an improvising ensemble. They kept their ticket prices at $5 (all the more impressive considering ten years of inflation) and never compromised their music—or anything else, for that matter.

That steadfast reluctance to sell out won vast amounts of respect from fellow musicians. Everyone from Joan Jett to Eddie Vedder paid lip service to the band’s integrity even as they conducted their own careers in ways that Fugazi never would. Publicly declaring respect for Fugazi, then, was at best a way of sublimating guilt. Much of the rock audience, knowing full well they were complicit in a lot of what Fugazi was opting out of, held the band in high regard for similar reasons.

Despite the alternative gold rush, Fugazi didn’t release a follow-up to Steady Diet of Nothing until June ’93, when they released In on the Kill Taker, which actually made the lower rungs of the Billboard Top 200 album chart.

Although Fugazi’s legend grew even larger in the Nineties, Brendan Canty feels the band’s early days tell its truest story. “People might look at us and think we’re this icon,” he says, “but at the time there was just a couple of hundred people coming to the shows and it wasn’t huge and nothing had potential. It was just important to do it. And the fact that we all wanted to go on the road and work as hard as possible, and that we were able to, is in itself its own success story. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about getting anywhere, but about getting through the process of fulfilling your own possibilities.”

CHAPTER 11

Fugazi