by Roni Sarig
Black Dots (Caroline, 1997); the band’s first recordings, from D.C. in 1979, including early versions and some never-released songs.
MINOR THREAT
Ian MacKaye, Minor Threat:
All I ever wanted was to belong to a community. D.C. is a very transitory town. The main industry is government, which I have no connection to, and the people who come work for the government are gone within a few years. In the black community there’s a deeper sense of community, because it’s larger and people don’t split. But in the white community you can feel very marginalized. So growing up there was a real desire – maybe even a necessity – to create something to belong to, some way to measure life.
Minor Threat was among the most passionate and exciting – as well as most musical – hardcore groups of the early ‘80s, but the band’s chief significance came in its relationship to its community. The Washington, D.C. punk scene – an insular society made of bands, labels, zines, skateboarding teens, and high school misfits of all sorts – wasn’t the first of its kind. But through the efforts of artists like Minor Threat’s MacKaye – who fostered at the local scene that could sustain itself through shared interests and common ideals – D.C. punk became a template for the entire punk subculture.
Mac McCaughan, Superchunk:
Minor Threat was probably the first hardcore record I bought. I heard other stuff on the radio and thought they were pretty cool, but those first Minor Threat 7 inches are so catchy, so raw and fast... Once I started thinking about the aesthetic of running a label – down to the ads and album covers, how to keep records cheap – Dischord [Minor Threat’s label] definitely influenced Merge [McCaughan’s label]. Their idea of being a label not so much centered around a band, but around a community. The idea of putting out bands you like and keeping it for people who are into this music.
Though MacKaye has long been agnostic and disdainful of organized religion, it’s easy to see how his church background informed the ethics he later applied to punk. MacKaye’s father, a theologian and former religion editor for the Washington Post, was a leader in a liberal inner-city church involved with grassroots political action. Following the King assassination in 1968, six-year-old Ian marched with his parents and church members.
With his earliest exposure to rock coming through church functions and activism, Ian always tied music to politics and social gatherings. After seeing the Woodstock film 16 times, MacKaye decided he wanted to throw a free music festival of his own someday. As a teen, Ian loved Ted Nugent’s music, wildman image, and outspoken sobriety, but discouraged by the professionalism of ‘70s arena rock, MacKaye instead took up skateboarding. With a group of D.C. kids that included his best friend, future Black Flag vocalist Henry Garfield (Rollins), he formed a completely independent, unsponsored skateboard team.
MacKaye started getting into punk bands like the Ramones and the Sex Pistols when he entered high school in 1977, though it wasn’t until his junior year that he discovered his calling. At a college radio benefit concert featuring the Cramps, MacKaye and his friends got a first taste of live punk rock and it forever changed the way they viewed music. Feeling like a participant – as opposed to a faraway spectator at arena rock shows – MacKaye found the social/musical community he’d been looking for. From there he discovered a small underground of punk outcasts he could identify with (as one of the few socially active high schoolers who didn’t drink or do drugs, he felt like a deviant himself). Though D.C.’s older art punks viewed MacKaye’s crowd as “teeny punks,” they soon established themselves as the heart of the local scene.
With the support of his parents, MacKaye decided to skip college and form a band instead. After playing bass in a short-lived group called the Slinkees, MacKaye and Slinkees drummer Jeff Nelson formed the Teen Idles. During its year-long existence the group managed to arrange a West Coast tour (with Henry Rollins as roadie) in search of early hardcore heroes like Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys and put out a single on its own label, Dischord. When the Teen Idles folded, MacKaye and Nelson regrouped with guitarist Lyle Preslar and bassist Brian Baker to form Minor Threat. Along with bands like Henry Rollins’ State of Alert (Dischord’s second release) and Government Issue, Minor Threat pushed the D.C. hardcore scene into motion.
Minor Threat built on the sounds of Bad Brains and Black Flag with Preslar’s high-tempo reverb guitar riffing, Nelson’s impulsive drum pounding, and MacKaye’s melodic yet sneering vocals. They perfected a hardcore style bands still copy. Balancing power and intimacy, songs like I Don’t Wanna Hear It and Small Man, Big Mouth attacked blind followers, liars, and bullies, and spoke directly to and about the lives of band members and people around them.
Jenny Toomey, Tsunami / Licorice:
There’s a lot of heart in what Ian does, he really challenges himself. Minor Threat just had perfect songs. It’s no surprise an entire genre of punk has grown up to copy them. [Simple Machines, Toomey’s label] gets demo tapes to this day of fifteen-year-old boys and girls singing in that exact same style.
The Minor Threat song that probably had the biggest impact was Straight Edge. As D.C. punks connected with lyrics such as, “I’ve got better things to do / Than sit around and smoke dope. / Always gonna keep in touch / Never want to use a crutch,” they began to advocate sobriety as an act of rebellion against mainstream society’s rampant substance abuse. Though it never constituted a majority in the punk scene (or even a majority of Minor Threat fans), “straight edge” became the name and rallying cry of a drug- and alcohol-free punk faction that spread across the country (and world), and still exists today.
Eric Wilson, Sublime:
I loved them even though I wasn’t straight edge. I wouldn’t even listen to the lyrics, the music was so good. I’d be riding to school with a Walkman cranking, “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke,” while I was smoking a roach. The music was just so pure and full of energy.
MacKaye resisted the straight edge tag once the movement showed signs of becoming tyrannically fundamentalist, but because he remained outspoken in the punk community it was difficult to separate the message from the original messenger. Idealism aside, though, straight edge had an important pragmatic role. While getting into shows was a problem for MacKaye and his still-underage friends, the young punks convinced venues to let them in provided they didn’t buy alcohol. To alert bartenders not to serve them, the kids marked their hands with the “x” that later became a symbol of straight edge affiliation.
As Dischord resumed activity in 1981 and ‘82-releasing Minor Threat’s first two EPs Bottled Violence and In My Eyes – Jeff and Ian moved into Dischord House, their home and base of business operations. Following Minor Threat’s community-minded practices such as insisting their shows be open to fans of all ages and cost no more than $5 per ticket, Dischord kept its record prices low as well. After a brief breakup while Preslar did a semester in college, Preslar rejoined and Baker switched to second guitar, while Steve Hansgen joined on bass. With a bolstered lineup, Minor Threat recorded an album, Out of Step, in early 1983.
Showing a maturation from its earlier finger-pointing rants, Minor Threat’s lyrical concerns on songs like Sob Story and Betray focused on the punk scene’s own shortcomings, while Look back and Laugh revealed a new sensitivity. Indeed, as the D.C. punk scene grew in the early ‘80s and slam dancing (moshing) attracted more violent elements, it became increasingly difficult to maintain cohesion. Meanwhile, Minor Threat’s rising national prominence made it more difficult to maintain the band’s community orientation. When a major label record deal became a possibility, tensions flared within the band, and Ian and Jeff – unwilling to separate their band from their label – disbanded Minor Threat for good. A final single, Salad Days, pointed toward the future without relying on nostalgia for the past: “Look at us today / We’ve gotten soft and fat / Waiting for the moment / It’s just not coming back... / But I stay on, I stay on.”
Mark Robinson, Unrest:
I was impressed
with Dischord Records locally, and the guys in Minor Threat. That was definitely a huge label influence on me. It was cool seeing bands around here doing shows and putting out records. It was almost like the country didn’t exist, people were famous just in D.C. and that was okay. I also liked their design elements. The TeenBeat [Robinson’s D.C.-based label] logo is kind of fashioned after it.
Remaining an integral part of the D.C. punk scene, MacKaye and Nelson devoted their energy to Dischord, which continued to release albums by local bands such as Scream (featuring future Nirvana / Foo Fighters member Dave Grohl) and Dag Nasty. MacKaye also continued his role as activist and participated in D.C. punk’s “Good Food October” and “Revolution Summer,” movements that attempted to distance the scene from negative elements and reshape punk aesthetics. In 1985 he formed Embrace, a band that defined a more mature and expressive post-punk sound, “emo-core.” Nelson collaborated with MacKaye on Egghunt, then played in the bands Three and High Back Chairs. In 1987, MacKaye teamed up with another well-known D.C. frontman, Rites of Spring’s Guy Picciotto, to form Fugazi, a band that is in many ways the ideal successor to D.C. hardcore. Both Fugazi and Dischord continue to enjoy success, entirely on their own terms, while MacKaye remains a vital part of a local scene that wouldn’t be the same without him.
DISCOGRAPHY
Bottled Violence 7” (Dischord, 1981); an eight-song debut single.
In My Eyes 7” (Dischord, 1982); a four-song follow-up single.
Out of Step (Dischord, 1983); a mini-album featuring 12 songs.
Salad Days 7” (Dischord, 1983); a final three-song single.
Minor Threat (Dischord, 1984); collects the first two singles together on one album.
Complete Discography (Dischord, 1988); collects all the band’s recordings on one CD.
AVANT PUNK USA
The bands classified here as avant punk fall somewhere between the British post-punk movement, which attempted to explore the outer reaches of punk sounds and structures, and the American hardcore scene, which tried to take punk’s hard-fast-short-loud aesthetic to it’s furthest point and build on punk’s do-it-yourself ethic. American bands like Flipper and Mission of Burma had a definite artistic kinship with the British post-punks, and were too arty (and not enough punk) to be hardcore.
By the late ‘80s, with hardcore bands like Minor Threat and Hüsker Dü either gone or diminished, younger groups that had descended from their tradition were left in a position to move beyond hardcore. Bands like Slint incorporated other influences into their music to create a more progressive, avant-garde brand of American punk and opened up entirely new possibilities for a style that only a few years earlier seemed to be running out of ideas.
For the most part, the bands in this chapter came out of – or operated within – the punk scene, side by side with hardcore and post-punk bands. And, while it was appropriate to group them together here, it’s important not to overlook the fact that neither the artists nor their fans ever had to choose sides. Despite their pop sensibility, the Wipers could easily share a bill with Black Flag and exert an influence on the same group of people.
WIPERS
Greg Sage, Wipers:
I wasn’t aware you had to look a certain way to be accepted in punk. Living in Portland, I wore flannel shirts, which I guess was the most uncool thing you could wear. A lot of people thought it was funny, they’d call me a logger. It’s funny how old photos from that era translated to what was going on in the early ‘80s with the grunge thing. So all of a sudden I became a leader of that.
The first notable punk band from the northwest, the Wipers are the earliest link in a chain that leads directly to Nirvana and the rest of the Seattle bands of the ‘90s. Despite this, and despite the fact their songs have been covered by bands like Nirvana (twice) and Hole, the group has managed to stay out of sight in the United States (they are better known in Europe). Though the Wipers’ relative obscurity may be partly due to their ahead-of-its-time indie approach, in large part it can be attributed to their leader (and only constant member) Greg Sage, a talented songwriter and guitarist whose career has been uncompromising to the point of being self-defeating.
Musically, it would be unfair to give the Wipers too much credit for starting the heavy metal/punk amalgamation that was dubbed “grunge” (credit for that goes more to Aberdeen, Washington’s Melvins). The Wipers, though, were a great band with great songs, whose greatest influence lay in the way they cleared a path in independent music for later Northwest bands to follow. From their base in Portland, the Wipers’ sent out a message of “be yourself” and “do-it-yourself” that was heard throughout Oregon and up to the punk rock centers in Olympia and Seattle, Washington.
Van Conner, Screaming Trees:
The Wipers were – still are, actually – an influence for everybody in the Trees. The Wipers were just so far before their time. They were our favorite band for years and years. The idea of us taking everything a little more seriously came from the Wipers. Having fun doing it, but putting a little heart and blood into it. That’s not something that sells records, but it’s something people notice.
From elementary school on, Greg Sage was interested in the recording process. His reason for writing songs as a teenager was more so he’d have something to record than out of a desire to express himself. Around 1977, he started playing music with his friends Dave Koupal (on bass) and Sam Henry (on drums). Though he had little knowledge or experience with punk rock at the time, when his band – which he named the Wipers – got invited to play live, he fell into Portland’s small punk scene. As a distant outpost of the early West Coast punk scene, Portland bands at the time were more of the “dress up” kind, imitating the leather and chains punk styles they saw in magazines. The Wipers, with their flannel shirts and jeans, clearly didn’t fit in, but when the band’s music caught on it sent a powerful message that good music was independent of fashions.
John McEntire, Tortoise / Sea and Cake:
He was kind of the first person to ever do stuff in [Portland, where McEntire grew up]. He was this amazingly enterprising guy who built his own studio in days when nobody did that, and put out his own records. It was before a lot of the hardcore bands were around. There was the same sort of independent idea happening, but before it was formulated and solidified by a larger community. I was a little too young to be fully impacted, but in time I came to understand how it developed on a local level.
Being from Portland proved problematic when the Wipers recorded their first single, Better off Dead, and Sage tried to release it on his own label, Trap. “We’d call the distributors on the East Coast, and they’d ask where our label was based. I’d say Portland, Oregon, and they’d laugh and hang up,” Sage remembers. It necessitated a move to New York, though the Wipers eventually returned to Portland. With the release of their debut album Is This Real? in 1980, Sage had developed a plan for how he wanted to make music. “My goal was to put out 15 albums in 10 years, and never play live, never do interviews, never put out photos,” he says. “To get people to listen I wanted to create a mystique, because the more that people know, the less they look into what you’re doing for the answers. But working with other people made it impossible. It was just a constant bombardment of ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’”
Carrie Broumstein, Sleater-Kinney:
Greg Sage and the Wipers are totally legendary here [in the Northwest]. His lyrics really sum up this weird sort of depression of being in the Northwest a lot, without really targeting anything. I know that Corin [Tucker of Sleater-Kinney] totally loved his guitar playing in a way that influenced her.
Though he never achieved his recording goal, Sage was able to maintain a low profile and his independence by not signing multi-album deals with record companies, retaining complete control of the writing and production of Wipers material, and doing as little promotion as possible. Of course, his unwillingness to go along with established record company practices also limited h
is commercial viability. Still, Is This Real? and the 1981 EP Youth of America established the Wipers as the leading punk band in the northwest. At a time when Black Flag’s hardcore sound was coming to dominate punk scenes on the West Coast, Wipers songs like Return of the Rat (covered by Nirvana) were a throwback to the more melodic, hook-laden punk of the Ramones, while Is this Real? was reminiscent of Elvis Costello. With Youth of America, Sage and a new Wipers lineup moved even further away from the current “short and fast” punk style with a 10-minute epic title track and more new wave / post-punk explorations.
Chris Cornell, Soundgarden:
We played shows with them and they were a really big influence on our band overall. They were an example to me of a band that could have punk aggression and post-punk sensibilities in their instrumental approach, but at the same time write songs that would stick with you and be as important to you as any band you’d grown up listening to. The first time I ever met our drummer Matt [Cameron] he played me a bunch of 4-track demos he’d recorded, and they sounded really cool. And then he played the Wipers, and I asked him, “Is that you, too?” And he just kind of rolled his eyes and said, “I wish.”
As the ‘80s progressed, the Wipers settled into a comfortable anonymity. Without much attention from the music press or radio, Sage continued to produce increasingly polished and consistently good albums such as Over the Edge – which featured standouts like Doom Town and the title track that Hole later covered – as well as Land of the Lost. In 1985, Sage also released his first solo album, which he recorded (like all Wipers material) in his own studio. Then, as the ‘80s ended and the Northwest rock scene was teetering on the verge of national prominence, Sage moved away from Portland. Disappointed with the growing metropolitanism of the region, he took refuge in the wide-open desert near Phoenix, where he built a new recording studio, pursued solo work, and produced other groups.
