Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Although Dischord House was in Arlington, they put MacKaye’s parents’ Glover Park address on the records, figuring they might not be at Dischord House very long (in fact, MacKaye still lives there) and wanting to preserve their beloved D.C. connection. All correspondence went to the Georgetown address, and very soon so did kids who wanted to see MacKaye.

  That summer, after the abortive national tour, Preslar decided he wanted to go to college. Minor Threat played a farewell gig around Christmas 1981 and then Preslar went off to Northwestern University, where he wound up rooming with future Urge Overkill singer Nate Kato and also befriended Kato’s buddy Steve Albini. Meanwhile, Nelson and MacKaye pursued a one-off project, and Baker joined Government Issue.

  But Preslar soon grew to dislike college life and began having second thoughts about quitting the band. And in the meantime, the In My Eyes EP was winning rave reviews in fanzines across the country, while Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys had been talking up the D.C. hardcore scene and Minor Threat in particular.

  Then MacKaye’s hero H.R. from the Bad Brains took MacKaye aside at a show. “They had come back from the West Coast,” MacKaye says, “and he said, ‘Ian, man, there’s kids from all over the country who want to know. You can’t just come out with these songs like “Straight Edge” and then not follow up. You have to get it together because they want to see you. They want to know.’ And so I was like, ‘Then let’s do it.’ ” There was little standing in the way, since Baker wasn’t very happy in Government Issue and Preslar had quit Northwestern after one semester. The reformed Minor Threat played their first show in April ’82.

  But they hadn’t counted on a painful backlash from their friends and fans. Within the D.C. scene, people believed that if a band broke up, it was simply mercenary to re-form. Of course, there was absolutely nothing to be mercenary about in the low-stakes world of D.C. hardcore, but that’s the degree of youthful purism that existed. Sharon Cheslow, a D.C. musician and fanzine publisher, wrote in the local zine If This Goes On, “Playing old songs just to please an audience seems far away from Ian’s original attitudes. If Minor Threat had just thought up a new name, discarded some of the old songs and created a whole new set, they would’ve been D.C.’s best hardcore band.”

  In response, they wrote a song called “Cashing In” that rails against the disloyalty of their own community. “There’s no place like home / So where am I?” MacKaye sings with undisguised bitterness. “I just felt so betrayed by my friends,” MacKaye says, “for doing what I wanted to do, for doing what I thought was the right thing.” They performed the song only once, at their first show after reuniting. Afterward Baker and Preslar heaved handfuls of change at the audience.

  When Minor Threat got asked to open for PiL at a Halloween show that year at Maryland University, MacKaye was dubious about the steep ticket price (about $8), but the rest of the band was adamant that they do it. Unfortunately, Public Image had demanded such a high fee that the promoters couldn’t afford to pay the opening band. “So I really put my foot down,” says MacKaye. “I said, ‘I want to be fed and I want soda.’ ” But when they arrived, the college students who were working the show had eaten all the food and there was nothing left but some supermarket brand of soda. “For us, we were connoisseurs of soda,” MacKaye says, “and it was such a slap in the face.”

  They eventually got pizzas and Coca-Cola, then played an intense show. “We rocked the fucking house,” MacKaye recalls. “Everybody was singing along. We had a huge following at the time and people were just really going off.”

  Earlier that day MacKaye had spotted PiL singer John Lydon, and when Minor Threat left the stage, MacKaye was excited that one of his early heroes had witnessed what he had wrought. “And we came offstage and just as we walked to the back doors, which were flung open, I saw this limousine pull up and Lydon got out of this limousine!” MacKaye says. “They weren’t even at the fuckin’ show! Those fuckin’ assholes!”

  Which is why, to this day, MacKaye does his best to catch the opening bands. “I’ll just never forget how insulted I was,” he says, “by the fact that they weren’t even there.”

  In late ’82 Brian Baker announced that either he was going to move from bass to guitar or he was going to quit. Conveniently, he’d already found a successor, Steve Hansgen. The rest of the band was dubious about the switch, but when Hansgen showed up to his audition, sang along word for word to every song, and not only knew all the bass parts but also played them even better than Baker, he was in.

  Taking their cue from the drastic stylistic evolutions of the Damned (“the Beatles of punk,” says Nelson), Minor Threat vowed to modify their sound with each new release. With the Out of Step album (Dischord #10), recorded in January ’83, once again at Inner Ear with Zientara and Groff, “Now we had two guitar players,” says MacKaye, “and that’s metal.” That was fine with Baker, who was a metal fan to begin with, but truth be told, the transformation is subtle at best—Out of Step is a hardcore album through and through.

  Some songs took aim at the hardcore scene itself—the backbiting, disillusionment, and false nostalgia that had set in within just a few short years. By virtue of being among the first to point out hardcore’s nascent decline, MacKaye once again became its conscience. “It Follows” notes that a lot of the things MacKaye was fleeing by being a punk—herd behavior, bullying, gossip—had infiltrated the punk scene.

  On the other side of the continent, in his “Sub Pop” column in the Seattle Rocket, Bruce Pavitt said of Out of Step: “Honest, introspective, this release focuses on pride, honor and friendship.” Actually, several songs were about the disintegration of MacKaye and Nelson’s friendship. It didn’t help that the two old friends lived in the same house, played in the same band, and ran the same record label. “There was,” says Nelson, “no space at all.” “Sit in the same room / We look the other way,” MacKaye sings on “No Reason.” “Fuck conversation / We’ve got nothing to say.”

  But elsewhere, the lyrical themes broadened considerably. When the band first started playing in the D.C. punk rock community, MacKaye was simply addressing his small circle, many of whom could readily recognize the specific people the songs were about. But then the band’s music began to reach more and more people outside the Dischord scene. “It’s getting more complicated because I’m dealing with a larger crowd,” recalls MacKaye, “and I’m realizing that now I’m dealing with, like, the fold—not punk rockers but normal people.” And in the process, MacKaye became more and more unsure—things were not so cut-and-dried anymore. By Out of Step, he’d written a song called “Little Friend” in which there was “No description for what I feel / It’s a non-emotion, it’s something gray / Way down inside of me”—quite a leap from the black-and-white world of the first EP.

  The big dilemma for Dischord had always been whether to re-press a catalog item or sink the money into a new release. Out of Step sold thirty-five hundred copies in one week, but because the distributors would take months to pay up and Dischord couldn’t get credit terms with any pressing plants, they couldn’t afford to get another few thousand copies manufactured. They wrote letters to the pressing plants pointing out that they’d worked with them for several years already, and included financial statements, reviews, and radio station playlists to bolster their case, but no plants were forthcoming. With Out of Step, the situation was made awkward by the fact that they had to decide whether to use their limited funds to re-press the album or release the debut by the Faith. And just to make things more complicated, the Faith’s singer was none other than MacKaye’s younger brother Alec. In the end, they simply borrowed money from friends and pressed both.

  Alternative Tentacles had released the Flex Your Head D.C. hardcore sampler in England and now several labels wanted to release Out of Step in Europe. Ruth Schwartz, a DJ at the Maximumrocknroll radio show in Berkeley, told her friend John Loder about the band. Loder recorded the English anarcho-punk group Crass and ran their label as well a
s Southern Studios in London. When Loder caught a Minor Threat show in New York and offered to press and distribute Dischord records, MacKaye and Nelson accepted. Southern Studios had credit terms with their plant so they could press new releases as well as keep the back catalog in print. And, even better, they had European distribution. Almost everything Dischord released has been pressed and distributed through Southern since 1984. Not only were the days of folding parties over, but the label could boast professional-looking records and MacKaye and Nelson now had more time for other projects.

  In spring of ’83 Minor Threat played a forty-nine-day, thirty-three-show U.S. and Canadian tour. By now the hardcore scene was flourishing and there were far more places to play. “The first time we toured, there were five or six places that we could call,” MacKaye says. “Second time we toured there was thirty places and the third time we toured there was fifty places. If you visualize a map of the United States, you could visualize little spots appearing—there’s a scene in L.A., Washington, San Francisco, Detroit, Boston, New York, things started to appear. Reno, Madison, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Austin, Gainesville. Then you could go there—your people existed. There was no reason to go to a town unless you knew some punk rockers. You didn’t want to play in a rock club—you only wanted to play with punk rockers.”

  Still, during the southern leg, the crowds could number as few as a couple of dozen, and never topped 150. They made $863 at a San Francisco show, the most they’d ever made. MacKaye had set up the tour using no written contracts, which was a sore subject among the rest of the band, who felt some promoters had taken advantage of the practice and ripped them off. MacKaye argued that promoters were going to rip them off anyway, contract or not.

  A big part of Minor Threat shows was the dance floor and the interaction between the audience and the band. MacKaye always made a point of passing the mike into the crowd so people could sing along (and amazingly, the mike always came back). If the PA conked out, he’d just conduct the crowd, who would bellow along over the roar of the amps. It was a powerful expression of community. “I love hearing people sing along with bands—I think it’s incredible,” says MacKaye. “There’s few things that affect me more powerfully than a room full of people singing with a band.”

  MacKaye never told anyone to get off the stage. Sometimes this encouraged a rapid and irreversible descent into chaos, but usually it just meant a steady stream of stage divers and kids who just wanted a few seconds of attention while they did some silly dance for their buddies. Anarchy, it seemed, could work.

  And yet for all the camaraderie, Minor Threat seemed to invite confrontation every step of the way. “When Minor Threat was on tour, I would get into fights every night,” MacKaye recalls. At one show in Dallas, a kid jumped up onstage and tore MacKaye’s shirt right off his back. “And I just dropped the mike and ran after him,” he says. “He couldn’t believe I came after him—I’d left the cage. And I jumped into the crowd and I grabbed him by the shirt, ripped his fuckin’ shirt off, and I just grabbed him by the pants and tried to pull his pants off, too.” That was right about the time the police showed up and shut down the gig.

  In San Francisco MacKaye again got attacked onstage. San Francisco was home to a hardcore gang called the Fuckups, who were led by one Bob Noxious. The Fuckups specialized in beating up singers from bands; Noxious had tackled 45 Grave singer Dinah Cancer onstage and the gang’s women’s auxiliary, the Fuckettes, vowed to get MacKaye. The Fuckettes were all skinheads, so when they blindsided MacKaye, he didn’t know they were women. “All I know is I’m singing at the On Broadway in San Francisco and these two kids tackle me,” he recalls. “And I just started fighting them. Because I’m in the middle of a song and I’m being violently tackled. They blindsided me. I landed on one of them and they were between my legs. So I started punching them. Then Bob Noxious comes up and I punched him out….”

  Crossing into Canada, their van was stopped by the border patrol. Spotting a punk rock band, the guards thought they’d hit pay dirt and searched the van closely. After much snooping around, one of the guards found a secret door Nelson had built into the wooden frame holding the bed and equipment in back. “And what’s in here?” the guard said expectantly. And he opened the door to find… eight hundred pieces of bubble gum.

  The band’s straight edge stance earned them a fair amount of taunting, especially from a band like Hüsker Dü, who were far from straight edge. The two bands played on the same bill in San Diego in January ’83. “They were fucking pricks to us,” MacKaye recalls. The first thing Bob Mould said to MacKaye was “Straight edge sucks.”

  “Fuck you,” MacKaye shot back.

  Then the Hüskers decided to have a little fun. “We got a bottle of aspirin and just started spreading them all over the stage,” says Mould, “just fucking with them. It was good-hearted, we meant no malice, it was just our way of being sometimes—being the pranksters, the fucks.”

  On an earlier tour, the band arrived to stay at Jello Biafra’s house, only to encounter a fellow in the living room who apparently began vomiting and then passed out as soon as the band walked in the room. In another room they found an impressive collection of bongs; next they came across a bunch of people smoking pot; finally there was a room with giant syringes scattered around. It was all a joke for their benefit. Bands would do things like dedicate a song called “I Was Drunk” to Minor Threat; even Black Flag changed the chorus line of “Six Pack” to “Straight Edge” at one D.C. show, precipitating a major falling out between MacKaye and Rollins.

  Even the rest of the band chafed at the chaste image MacKaye lent Minor Threat. “It was a little like being on tour with one of your parents,” says Nelson. “It wasn’t like there were that many girls hanging around with which you could have had fun, but you would definitely be embarrassed to do something like that even though he never said it. It was just a sensed thing.”

  But the band clung to their all-ages policy no matter what. Just before an L.A. show, the club’s manager announced he would admit only those twenty-one and over. So Minor Threat simply moved the show—and the entire crowd—to a local rehearsal studio.

  It was the longest tour any of them had been on, and road fever got the best of even the mild-mannered Nelson. In San Francisco they stayed at the Vats, a former brewery that the politico-punk band MDC had converted into living and rehearsal space. Nelson was going to the store for sandwiches and asked if anybody wanted one. “No, I don’t want anything,” Baker said, a bit brusquely. When Nelson came back and began making his sandwich, Baker grabbed a slice of Nelson’s bread and started eating. Nelson snapped. “I said something to him and he said something back,” says Nelson, “and I leaped across the table at him and I was throttling him over a piece of bread!”

  When they got back, Preslar and Baker took up dreary day jobs while MacKaye and Nelson devoted themselves to running the label full-time.

  Hardcore was made by a bunch of bellowing, crew-cut, shirtless young men playing loud, fast, aggressive music. But MacKaye takes strong issue with the idea that the music was macho. “See, to me, Lynyrd Skynyrd was macho,” he says. “It’s contextual. It didn’t seem macho to me at all. It seemed like spaz.” But to begin with, many of MacKaye’s lyrics involve fighting, and what is more definitively macho than fisticuffs? “It was very testosterone laden,” agrees Sharon Cheslow, “a test of how much abuse you could take in dancing and how intense and aggressive the music could be.”

  There were no women in any of the key D.C. hardcore bands, even though women like X’s Exene, Patti Smith, the Germs’ Lorna Doom, and many others were in punk’s greatest bands. MacKaye chalks it up to social conditioning: “There’s a certain kind of aggressiveness that leads the boys to pick up the instruments,” he says. “Another aspect was that hardcore’s aggression came from a need to express years of pent-up anger at society and family,” says Cheslow. “Although many of the females had just as much anger, it wasn’t as easy or socially acceptab
le for us to release. The angry young boy thing was very romanticized. Angry young girls were a threat.”

  Even as recently as the early Eighties, most girls weren’t encouraged to play anything besides classical piano or acoustic guitar—they just didn’t have any way of learning how to rock. “And the guys either didn’t want to take the time to show their female friends,” says Cheslow, “or didn’t want to come across as condescending, and a lot of the girls didn’t want to ask for help.”

  Cheslow recalls that when her band Chalk Circle started playing out, a lot of guys teased them. “There was constant ridicule by a lot of the guys of female musicians who they felt were ‘lame,’ ” says Cheslow, “not loud enough, not fast enough, not distorted enough.” So women assumed an auxiliary role, taking photographs, helping to run Dischord, publishing fanzines, hosting shows in their parents’ basements.

  “Some people say the early punk rock was corrupted by the fact that it was all boys,” says MacKaye. “But I say that’s bullshit. Whether we were boys or not, we were breaking ground. It made what’s happening now totally possible.”

  In 1981, if you were going to try to explain what was going on in Washington, you would say [major label new wavers] the Urban Verbs, not Minor Threat,” says Mark Jenkins. “There was plenty of other stuff happening. It was only in retrospect that people saw the hardcore scene was maybe the most important thing—hardcore and go-go—to happen in Washington in the early Eighties.” Thus no record company scouts ventured to D.C., and with the entertainment industry so far away, bands didn’t think too much about signing major label record deals, leaving the scene free to flourish and its sound to develop unmolested.

  Unlike first-wave English punks like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned, who clearly sought a wider audience through media hucksterism, hardcore punks were happy, even determined, to limit their appeal. The music was resolutely unmelodic, humbly recorded, and vastly unsexy. It was a point of honor not to reach out beyond their own nationwide tribe. It was not only a way to cement a fledgling community, but like slam dancing itself, it was also a way to feel powerful at a time in life when one can feel particularly powerless: the Man would never take this music away.