Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  “He didn’t really talk until he got his girlfriend,” says Mascis, “and somehow that jump-started his ego, and he went from ‘I am Lou, I am nothing’ to ‘I am the greatest.’ He just went ffffft, just flipped the scales. And then he started talking a lot. And then I was realizing from a lot of the things he was saying, ‘Hmmm, maybe I don’t like Lou.’ I’d never heard him talk before so I didn’t really know what was going on in his head. And then when you hear what’s he’s talking about, it was like, ‘Hmmm, interesting—I’m not really into that.’ ”

  Starting with the Bug tour, Barlow occasionally abandoned his usual parts and indulged in what Fetler calls “sonic dronings,” Sonic Youth–inspired playing that wasn’t anywhere near what he’d played on the record. Barlow had been playing tape collages between songs for a year or so, surely borrowing the idea straight from Sonic Youth; but now he was setting them off during the songs. It may well have been Barlow’s way of asserting himself after being so subdued; at any rate, Mascis took the unsolicited modification of his music as a personal affront.

  It had all come to a head at an early ’88 show at a small club in Naugatuck, Connecticut. The place was far from packed and the band wasn’t playing very well. They were halfway through “Severed Lips” when Barlow began making feedback with his bass instead of playing the usual part.

  “Lou is sitting on the drum riser, just making noise through every song—this one note—and just trying to goad us, taunting us, basically,” says Mascis. “And I’m playing and I’m like, ‘I think Murph’s going to beat up Lou.’ And it goes on a little bit more and I’m thinking, ‘Yup, this is going to be bad, Murph’s going to beat up Lou.’ And I keep playing and I keep thinking that, and finally, I think, ‘Huh, I guess Murph’s not going to beat up Lou. I guess I’ll have to do it.’ ”

  Mascis rushed across the stage and tried to hit Barlow with his guitar. Barlow raised his bass like a shield while Mascis bashed away at him repeatedly. (“It made a pretty good sound,” Mascis recalls somewhat fondly.) After a few failed bashes, Mascis stalked offstage yelling, “I can’t take it! I can’t take it!” Barlow called after him, “Can’t take what, J? Asshole!” and raised his fists in triumph. “I got really psyched, like psychotically happy, and just went, ‘Yes!’ ” says Barlow. “I felt like he’d proved to me that he actually had feelings. He never would react to anything at all, ever.”

  “I remember just sitting there at my drum set going, ‘OK, this is my perfect opportunity to pummel both of these guys,’ ” says Murph. “But instead I just walked off.” Barlow followed Mascis and Murph backstage and assured them that he didn’t mean anything by the feedback. The band went out again, played what was surely a fearsome cover of “Minor Threat” and drove home in silence. It was the beginning of the end.

  In one fall of ’88 interview, Mascis acknowledged the band’s overwhelming internal strife but admitted he was just too lazy to fire anybody: “I just know I’ll always be in a band,” he said, “so I’d rather just have one and keep going rather than have to start another one.”

  But in July ’89 Mascis decided Barlow had to go. He and Murph went over to Barlow’s house to deliver the news. Tellingly, it was the first time either of them had ever been there. Mascis had a knack for delegating unpleasant tasks, so Murph did most of the talking while Mascis hovered in the doorway. “I would be the spokesman for J, and I would kind of present bad news or pave the way,” says Murph. “He was just into having other people execute his dirty work. J is very smart that way—he gets a great network of people to suffer the blow.”

  But somehow, even after an hour of talking, they hadn’t managed to convey the idea that they were firing Barlow. Instead, Barlow had the impression that the band was breaking up entirely. “I said, ‘OK, that’s cool, see you guys later,’ ” says Barlow. “And they left.”

  “We did kind of let him believe that,” Murph admits. “That was the evil thing. J and I were just spineless.” In fact, they had already booked a tour of Australia and arranged for Northwest punk mainstay Donna Dresch, who had played for a time with the Screaming Trees, to fly in from Washington State to replace Barlow. They were even thinking about signing with Warner Brothers.

  A day or so later, Barlow heard about all this from a friend. Distraught, he called up Mascis, and Murph and Mascis dropped by Barlow’s house again. “We had everything out,” says Mascis. “I didn’t say anything. I was just sitting there, observing. Murph was doing all the talking. We couldn’t deal with each other at all.”

  The next day Murph and Mascis were sitting in their friend Megan Jasper’s kitchen, talking about Barlow and regretting that they hadn’t been more straightforward with him when suddenly Barlow burst in the door. “You fucking assholes!” Barlow screamed. “I can’t believe you didn’t have the balls to tell me to my face! I have to find out on the street!”

  “All of the disgust that I was holding in for all those years just came out,” says Barlow. “It was pretty rough to deal with, not so much because of what they had done to me, but just the role I had chosen to play and all of the stuff that I had chosen to let build up inside of me and never really deal with. I had to sort through a lot of that and I was really extremely angry.” After some more scolding, Barlow left without further incident.

  Mascis served as some kind of perverse muse for a whole series of Sebadoh songs. “I got a lot of hatred out just by writing songs,” Barlow says. “I just wanted to get under his skin. I wanted to wheedle my way in, in some way that was just not anything like what J was doing. So he was a real inspiration in a lot of ways.”

  Most of the screeds came out on singles, including one titled “Asshole”; the sleeve even has the Sebadoh name set in the same typeface as the Dinosaur logo. Barlow coyly acknowledged his target by including a snippet from the film Say Anything. “This song is about Joe,” says a girl’s voice, “and all my songs are about Joe.”

  Barlow insisted he was obsessed not with Mascis but with the issues of control the situation represented. The relationships within Dinosaur, he held, were a metaphor for a larger truth about the human condition. “That’s a weird little kink in human nature that I couldn’t figure out,” Barlow says. “This idea of negative charisma and the way people tend to project things onto people and also control, the myriad ways people can control other people. Sometimes it has nothing to do with actually telling them what to do. It has to do with totally vibing people out. And there was so much of that going on.”

  Barlow’s screeds alienated many Dinosaur fans, most of whom bought Mascis’s image as a benign, gifted narcoleptic. But Mascis himself says he didn’t care about Barlow’s attacks. “It’s just more Lou to me,” he says wearily. “I’ve had a lot of Lou in my life.”

  The rift between Mascis and Barlow was enthusiastically covered by the press. “It makes me sick that I spent six or seven years putting my heart and soul into that band,” Barlow told Cut zine in 1990. “They’re sleazebag snob pigs like no one I have met in my entire life. J’s always been an asshole.” It was a bit of a one-sided feud, though, since Mascis rarely fired back, not out of his usual avoidance of communication, but because he’d honored a request by Barlow that he not talk about him to the press.

  When Mascis was asked in a Melody Maker interview what the band planned to do now that Barlow had gone, his reply may have defined the slacker ethos right then and there. “We have no plans for what we want to do next,” he said. “We have no plans about anything, really.”

  By the summer of ’90, Dinosaur released a great new single, “The Wagon,” which Melody Maker named one of two Singles of the Week. “Am I allowed two-word reviews?” asked writer Everett True. “Sheer exhilaration!” He went on, of course.

  By this time Mascis had decided to move to a major label. “The thing I thought was great about it was they would just pay you on time,” says Mascis. “I like Greg Ginn and stuff, but they wouldn’t pay you. Homestead I didn’t like and they were more just, lik
e, dicks. They didn’t pay and they didn’t care. It was like all these indie labels that are ripping you off are supposed to be better than the major label who won’t rip you off.”

  Other than that, Mascis’s reasons for moving to a major are unclear. “It just seemed like the thing to do, I don’t know,” says Mascis. “Just because we could do it. I’m not sure.”

  Mascis says he got little grief from the indie cognoscenti for going major label. “It wasn’t that polarized yet,” he says. “It was just kind of this weird thing—‘Wow you’re on a major.’ There were a few bands that did it and stuff, it’s just kind of odd, you’re not really sure what to think of it. I can see now how it’s damaging, after being through it. I didn’t really have any concept.”

  Mascis solved his communication issues by playing virtually every instrument on Dinosaur’s 1991 major label debut Green Mind, which won the attentions of commercial radio, the major music magazines, and even MTV.

  Meanwhile Barlow had come back into Mascis’s life—terrified that he might go broke now that he wasn’t in Dinosaur, Barlow hired a lawyer and sued Mascis for $10,000 in back royalties. “But I didn’t owe him anything—we hadn’t gotten any money,” says Mascis. “I was really flipped out about that. I thought that was just really a bummer to me. Instead of calling me up and asking me, he just assumed. I’m not sure what was going on with him at the time, but that was really… I don’t know.” But during months of legal wrangling, some money actually did come in and the two settled.

  It was the beginning of a rough period for Barlow. Because he was paying a lawyer to recover the money he felt he was owed, Kathleen Billus was supporting him. “And she eventually supported me until she hated me and dumped me,” says Barlow, “for the lawyer that was getting me the money from J! It was just nuts!” (Barlow and Billus soon reconciled and eventually married.)

  Barlow was convinced that Dinosaur could have achieved widespread popularity if they’d only preserved their original inspiration. Mascis, he says, deliberately avoided any steps that might have brought the band greater fame. “For him it was, ‘I don’t know if I want to be famous,’ ” says Barlow. “Or ‘I don’t know, I have nothing to say.’ I was, like, ‘What?’ He just got too caught up in it or something. I mean, Jimi Hendrix wasn’t asking himself all these questions, he just fucking did it. And they got off on it. Black Sabbath, any fucking band, they were into music. Why deny it? That just drives me absolutely insane. Isn’t this what it’s all about?”

  Shortly after Nevermind was released and immediately began scaling the charts, Barlow bumped into Mascis on the streets of Northampton. “I was like totally high and drunk,” says Barlow, “and I was like, ‘They fucking beat you to it! You could have done it, you asshole, we could have fucking done it!’ ”

  CHAPTER 11

  Fugazi

  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 sam
e 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.”