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.
Revolution Summer was off to a rousing start.
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 se
emed 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.”
Clearly, it was time to get out of Rockville.
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.
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