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.
BERT QUEIROZ
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 th
an 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.
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