Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  Realizing they’d be raising relatively small amounts of money, the members of Fugazi reasoned it would be more effective to funnel funds to small organizations for whom even a few hundred dollars would be a significant windfall. And they were local organizations because, as Picciotto puts it, “we’re all serious hometowners.” (In fact, MacKaye is a sixth-generation Washingtonian.) With D.C. swiftly becoming the drug and murder capital of the nation, corruption rife within the city’s government, and residents deprived of voting representation in Congress, social services were sketchy at best and the town was falling into disrepair; there was a lot that needed help. The band decided to focus on helping the downtrodden, donating to prison reform organizations, free clinics, homeless shelters, and AIDS clinics. One of their favorite concerns was the venerable Washington Free Clinic, which provides medical services for the poor and uninsured; MacKaye’s father had been involved with the organization for decades.

  Like MacKaye’s family, Canty’s parents were veterans of the civil rights movement of the Sixties and would often put up demonstrators who came through town. “So for us,” says Canty, “to me at least, it feels like a continuation from that spirit—to give back to the community that wrought you.”

  Positive Force hooked up the band with some unorthodox venues, such as the Sacred Heart Church in the racially mixed Mount Pleasant neighborhood and the Lorton Correctional Facility in Virginia, where they played a Boxing Day 1990 show to a few dozen inmates. “They were pretty freaked out,” said MacKaye. “They’d never heard anything remotely like us before.” Footage of the show from director Jem Cohen’s Fugazi documentary Instrument reveals that the audience was more amused than “freaked out” by the earnest Fugazi, but the gig was still a bold move.

  MacKaye may have been the instigator of the band and exerted a strong pull on its aesthetics in the early stages, but he had learned from bitter experience with Minor Threat to make sure there was band unanimity every step of the way. “He’d sing every lyric to us to make sure we were cool with the sentiment,” says Canty. “He’d realized the importance of that, of making sure everybody was in on every decision and being on the same page aesthetically with him—and behind the sentiment of the song.”

  Recalling another sticking point with Minor Threat, MacKaye even suggested to the others that they record for his friend Corey Rusk on Touch & Go instead of Dischord so as to avoid any conflict of interest. “We were like, ‘Fuck that, man,’ ” says Canty, “because part of the thing that we were trying to grow was with Dischord—it was a huge part of our community.”

  In June ’88 they recorded a self-titled seven-song EP at perennial Dischord favorite Inner Ear Studios; local musician Ted Nicely, another Yesterday and Today alumnus, produced the sessions. The EP kicks off with one of Fugazi’s most enduring anthems. The way the tense, reggae-inflected verses of “Waiting Room” explode into a heavy metallic chorus, one would assume the song is an impatient call to action. But actually, it is about carefully getting all one’s ducks in a row—just like MacKaye had done with Fugazi. “I won’t make the same mistakes,” MacKaye sings, “Because I know how much time that wastes.”

  Picciotto sings lead on “Bulldog Front,” another tense, subdued verse erupting into a fist-pumping chorus, about tearing down the walls of stubborn apathy and willful ignorance. Like most of Picciotto’s lyrics, the words aren’t overtly political, but lines like “Ahistorical—you think this shit just dropped right out of the sky” had far-reaching implications—be aware, the song seems to say, that ignorance is slavery. Picciotto’s AIDS meditation “Give Me the Cure” takes a different tack, the arty dissonances and novel structure building more and more tension with every change.

  MacKaye’s “Suggestion” goes in for Gang of Four–ish herky-jerky punk-funk, veering off into false crescendos that ratchet up the verses mercilessly. “Why can’t I walk down the street / Free of suggestion?” MacKaye sings, assuming the persona of a sexually harassed woman. (The song was based on the real-life experiences of Dischord scenester Amy Pickering, but some felt MacKaye had no right to sing about a woman’s experience. “That’s nonsense,” MacKaye said. “It’s a human issue that we should and will continue to have to deal with.” The power of “Suggestion” is undeniable and it has remained a staple of Fugazi live shows ever since.)

  After completing the EP, Fugazi set out on a long European tour. Despite MacKaye’s renown, lining up a European tour for a band without a record was quite a feat. But no one had anticipated the draining effects of a lengthy European tour, with its constantly shifting cultures, food, currencies, language, and time zones. The three-month trek was the “hardest thing I’d ever done up to that point,” Picciotto says, “just a really harsh tour.”

  FUGAZI AT THE MONTGOMERY COUNTY COMMUNITY CENTER, APRIL 9, 1988.

  BERT QUEIROZ

  Then again, Picciotto hardly made it easy on himself. He made up for not having a guitar in his hands by running all over the stage like a crazy man. He would get completely carried away, flinging himself about the stage, rolling on the floor, and twisting himself into tortured shapes. At one legendary show at a gym in Philadelphia, he sang a song while hanging upside down from a basketball hoop, then fell in a heap onto Canty’s drums. Invariably he’d be a mass of aches and pains the next day, and yet he couldn’t help but get up and do it again at the next show. After just a few nights in a row of this, Picciotto was a wreck. And Europe was more than a few nights—it was a few months.

  Then there were the accommodations, which were mostly squats. Squats were a legacy of late Sixties underground culture, when unkempt European youths began occupying abandoned buildings in search of cheap housing and a different way of life. Typically squats were run like communes and deeply involved in radical left-wing politics. Many of them made much of their money hosting rock shows.

  Squats meant “a series of stinky rooms,” says Canty, “and/or a series of rooms where people are staying up all night, smoking hash next to you while you’re trying to sleep. Or waking up to Black Flag playing at eight o’clock in the morning.”

  “There was plenty of times being in Germany and you’re playing in some shitty, really awful squat with German punks passed out on the stage in front of you and the whole place reeking because nobody cleaned up all night—somebody vomits on the stage, total squalor,” Canty continues. “And then at the end of the night, we say, ‘You promised us a place to stay,’ and they go, ‘Oh yeah, here it is.’ And you look over and it’s your dressing room, which is right off the stage. So you go and you set up your sleeping bag in a room [where] you just got offstage about an hour before and it still stinks, there’s still vomit on the stage right next to where you’re sleeping. So you get in your sleeping bag, there are some mattresses back there but they’re totally disgusting so you lay them out and you get in your sleeping bag.

  “And you get up to go to the bathroom—this is all true—and the toilet is smashed and there are rats running around the toilet. So there’s no place to shit or piss. And there’s no running water. And you’re locked in because they want to lock the place. So we had to piss out the mail slot. And there’s rats running around, so we all get in our sleeping bags and we just pull the drawstrings up as close as possible so the rats won’t get in.”

  D.C.’s straight edge reputation dogged the band everywhere they went, especially in the squats, where the hippie drug legacy had never faded. “I’d actually already ingested everything any of these people had ever thought of when they were nine,” says Lally. “Not to mention that we weren’t flying any flags. We weren’t saying anything. And we were getting all this… stuff.”

  Canty recalls plenty of times when “somebody in a group house brings you there to sleep and the other members in the group house hate you for Minor Threat or whatever reason.” “Or they write things on your bananas,” Lally chips in. “Your banana says, ‘You guys are assholes.’ ”

  Fugazi had arranged to record their debut album
at the end of the tour, in December ’88, with John Loder at Southern Studios in London. Unfortunately they hadn’t realized the implications of recording first thing in the morning after the final night of the tour. The band was spent. They tracked an album’s worth of material, but in the end the performances weren’t up to snuff so they trimmed it down to an EP.

  Fatigue may have bogged down the performances, but recent events back home were also troubling the band. That November former CIA chief George Bush had won the presidential election, ensuring yet four more years of a Republican in the White House. “That was horrible,” Picciotto recalls. “The nausea so many felt when Bush got in, we’d already been through eight years of Reagan and then Bush goes in and he was so creepy, so fucked up. Man, that was terrible.”

  The dread and anger are all over Margin Walker. On the title track, Picciotto reinvents Cupid as a Lee Harvey Oswald–style sniper, riding just ahead of a MacKaye guitar onslaught denser than anything he’d done before. On “Provisional,” Picciotto takes to task both a complacent public “Secured under the weight of watchful eyes, lulled to sleep under clear expansive skies” and irresponsible politicos (“We hope we don’t get what we deserve, hide behind the targets in front of the people we serve”). And Picciotto’s “Lockdown,” hectic and teeming, is a typically abstruse indictment of one of his favorite targets, the deplorable U.S. prison system.

  MacKaye’s lyrics are more direct, more anthemic than Picciotto’s sometimes precious verbiage, but they are still largely metaphorical and elliptical. If, as MacKaye says, Minor Threat’s lyrics were like one-size-fits-all clothes, Fugazi was more like uncut cloth. “If they want to make some clothes, they can use this fabric,” says MacKaye. So although MacKaye skirts overt political statements on the PiL-ish “And the Same,” a loosely sketched condemnation of force as an instrument of policy, it is still, as MacKaye bluntly puts it, “An attempt to thoughtfully affect / Your way of thinking.” On the spitfire reggae verses of the ecological protest “Burning Too,” MacKaye warns, “We are consumed by society / We are obsessed with variety / We are all filled with anxiety / That this world will not survive.”

  Though he was singing more and more, Picciotto was dissatisfied with his role in the band. “I was used to a much more open, democratic musical thing happening,” says Picciotto. “I wanted to play.” So upon returning from the European tour, they all agreed that Picciotto should start playing guitar. The problem was MacKaye’s sturdy, rhythmic style meshed seamlessly with Lally’s supple, dub-influenced bass; Picciotto couldn’t find a way in. Then he realized there was a wide patch of sonic real estate available in the upper frequencies. Using a Rickenbacker, the trebly, chiming guitar made famous by the Byrds, Picciotto could cut through MacKaye’s chunky chording like a laser beam. And he did.

  Picciotto’s move to guitar changed the band profoundly, and not just because two guitars filled out the sound. In the past the band would play MacKaye’s songs pretty much as he wrote and arranged them. It was awkward to jam and experiment in rehearsal because the instrumentless Picciotto couldn’t participate. But now that Picciotto had a guitar, everyone felt free to improvise; ideas were tossed around as a group, and the band started delving much further into ensemble passages full of startling guitar textures, dissonant chords, and novel approaches to phenomena like feedback and harmonics.

  And MacKaye and Picciotto created all those effects without benefit of distortion pedals; MacKaye never varied his equipment: a Gibson SG guitar and a Marshall amplifier. “Even though I know that there’s a lot of options, I’m not interested in options,” he says. “I’m interested in how far I can take this simple equation, which is an amp, a cord, and a guitar, and how much I can do with it.”

  The band’s less-is-better approach even extended to their diet; they had gone vegetarian, which was a pretty tricky thing to be on the road in the U.S.—the interstates held nothing but meat-intensive fast-food joints. Eventually they discovered that one chain had a veggie cheese melt, but for a long time they would fill up a cooler with decent food from grocery stores and simply picnic in their van.

  Like most bands, Fugazi learned the lessons of touring the hard way. For instance, there was the constant matter of where to sleep after the gig. MacKaye had punk rock friends in most towns, but sometimes they were a little too punk rock for the rest of the band. “A place where there’s cat piss where you lay down your head to sleep, don’t go back,” advises Lally. “Do not return to that place.”

  “No matter what Ian says,” adds Canty.

  But after a tour or two, the band rarely had a problem finding nice, urine-free places to stay and were always asked back. “We washed our dishes,” Canty explains. “That’s the key: when you go to somebody’s house, wash your dishes. And then they’ll ask you back.”

  On their first U.S. tour, the summer of ’88, they played Olympia’s Evergreen State University. Show promoter Calvin Johnson passed a hat so the band could get paid. “It just seemed like paradise being out there,” says Picciotto. “It’s such a weird sleepy small town and yet there was so much action there—there were so many great bands, so much energy. It was one of the first places we played where we really felt at home, where the kids were dancing and the vibe was just so incredible.”

  Maybe it was the affinity between two capital cities that were cultural wastelands, but there was also a surprisingly high degree of cross-pollination—Calvin Johnson had lived in the D.C. area in his teens, and Canty’s sister had moved to Olympia; Dave Grohl would eventually leave the D.C.-based hardcore band Scream for the Olympia-based Nirvana, and Olympia punk maven Lois Maffeo soon moved to D.C.

  The two towns formed a strong cross-continental bond, not only making musical connections but exchanging useful ideas and information, forging a consensus about the way things ought to be in the indie world and beyond. The D.C.-Olympia axis would prove to be an influential force in the years to come. “When we went there, we locked in really hard with those people,” says Picciotto. “It was always a really good spot for us.”

  In September ’89 they recorded their first album, once again at Inner Ear with Ted Nicely producing. Nicely was studying to be a chef at the time and had limited time to record the album, so the sessions took place between the decidedly un–rock & roll hours of 9 A.M. and 1 P.M.

  It was a pivotal time for Fugazi. By now Canty and Picciotto were contributing substantial musical ideas; the multitalented Canty even wrote some bass lines and choruses. “That’s when we all threw ourselves into it really earnestly,” says Canty. “It was the first time that both Guy and I could say, ‘This is our band.’ ”

  Better recorded than the two EPs and played with the awesome power of a first-class rock band, Repeater is a post-punk classic.

  The band members’ thorough knowledge of rock music compelled them to be as original as possible. When something sounded clichéd, “then comes five hours of trying to put the parts where they’re not supposed to go,” says Lally. So the songs on Repeater veered in all sorts of unexpected directions: squalling noise, tense rhythm breakdowns, static guitar reveries, or a mighty, wall-rattling unison clang. The mix of influences was also unique: a more aggressive take on the reggae-punk fusion that bands like the Ruts had explored, infused with the righteous fervor of the Clash, and driven home with foot-stomping guitar riffs à la MacKaye’s old favorites Queen and Ted Nugent. They were also clearly paying a lot of attention to hip-hop; the catchy call-and-response hollering recalls Run-D.M.C. while the repeating guitar squeal on the title track owes much to Public Enemy’s epochal “Rebel without a Pause.”

  The Canty-Lally rhythm section was now red-hot—Canty hits with the force and precision of karate chops, Lally’s nimble lines could induce vertigo—and their hectic interplay recedes only for the band’s trademark whiplash silences. As ever, pensive passages would suddenly erupt into glorious choruses, as in “Merchandise,” where MacKaye thunders, “You are not what you own!” while an heraldic ascend
ing guitar riff raises the roof.

  As six-string adventurists, the band was in a league with Sonic Youth, but most people fixated on the band’s politics and policies. And there’s no denying that their politics, sharply expressed on Repeater, were provocative. The leadoff track, Picciotto’s “Turnover,” is an extended metaphor about ignoring social ills—to “turn off the alarm” and go back to sleep. Next, the kinetic title track illustrates the effects of that approach—a chilling monologue told from the point of view of a career criminal, it jump-cuts to the point of view of someone hearing gunshots outside. Then the song shifts narrators once again: “We don’t have to try it and we don’t have to buy it,” MacKaye roars.

  That last line is echoed throughout the album. Repeater is practically a concept album about the notion that one can effect social change by carefully considering the things one buys—and Fugazi extended that idea well beyond the material sense. “Never mind what’s been selling / It’s what you’re buying,” sings Picciotto in “Blueprint,” echoing a think-for-yourself line at least as old as Black Flag. “Merchandise, it keeps us in line / Common sense says it’s by design,” MacKaye sings in “Merchandise.” Even MacKaye’s harrowing OD nightmare “Shut the Door” is a heated meditation on the perils of consumption. “She’s not moving! She’s not coming back!” he hollers with more rage than terror.

  The thing was Fugazi not only talked the talk; they walked the walk. The band had quickly become an ethical lodestar for bands and fans alike, revered bastions of integrity in an increasingly compromised and corrupt world, an impeccable benchmark for everything that pioneering bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen stood for: pragmatism, community, independence, and engagement.

  Fugazi existed in an entirely separate realm from what MacKaye calls “college rock”—Dinosaur Jr, Camper van Beethoven, Mudhoney, and the like—which was then in its heyday. They didn’t socialize with the SST bands or the so-called “pigfuck” bands on Homestead and Touch & Go. MacKaye even fell out of touch with his old friend Corey Rusk during the late Eighties. “That whole Chicago [scene]—Naked Raygun, Big Black, that crew,” MacKaye says dismissively, “were the guys who smoke cigars and eat ribs.