Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  “That whole world, those guys, I think they just were not into punk rock,” MacKaye continues. “They grew up on it and then they were growing out of it.”

  The band toured Repeater for virtually all of 1990: after a few local shows in January, they toured the South from February until April, then the rest of the U.S. from May through July; from September through November they were in Europe. Hard touring was not only the crucible in which the band’s basic tenets had been formed; it was the main way it won fans. But it was also tough on a band that very much enjoyed their local scene, not to mention their personal lives. “We wanted to play,” says MacKaye. “It was rough, physically, but it’s like, why do people jog or why do people do anything that involves discipline? I don’t know. Bands play music.” (MacKaye’s sole advice for surviving the rigors of the road: “Drink a lot of water.”)

  Because they kept playing unconventional venues, touring never stopped being an adventure. In May ’90 they played a Dallas warehouse that local punks had converted into a living space. In the ground floor’s huge lobby, they had built a stage on top of a crumpled car they had dragged through the front door. The show was packed with about eight hundred people.

  Before the show a street fight between two rival skinhead gangs—a Nazi white power outfit and an anti-Nazi group who wore Star of David patches—threatened to spill over into the show. To cool things down, MacKaye went out and met with the leaders of the two groups. “One guy was wearing a Nazi uniform with a swagger stick,” MacKaye recalls. “And I swear he was wearing a monocle.” MacKaye brokered a peace agreement, pointing out that the warehouse punks had been nice enough to put on the show and it wasn’t right to make it into a battlefield.

  Finally the first band went on. But then the police showed up and called the fire marshal, who obligingly pointed out various violations. For nearly an hour Fugazi and the show’s promoters made exit signs and put lights on them, taped off exit lanes, and cleared exit doors as the crowd grew increasingly restless.

  After all the work was completed and Fugazi was getting ready to take to the stage, the fire marshal told MacKaye the place still wasn’t up to code. A cop told MacKaye to tell the crowd the show was off. “I’m not going to tell them no show,” MacKaye replied. “You’re going to pull the plug on this, you go tell them.”

  “You’re trying to start some trouble with me?” the cop said.

  “Sir, I’m not trying to start any trouble with you,” MacKaye said firmly. “I’m just telling you that if you’re going to stop the show, you can go tell them. Because I have worked hard to make it happen.”

  They discussed the situation some more and finally reached a compromise. MacKaye got onstage and, to loud cheering, announced that the police had decided to let them play. There was only one catch: the audience had to go outside. “They’ve closed the street off and we’ll have the doors open and we’ll play as loud as we can and we’ll sing as hard as we can,” MacKaye told the crowd.

  After an initial uproar, everyone filed out onto the street and Fugazi played to an empty warehouse, with the open doors blocked by a chain-link fence. “Between songs we would run up and look out the chain-link fence,” MacKaye says, “making sure the police weren’t hitting anybody.”

  By this point there was a raging bonfire in a vacant lot across the way and hundreds of kids were dancing in the street and stage-diving off parked cars. “That kind of stuff,” MacKaye notes, “is just not going to happen at a rock club.”

  After Repeater the band was routinely selling out 1,000-capacity shows and yet still hauled their own equipment, booked their own shows, and slept on people’s floors (and they still do). “I love staying with people,” says MacKaye. “I love doing the driving. I love having to load equipment. The experiences are things that a lot of people never have.”

  From the very beginning, MacKaye had done pretty much all the administrative work for Fugazi—and wouldn’t have it any other way. “He basically had experience at having done A, B, C, D, E, F, and G,” says Lally. “And he was good at it. And he was pretty insistent on doing it.” MacKaye managed the band, booked the tours, got the money at the end of the night. He even insisted on driving the van at all times (which he does to this day). Cutting out managers, booking agents, lawyers, publicists, and road managers is a lot different from the way most bands go about things. “Yeah, but that’s because we stopped to think about it,” Canty says. “We stopped to think about that because it’s self-preservation.”

  But a lot of bands don’t even think about self-preservation. Canty replies with an analogy about how most people don’t think twice about eating meat, mainly because most food stores don’t offer many other options. “Waaaaay in the back, by the scallions, is some tofu,” Canty says.

  So Fugazi simply went to the back of the store? “We went to a different store,” Canty says, proudly.

  “And we went to the back of that one!” Lally chimes in.

  “And,” Canty adds, smiling and pounding the table, “we bought in bulk!”

  Both MacKaye and Picciotto are extremely uncomfortable with connecting the band’s business style with something as personal as vegetarianism, but the same sensibility is at work in both cases. MacKaye constantly evaluates every aspect of his life, cutting out unnecessary things that most people unthinkingly accept. “This is what I am trying to do across the board,” says MacKaye. “If you’re going to see me play music, that’s the way it will manifest. If you came over to my house, you’d see the way I live. If I make you dinner, you’ll see the food I eat. After trying to be thoughtful about my life and to consider what I’ve inherited and what I need and what I don’t need and what I’ll discard and what I want to gain, what’s important, what’s not important. By going through this checklist and trying to figure all these things out, this is what I’ve arrived at. And if I’m in a band, it’s going to manifest in that presentation.”

  Fugazi simply cut out the needless clutter in their lives, things most bands accept without ever questioning why. If Walden author Henry David Thoreau were to have managed a rock band, it probably would have been run a lot like Fugazi.

  Same with Dischord itself. The label almost completely dispensed with promotion to press and radio—the outlay was more trouble and expense than it was worth. Dischord employees “recovered” all the paper they needed from other people’s trash. In 1989 a friend got a huge supply of stationery from a marketing company that was throwing it out; it all bore letterheads, but the label simply used the other side of the paper. Dischord was still using the paper ten years later and has never bought an envelope in its entire existence. And the savings got passed on to the consumer: Dischord albums were never more than $10, even on CD.

  On January 12, 1991, Fugazi played in the freezing cold rain at Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, on the day Congress gave the OK to begin bombing Iraq. “When Operation Desert Storm happened,” says Picciotto, “people were petrified in this town.” Two thousand people showed up and pogoed so hard that they sent up clouds of steam drifting over the stage. Four days later the bombs began falling on Baghdad.

  By the summer, Repeater had sold well over a hundred thousand copies, an astounding number for a small indie label, especially one with such minimal promotion. Word of mouth about the band had spread widely through the indie community, and the record was selling far beyond just the hardcore crowd. Unswerving integrity was one thing, but it was their live shows that made Fugazi an underground legend. Already masters of tension and release, they could mesmerize a crowd with a tightly coiled rhythm vamp, add in some fraught guitar interplay, and then blow it all away with gale-force explosions of thunderous volume. A song like “Shut the Door” might get stretched out to nine minutes or more as the band leaned into extended but riveting improvisations, showing off an uncanny musical telepathy honed by endless roadwork. Fugazi never worked with a set list, which meant they could vibe off the crowd and each other in perfect synchrony.


  Studious-looking in his nerdy glasses, Canty slapped out the band’s funkified rhythms as Lally paced around by his amp, casually eyeing the crowd from under the brim of his watch cap. But it was Picciotto and MacKaye’s show, the two of them lunging and lurching around the stage, twisting their bodies like wet washcloths, violently swinging the necks of their guitars as if to knock the previous chord unconscious.

  The two frontmen were a study in contrasts: while MacKaye would go in for anything from a knock-kneed Lindy hop to Townshendian guitar leaps, Picciotto chewed the scenery—he fell all over the place, humped the stage, climbed the amps, contorted his body like a Gumby doll. MacKaye dressed in drab, baggy clothes; Picciotto would sport tight black jeans and, invariably, a red shirt. MacKaye’s sober athleticism found its polar opposite in Picciotto’s almost hammy sensuality, a formidable yin and yang that powered the band’s galvanic performances.

  By this time even the Meat Puppets and Mike Watt’s band fIREHOSE had signed to majors, and about half a dozen major labels wanted to sign Fugazi. But the band felt their music was already being distributed adequately. Sales bore that out. And with Dischord, they definitely knew who they were dealing with. Of course, there were also the inevitable noble reasons. “Big bands that stay independent lend weight to the indie movement,” MacKaye said. “People are forced to deal with indies to get big names. That gives a lot of other bands access, it spreads the wealth.”

  Spreading the wealth was important to Fugazi—the band always gave opening slots on tours to independent bands who didn’t necessarily draw crowds but merited the high-profile gig. And even on longer tours, they usually kept an opening band on the bill for no more than a half dozen shows or so, in order to give exposure to as many bands as possible.

  The band was now routinely committing rock & roll heresy by turning down big interviews with major national music magazines like Rolling Stone, Details, and Spin, partly because they carried tobacco and alcohol advertising. “Some magazines just make us uncomfortable,” MacKaye explained to the zine Noiseworks. “As we’ve gotten bigger, there’s choices we’ve had to make, and we don’t like things out of our control. We’re trying to maintain that right.” “I don’t trust those mags to reflect us accurately or honestly,” Picciotto added. “I certainly don’t need a mag that puts ‘for men’ on the cover like Details.” But Picciotto singled out Rolling Stone for the most opprobrium: “I can’t see,” he said, “what in God’s name they have to do with rock & roll.”

  The old “belly of the beast” argument didn’t wash, either—“I can see there’s a point to getting good ideas into Rolling Stone,” Picciotto added, “but when you’re sandwiched between a thousand bad ideas, I don’t think it translates.”

  For their second album, they again requested the services of Ted Nicely, but Nicely was now a full-time chef and treasured his free time, so he reluctantly turned down the job. Then the band figured that since they did everything else themselves, they might as well do their own recordings as well.

  The approach had another benefit. None of them, not even the veteran MacKaye, had ever been in a band that had stuck together this long. “We were kind of hitting a plateau,” says Picciotto, “where we needed to find a way to keep pushing it so it didn’t feel static.” Making their own record seemed to be one way of doing that. So in January ’91, they enlisted the trusty Don Zientara as engineer and went to it.

  But the timing wasn’t right. The band had been on the road constantly that year and it showed. “Within the band, our communication at that point was kind of weird,” Picciotto says. “I think it had to do with that we’d been around each other a fuck of a lot.”

  Many bands would snipe at each other under such circumstances, but the members of Fugazi did something else almost as deadly to creativity—they treated each other with kid gloves. “Here’s four people who have a fairly good idea of how to make a salad,” says MacKaye, “and yet everybody was so concerned about insulting other people’s taste that no one dared to pick up a head of lettuce or chop a tomato or anything. We all just sat there and let it sit in the middle of the room. No one wanted to take control because it seemed like it would be offending someone else.”

  On top of it all, the band had little grasp of the full capabilities of a recording studio. So they simply decided to make a very straightforwardly recorded album, an unadorned document of the songs so people could sing along by the time the band came to town. “Our position was that the records were the menu and the shows were the meal,” MacKaye says, echoing the Minutemen’s earlier “flyers and gigs” philosophy. Nevertheless, it wound up to be a very powerful record.

  Steady Diet of Nothing continues in the vein of Repeater, with tense, sinuous rhythms, novel guitar textures, big sing-along choruses, and dramatic dynamic contrasts, but this time with more sense of space—and darkness. All the roadwork had not only strained relations within the band, but they felt out of touch with their beloved local scene. All this took place in the midst of the Gulf War, when yellow ribbons, “I Support Our Troops” bumper stickers, and breathless media coverage of so-called smart bombs all signaled overwhelming public approval of the U.S.’s gunboat diplomacy. “I think we all started to feel that America was just becoming a madhouse,” says Picciotto, “and it depressed us a lot.”

  Picciotto’s “Exeunt” starts things off with a great rotating bee-hum of feedback that lapses into a slow-galloping reggae-fied groove topped off with angular caterwauling guitar. The song is about as elliptical as it gets, but then MacKaye follows it up with another classic Fugazi anthem. “Reclamation” declares its intentions in direct terms: “Here are our demands: We want control of our bodies,” MacKaye announces amidst pointillistic guitar harmonics. “You will do what looks good to you on paper / We will do what we must.” In a singsong roar, MacKaye chants the word “reclamation” over a guitar hyperstrum at once frenetic and grand.

  In pointed opposition to the “Reagan Sucks” approach of hardcore, Steady Diet addresses charged politics in oblique ways; this fact spoke nearly as many volumes as the lyrics themselves. Picciotto’s chant-along “Nice New Outfit” neatly limns the West’s “Might makes right” philosophy: “You can pinpoint your chimney and drop one down its length / In your nice new outfit, sorry about the mess.” He addresses “Dear Justice Letter” to famed liberal Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, bemoaning the fact that the great judge had retired the previous year, leaving the Court stacked with conservative Reagan/Bush–era appointees.

  It wasn’t all political, though—MacKaye’s forlorn “Long Division” examines the slow, no-fault disintegration of a friendship; in “Latin Roots” Picciotto comes to terms with his Italian ancestry, and on “Runaway Return” he recasts the age-old prodigal son story in a modern context. But the last words on the album, from MacKaye’s “KYEO” (“keep your eyes open”) leave no doubt as to the band’s focus: “The tools, they will be swinging,” MacKaye defiantly hollers, “but we will not be beaten down.”

  The album enjoyed some fortuitous timing. Because Steady Diet of Nothing came out in 1991, the Year That Punk Broke, it emerged as a big seller and the first Fugazi record that most people heard.

  Fugazi went on to release three more albums in the Nineties, and although the crowds at their shows fell off a bit as the alternative rock phenomenon waned, Fugazi never failed to sell out the rooms they played, continuing to make challenging, exciting music and progressing even further as an improvising ensemble. They kept their ticket prices at $5 (all the more impressive considering ten years of inflation) and never compromised their music—or anything else, for that matter.

  That steadfast reluctance to sell out won vast amounts of respect from fellow musicians. Everyone from Joan Jett to Eddie Vedder paid lip service to the band’s integrity even as they conducted their own careers in ways that Fugazi never would. Publicly declaring respect for Fugazi, then, was at best a way of sublimating guilt. Much of the rock audience, knowing full well th
ey were complicit in a lot of what Fugazi was opting out of, held the band in high regard for similar reasons.

  Despite the alternative gold rush, Fugazi didn’t release a follow-up to Steady Diet of Nothing until June ’93, when they released In on the Kill Taker, which actually made the lower rungs of the Billboard Top 200 album chart.

  Although Fugazi’s legend grew even larger in the Nineties, Brendan Canty feels the band’s early days tell its truest story. “People might look at us and think we’re this icon,” he says, “but at the time there was just a couple of hundred people coming to the shows and it wasn’t huge and nothing had potential. It was just important to do it. And the fact that we all wanted to go on the road and work as hard as possible, and that we were able to, is in itself its own success story. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about getting anywhere, but about getting through the process of fulfilling your own possibilities.”

  CHAPTER 12

  MUDHONEY

  LOUD BALLADS OF LOVE AND DIRT

  —SUB POP CATALOG DESCRIPTION OF MUDHONEY’S DEBUT ALBUM

  In retrospect, Nirvana’s legend looms far larger, but it was Mudhoney who spearheaded the Seattle grunge explosion and were Sub Pop’s flagship band for the entire time they were on the label. Mudhoney put Sub Pop on the map. “In ’88, ’89, Mudhoney would blow Nirvana off the stage,” says Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt. “They were the great band. They blazed the trail for Nirvana.”

  Beginning with Sonic Youth, the American indie underground had become increasingly concerned with approval from England. And for a British press fascinated with the pigfuck bands’ unsparing portrayals of America’s more brutish and provincial aspects, the next step was to find bands who actually embodied them. And what better place to find them than the rugged Pacific Northwest, then unfamiliar territory even to most Americans; it was a region that still held remnants of the frontier and was known for little more than building airplanes and logging. The idea of blue-collar mountain men making Sasquatch rock appealed directly to the British press; the enthusiasm quickly echoed back across the Atlantic.