This is a Call (6 page)

If liberal, leafy Evanston, Illinois was an unlikely breeding ground for punk rock revolution, the same could be said of Washington DC’s affluent, elegant Georgetown district, home to politicians, foreign diplomats and some of the city’s most influential, wealthy and well-connected families. Before he was elected as the 35th President of the United States in 1961, Senator John F. Kennedy owned a house in the district; former US President Bill Clinton also lived in the area while studying at Georgetown University, America’s oldest and most prestigious Catholic university. The hub of Washington’s glamorous social scene, Georgetown is best known for its refined architecture, upscale boutiques and high-end restaurants, but it was in this genteel, gentrified district that the punk rock scene which changed Dave Grohl’s life was spawned.

Ian MacKaye is the godfather of that community. A most reluctant punk rock icon, MacKaye’s name has nonetheless become a by-word for uncompromised integrity, independent thought and unyielding, principled self-determination. The Clash’s Joe Strummer once commented: ‘Ian’s the only one who ever did the punk thing right from Day One and followed through on it all the way.’ Dischord, the record label MacKaye co-founded in 1980 to document his hometown’s nascent scene, stands as an inspirational example of the potential of the punk rock underground. Preferring handshake deals over legal contracts, selling its releases at affordable prices and splitting all profits evenly between artists and the label, Dischord is a collective that values community above commerce, and offers an alternative, ethical framework to standard record industry practices. The trailblazing bands Ian MacKaye fronted – among them Minor Threat, Embrace and Fugazi – operated defiantly out of step with the music business; his current group The Evens continue happily to do so.

Like Dave Grohl, MacKaye is the son of a journalist father and a schoolteacher mother: unlike Grohl, one can easily imagine him excelling in either profession. Often portrayed as an austere, intimidating character, in person MacKaye is thoughtful, eloquent and disarmingly direct, blessed with a dry wit and an encyclopaedic knowledge of, and boundless enthusiasm for, music.

MacKaye’s introduction to punk rock came on the night of 3 February 1979, when he attended an all-ages concert featuring New York’s trashy punkabilly ghouls The Cramps and Washington DC New Wave outfit Urban Verbs at Georgetown University’s Hall of Nations. He remembers that night as ‘one of the greatest nights of my life’.

‘At that show I entered into a whole new universe,’ he told me in 1992, as we conducted an interview in a Georgetown café three blocks from 36th and Prospect Street, the former location of the Hall of Nations. ‘I met a lot of really interesting people who challenged me artistically and emotionally and politically and sexually, people who threw up all these different ideas and alternative ways of living. And when the music you listen to challenges established notions of how music should sound, it gives you the message that rules can be broken. It was the most unbelievable, mind-blowing night.’

The Cramps’ show was a benefit gig to raise money to save WGTB, Georgetown University’s radio station, which had recently been shut down after having its broadcast licence and FM frequency sold to the University of the District of Columbia for just $1. With its provocative left-wing political bias and vocal support for gay rights, abortion rights and the anti-war movement, WGTB had long been a thorn in the side of the university’s Jesuit administration.

The majority of those in attendance at the Hall of Nations, however, were less concerned about the suppression of the station’s subversive news bulletins than by the loss of WGTB’s eclectic, playlist-free programming, which had brought punk rock to the DC airwaves for the first time. Then a 17-year-old senior at Woodrow Wilson High School, MacKaye went along to the show with friends to add his voice to the protests. Also present was his future Fugazi bandmate Guy Picciotto, then a 13-year-old student at DC’s private Georgetown Day School.

As The Cramps kicked into their ramalama rock ’n’ roll rumble, vocalist Lux Interior went into a frenzy, scaling amps, hurling microphone stands around, diving into the crowd and vomiting on the stage. Urged on by this demented master of ceremonies, the Hall of Nations’ audience responded in kind, its largely teenage occupants pinballing around the room, overturning tables and hurling chairs through windows. For Ian MacKaye, whose previous concertgoing experience was limited to arena shows by hard rock behemoths Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent and Queen, it was an impossibly thrilling, unforgettable experience, one which instantly transformed him, in his own words, into ‘a punk rock motherfucker’.

Two weeks later, on 15 February 1979, MacKaye and his friends Jeff Nelson and Henry Garfield (now better known to the world as ex-Black Flag vocalist-turned-punk rock renaissance man Henry Rollins) went to see The Clash play DC’s Ontario Theatre on their Pearl Harbor Tour, their first US trek. London’s finest opened up with the provocative ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’ – with Joe Strummer spitting ‘
Never mind the Stars and Stripes, let’s print the Watergate tapes
’ – and closed with the incendiary ‘White Riot’, during which a frustrated Mick Jones repeatedly smashed his Les Paul guitar against an amplifier stack until its headstock snapped off. MacKaye, Rollins and Nelson were transfixed by the band’s fire, ferocity and fury.

‘They were detonating every song, like “use once and destroy”,’ recalled Rollins in Clash associate Don Letts’s punk rock documentary
Punk: Attitude
. ‘They were burning through the music like napalm. They weren’t even playing it, they were just chewing it up and eviscerating it as they went through it, like after the show there’d be no more Clash. And we walked out of there stunned. The Ramones were great, but it was like The Beach Boys compared to that … The Clash came through and just went, “Wake up, let’s go!”’

Asked in 2004 to describe Washington’s music scene at the tail end of the seventies, Ian MacKaye responded, ‘There was no music scene in Washington really, that’s my answer.’ As an erudite scholar of his hometown’s cultural history, in the late seventies MacKaye would have been keenly aware of popular local bands such The Razz, Urban Verbs and the Slickee Boys and indeed Washington’s vibrant funk-driven Go-Go scene, but those bands said little to MacKaye about his own life. The Cramps and The Clash gave him the impetus to change that.

Within weeks of attending his first punk shows, the teenager had picked up a bass guitar and formed his own punk band, The Slinkees, with Nelson on drums. The band managed to play one show in a friend’s garage before singer Mark Sullivan quit in order to attend university in New York. Undeterred, MacKaye promptly recruited a new singer, Nathan Strejcek, and changed the quartet’s name to the Teen Idles.

Another young DC band who’d fallen under The Clash’s spell were Bad Brains, four young Rastafarians from the south-east of the city. Formerly a jazz-fusion collective named Mind Power, influenced by Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, Paul Hudson (aka H.R.), Earl Hudson, Gary Miller (aka Dr Know) and Darryl Jenifer had been introduced to punk rock by their friend Sid McCray, a fan of The Damned, the Dead Boys and the Sex Pistols. By 1979 Bad Brains were determined to outpunk
everyone
, mixing fat dub reggae bass lines with blur-speed rhythms, jarring tempo changes and frenetic, feral energy. At that point no band played faster, or swung harder. But Bad Brains had another mission too, to spread a doctrine of Positive Mental Attitude via vocalist H.R.’s empowering, motivational lyrics, themselves inspired by
Think and Grow Rich
, a self-help, personal development manual written and published by author Napoleon Hill during the Great Depression. To say that DC rock clubs, then more used to hosting coolly detached New Wave acts and rootsy rock ’n’ roll bands, were unprepared for this whirlwind of energy blowing their way is something of an understatement.

‘Bad Brains were some black youths who wanted to play punk rock and hard rock and a couple of club owners were confused and a little frightened,’ Darryl Jenifer told me in 1996. ‘Punk rock was a
vulgar
thing, and maybe some people wanted to look at the black situation too as a vulgar thing: one time this guy said, “We ain’t having no punk stuff in here, and damn sure we ain’t having no black punk stuff.” But we had the PMA with us at that time, Positive Metal Attitude, and the “quitters never win” concept, so these little obstacles didn’t mean that much to us.’

Inspired by stories they had heard of The Clash playing free shows in community centres in England, the quartet began setting up gigs in housing co-ops and friends’ basements, as a ‘fuck you’ gesture to the club owners who’d banned them from their premises. In doing so, the quartet helped create an alternative gig circuit in their hometown, and a template for self-sufficiency other DC bands would soon seek to emulate.

After they’d blown his band off-stage at a June 1979 show at Georgetown rock venue the Bayou, The Damned’s drummer Rat Scabies offered to help Bad Brains put together an English tour, convinced that their righteous energy would revive the UK’s flagging punk scene. That autumn, after honing their chops with a succession of shows on New York’s Lower East Side, the band decided to make the trip. They would soon discover that their PMA was no match for over-officious English bureaucracy. Arriving at London’s Gatwick airport without work visas, the quartet were detained, questioned and summarily dumped onto the next outbound flight to New York. To rub salt in the wound, all their gear was stolen.

Back in New York, the city’s punk community rallied around the band, lending them instruments and squeezing them onto bills where they could: Jimi Quidd and Leigh Sioris from The Dots even paid for a studio session for the band, during which Bad Brains recorded two songs, ‘Stay Close to Me’ and ‘Pay to Cum’. The latter, a one minute 33 seconds rush of breathless, bawling positivity, flamethrower guitar and blur-speed rhythms, would eventually become the A-side of the band’s début single, and a musical benchmark for every hardcore band that followed in their wake. But for all the support they received in NYC, just three months after departing Washington Bad Brains were back in the city, penniless and homeless. MacKaye’s Teen Idles stepped in to help, inviting their brethren to use their equipment and practice space in the basement of Nathan Strejcek’s parents’ house. Watching the older punks rehearse was an education for the kids from Wilson High.

‘Bad Brains influenced us incredibly with their speed and frenzied delivery,’ Jeff Nelson admitted in the excellent DC punk scene memoir
Dance of Days
. ‘We went from sounding like the Sex Pistols to playing every song as fast and as hard as we could.’

‘H.R. was the energizer,’ MacKaye stated in 2001. ‘He was really passionate about what he did. He was a visionary. He really got a lot of us kids thinking we could do anything. He was really full of great ideas and was always the one who said “Go”. They were a complete inspiration as a band.’

‘Dr Know always used to say, “Each one teach one,”’ Darryl Jenifer told me when I asked about his band’s influence on the DC scene and beyond. ‘It’s a musical tapestry we got going here. It don’t start with us. Respect is due to the magic of music, not Bad Brains.’

As the new decade dawned, stories of other bands playing urgent, raging punk rock across America were reaching DC. In the racks of Yesterday and Today records in Rockville, Maryland, an independent record store owned by former DJ Skip Groff and largely frequented by teenage punks eager to hear the latest import singles arriving from England, new releases from West Coast labels Dangerhouse, Slash, Frontier and Alternative Tentacles records were arriving weekly, bringing to the attention of Ian MacKaye and his friends bands such as The Germs, The Weirdos, Deadbeats, The Flyboys and Dead Kennedys. After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High in June 1980, MacKaye and Nelson hatched a plan to check out the nascent West Coast scene, booking shows for the Teen Idles in LA and San Francisco.

As with the Bad Brains’ proposed UK trip, things didn’t go according to plan for the adventurous young punks. In LA the quartet found themselves sharing a bill at the Hong Kong Café with obnoxious Seattle shock rockers The Mentors, Masque club regulars Vox Pop and brutal ‘biker punks’ Puke, Spit and Guts, who sang of murder and rape and looked like they would happily slit the Teen Idles’ throats for the price of a cup of coffee. More disappointingly, in San Francisco the quartet were bumped at the last minute from their promised slot on a Dead Kennedys/Circle Jerks/Flipper show at the Mabuhay Gardens by promoter Dirk Dirksen, who only reluctantly agreed to rebook them on a bill with New Wave outfits The Wrong Brothers and Lost Angeles at the venue the following evening following lobbying efforts on the band’s behalf from the Circle Jerks.

California nonetheless left indelible impressions on the young band. They took note of how punks from the Golden State – most notably the feared Huntingdon Beach crew who followed the Circle Jerks and Black Flag from show to show – conducted themselves, taking shit from no one: this was a revelation for the DC youths, who were routinely hassled and abused on the streets of Georgetown. They also noticed that the Mabuhay Gardens had instituted an ‘all-ages’ policy for gigs, marking a large black ‘X’ on the hands of audience members too young to drink alcohol to distinguish them from patrons legally allowed to purchase intoxicating liquor. On their three-day bus trip back to the East Coast the young punks talked excitedly about introducing these practices to their hometown. Washington DC was about to get a noisy wake-up call.