This is a Call (7 page)

Back on home turf, though, cracks began to appear in the group dynamic. The experiences of the past year had left the articulate MacKaye with plenty to say, but he no longer felt comfortable putting his words into Strejcek’s mouth. The band agreed to split, but before doing so the decision was made to document their time together by releasing a seven-inch single on their own label, funded by the $600 they had amassed from their 35 live shows. The quartet had already recorded an eight-song tape with local sound engineer Don Zientara at Inner Ear Studios – a four-track tape recorder set up in Zientara’s suburban home in Arlington, Virginia – and sought advice from Skip Groff, who had his own small record label Limp Records, on the mechanics of putting out a record.

In December 1980, a month after the band played their final show at DC’s 9:30 club, the Teen Idles’ seven-inch
Minor Disturbance
EP emerged as the first release on the newly created Dischord record label. The cover featured a photograph of Alec MacKaye, Ian’s younger brother, with an inked ‘X’ on each of his clenched fists, an image which neatly captured the defiant mood of the emerging youth community. MacKaye and Nelson pledged that if they managed to sell enough copies of the EP to recoup some of their investment, they would use the money to put out records by their friends’ bands. It was a proud moment for the teenage punks but, never one for nostalgia, MacKaye had already moved on. By the time Skip Groff put the
Minor Disturbance
EP on sale at Yesterday and Today, MacKaye’s new band Minor Threat had already played their first show.

‘Revolution is not the uprising against pre-existing order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.’ Printed on the inner sleeve of Fugazi’s 1990 album
Repeater
, this quote from Spanish liberal philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1929 text
La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses
) offers an insight into Ian MacKaye’s
modus operandi
since the night he first discovered punk rock. Raised by liberal, free-thinking, intellectual parents, for MacKaye the notion of an independent counterculture was not some intangible pipe dream, but rather a viable and attainable reality. It is this conviction that has driven his life’s work.

In October 1981 MacKaye’s first step towards independence saw him move out of his parents’ Beecher Street home in North-West Washington and take up residence in a rented four-bedroom house in Arlington with Jeff Nelson and three punk rock friends. Dischord House, as the property was known, soon became the creative and spiritual epicentre of the emerging DC hardcore community. An office for MacKaye and Nelson’s label was set up in a small room next to the kitchen, while the basement of the house was utilised as a rehearsal space for bands, among them Henry Garfield’s State of Alert (S.O.A.), Alec MacKaye’s The Untouchables, Iron Cross and MacKaye and Nelson’s new outfit Minor Threat.

When their bands weren’t practising, the young musicians spent their time at Dischord House hand-cutting and pasting record sleeves for Dischord releases (the second of which was S.O.A.’s bruising
No Policy
EP), designing flyers for upcoming shows, dubbing demo cassettes to trade with penpals, scribbling columns for fanzines and writing letters to record store owners, promoters and college radio DJs nationwide, anything to spread the DC punk gospel. The first Dischord releases were mailed out bearing the slogan ‘Putting D.C. on the Map’, but there was genuine pride and conviction behind the tongue-in-cheek sentiment: MacKaye regarded each release as another stepping stone towards the creation of a truly independent artistic community in his hometown. To MacKaye, Dischord was about nothing if not its sense of engagement, involvement and connection.

‘From the very beginning of the label we were told time and again that the way we were approaching the business was unrealistic, idealistic and ultimately unworkable,’ he recalled in 2004. ‘They said that it couldn’t work, and that it wouldn’t. Obviously it fucking worked.’

Dischord’s most popular, passionate and influential band was Minor Threat, arguably
the
defining act of the American hardcore movement. Featuring MacKaye on vocals, Jeff Nelson on drums and Georgetown Day School students Lyle Preslar and Brian Baker on guitar and bass respectively, Minor Threat played super-fast, super-tight, morally righteous punk rock that blazed with an incandescent fury which left all who saw them indelibly marked. Though Minor Threat would record just two EPs and one full-length album, their influence on the nascent hardcore movement was incalculable, their commitment to breaking down the barrier between ‘artist’ and ‘audience’ unequalled.

The band’s début release, the
Minor Threat
seven-inch EP was a revelation. Rather than pointing a finger at the Republican administration in the White House (as was
de rigueur
in hardcore circles at the time), MacKaye’s scathing, indignant lyrics targeted both his own community and everything it stood in opposition to, sparing no one, friend or foe. The EP’s most infamous song was ‘Straight Edge’, the clean-living MacKaye’s apoplectic response to substance-abusing punk rock fuck-ups who took Sid Vicious’s self-destructive cartoon nihilism as a template for their own lives.

Elsewhere he tackled themes of peer apathy, masculinity, violence and failing friendships, with equally unambiguous, thrillingly direct anger. If Black Flag’s
Nervous Breakdown
EP was a declaration of independence, the
Minor Threat
EP was a declaration of war, a war MacKaye was determined to wage all across the nation. To do so meant tapping into what author Michael Azerrad called hardcore’s ‘cultural underground railroad’, an interlinked community of promoters, fanzine writers, college radio stations, independent record stores and alternative venues.

Prior to the arrival of Black Flag there was no national grassroots touring circuit for America’s punk bands. That group’s pioneering attempts to establish a network, using phone numbers bassist Chuck Dukowski copied from the sleeves of the earliest hardcore seven-inch singles, was partly born out of necessity – by 1981 Black Flag’s hometown shows were notorious for pitched battles between punk kids and the brutal LAPD, making it increasingly difficult for the band to secure bookings
anywhere
– and partly derived from Greg Ginn’s desire to replicate the violent, untrammelled energy of his group’s LA shows in every town and city in the union. For Ginn and Dukowski, the idea of stepping into the unknown to confront and challenge was integral to the punk rock experience.

‘We like to play out of town,’ Ginn told
Flipside
in December 1980. ‘You’ve gotta threaten people sometimes.’

‘We think everybody should be subjected to us, if they like it or not,’ the guitarist added in another interview.

‘There’s more impact in playing for people who aren’t just soaking up the punk thing,’ Dukowski explained to
Outcry
fanzine in 1980. ‘It’s actually more stimulating to play for an audience that has not heard it and probably has a prejudice against it.You almost don’t know what to do when you’re in front of people who love it. It’s much easier when you’re in front of people who are sort of neutral or anti what you’re doing. You get all these people out there who’ve never seen it, don’t know what to expect and you get out there and blow ’em away.’

‘Greg Ginn had a ham radio thing as a teenager and through that he knew all about fucking up people from other towns – he just extended that to the idea of playing gigs,’ explains Mike Watt, now playing with The Stooges, then the bassist with Black Flag’s SST labelmates/touring partners, San Pedro agit-funk punks The Minutemen. ‘Before Black Flag there was no template. We literally had to invent this thing for ourselves. The rock ’n’ rollers really hated punk, so it was hard to play their clubs, so we’d play ethnic halls, gay discos, VFW halls, anywhere that would have us, because we also learned from Black Flag that when you ain’t playing you’re paying.’

Black Flag seemed to invite confrontation – whether this be with cops, promoters or indeed their own fans – with their every move, and each day on the road brought both fresh challenges and familiar entanglements. Henry Rollins’s Black Flag tour diaries, published in 1994 as
Get in the Van
, offer the most searing account of the experience of touring the USA in a hardcore band in the early 1980s, mapping out the scene’s lawless, anarchic landscape with unflinching detail. Rollins’s diary entry for 7 July 1984 was not untypical:

In the middle of the show, I took a knife off a guy and started swinging it at people in the front row. I put my other hand in front of my eyes so that they could see that I couldn’t see. I hope it bummed them out. Next, a guy handed me a syringe that looked full. He said that there was coke in it. I took it and threw it into Greg’s cabinet screen. It stuck like a dart. After the show, some fucked-up guy was trying to crawl into the van with us. I pulled out Dukowski’s .45 and put the barrel on the man’s forehead and told him to get the fuck away.

On the road Minor Threat themselves faced trouble at every turn. The didactic tone of their EP infuriated just as many punks as it inspired, with many of the group’s detractors interpreting MacKaye’s militant lyrics as a personal assault upon their lifestyle. Each night on tour MacKaye faced drunken hecklers and macho lunkheads hellbent on imparting a little attitude adjustment of their own. With tedious regularity, violence ensued.

Such hostility only added to the escalating stresses of life on the DIY circuit. Money was tight, drives were long and mind-numbing, comforts were scarce. Soon enough, the band was at war not just with the outside world, but also within: internecine arguments raged around divergent views on questions of materialism, ethics, aspirations and intentions. Yet, for all the bullshit they encountered, Minor Threat in full flight were truly transcendent, providing a visceral experience few bands of their generation could hope to match. ‘Ian MacKaye sings with more meaning and honesty than anyone I have seen,’ noted a reviewer for
Flipside
when the band played The Barn in Torrance, California in July 1982. ‘The crowd went nuts singing along with every song. If you miss these guys live I feel sorry for you.’

While Ian MacKaye and his friends travelled America’s highways and byways inspiring and empowering a new nationwide punk rock community, back in Washington DC Dave Grohl was embarking upon his own personal revolution.

To mark his allegiance to the punk tribe, in 1983 he gave himself his first tattoo using a needle and pen ink, a primitive technique he picked up from watching
Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Bahnhof Zoo)
, a 1981 film about the drugs scene in seventies Berlin. His intention was to ink Black Flag’s iconic four bars logo on his left forearm: he managed to etch three of the four bars into his flesh before the pain proved too much to handle.

Guided by Tracey Bradford’s recommendations, and the reviews of records he read in
Flipside
and its more politically conscious San Franciscan counterpart
maximumrocknroll
, he began seeking out punk rock wherever he could find it, the noisier and nastier the better.

‘Dave and I played lacrosse in junior high school and we went to a lacrosse camp at the University of Maryland the summer we were turned on to punk rock,’ remembers Larry Hinkle. ‘We both had a little spending money that week, and during a break we checked out the university’s student union book store and record store. I bought some stupid souvenir like a baseball cap or shorts or something, but Dave bought an Angry Samoans record,
Back from Samoa
, from the record store. It was one of his first punk records and he couldn’t wait to get home and listen to it at the end of the week. I remember asking him why he would buy a record at a lacrosse camp when he could spend his money on some cool crap like I had. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but he definitely couldn’t care less about all that stupid souvenir shit. From then on, it was all about the music.’