Fugazi: C or D?

I grabbed the physical editions of at least the first set at the time, and iirc I think they're just CD-Rs (that Joe burned?) with the same basic reused artwork. Though honestly I haven't taken out the actual CDs for years, so maybe they're not CD-Rs? That's how I remember them at least.

If I can shill for one second. A friend of mine has just started up a new little bespoke label, and the first release is this collab between Brendan and sound artist Stephen Vitiello.

https://playneutral.bandcamp.com/

Mods are asleep, post Long Hair Ian: https://www.instagram.com/p/CU5hejWDRHj/

xpost: listening now, sounds cool!

this is really cool, thanks. Taylor Deupree involvement! and Rebecca Gates is thanked for some reason <3

Also, happy 20th birthday, The Argument!
https://www.stereogum.com/2164172/the-argument-turns-20/reviews/the-anniversary/

oh no i’m old

The Argument Turns 20

In 15 years of doing Fugazi

Oh shit i never really put these numbers together, that they have not been a band longer than they were. Still by far the band I most regret not seeing live.

The Vitiello / Canty collab is so great!

They were a force of nature live

I saw them three times and every one of those times Ian stopped mid-song to dress down some jackass trying to crowd surf. Money well spent!

I maintain to this day that I saw Ian whallop a stage invader with his guitar when they played Brixton Academy on the Red Medicine tour

I saw them at least twice at Fort Reno in DC, once at the Electric Factory in Philly, once at Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ, and I feel like there's at least one more I'm forgetting. One of them was in fact, I am pretty sure, the famous "I saw you eating ice cream!" show memorialized in Instrument, something I have only pieced together from vague memory combined with friend's account.

Re the berating (which happened at all of my shows too), I have a running joke with a friend about how Ian is "Dad" and Guy is "Mom." At the first show I went to, the Killtaker tour, it was worse than crowdsurfing, it was skinheads stomping people, including my friend who was in the pit. We were 14 years old. The crew let us sit and watch from the back of their truck after.

Absolutely electrifying live show, and the "YOU! YOU DOING THAT CRAZY, VIOLENT, SWINGY ARMS DANCE!" moments were every bit as much a part of it as Dark Star was for Dead shows.

*(not a direct quote)

This is the 'ice cream' gig - https://www.dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/washington-dc-usa-80993

Right, yup. That would in fact have been the same one at which my friend got kicked by skinheads and we wound up sitting on the truck. First one I went to.

Said gig is discussed in the introduction of Joe Gross's In On the Kill Taker book.

At the time I remember in the zines of the era there was a fair amount of clowning on Fugazi for show stopping and "policing" the crowds, but, as a relative slight (at the time anyway) teenager any really big punk/alternative shows at the time (91-95 esp in my experience) were so violent and could be so scary there were times I didn't even want to go see bands. Nirvana busting through to mainstream and moshing/slamming being on MTV made it instantly de rigueur for every single show where the bpms got above 80 and the spike in jocks at like every show. People were going to see bands to start fights essentially.

Add to that the low bar for entry to Fugazi shows (all ages/5 bucks) made them pretty much ground zero for all kinds of terrible behavior in the audience and I was always so happy and thrilled when Ian would call out some asshole and give him his five bucks back and tell him to leave.

Yeah, I mean I've always been a bit of a wuss, but if it's between "uncool policing" and "kids getting kicked in the head with steel-toed boots" I'm on the side of uncool policing.

Yes! I too always loved the scolding. I saw em for the first time at a tiny place (upstairs I even think it was) in Burlington Vermont. I had never heard them before, and I also hadn't heard about the Rodney King video, which had just come out, and they talked about it. I think they opened with the volume swells on "Turnover" which was incredibly exciting. All of it made me a lifetime fan.

Later that summer after Steady Diet had come out I saw them in Detroit at a bigger theater (the Majestic?). It was the day after the first Lollapalooza had played at the outdoor ampitheater in the suburbs, Pine Knob. Nation of Ulysses opened. There were frightening skinheads everywhere and it was the only time I ever felt genuinely unsafe at a show. Ian and Guy were on them the whole show.

am pretty sure an acquaintance got the boot from the one time fugazi played reno (the city) in the late 90s. i didn't go because i was such a cool hiphop kid at the time, but i remember some of my skater friends went and they said it was good, but also kind of goofed on the band for being so militant about it.

sidenote: said skater friends asked me for a ride to the show and offered to buy me a ticket, a SUPER BURRITO™, and give me gas money. because i was such a cool hiphop kid, i had to decline. uhh, yeah.

They even knew enough not to buy you an ice cream to bring into the show.

Nirvana busting through to mainstream and moshing/slamming being on MTV made it instantly de rigueur for every single show where the bpms got above 80 and the spike in jocks at like every show. People were going to see bands to start fights essentially.

FTR this predated Nirvana. I first noticed it at a Red Hot Chili Peppers show in 1990. The pit was full of thick-necked assholes in Duke caps randomly punching people.

The one Fugazi show I saw (Exeter, UK, 2002) someone attempted to crowd surf and the crowd just parted. They got carried out covered in their own blood from a head wound. Ian stopped and gave a short lecture, obviously.

I remember seeing "slamdancing" at the very first show I went to, Living Colour circa 92. So it had already migrated beyond hardcore punk by then into bigger bands.

I also have a vague memory of being at a Dead Milkmen show and someone breaking their arm in the pit. I generally stayed away from the pit at that age (we're talking like middle school).

FTR this predated Nirvana. I first noticed it at a Red Hot Chili Peppers show in 1990

Yeah I meant more like They Might Be Giants where I saw slamming and crowd-surfing in the era

Their penultimate UK tour they played this scary-ass, over-sold venue in East London, the Rex, and some guy who'd been snapping the show from the stage gave his camera to someone else side of stage and did a huge leap into the crowd. When he got back onstage, Ian made him stand up, stripped his photo pass from him and, after a sturdy lecture, sent him back into the crowd, onstage privileges permanently revoked.

Their last UK tour I saw them in Brighton, and they had this awesome local band Cats On Form playing support. I was reviewing for Kerrang!, and the photographer, Nick Stevens, took this fantastic shot of Guy pretty much doing the splits while playing guitar in that awesome Nijinsky-of-hardcore style he's made his own. It was such a good photo that Kerrang! included it as a pull-out poster a couple of weeks later, and blown up to A3 or whatever you could clearly see Cat On Form watching, sat on the side of the stage, watching in awe. This band influenced so many other groups, and that influence can only have been positive.

https://live.staticflickr.com/3663/3407839766_320d1d9ea1_b.jpg

I was at the Rex show as well. I remember Ian issuing a stern rebuking to a guy about flyer distribution (he had thrown a load of flyers on stage).

Dear Justice (don't) Litter

FTR this predated Nirvana. I first noticed it at a Red Hot Chili Peppers show in 1990

Yeah I meant more like They Might Be Giants where I saw slamming and crowd-surfing in the era

― chr1sb3singer, Tuesday, October 19, 2021 5:06 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

the height of this for me was watching some concert on MTV and people were crowdsurfing to "Linger" by the Cranberries

do u have to
do u have to
do u have to mosh to "linger"

https://podbay.fm/p/the-alphabetical-fugazi

^Thanks!

That's awesome.

Saw dcer Chris Richards loving and touting that. Haven’t listened yet myself

oh wow, looks like I have my next several weeks of podcast bingeing cut out for me then.

The wrap up conversation with Guy and Ian is incredible.

Most interesting part for me was the thing about the drums on Margin Walker being sample-replaced without the band's knowledge, and no one knowing about it for all those years.

:O

Very much hoping some enterprising soul is listening to the wrap-up episode and is now writing to Ian to take charge of the process of editing and releasing all the amazing rehearsal recordings they have <praying hands emoji>.

https://i.imgur.com/WgwoJYN.jpg

lol

I saw the debut of new doc “We are Fugazi from Washington D.C.” Saturday night. It’s not a conventional doc but is instead a series of old live gig songs, a few old interviews, footage from a dc exhibit from 2019 with data about Fugazi dc gigs and how most were for charitable causes . Plus new interviews with the folks who lugged big video cameras in those pre- I phone days to Fugazi gigs . The doc was put together by Joseph Pattisall ( who had done a doc on dc graffiti artist Cool Disco Dan); Jeff Krulik ( Heavy Metal Parking Lot ); and Joe Gross ( wrote a 33 1/3 on a Fugazi album and used to live in DC area before going to Austin). Ian Mackaye was involved in helping provide access to some audio of shows and film footage and knowing some folks who made films .

I enjoyed it. Some aspects might not be clear to those not familiar with band. The semi famous “ice cream eater” spiel from a Fort Reno park in Dc show is included plus lots of other dc gig footage as well as from shows elsewhere in the world. Most not on YouTube. One omission that surprised me was no footage of “No blood for oil “ protest gig in Lafayette Park by the White House.

I may go see it at AFI when I'm in DC - they added dates. I may even see myself.

Is there Mark Anderson content?

I have, um, some feels about Positive Force

Yes, you even see a young Mark. I had some up and down uh feels about Positive Force . But more up than down. There is also the 2019 data study guy who looked back at all the Fugazi free and benefit shows. But it doesn’t go into deep detail about Positive Force.

Tickets still available for the 18th and 23rd. At opening night there were folks there who came from Atlanta, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, New Jersey

At the Q and an after the screening, an East LA guy now in his 40s spoke about how inspired he was by seeing them when he was 14 at the Anti Club in Los Angeles.

I kept looking for myself in the crowd footage of various DC shows but didn’t see myself. The crowd at Fort Reno park free Fugazi gigs were in the thousands. The bands that play there now just draw 100 at most

The folks whose live and interview footage was used were there and they discussed afterwards the difference between lugging big old video cameras then and using cellphones now. Jim Saah who is also a professional photographer and has a book of dc punk and more photos out, was doing the standard over age 50 grumbling about people holding up cell phones and doing bad quality footage. Another participant Sohrab who used to play in bands responded to him— I was 14 then and my skill level was terrible. I was lucky enough to have parents who had a big video camera and let me use it. Who are you to set rules now regarding who is allowed to tape and who isn’t.

While there were women photographers at Fugazi shows back in the day, none of the video folks in the doc and at the AFI Silver were female.

Unrelated observation—Also while the film has some brief old interviews with Ian and Guy, there’s no interviews with drummer Brendan or bassist Joe Lally.

Oh, one of my fave clips in the movie is when Amy Pickering , who worked At Dischord and played in bands, was the guest vocalist on “Suggestion.” Having Amy sing lyrics including “Why Can’t I walk down the street free of suggestion “ made the song so much more powerful