MacKaye had wanted to be a rock musician since he was twelve. “I saw Woodstock so many times, I listened to rock & roll records all the time, I wanted to be in a band,” he says. “All I wanted to do was break guitars. We would just go shoplift plastic guitars and practice breaking them for our concerts. I didn’t even learn how to play the motherfucker, I just broke the thing.
“But it was just so clear to me,” MacKaye continues, “that I would never be in a band because I wasn’t talented—I had no idea how to play guitar. There was no hope for me because I wasn’t part of the industry-sponsored, don’t-try-this-at-home nature of rock. You look at rock & roll at that time—Nugent or Queen or whatever—they’re gods. So I knew that I could never be like that. And I gave up—I just started skateboarding.”
In eighth grade MacKaye discovered a band called White Boy, a bizarre local father-and-son act who played proto-punk songs with titles like “Sagittarius Bumpersticker” and “I Could Puke.” The records were clearly handmade; the label’s mailing address was obviously just their home. “I thought that was the coolest thing in the world,” MacKaye says. “That was my first inkling of an underground independent music thing.”
Then MacKaye discovered punk rock through hip friends and a hip local radio station—in this case, Georgetown University’s WGTB. He delved further into the music at Yesterday and Today, a record store in the humdrum Washington suburb of Rockville, Maryland. MacKaye and his buddies would stop by there once a week and stock up on the latest punk singles while owner Skip Groff happily lectured them on rock history.
MacKaye’s classmate Jeff Nelson was a bespectacled, preternaturally lanky State Department brat who “lost tenth grade and half of eleventh grade to pot,” as he puts it, “and then lost half of eleventh and twelfth grade to punk.” He and MacKaye first met when Nelson set off a pipe bomb outside their school and MacKaye went to investigate; they quickly became friends.
MacKaye and Nelson saw their first punk show in January 1979—a benefit concert by the Cramps for WGTB, which had run afoul of the school’s dean by running an ad for Planned Parenthood and lost its funding. “It blew my mind because I saw for the first time this huge, totally invisible community that gathered together for this tribal event,” MacKaye says. “And it was so dangerous, so scary for me—I mean, Lux Interior was vomiting onstage. Totally crazy scene. Every given was really challenged at this gig. At that moment I realized here was a community that was politically confrontational, that was theologically confrontational, that was artistically confrontational, that was sexually confrontational, physically confrontational, musically confrontational. There was all kinds of craziness. Everything was in the room.
“I thought, ‘This appeals to me. This is the world I think I can breathe in. This is what I need.’ ”
MacKaye was working at a pet shop with Garfield, and a few days after the Cramps show, he shaved off all his hair with a dog trimmer, a major statement in the age of designer jeans. And then a week or so after that, he saw the Clash. Ian MacKaye had become a punk.
In the midst of the chaos of the Cramps show, some guys were hanging out flyers for their band. They called themselves the Bad Brains. “And they were the coolest-looking, most heavy-looking dudes in the joint,” says MacKaye. “They were so awesome.”
The Bad Brains had begun as a jazz-rock fusion band but, having discovered punk, used their chops to play punk rock at faster speeds than anyone had previously attempted, with more precision than anyone had previously been capable of, and with more explosive passion than anyone had previously imagined. They released the epochal “Pay to Cum” in 1980, a blistering minute and a half of pure punk fury. “The Bad Brains,” says MacKaye, “were really one of the great bands that existed of any time.” Just as important as the music, the Bad Brains’ Rastafarian spirituality and righteous politics struck a chord in D.C. punks; it made them realize punk was something you could hang an ethos on.
Bad Brains’ lightning chops aside, punk rock’s rudimentary musical requirements convinced MacKaye that anybody could do it, and soon he and Nelson were playing in a high school punk band called the Slinkees with their school friends Geordie Grindle, who played guitar, and vocalist Mark Sullivan. They played precisely one show before Sullivan went off to college, then drafted singer Nathan Strejcek after Garfield turned down the gig and renamed themselves the Teen Idles.
The Teen Idles, MacKaye said, were “trying to get away from a really corrupted music, you know, basically your heavy metal bands that were into heroin, cocaine, just a lot of drinking. We just drank a lot of Coke and ate a lot of Twinkies.”
The band played proto-hardcore tunes that skewered their social milieu. “When I became a punk, my main fight was against the people who were around me—friends,” said MacKaye in the essential 1983 hardcore documentary Another State of Mind. “I said, ‘God, I don’t want to be like these people, man. I don’t fit in at all with them.’ So it was an alternative.”
At the time the major labels were in the midst of co-opting punk rock by dressing it in skinny ties and modish haircuts, virtually willing a trend called “new wave” into existence. Many fans bought in, as did plenty of bands, pushing punk back to the margins. Vanguard punks like the Clash and the Damned were losing their edge so quickly that by 1980 Strejcek would holler in the Teen Idles’ “Fleeting Fury,” “The clothes you wear have lost their sting / So’s the fury in the songs you sing.”
To resuscitate that precious fury, the Teen Idles tried to look as daunting as possible, sporting shaved heads, mohawks, and various other punk gear. Nelson and MacKaye would even pound nails and tacks into the soles of their boots so they’d make an ominous clacking sound. “I remember going to the dentist at one point, and I had these round upholstery tacks on the bottoms of my boots,” Nelson recalls with a chuckle, “and there was a marble lobby in the office building and a big door at the end, and I couldn’t even pull it open because when I’d pull on it I’d just slide toward the door. I couldn’t get in!”
They also took to wearing chains on their boots so they’d rattle as they walked down the street—the idea was to intimidate the jocks and rednecks who had started to hassle them for looking different. But the toughguy look couldn’t have been further from the truth. “In our shows and within our own community, we were totally goofy guys,” says MacKaye now. “We were painfully honest—we didn’t shoplift, we didn’t vandalize, we didn’t spray-paint. We were just good kids. That was our whole joke: We don’t do anything—everybody hates us just because of the way we look.”
But the tough look backfired, drawing even more altercations than before. “It was a great way to learn about how much hatred really exists in this world,” says MacKaye. “If you do something so dumb as spray-paint your hair, then next thing you know you have grits from southern Maryland chasing you down the fuckin’ street just because you chose to do something a little different. You realize just how fucked up our society is.”
The Teen Idles did two demo sessions at a local studio in February and April ’80 and remained unbowed even after the engineer and a visiting band openly laughed at them as they recorded. They began playing shows at pizza joints, house parties, an art gallery/Yippie commune called Madam’s Organ in D.C.’s racially diverse Adams Morgan neighborhood, and the Wilson Center, a Latin American youth center in nearby Mount Pleasant. After playing a dozen or so gigs, opening for local bands like the Bad Brains or MacKaye’s brother Alec’s band the Untouchables, they decided to light out for the Coast.
MacKaye and his circle took their inspiration from West Coast punk rock rather than from the older and more debauched New York punks. They resented the fact that everybody said you couldn’t be a punk if you didn’t live in New York—what did being punk have to do with geography? Besides, no one was more punk than California bands like the Dead Kennedys. By that time New York bands such as Mars and DNA had developed their own powerful reaction against new wave, called no wave, and the music was far m
ore radical than the jacked-up punk rock of the West Coast bands. But after going up to New York to check out the scene, MacKaye and his crew weren’t having any of it—no wave, says MacKaye, was “artier and druggier and didn’t really speak to us. Plus, they were snobby to us because we were just little kids.”
So MacKaye and his buddies devoured West Coast zines like Damage, Slash and Search & Destroy, eager for any shred of information about California punk. They grew to love the Germs, the bands on the Dangerhouse label, and especially Black Flag. “That Black Flag single was life-changing for us,” MacKaye says. “Nervous Breakdown—one of the greatest records ever released, in my opinion.”
And in early August ’80 the Teen Idles, along with roadies Mark Sullivan and Henry Garfield, took a bus out to California to play some shows. Very quickly they learned the difference between being a punk in D.C. and being a punk in Los Angeles. When they arrived at the L.A. bus station, a cop, wary of violence-prone punks, hassled the Teen Idles, calling them “faggot” and “clown.” In retaliation, Nelson grabbed his ass at the cop, who promptly handcuffed him for an hour.
They were supposed to open for the Dead Kennedys and the Circle Jerks at L.A.’s Hong Kong Cafe, but the club owner dropped them from the bill when he saw how young they were. They had to settle for playing the next night, opening for the notorious Mentors and an outfit known as Puke, Spit and Guts. The Teen Idles made quite an impression. “People were freaked out how fast we were,” MacKaye says. “They could not believe it.” On the other hand, the band could not believe their paycheck: $15.
When they played San Francisco’s fabled punk bastion Mabuhay Gardens (making a grand total of $11), they met up with a bunch of badass L.A. punks with names like Mugger (of the SST posse), Drew Blood, and Critter. “They were terrifying and they just beat up anybody who crossed them,” MacKaye recalls, still a bit awed. For the Teen Idles, who were constantly harassed for being punks back home, it was an empowering encounter. “We brought that home,” Sullivan says. “I don’t think we’d been home three days before we were walking down M Street or something and somebody says, ‘Hey, fag!’ And six lightbulbs went on over six little heads and six little guys trounced somebody. And it was a very powerful feeling.”
“I don’t know if you’ve experienced a carload of hillbillies going by and yelling, ‘Faggot!’ at you or getting beat up by marines in Georgetown,” says MacKaye, “but there’s something so satisfying about someone yelling something at you as they go by and then racing after the car and dragging them out of the car at a red light. And seeing those guys do that stuff made us feel like we need to defend, we need to circle the wagons. We need to fight back.” Fighting also proved to be an effective way of separating the wheat from the chaff, punkwise. “We were trying to stand out, and the one way it seemed at the time was violence,” says MacKaye. “Violence was one way to ratchet it up, to make it too unpleasant to people who weren’t really down.
“I had intellectualized violence quite a bit,” MacKaye continues. “I had a philosophy of violence, which was that I bruise the ego. That was my theory. I fought a lot, but I never maimed people. I was not a cruel fighter. My concept was that I would never back down from a fight. I would just come at people. The idea was to break their will—I didn’t want to hurt nobody, I really didn’t want to hurt nobody. All I really wanted to do was tell them not to hurt me and not let them have the sense that they were going to dominate us.”
When Black Flag first played D.C. at a club called the Bayou, the owner installed three extra stage bouncers for the occasion. “That made the night so fun for us, man!” MacKaye bragged to Forced Exposure. “I’m talking those motherfuckers were leaving blood pouring! ’Cause it’s good, to me, that’s justified aggression. I believe in that, I’m an aggressive person.”
In the fall of ’80 Yesterday and Today’s Skip Groff had taken the Teen Idles to Inner Ear, a small studio just across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and recorded them with owner Don Zientara engineering. It was the beginning of a key relationship.
Inner Ear was just Zientara’s house—he had a reel-to-reel four-track recorder and some homemade gear; the mixing board was on the porch, connected by a bunch of wires to the basement, where the band played. “Everything was held together with clothespins,” Zientara says, chuckling. Back then, before the advent of the home four-track machine, there were very few options between recording on a boom box and in a full-blown professional studio. Inner Ear was a godsend.
Although Zientara was about fourteen years older than the members of the Teen Idles and more accustomed to recording things like harp music and Celtic folk tunes, he was a former folkie and appreciated what they were doing. “They were teenagers,” Zientara says, “and they had everything that came with teenage years—the slight bit of arrogance, distrust of elders and organizations and companies, they brought all that in. It was reinforced by the fact that they were punks at the time and everybody held their nose up as they passed by. That made them more cliquish in many ways—it was them against the world, and they played music with that in mind.
“This music, it was ‘Let’s give it 100 percent for a minute and a half, and then drop down out of sheer exhaustion, then shove it out of the way and get on to the next one,’ ” Zientara continues. “It wasn’t like we were taking the time to archive this for posterity. There was no posterity, there was no future. There was just the present.”
The band had not thought about what they’d do with the tapes and simply shelved them.
The Teen Idles played their last show on November 6, 1980, opening for former Jefferson Airplane bassist Jack Casady’s new wavish band SVT at the newly opened 9:30 Club. It was a key event, and not just because it was the Teen Idles’ swan song. They had also struck a key blow for all-ages shows.
Washington had a law that excluded minors from bars. Yet there was another law that stated that any establishment that sold alcohol must also sell food. This technically made it a restaurant, and minors could not be barred from restaurants. Still, the risk of being prosecuted for barring a minor from a restaurant was far smaller than the risk of being fined for serving alcohol to a minor, so minors didn’t get into rock shows. MacKaye and his friends would stand outside clubs and try to hear now-legendary punk bands like the Damned and Stiff Little Fingers as they played inside, a frustrating experience they would never forgive or forget.
But at the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco, the Teen Idles were allowed in once they got big Xs drawn on their hands, signaling they were underage. They suggested this to the 9:30 management, vowing that if any underage punks were caught drinking, the club could just ban them all forever. The 9:30 Club opened its doors.
Right after the final Teen Idles show, MacKaye and Nelson brainstormed ideas for their next band on a long drive up to Colgate University in upstate New York, where Mark Sullivan was enrolled. By the time they got back, it was decided: the band was going to be called Minor Threat. The name was disingenuous. “We were minors—underage—and also just diminutive,” says the 5’7” MacKaye. “Just a small threat, nothing to worry about.” They also agreed that MacKaye would be the singer. “I just had an idea of how one might sing,” he says. “I watched Woodstock sixteen times, watched Joe Cocker, and I wanted to be the singer.”
When they got back, they recruited guitarist Lyle Preslar, a pupil at the upscale private Georgetown Day School, whose band the Extorts had recently broken up. (Henry Garfield began singing with some former Extorts and they became S.O.A.) Preslar brought in his towheaded schoolmate Brian Baker on bass. Baker had been something of a guitar prodigy—as a child in Detroit, he had jammed with Santana at the city’s rock palace Cobo Hall. At first both Baker and Preslar were a bit scared of Nelson, with his mohawk and a German army officer’s uniform he’d found in the trash and stitched back together. “I was such a tough, scary-looking crazy guy,” says Nelson. “But basically that was me being shy.”
CLOCKWISE FROM UPPER LEFT: IAN M
ACKAYE GETTING HIS HAIR DONE, LYLE PRESLAR FIRING UP THE LES PAUL IN THE CRAMPED PRACTICE SPACE IN THE DISCHORD HOUSE BASEMENT, BRIAN BAKER IN THE MINOR THREAT VAN, JEFF NELSON IN THE DISCHORD OFFICE, ALL 1982.
CYNTHIA CONNOLLY
Very quickly, though, the music fell into place. It was delivered with the speed, power, and precision of a jackhammer, a series of violent starts and stops interspersed with flat-out sprints that had the band playing as fast as they humanly could. The rhythms dealt almost exclusively in what would become hardcore’s signature, a hyperactive one-two beat. Nelson played like a machine—with his wiry arms moving at a blur, they looked like piston rods on a locomotive; his stamina was mind-boggling. He and Baker formed a fearsome rhythm team. Using the classic combination of the chunky attack of a Gibson Les Paul guitar and the crunch of a Marshall amplifier, Preslar played barre chords, rock’s bread and butter, with a strength, speed, and accuracy that are extremely difficult to duplicate.
On top of it all, MacKaye spouted his lyrics like a frantic drill sergeant, halfway between a holler and a bark. Considering he was essentially shouting, and within a very narrow range, MacKaye’s vocals were very tuneful. As the band hammered out their strict rhythms, MacKaye phrased against them, as if he were fighting the conformity of the beat. Yet his offbeat phrasing was carefully devised; he sang it virtually the same way every time, even live.
Guy Picciotto was a friend of the band and was invited one day to attend a Minor Threat practice at Baker’s mother’s house. “Just being in the room and watching them practice, the force of [MacKaye’s] delivery and the way that those guys worked, it was really pretty intense,” Picciotto remembers. “They were writing ‘Screaming at a Wall’ and it was just such an incredible song. It had this breakdown in the middle that was so incredible, and I remember them piecing it together and arranging it, and it just felt like I was at a Beatles practice or something.”
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