Our Band Could Be Your Life

by Michael Azerrad

  The band’s first show was on December 17, 1980, opening for the Bad Brains. And people were blown away. “They were an incredible band,” says Mark Jenkins, then the editor of the alternative biweekly Washington Tribune. “They were powerful, they were charismatic, they were passionate, they just demanded your attention.”

  “So many things went on in such a short time,” says Nelson. “All of a sudden, we were a well-oiled machine. It was just weird.”

  The band seemed fueled by an unquenchable rage. “I was very angry,” says MacKaye. “I was nineteen and about to leave the ranks of the teenagers and I was furious—the evolution of punk rock had grown from these silly kids to being embattled silly kids to being embittered silly kids, then embittered kids and then violent, embittered kids. It just kept getting ratcheted up.” Even though their look was deliberately provocative, MacKaye and his friends still were outraged at getting hassled; not only that, they were all in late adolescence, a turbulent time for anyone.

  And to top it off, the older D.C. hipsters dismissed them as “teeny-punks.” “No one took us seriously,” says MacKaye, his frustration still evident. “And it drove us crazy—how much more real could we be? We were kids! We picked up guitars! We taught ourselves how to play! We wrote our own songs!”

  Garfield got MacKaye a job taking tickets at the Georgetown Theatre, right on the neighborhood’s main drag, Wisconsin Avenue. The street was a promenade for yuppies, preppies, college kids, and other straitlaced, affluent young Washingtonians—in other words, a place MacKaye and his punk friends loved to hate. MacKaye worked there three nights a week for five years, sitting behind the glass and glaring out at the straights. “Every Friday night,” says MacKaye, “I just sat there and I just watched a parade of fucking idiots going by. It was party night, it was Georgetown, and it just turned my stomach.” It’s no coincidence that most Minor Threat songs were written in that window.

  By now the punk rock movement had been well tamed by the major labels and willing accomplices like Ultravox, Joe Jackson, and Spandau Ballet. A pioneering few began devising an ultra-punk—undiluted, unglamorous, and uncompromising—that no corporation would ever touch. “We were a new kind of punk rock,” says MacKaye. “We were hardcore punk rockers.”

  Hardcore was the latest volley in a transatlantic tennis game, with punk rock as the ball. The British had received the first wave of American punk bands—Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones, et al.—and fired back with the Sex Pistols, the Damned, Buzzcocks, and countless others.

  “When the ball came back this way, there was an intense spin that Americans put on it when they sent it back over,” MacKaye says. “That’s why it became so amped—it was just so much more intense, it was a lot less of a fashion thing. The kids were younger and they just went to town with it.” So while the first wave of punks abandoned the music and moved into post-punk, a younger crowd took their place and developed hardcore, a combustible mixture of white teenage male angst and frustrated energy.

  There was a quantum difference between early punk and hardcore—it was something like the difference between bebop and hard bop in jazz, or the leap from Chuck Berry’s affable rock & roll to Jimi Hendrix’s freaky electrocution of the blues. It was all about the intensity of your delivery.

  Because many kids on the scene came from just two high schools (Wilson and Georgetown Day) the D.C. punk scene was very inbred, socially and aesthetically. They all listened to the same music, went to the same schools, played parties at each other’s houses. “In a sense, it was a small town scene even though it was a city,” says Mark Jenkins. “If virtually everyone had a Wire song in their repertoire, it was because they were kids, they didn’t have that many records, they all listened to each other’s records, they reinforced themselves.”

  A case in point is the “Stepping Stone” phenomenon. MacKaye says Minor Threat didn’t even know “Stepping Stone” was originally a Monkees song and only knew the Sex Pistols’ version. A latter-day “Louie, Louie,” “Stepping Stone” enjoyed a tremendous renaissance in the early Eighties underground; Minor Threat was just one of many D.C. bands to cover the song (at Minor Threat’s second show, each of the seven bands on the bill covered the tune).

  Their light-speed take on the song is indicative, the extreme velocity tracing directly to the Bad Brains. “They were so fast and so good,” MacKaye recalls. “And that was an aesthetic. And that’s what we danced to. So we started to play fast, too. We also knew that, as an aesthetic, it was our own—for a few moments there.”

  Having one’s own aesthetic was a rarity for many Washingtonians. “If you grew up white in this city and you’re not part of the political establishment,” says MacKaye, “or you’re not part of the true culture, which is a black culture, then you have no culture. There is nothing here.” So they decided to make their own culture, and it couldn’t have been more different from black culture. “Hardcore in general seemed the least funky music ever played on guitar,” says Mark Jenkins. “To a certain extent I think it’s the effect of streamlining—just taking all the syncopation out of it, turning it into this blur.”

  In their one-year existence, the Teen Idles had amassed $900, all of which went into a band kitty kept in a cigar box. When the band disolved, they had to decide whether to split the money four ways or press up the recordings they’d done with Don Zientara. The choice was obvious. “We just said, ‘Let’s document ourselves,’ ” says MacKaye. “We figured that having a record would be pretty cool.”

  “I don’t remember thinking it was going to be anything more than just one record,” adds Nelson. “We didn’t have any grandiose plans.”

  With Groff’s help, MacKaye and Nelson, still in their late teens, commenced work on their debut release, the Teen Idles’ eight-song Minor Disturbance seven-inch EP, released in January ’81. MacKaye dubbed their new label Dischord Records.

  Nelson designed the sleeve, which featured a punk rocker’s hands with the telltale underage Xs drawn on them. They arranged the pressing and printing, ordering an initial run of a thousand copies. Everything had to be cut, folded, and glued by hand; MacKaye, Nelson, Strejcek, and their friends spent much of their waking hours assembling the covers.

  Drawn by the cover shot of punk heartthrob Penelope Houston of the Avengers, they discovered an obscure fanzine called Touch & Go, published out of the unlikely punk outpost of Lansing, Michigan, and edited by Dave Stimson and one Tesco Vee. Impressed, they sent Touch & Go a Teen Idles single. Although the record got broken in the mail, the Touch & Go folks liked the cover art so much that they taped the record together just to see what it sounded like. They managed to hear a few seconds at a time, enough that they immediately wrote back and asked for another copy.

  Touch & Go wrote up a glowing review and soon orders began trickling in from readers. Dischord sent copies to other fanzines, as well as radio stations like KPFA and KUSF in San Francisco. Reviews and some airplay followed—the Bay Area’s Maximumrocknroll radio show had “Get Up and Go” at number one for weeks—and more orders rolled in. “We couldn’t believe it,” says MacKaye. “First of all, it was an eight-song single. Nobody had ever heard of an eight-song single. They were freaked out. But nobody could tell us why we shouldn’t do it. No one could explain why a punk would ever follow any mainstream rule about how many songs you could put on a single.”

  They had decided that if Minor Disturbance sold, they’d simply put all the money into releasing another record. Dischord was short on cash, so Henry Garfield put up money he’d earned from managing an ice-cream store to record his band, S.O.A., and their ten-song seven-inch became Dischord’s second release. When the money came back from those first two seven-inches, they had the funds to make more records. In the four months after the Teen Idles record came out, key D.C. punk bands including Youth Brigade and Government Issue—friends of Nelson and MacKaye—formed, and Dischord released seven-inch records by both of them. “We were a
ll working our asses off,” says MacKaye. “I was working all the time trying to pay for everything. But it was all about documentation.”

  In March ’81 Black Flag came to the East Coast for the first time, playing the Peppermint Lounge in New York. The whole D.C. crew drove up for the gig. “And we also raised hell,” MacKaye says. “We got in a lot of fights. Everybody hated us.”

  The cool, older, more intoxicant-friendly New York crowd did not appreciate the rambunctious kids from D.C. who knocked into anyone with long hair (“hippies”) or those who weren’t slamming with them. Writing in his fanzine The Big Takeover (ironically, the title of a Bad Brains song), Jack Rabid assailed the D.C. punks’ behavior as “a stupid, macho, phoney trip,” adding, “If you insist on this bullshit attitude than [sic] we may as well forget all the positive aspects of our scene and chuck the whole thing out the window. And may a hippie beat the living shit out of you.”

  Two weeks later the D.C. crew headed up to the Dead Kennedys show at Irving Plaza and even more fighting broke out. “It was the most crazy brawl,” MacKaye says. “I can remember one fight at that show that started in front of the stage and rolled—it was four or five of us fighting—across the floor to the top of the stairs and then rolled down the stairs fighting. It was incredible! It was like a Western or something.”

  Critic Lester Bangs, in a review of the Black Flag show, called MacKaye and his cohorts “muscleheads from Washington,” which irritated the D.C. crew even more than being called “teeny-punks.” “When he called us muscleheads, we were like, ‘Fuck you!’ says MacKaye. “We were so mad.” Not long afterward a review of a Dead Kennedys show also called the boisterous D.C. crew “muscleheads,” so in typical punk fashion they turned insult into asset: a musclehead, they reasoned, must be someone with a very strong brain. Not long afterward Dischord issued the landmark D.C. hardcore compilation Flex Your Head. It sold a remarkable four thousand copies in the first week of its release.

  Minor Threat debuted with Dischord’s third release, an untitled seven-inch EP recorded in early May ’81. In a mere eleven minutes, the eight songs inveigh against blowhards (“I Don’t Wanna Hear It”), stubborn friends (“Screaming at a wall”), Bible freaks (“Filler”). The songs were all about very specific aspects of their lives: “Bottled Violence” rails at those who got drunk at shows and beat up people; “Minor Threat” warns of growing up too soon; “Seeing Red” is about getting taunted for looking like a punk. All of it packed a powerful gut-punch power, delivered at extreme velocity; the amazing thing was you could also sing along with it. Minor Threat had delivered a quintessential hardcore document.

  The natural teenage revulsion toward adults and authority figures was only magnified by the unique environment of Washington, D.C. “When you live in Washington and you see these people downtown, it’s like, ‘Who are these people?’ ” says MacKaye. “ ‘Who are these starched motherfuckers?’ It is such a falsehood. It is so gross to me and so weird, so much the antithesis of anything natural. I just hate it, I have always hated it. When I was a kid, I hated the mask of adulthood. And I was threatened by it.”

  But despite their hometown, Minor Threat songs rarely aimed at larger political issues, concentrating instead on interpersonal conflicts. “We were pretty much middle class, upper middle class, whatever,” Nelson says. “Maybe that had something to do with it. I think it would have been false bravado and swaggering if we had been much more vicious and more bitching about ‘the system’ oppressing us.”

  Countless hardcore bands sang variations on the “Reagan sucks” theme, but MacKaye pointedly avoided taking any potshots at the doddering hawk in the White House. It took far more nerve to call your own people to task than to deplore things like the situation in El Salvador, which MacKaye feels most bands didn’t even understand anyway. “I fuckin’ hated Reagan,” says MacKaye. “I’ve always hated the government. I guess what I felt like was it wasn’t my domain. I didn’t know enough about politics to really sing about them. And I didn’t know enough about the world to really sing about it. But I knew enough about my world to sing about it.”

  “The whole point is if you deal with yourself and people you can exert influence upon,” said Preslar, “then maybe you can put those people in a mentality that will be beneficial to everybody else later on. And that’s the only hope you can possibly have.”

  Like the music itself, the lyrics were very concise and unambiguous, an approach that MacKaye eventually discarded. “That really direct, clear thing leaves no wiggle room for anybody,” he says. “It comes off way too much like I know every fuckin’ thing in the world.” Literally every one of MacKaye’s lyrics was addressed to some unidentified second person. So the effect on the listener was simultaneously to feel accused (the singer is hollering at “you” all the time) and righteous (the “you” is easily transferred to someone in the listener’s own life). The lyrics set up such a well-defined value system that people bonded tightly with MacKaye as an arbiter, a moral compass, particularly for the inordinate number of abused and neglected kids who had embraced the hardcore subculture.

  “There was definitely a point early in Minor Threat where he was a preaching motherfucker,” says Nelson. “It definitely was ‘holier than thou’ sometimes. And how could it not be when you’re presenting, so vehemently and so stridently, such an antiestablishment approach. My approach would have been more conciliatory. It would not have had quite the same impact, I don’t think. I don’t think it was a conscious thing—that’s the way he is. He is very direct, very unabashed.”

  MacKaye and his brothers and sister were raised in a family environment that exemplified the best of what the Sixties counterculture was about. MacKaye’s parents, says Rollins, “raised their kids in a tolerant, super intellectual, open-minded atmosphere. I think they’re both real hippies—real-deal, microbus, be-in, dropout hippies. So they didn’t whack the kids around and there wasn’t ‘Go do this and be all you can be rah-rah-rah’; it was like, ‘Well, son, let’s listen to what you’re listening to.’ During Ian’s teenage years, the house is filled with all of Ian’s crazy dyed-hair friends who were very wonderful people who I know to this day and Ian’s parents never batted an eye. You come in with a mohawk and [his mother] Ginger would go, ‘Oh wow, that’s really wild! Do you want something to eat?’ It was never a double take ever.”

  MacKaye’s father, a former White House correspondent for the Washington Post and later the religion editor there, was also a noted theologian and very active in St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Washington, a highly progressive church that held rock services, ordained female priests, and sanctioned same-sex marriages as early as the Sixties. The church was involved with all kinds of protests in the Vietnam era, and the MacKayes would often put up visiting demonstrators, mostly hippie kids. His upbringing may be why although MacKaye held a staunch anti-establishment stance, his most deeply held ideas had strong connections to the best aspects of Christian morality. “Ian’s not a religious person,” says Mark Sullivan, “but he behaves like one.”

  Nelson remembers MacKaye getting very angry at him when he got stoned before the Damned’s first show in D.C. “I was supposed to go to Ian’s house to meet his parents for the first time,” Nelson recalls. “And he was really pissed off. He felt sort of betrayed as a friend that I had done that.

  “His thing was ‘I don’t need drugs, I’m not going to take them,’ ” says Nelson. “A very unusual strength of will. A very tiny percentage of the population has anything like that kind of willpower and determination and self-control and resistance to peer pressure. It’s a whole host of things which make him the pretty amazing person that he is.”

  Even before MacKaye thought of a name for his brand of sobriety, the Teen Idles had had a song called “Milk and Coke,” which pointedly championed their two favorite beverages. But by the time of Minor Threat, MacKaye had written a forty-six-second outburst called “Straight Edge.”

  “OK, fine, you take drugs,
you drink, whatever,” MacKaye explained when asked about the song’s title. “But obviously I have the edge on you because I’m sober, I’m in control of what I’m doing.”

  Alcohol was a major target of MacKaye’s ire, and in a 1983 interview he got particularly vehement on the subject. “There’s nothing I hate more than hearing people use that shit as an excuse,” he said. “Too many times it’s ‘I’m sorry what happened last night, I was fucked up.’ Well, fuck that shit, man. I don’t like getting hit by some drunk motherfucker just because he’s drunk. I don’t buy it. Can you imagine what drinking has done to people’s conscience, just in what they’ve done under the influence and allowed themselves to do under the influence and then when they sober up, realizing what they’d done? It’s sad to me, it’s sad.”

  Although Minor Threat’s music came across with brutal force, it was carefully composed and precisely played, a compelling metaphor for the sober, righteous lifestyle advocated in the lyrics. It was also a compelling advertisement for it as well—you couldn’t play this incredible music if you were fucked up; you certainly didn’t play it to get laid.

  “Straight edge” soon became more than a song; it became a way of life among the Dischord crowd. In a very punk way, they made a virtue out of what they weren’t allowed to do: since they were underage, they were forced out of the clubs. So they simply declared it cool not to drink. Besides, teen drinking laws were practically set up in order to entrap kids; straight edge leapfrogged out of that dynamic. “Since we weren’t allowed to legally drink,” said Nathan Strejcek, “we said, ‘Fine, we don’t want to,’ just to piss the lawmakers off. This is where we established a new place in modern society for ourselves… clear-minded thinking against the most evil of all, the adults!”