“What would punks be doing now?” said MacKaye in 1983. “Sitting around and getting fucked up and being rowdy. I don’t want to be that. I want to beat that and I know that we can. The merchants of Georgetown want nothing more than to have punks smashing out windows, spray-painting the walls, drink in the streets and beat up people. And the reason we fuck them so good is we went to Georgetown and we’re honest as shit, we never steal, we go to the store, we pay our money, we’re just totally nice, and best of all, we got our heads shaved and we’re totally punk rockers and we’re totally going against what they want.”
Renouncing sex, drugs, and drink was renouncing the unattainable rock & roll myth, making music relevant for real people—you couldn’t pursue the rock & roll lifestyle and then get up in the morning and go to school or work. But you could if you went to sober all-ages matinees. Ethics aside, straight edge was a way of rescuing rock music from being simply a vehicle for selling drinks. (The band didn’t sell T-shirts and other merchandise for the same reason: the music was not a vehicle for generating revenue; it was an end in itself.)
MacKaye railed against alcohol as an emotional crutch, but he also felt it was symptomatic of a larger laziness and uncreativity, a function of a mindless consumer culture that stifled individual thinking. “The bar thing cripples people,” MacKaye said. “I’m not saying, ‘Don’t go to bars.’ I’m not saying, ‘Don’t drink alcohol.’ I’m merely saying, ‘Try to find a little more entertainment from your own resources.’ As opposed to going out and buying it.”
MacKaye’s reasoning about straight edge was sound and persuasive, but no one is that vehement on a particular issue without having a personal stake in it. As it turns out, a member of MacKaye’s immediate family was an alcoholic, and at a very early age he’d seen the damage done; by the time he was eleven he’d resolved never to drink, long before he was in a band. It may also be why the concept of moderate drinking is barely even part of the discussion.
Straight edge caught on throughout the hardcore community, but MacKaye has always steadfastly denied he wanted to start a movement. “I was trying to defend myself against the idea that I was a freak for not drinking,” MacKaye says. “I’m not a freak, I didn’t feel like a freak. What I felt like was somebody who had made a choice in my life.” Free choice and independent thinking—flex your head!—were the real point of straight edge.
“At least,” MacKaye said, “it’s not a bad set of rules.”
Although there were few places for bands like Minor Threat to perform, Dischord already had a strong mail-order business, so they just called customers, record stores, and radio stations and asked where to play. Eventually MacKaye lined up an ambitious cross-country jaunt that stretched all the way to San Diego, and they set out in August ’81. Nathan Strejcek’s new band, Youth Brigade, was also along for the ride; there were fourteen or fifteen guys on the trip, a few of them not even yet sixteen.
MacKaye’s pen pal Corey Rusk of the Necros arranged for the band to stay at his parents’ house in Ohio, then they continued on to Chicago, where they had a gig at the seminal punk club O’Banion’s. O’Banion’s management almost canceled the show when they realized the band was under twenty-one, but MacKaye talked them into it, agreeing to make their young pals stay outside. “We’re all set up and right next to me was the exit to the street,” MacKaye recalls. “We had already made a plan with everybody. We set up and I said, ‘Good evening, we’re Minor Threat from Washington, D.C.’ And then I kicked the door open and everyone just ran in.”
Local punk mainstay Santiago Durango did sound for that show. “They played and there were about five people there, but, boy, they blew the roof off that club,” says Durango, who later joined Big Black. “I thought, ‘Whoa, what energy, what…everything.’ I thought, ‘Holy shit, what am I doing playing music—these guys are just awesome!’ They were very tight-knit—they brought their own little fans. At one point they thought that somebody had said something to them, so they all banded together and started chasing some phantoms down the street.”
Then it was on to Wisconsin, where they stayed with a band called the Bloody Mattresses, a bunch of punk rock kids who were living in a former dental office building; each resident lived in a former dentist’s office and the waiting room was their living room. The bands stayed there for a few days, subsisting on that masterstroke of the Reagan regime, government cheese.
They had just played at a club called Merlyn’s—“That was a tremendous night of fighting, people got thrown down the stairs,” MacKaye recalls—when the parents of the guitar player in Youth Brigade called and said to bring their van home or they wouldn’t pay for college.
While Youth Brigade went home, Minor Threat stayed on, sneaked across the Canadian border, and played a show in Windsor, Ontario, with the Necros, then went home dejected, having canceled the rest of the tour.
They recorded the In My Eyes four-song EP in August ’81, again at Inner Ear with Don Zientara engineering; Skip Groff supervised the recording.
The title track had a regulation hardcore chorus, but the verses were an innovation—they slowed down to a mere Sex Pistolsian velocity. In the already heterodox world of hardcore, something like that was, as MacKaye puts it, “a real break.” In the song MacKaye restates the straight edge ethos, alternating his delivery from line to line, mockingly stating, “You tell me you like the taste,” then screaming, “You just need an excuse!” The band is right behind him every step of the way, dropping out only as MacKaye angrily demands, “What the fuck have you done?” More than just an accusation leveled at the object of the song’s wrath, it was a challenge to anyone within earshot.
“Out of Step” is an excellent example of the way MacKaye would sing against the beat—as he bellows the chorus line “Out of step with the world!” he’s singing in a different meter than the band, making him literally out of step with the music. But the song was far more important for its lyrics, in which MacKaye refined the ideas first brought up in “Straight Edge.” The reason he’s out of step with the world: “Don’t smoke / Don’t drink / Don’t fuck.”
It was a moral universe that seemed to have an uncomfortably puritanical ring to it. “Of course, what it all boils down to is sex,” MacKaye opined in a 1983 interview. “It’s all a social thing and for people to loosen up, to drink a little alcohol to loosen up their sexual organs or whatever, to get the nerve to do what everyone wants to do anyway. It seems pretty stupid. You’ve opened a Pandora’s box of talk. I could go on all day about it.”
The puritanical tag stuck to the band, which one reviewer called “the Stooges fronted by a Zen monk,” getting to the point where MacKaye felt obliged to pronounce himself “not asexual” in an early Maximumrocknroll interview. The “don’t fuck” line, he stated, referred to uncaring, “conquestual” sex. It was, MacKaye says now, about people whose “whole being is just about getting laid, so all other issues, everything else that’s important, like friendships or other people’s feelings, are secondary.” He felt the whole mentality was promoted by the media. “On television kids see people every night going off with different people. And these characters never have any of the real-life problems that occur, like pregnancy, VD, et cetera. It’s always clean. It is a myth. It’s wrong. And a lot of people get caught up in the fantasy.” So renouncing casual sex was just like renouncing alcohol—it was just another self-destructive behavior that society foisted on young people, ultimately for commercial purposes. And Ian MacKaye, for one, was having none of it.
But straight edge was not as hard-and-fast as others interpreted it to be. MacKaye summarized straight edge as “controlling things and not letting them control you,” which gave both Nelson and Preslar the leeway to acknowledge in interviews that they were occasional drinkers and yet still considered themselves solidly straight edge. “There’s a difference between alcohol as a beverage and alcohol as an abusive drug,” Preslar explained.
But the other members of Minor Threat were
less concerned with accusations of puritanism than the idea that the band was telling people what to do. The prime culprits were the “Don’t smoke / Don’t drink / Don’t fuck” lines in “Out of Step.” The “I” (“I don’t smoke…”) was only implied, mainly because the extra syllable didn’t fit the line. But Nelson, who was laying out the lyric sheet, insisted on inserting the first-person singular before each line to make clear that it was a statement about MacKaye himself, not an imperative. MacKaye, a stubborn fellow, refused. The argument got more and more heated, until Nelson finally shouted, “You don’t do these things. But I might want to!” And with that, MacKaye bounded upstairs and kicked a hole in Nelson’s door.
“And that’s when it dawned on me what the argument was really about,” says MacKaye. “It wasn’t so much about what other people were thinking, it was because the people in the band were starting to feel hemmed in by my aesthetic.” MacKaye understood their position and yet he also felt a little betrayed. “I really wanted to feel we were all together on things,” he says. “But I understood their point.” In a rare show of compromise, MacKaye relented and allowed an “I” in parentheses in front of the first line.
But the straight edge controversy would not go away, and they felt obliged to rerecord the song in 1983 with a brief explanatory speech by MacKaye that began: “Listen, this is no set of rules. I’m not telling you what to do….” But it was too late. Bands like Boston’s SS Decontrol and Reno’s 7 Seconds took up the straight edge call and began broadcasting it to their communities as doctrine, something that disappointed MacKaye—instead of thinking for themselves, they seemed to be parroting what they’d been told, which was precisely not the point. Eventually, hardcore kids across the country were walking around with Xs on their hands to show they were “straight edge.” (The phrase now appears in several dictionaries.)
Still, it wasn’t as if the whole D.C. hardcore scene abstained from drugs and alcohol; far from it. “The straight edge thing was maybe cool for six months when you were sixteen,” says Mark Jenkins, “but by the time you got a little older and had some more options and you started experimenting, it sort of slipped away.” But straight edge was attractive to a whole new crop of kids repulsed by the cocaine-fueled yuppie excesses of the Eighties. “That’s why I really was into Minor Threat,” says Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis. “It really amazed me somehow, because I was totally not into drugs at all by fifteen, it was passé to me. To hear that, I could relate to it so much more—wow, punk rockers that aren’t junkies! This is a step closer to my reality. It was pretty cool.”
Most Minor Threat songs brilliantly, concisely got their points across. But then there was “Guilty of Being White.” MacKaye had meant well—the song was inspired by his experiences at D.C.’s Wilson High, which was about 70 percent black, where he and his friends had gotten picked on by black kids on a regular basis, getting punished for everything from black poverty to the death of Martin Luther King. But the song was widely misinterpreted. “To me, at the time and now, it seemed clear that it’s an antiracist song,” says MacKaye. “Of course, it didn’t occur to me at the time that I wrote it that anybody outside of my twenty or thirty friends who I was singing to would ever have to actually ponder the lyrics or even consider them.”
The suspicions of racism, although unfounded, were only bolstered by MacKaye’s shaved head, which duplicated the look of the skinheads. (The original skinheads began in England in the mid-Sixties and were multiracial, working-class, hippie haters. But within a decade, racist organizations such as England’s National Front had co-opted the look; reactionary nationalist punk rock bands exported it to the U.S., where it took hold among the more benighted strata of white American youth.) But MacKaye says his coif had everything to do with the fact that he had curly hair and so couldn’t spike it properly. He envied his brother and his friends who could go to Georgetown and instantly attract abuse simply by virtue of their vertical hairdos.
MacKaye had been drawn to punk partly because it provided a community framework for his outsider thinking. “I’ve always been enthralled by gangs and communes, any collection of people where it’s a family kind of thing,” MacKaye says. He already had a gang, so the next logical step was to have a commune.
On the first of October ’81, MacKaye, Nelson, Sab Grey of Iron Cross, and former Untouchables Eddie Janney and Rich Moore moved into a dowdy four-bedroom house just off a main road in Arlington. The house was unattached, so they could rehearse in the basement without bothering anyone, and it was in a neighborhood just safe enough that they wouldn’t have to worry about getting ripped off. At $525 a month, the rent was cheap, yet everyone was so broke that they often dined on whatever MacKaye could bring home from his job at an ice-cream store—“I would bring home anything with nuts in it on the premise that maybe it was a little more foodlike than, say, chocolate,” MacKaye recalls.
They named their new home Dischord House. “It was about having a place to practice,” says MacKaye, “a place to do the records, and just an epicenter for this community.” The place became just that, as well as a famed way station for hardcore bands coming through town.
“It was about trying to cohere, bring us all together,” MacKaye continues, “and give us a project to work on and something to create an energy, something we could build with.” Minor Threat’s “Stand Up” celebrated the security of that community: “You came to fight / But if I do fight / Nothing to fear / ’Cause I know / My friends are here.” It was an awful lot like the tribal family of Mods the Who’s Pete Townshend had celebrated in the early Sixties. In both cases, these were people fresh out of their teens, realizing the vast amount of freedom that was suddenly at their disposal and yet yearning for some structure to cope with it all.
“Basically, we were misfits, we were people who were looking for a tribe—we didn’t feel comfortable in society, so we were looking for our own society,” says MacKaye. And MacKaye resolved not to make the same mistakes the Sixties hippies had. “The hippies failed,” MacKaye said. “They struck out against that shit, but then they just settled down and got their careers happening.”
In fact, the Sixties counterculture was a far greater model for MacKaye than his haircut suggested. “I came from the Sixties, I grew up in the Sixties,” he says, “and I felt like there were higher goals, there were more important things—normal life is something to fight against, not for. And I couldn’t understand what happened to this whole notion that people should live alternative lives. I was wrapped up with it as a kid. I never understood what happened to these people who were starting their own farm, these people who were fighting the government. What happened? Everyone was just getting high. That was it, all anybody wanted to do. The late Seventies, all everybody wanted to do was get high. So what’s up? I wanted to be part of some vocal, active, revolutionary gang/tribe/family/community. I wanted to be a part of something, I wanted to have parameters of some sort that made me feel like I had a culture. And if I wasn’t going to be raised with a culture that went beyond my immediate family, then I damn sure was going to create one.”
Initially, Dischord Records was run by MacKaye, Nelson, and Strejcek at Strejcek’s house. But according to MacKaye, Strejcek wasn’t tending the business well enough, perhaps distracted by his girlfriend. “So,” MacKaye says, “we decided to take it back.” Strejcek is still bitter about it, but there’s no doubt that in the ensuing years Nelson and MacKaye worked extremely hard to make Dischord a success.
During Minor Threat’s existence, Dischord was a very small-scale operation, dealing exclusively in small runs of seven-inch records. The label’s principals lived hand-to-mouth; Nelson worked at a 7-Eleven, and MacKaye worked virtually around the clock, at the ice-cream store by day, taking tickets at the movie theater by night, and driving a newspaper delivery truck in the wee hours of weekend mornings, somehow also managing to run the label and rehearse with the band in his free time.
Even though it was a fairly small operation, there we
re still plenty of things to do. Cutting, folding, and gluing the seven-inch covers, then inserting the photocopied lyric sheets, was a lot of work, so they’d have folding parties and invite their friends. “You’d just watch TV,” Nelson recalls, “and get blisters and burn your nails from folding over the paper and gluing those down.” Some copies would get a special touch: “Folding all the lyric sheets and sealing them with a kiss or a fart,” says Nelson. “That’s what we’d do on some of them, we’d write ‘S.W.A.K.’ or ‘S.W.A.F.’ on a few of them.”
Filling mail orders meant hauling cardboard boxes out of the Dumpster of the 7-Eleven and cutting them down to size. Nelson would then neatly hand-letter the address, draw a decorative box around the recipient’s name, and stamp each package. “They would want to kill us at the post office,” he says.
On behalf of the label, Nelson and MacKaye made good friends with store owners across the country. This was before fax machines and e-mail, so it was strictly by phone and regular mail; Dischord would send records and trust the stores to send money back. “Those friendships and contacts made and kept were crucial for a label being taken seriously and building up credibility,” says Nelson. “It’s not just the kids who are buying the records, it’s the store owners who know to watch Dischord Records or Touch & Go and then are passing on their feelings about that to the kids. When something is so small and so underground, it involves everybody—not just record store owners but club owners, magazines, bands. It was in everybody’s interest to cooperate.”
Then there was the job of contacting distributors such as Systematic in San Francisco, who, says Nelson, “were really, really nice people, always behind in paying but they trusted us and loved us and we trusted them and loved them.” MacKaye and Nelson would call radio stations—mostly college—and follow up. But college radio airplay was scant—back in the early Eighties being into hardcore punk and going to college were two different things.
Our Band Could Be Your Life Page 18