‘Bad Brains were some black youths who wanted to play punk rock and hard rock and a couple of club owners were confused and a little frightened,’ Darryl Jenifer told me in 1996. ‘Punk rock was a vulgar thing, and maybe some people wanted to look at the black situation too as a vulgar thing: one time this guy said, “We ain’t having no punk stuff in here, and damn sure we ain’t having no black punk stuff.” But we had the PMA with us at that time, Positive Metal Attitude, and the “quitters never win” concept, so these little obstacles didn’t mean that much to us.’
Inspired by stories they had heard of The Clash playing free shows in community centres in England, the quartet began setting up gigs in housing co-ops and friends’ basements, as a ‘fuck you’ gesture to the club owners who’d banned them from their premises. In doing so, the quartet helped create an alternative gig circuit in their hometown, and a template for self-sufficiency other DC bands would soon seek to emulate.
After they’d blown his band off-stage at a June 1979 show at Georgetown rock venue the Bayou, The Damned’s drummer Rat Scabies offered to help Bad Brains put together an English tour, convinced that their righteous energy would revive the UK’s flagging punk scene. That autumn, after honing their chops with a succession of shows on New York’s Lower East Side, the band decided to make the trip. They would soon discover that their PMA was no match for over-officious English bureaucracy. Arriving at London’s Gatwick airport without work visas, the quartet were detained, questioned and summarily dumped onto the next outbound flight to New York. To rub salt in the wound, all their gear was stolen.
Back in New York, the city’s punk community rallied around the band, lending them instruments and squeezing them onto bills where they could: Jimi Quidd and Leigh Sioris from The Dots even paid for a studio session for the band, during which Bad Brains recorded two songs, ‘Stay Close to Me’ and ‘Pay to Cum’. The latter, a one minute 33 seconds rush of breathless, bawling positivity, flamethrower guitar and blur-speed rhythms, would eventually become the A-side of the band’s début single, and a musical benchmark for every hardcore band that followed in their wake. But for all the support they received in NYC, just three months after departing Washington Bad Brains were back in the city, penniless and homeless. MacKaye’s Teen Idles stepped in to help, inviting their brethren to use their equipment and practice space in the basement of Nathan Strejcek’s parents’ house. Watching the older punks rehearse was an education for the kids from Wilson High.
‘Bad Brains influenced us incredibly with their speed and frenzied delivery,’ Jeff Nelson admitted in the excellent DC punk scene memoir Dance of Days. ‘We went from sounding like the Sex Pistols to playing every song as fast and as hard as we could.’
‘H.R. was the energizer,’ MacKaye stated in 2001. ‘He was really passionate about what he did. He was a visionary. He really got a lot of us kids thinking we could do anything. He was really full of great ideas and was always the one who said “Go”. They were a complete inspiration as a band.’
‘Dr Know always used to say, “Each one teach one,”’ Darryl Jenifer told me when I asked about his band’s influence on the DC scene and beyond. ‘It’s a musical tapestry we got going here. It don’t start with us. Respect is due to the magic of music, not Bad Brains.’
As the new decade dawned, stories of other bands playing urgent, raging punk rock across America were reaching DC. In the racks of Yesterday and Today records in Rockville, Maryland, an independent record store owned by former DJ Skip Groff and largely frequented by teenage punks eager to hear the latest import singles arriving from England, new releases from West Coast labels Dangerhouse, Slash, Frontier and Alternative Tentacles records were arriving weekly, bringing to the attention of Ian MacKaye and his friends bands such as The Germs, The Weirdos, Deadbeats, The Flyboys and Dead Kennedys. After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High in June 1980, MacKaye and Nelson hatched a plan to check out the nascent West Coast scene, booking shows for the Teen Idles in LA and San Francisco.
As with the Bad Brains’ proposed UK trip, things didn’t go according to plan for the adventurous young punks. In LA the quartet found themselves sharing a bill at the Hong Kong Café with obnoxious Seattle shock rockers The Mentors, Masque club regulars Vox Pop and brutal ‘biker punks’ Puke, Spit and Guts, who sang of murder and rape and looked like they would happily slit the Teen Idles’ throats for the price of a cup of coffee. More disappointingly, in San Francisco the quartet were bumped at the last minute from their promised slot on a Dead Kennedys/Circle Jerks/Flipper show at the Mabuhay Gardens by promoter Dirk Dirksen, who only reluctantly agreed to rebook them on a bill with New Wave outfits The Wrong Brothers and Lost Angeles at the venue the following evening following lobbying efforts on the band’s behalf from the Circle Jerks.
California nonetheless left indelible impressions on the young band. They took note of how punks from the Golden State – most notably the feared Huntingdon Beach crew who followed the Circle Jerks and Black Flag from show to show – conducted themselves, taking shit from no one: this was a revelation for the DC youths, who were routinely hassled and abused on the streets of Georgetown. They also noticed that the Mabuhay Gardens had instituted an ‘all-ages’ policy for gigs, marking a large black ‘X’ on the hands of audience members too young to drink alcohol to distinguish them from patrons legally allowed to purchase intoxicating liquor. On their three-day bus trip back to the East Coast the young punks talked excitedly about introducing these practices to their hometown. Washington DC was about to get a noisy wake-up call.
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