‘We all decided that this is it, Revolution Summer,’ MacKaye told the fanzine. ‘Get a band, get active, write poetry, write books, paint, take photos, just do something.’
For Beefeater frontman Thomas Squip, another resident of Dischord House, Revolution Summer was more than just a time of musical rebirth. As he explained to Flipside in a July 1985 interview, he considered Revolution Summer to be about ‘putting the protest back in punk’. The Swiss-born singer was soon backing up his words with action. That same month he helped organise the Punk Percussion Protest, a noisy anti-apartheid rally which saw scores of young punks gather on Massachusetts Avenue to bang on drums, buckets and bins outside the South African Embassy. Soon, in close co-operation with newly formed activist group Positive Force, DC punks – including the members of Mission Impossible – were lending their voices to a wide range of causes, from protests against America’s clandestine war in Nicaragua to benefit concerns for civil liberties organisations, community clinics and homeless shelters. Chris Page remembers the time as ‘eye-opening, empowering and transformative’. With delicious irony, DC punks were taking Reagan’s ‘we must do what we know is right and do it with all our might’ words to heart, and using them in opposition to some of his most reactionary policies.
In June the new wave of DC punk was showcased by a seven-inch compilation, put together by Metrozine editor Scott Crawford in collaboration with Gray Matter man Geoff Turner’s label WGNS. Its title, Alive & Kicking, was intended as a defiant rebuttal to those hardcore zealots who considered the DC scene as dead as the American Dream. Crawford selected for inclusion Mission Impossible’s ‘I Can Only Try’, alongside tracks by Beefeater, Marginal Man, United Mutations, Gray Matter and Cereal Killer: once again, over in Berkeley, maximumrocknroll gave positive feedback.
That same month also saw the release of the first record on Dischord for two years, the first, in fact, since Minor Threat’s Salad Days single. The self-titled début album by Guy Picciotto’s Rites of Spring could hardly have been more symbolic of the scene’s regeneration.
By common consent, Rites of Spring were Revolution Summer’s most inspirational band. They sang of love, loss, wasted potential and spiritual rebirth while attacking their instruments with a commitment, intensity and kinetic fury that saw guitars and amps reduced to matchwood. Their wiry, sinewy, high-tensile compositions eschewed hardcore formulas, choosing instead to strip away the genre’s machismo in order to expose its raw, sensitive, bleeding heart. RoS shows were genuine events that saw audiences moved to tears by the group’s passionate and cathartic outpourings. They would play just fifteen shows in their short history, and Dave Grohl says that he was present at every one of them.
‘A lot of people don’t realise the importance of that band, but for us they were the most important band in the world,’ he remembers. ‘They really changed a lot in DC. They played every show like it was their last night on earth. They didn’t last long, but then for bands in Washington DC a career in music was never the intention. The motivation was “Let’s get together and fucking blow this place up, until we can’t blow it up any more.” Once the inspiration or electricity felt like it was fading, or once a band started to feel like a responsibility, they’d just break up. It was all about that moment. But those moments were so special to us.’
July 1985 also saw the return to the stage of DC hardcore’s spiritual leader. Ian MacKaye’s new band Embrace may not have been as musically adventurous as Rites of Spring, but they were a powerful, emotive unit in their own right. As with his previous band Minor Threat, Embrace asked a lot of questions, but this time MacKaye’s rage was for the most part directed inwards, as he dissected his own foibles and flaws in unflinching, forensic detail. In part, this soul-searching was sparked by MacKaye’s admiration for DC’s younger punk set. When he looked at bands such as Mission Impossible and their peers Kid$ for Ca$h and Lünchmeat, MacKaye saw a new breed of idealistic, gung-ho teen punks operating in blissful, stubborn denial of hardcore’s demise, a poignant echo of his own reaction to premature reports of the death of punk rock: it made him wonder at what point he stopped believing. ‘Those kids were super enthusiastic and it reminded us of our younger selves,’ he recalls. ‘It was inspiring to see high school kids playing again.’
‘The American hardcore movement may have been all over by 1984, but none of us wanted to believe it,’ admits Lünchmeat vocalist Bobby Sullivan. ‘It was hard for us to measure up to what had already happened, but we were all fans of Minor Threat and Bad Brains and we wanted to carry on the tradition, in the right way.’
Dave Grohl and Bobby Sullivan were regular visitors to Dischord House in the summer of ’85. Ian MacKaye had known Sullivan for years, as he was the younger brother of his former Slinkees bandmate Mark Sullivan, and he remembers Grohl as a nice kid to have around, always positive, friendly and full of enthusiasm. He first saw the pair’s bands play together at a tiny community centre in Burke, Virginia that July. For all the positive energy surrounding Revolution Summer, a number of prominent venues, including the 9:30 Club and Grohl’s beloved Wilson Center, had that summer stopped booking hardcore bills due to the attendant violence and vandalism. Lake Braddock Community Center in the new-build community of Burke had emerged as a new venue after Kid$ for Ca$h guitarist Sohrab Habibion persuaded his mother to sign up as a sponsor to allow him to use the hall for all-ages shows. In keeping with the inclusive vibe of these gigs, the new venue lacked even a stage, the division between the audience and performers having been distilled down to nothing more prohibitive than a line of duct tape marked on the ground. Mission Impossible and Lünchmeat shared this ‘stage’ for the first time on 25 July 1985; Ian MacKaye was in the audience to see them.
‘Everyone said, “You gotta see this drummer, this kid, he’s 16, he’s been playing for two months and he’s out of control,”’ MacKaye recalls. ‘And then I saw them, and Dave was just maniacal. He didn’t have all the chops down, but he was dialling it in from the gods, his drumming was so out of control, and he wanted to play so hard and so fast, it was kinda phenomenal. Everybody was like, “Woah, that guy is incredible!”’
‘One night Ian came up and told me that he thought I played just like [D.O.A./Black Flag/Circle Jerks drummer] Chuck Biscuits,’ recalls Grohl. ‘To me that was like saying, “You are just like Keith Moon,” because Chuck Biscuits was a huge inspiration to me. So from then I became that kid in town who played like that, I had this reputation as being this super-fast, fucking out-of-control hardcore drummer.’
‘Honestly, from the moment you saw Dave play, you were just in shock, because he seemed superhuman,’ laughs Sohrab Habibion, now playing guitar in the excellent Sub Pop post-hardcore band Obits. ‘I liked Mission Impossible, Chris was a really cool singer and they had great songs, but you’d see them play and there’d be this monster on the drums. Dave sat in with my band Kid$ for Ca$h for a couple of shows and it was hilarious, because the whole band was instantly transformed to a higher calibre. We played one show out at Lake Braddock with 7 Seconds and they were all just staring at him, like, “Who is this guy?”’
‘People definitely talked about him,’ agrees Kevin Fox Haley, a Woodrow Wilson High School student at the time. ‘Everyone would say, “You gotta see this kid on drums, he’s insane.” To me it seemed like it stemmed from hyperactivity, because he was kinda a spazz, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but he was so goofy and full of energy. I’m from Washington DC and I’m sorry to say that myself, and some people from Dischord, were pretty snobby about looking down on the kids from the suburbs, so maybe at the time I was still stuck in that snobbiness where I was like, “Yeah, he’s good, but he’s from out there …” But he definitely stood out.’