Guy Picciotto and Mike Fellows of Rites of Spring, with Chris Bald (partially obscured) in front row, Food for Thought, July 29, 1984 (by Cynthia Connolly)
Minor Threat had split, tensions were rising at Dischord House, the label was several thousand dol- lars in debt, and Ian MacKaye—as he recalled a few years later—“was so depressed that I serious- ly was suicidal.” As for D.C. punk, the usually upbeat MacKaye foresaw a sort of living death: “I think hardcore or punk or whatever it is could last for many years. But it’s like the soul could die while the body lives on.”
One person who noticed MacKaye’s mood was Skip Groff. He asked MacKaye to work part- time at Yesterday and Today, hoping the job would shake some of the unmoored musician’s gloom. “I started to work there,” MacKaye said, “just to give myself something to do because I really was not happy.”
MacKaye wasn’t the only original Georgetown punk who suffered a crisis of faith. Many of the old crew were now in college, returning to a more typical course for children of white-collar parents, although some of them chose schools in the D.C. area to stay connected to the punk com- munity. After Faith broke up, Chris Bald remembered, “I felt kind of stuck because this was going to be my life and all of sudden there wasn’t any Faith. Friends were going off to college, and I thought, why are they doing this? Everyone still wanted to make the right career moves—but I thought we were all saying ‘screw the career world.’ I got really disillusioned.”
Bald went to work at the National Journal, a small but influential inside-government publi-
cation. He learned more about national politics while his personal politics unraveled. “I’ve never been the king of self-control,” he said. “I started drinking again, got into the boring 9-to-5 routine [where] the only time you have are weekends. What do you do with friends on weekends? You drank.” His slide was mirrored by more than a few of his old allies.
MacKaye and Bald’s despair had nothing to do with a decline in D.C. punk’s audience. The scene was still growing, and such stalwarts as Government Issue, Scream, and Marginal Man remained active. GI released Joyride on Fountain Of Youth; the album added some metal to the
band’s personal lyrics and pop-punk music. With Mike Fellows’ melodic bass underpinning John Stabb’s vulnerable lyrics, one track—”Understand”—was a classic of the form.
Marginal Man had released its first album on Dischord, but its second was on Gasatanka, a subsidiary of Enigma, a large independent California label. “At the time, it looked like Dischord might go under,” Pete Murray explained. Scream began to negotiate with Rough Trade to issue an album recorded at two separate sessions in 1984; when it finally appeared in mid-1985, the record was a Rough Trade/Dischord co-release.
These three bands were more popular than ever, but no new groups had risen from the ranks of the old Georgetown punks. The sense that harDCore was a special community was ebbing away. “We sat around and watched it all fall apart,” MacKaye said later.
For years, Georgetown punks had gained perverse satisfaction from upending people’s prejudices. “We’d fuck with the merchants in Georgetown so royally,” MacKaye remembered. “We had our heads shaved, right? We were punk-rock motherfuckers but we’d be totally polite and not steal anything. It fucked with them so badly.”
Now Georgetown was a different scene. Kids hung out aimlessly, getting drunk or high, smashing bottles, shoplifting, starting fights, committing acts of vandalism, begging spare change for cigarettes or beer. One of the first signs of the transformation had been when Bryant DuBay, a Rat Patrol member, drunkenly smashed the plate glass window at Clyde’s, a Georgetown restau- rant. DuBay escaped capture, but MacKaye was chagrined: “The police stopped by while I was working at the Georgetown Theater. We knew each other and they didn’t hassle us, but they asked me, ‘What’s up with your friends?’ What could I say? It was a stupid thing to do.”
Even shows were becoming less appealing to harDCore veterans; gigs seemed overrun with kids they didn’t know doing things they didn’t like. When GI played, the stage was constantly commandeered by younger punks with less interest in the music than in being seen. “The folks who had been into Minor Threat at the end just switched over to us,” said John Stabb.”We got the freak show.”
Outright antagonism developed between the Dischord crowd and the kids who now con- gregated in Georgetown and nearby Dupont Circle to drink, talk, and sometimes fight. The Dupont kids were dismissed as “drunk punks” by many in the Dischord crew, while many of the newer punks viewed Dischord as elitist, cliquey, and self-righteous. Once harDCore had been a family.
Now, Wendel Blow wryly noted, “it became a dysfunctional family.”
The malaise was felt elsewhere as well. In early ‘84, the cover of Maximum RockNRoll asked
a simple but unavoidable question: “Does Punk Suck?” In New York, an increasingly macho and reactionary scene formed around bands like Agnostic Front and Cro Mags. In Boston, SSD added a second guitar player and turned toward heavy metal. Kenny Inouye remembered playing with them and being astounded. “I figured it would be a joke, but it wasn’t. They were serious about it [but] it wasn’t even good heavy metal.”
Black Flag was prolific, releasing six albums and EPs in under two years, while Family Man
marked Henry Rollins’ recorded debut as a spoken-word performer. The band toured doggedly, often playing smaller towns that had never hosted a punk show before. In April 1984, the group played its first D.C. gig since Kira Roessler replaced Chuck Dukowski on bass; the venue was Pierce Hall in All Souls Unitarian Church, a promising new space just two blocks from Wilson Center. The performance was strong, but marred by fighting and the destruction of the bathrooms. An All Souls employee “showed me the destruction and said ‘This is your last show here,’” “ Rollins recalled. Indeed, it was the last show there by anyone for years to come.
Rollins was not used to this kind of behavior in his hometown. “In the beginning there were so few of us,” he said years later. “I felt responsible, we all did. It meant a lot to you, you wanted [the space] to be there next week.”
“Today’s music [scene] is not responsible, people aren’t saying the real thing.” he contin- ued. “It was do or die then. Now it’s a casual attitude—casual youth casually shitting where they live because there’s always some kind of Mom to clean up for them. In those days there was no ‘Mom’—we did it. There were always bad eggs in punk but now the ratio of jerks has gone up to where there are 40 jerks at a show breaking bathrooms. And All Souls had this beautiful marble bathroom—it took some breaking! Crowds today just take it for granted.”
Rollins knew that kind of irresponsible, consumerist attude was a betrayal of DC punk’s original promise. Yet at the time he, like John Stabb, generally didn’t comment on the audience’s behavior during shows lest he be seen as a “preacher.”
one but two bands: the long-promised all-reggae Zion Train and another group more in the Rasta- punk mold of Bad Brains. HR asked Dr. Know to join Zion Train, an offer declined in favor of work- ing with Darryl Jenifer on a new project. The second band, HR, came together more quickly.
The singer recruited guitarist David Byers, formerly of the Enzymes and Tony Perkins and the Psychotics, a playful punk-funk band. The gig was a dream come true for Byers, a longtime Bad Brains aficionado, as well as a boon for HR. Byers was a hard-edged yet jazzy guitarist who joined Earl Hudson in crafting a potent musical framework for HR’s return. HR, Byers, and Hudson worked with a shifting lineup of musicians who could move easily from thrash into many other styles. HR described the new band as “not as much hardcore, more reggae, jazz, more variety. The basic set is rock’n’roll but we mix it up a little more” than Bad Brains.
HR’s lyrics were as militant as ever. The singer had taken to wearing military fatigues and writing songs like “Let’s Have A Revolution” and “Free Our Mind.” “I have always been committed to the struggle of the poor man, the unfortunate, the slaves, the prisoners, the exploited, and against the innocent bloodshed of victims and the overall demeaning of civilization today,” HR told
Metrozine, a new fanzine. “I will be forever against hypocrites, murderers, thieves, and oppressors
of the people. Until Babylon falls, we will not rejoice.”
HR was supporting himself by selling marijuana, a righteous occupation for a Rasta, but one that brought him directly into conflict with Babylon. A distribution ring operated from the row- house that HR and other dreads and punks occupied during 1984. The house was on the corner of 17th and U Streets NW, directly across the street from the 3rd District Police Headquarters.
HR would often spend his days on nearby Columbia Road, selling some pot and talking with other dreads and passersby. Then came the day in mid-May shortly before the band was to make its debut; the venue was a new one HR had discovered, the Newton Theater, a former moviehouse near Catholic University in Northeast Washington. As the singer prepared to sell some herb to a customer outside the Ontario Theater on Columbia Road, police swooped in. HR was handcuffed and taken in.
HR was released on bail in time to play the gig, where he still proved to be a riveting per- former. The show, which the singer dedicated to “all the hungry, poor, rebellious youths in Washington D.C,” was a Bad Brains-style unity production, bringing together Philadelphia’s McRad, New York’s Antidote, and Underground Soldier, a pop-punk band from the D.C. suburbs with a strong female vocalist, Helen Danicki. HR’s debut was followed with a mini-tour of the East Coast
and a recording session at Cue Studios in the Virginia suburbs.
Then, however, the singer had to serve two months at D.C.’s prison in Lorton, Va. as a result of his arrest. “It was a test,” HR would later say. “I give thanks to Jah that I was able to grow in there still. You can even find unity there, there’s unity even in the depths of Hell.” There were soon signs, however, that his incarceration had not made HR any more stable.
Because of the jail sentence, it would be nearly six months between HR’s first D.C. show and its second, at the 9:30 Club in mid-November. The bill was an odd pairing with D.C.’s most pop- ular “new” band of the moment, the Meatmen. The latter had existed in some form since 1981, but only in the past year had frontman Tesco Vee turned the concept into a real band. He had record- ed an EP,Dutch Hercules, featuring the usual sophomoric joke-punk songs but a new cast of musi-
cians, including Lyle Preslar, Brian Baker, and Ian MacKaye, as well as Bert Queiroz, Rich Moore, and Mike Brown—all uncredited on the record.
Technically, the EP was a solo release credited to Tesco Vee and the MeatKrew, but it was a short hop from the record to the return of the Meatmen. With the end of Minor Threat, Preslar and Baker could make a serious commitment. The resurrected band played its first show at a 1983 benefit for Touch and Go magazine.
Meatmen shows were massive productions with props and costumes. Perhaps it was this reputation for outrageous spectacle that drew more than 600 people to the Wilson Center—the largest show there yet—in January 1984 to see the Meatmen’s second D.C. performance. Tesco rode onstage on a moped wearing tight gold lame pants to begin a show quite unlike the usual harDCore concert.
The Meatmen were irreverent, energetic, and occasionally clever, but much of Vee’s humor was best suited for a junior-high locker room. The band was hardly an artistic progression for Preslar and Baker, who had stuck together after the end of Minor Threat. First they had briefly joined Glenn Danzig’s new band Samhain, an experience Preslar wryly described as a “date with Satan.” Then the guitarists began playing with the Meatmen while developing a new band that con- tinued the more melodic direction they had planned for Minor Threat. With Deadline alumni Ray Hare as the vocalist, the 400 was a pop-punk band in the mold of U2 and the Alarm.
In retrospect, he and Preslar viewed the project as a mistake, but “at the time we thought we were going to be pop stars,” Baker laughingly recalled. When the 400 debuted at the University
of Maryland with Government Issue, the group demonstrated much musical skill but little soul. In the fanzine, WDC Period, Dave McDuff called the band “very tight but also very uninspiring.” Preslar
and Baker soon accepted this assessment, and the 400 folded after a few shows.
Preslar and Baker weren’t the only D.C. musicians struggling to find a direction. Void was falling apart on stage. The band had increasingly shifted toward heavy metal, and its shows seemed to be public practice sessions. The apparently unrehearsed group struggled erratically through its new material, mirroring the chaos in the audience. In late 1984, the Wilson Center hosted a series of shambolic shows marred by fights and vandalism. Thirteen-year-old Metrozine editor Scott
Crawford went to see HR and Void only to leave in disgust before the latter played: “There were too many fucking fights. Is it really worth it?”
Hardcore seemed increasingly to be merely providing a soundtrack for mayhem, with crowds breaking windows, smashing bottles, and fighting in the street. Understandably, few ven- ues wanted to host punk shows anymore. The 9:30 matinees had ended, replaced by the occasion- al gig, mostly with out-of-town headliners. Pierce Hall was gone almost before it opened, and Space II Arcade closed. The usual problems soon shut down HR’s discovery, the Newton Theater.
Gordon Ornelas’ WDC Period became one of the most prominent voices lamenting
harDCore’s auto-destruction. “Gordon Gordon” (as he called himself in print) had recently moved to Washington from the Midwest, startingWDC Period mostly as a humor mag. Unfamiliar with the
local scene, he committed an ironic blunder when, looking for filler for issue #4, he reproduced a Dischord ad clipped from Flipside. Knowing only that Dischord was an important local label, he put
the ad next to a “D.C. Drug Report,” a half-serious listing of local prices for illegal drugs.
MacKaye was not amused by this act of generosity, and told the startled Gordon as much. “Until John Stabb pulled me aside and explained the whole straight edge thing I had never heard of any kind of youth philosophy that didn’t encourage drug use, let alone discourage it,” Gordon explained. While Gordon was scarcely a puritan, over time WDC Period became a voice for respon-
sibility and sanity in the punk scene.
HarDCore’s founders didn’t know what to do about the deterioration. Ten years later, MacKaye recalled standing next to HR at one chaotic show, complaining about the ugliness: “I was like, ‘Man, how did this happen?’ HR just blew me out of the water. He turned to me and said ‘You want to know who did this? You did.” MacKaye was startled, but he knew that there was some truth to HR’s judgment.
Despite its violent moments, the Dischord crowd had provided a sort of moral center for D.C. punk. Now they seemed directionless. No one was able to get a band together. MacKaye had an ambitious idea for a group called Grand Union that would have a large, changing cast of mem- bers. Others were skeptical, preferring to stay with more traditional musical lineups.
Yet no such bands appeared. In the first half of 1984, meetings were even called to jump start the process. Nothing resulted, and the community disintegrated. With Dischord in crisis both financially and creatively, Amy Pickering later noted, “We had to get our shit together before we could help anyone else.”
D.C. punk was going in new and sometimes disturbing directions. In 1984, anyone who looked at band posters in Washington knew of 9353. The quartet’s skillfully crafted, multi-colored flyers were pasted throughout the city. The confrontational images were mostly done by singer Bruce Merkle, who had already unsettled more than a few commuters with his sidewalk spray-paint stencils of such phrases as “Penis Cancer.”
9353 was the most powerful of the bands from the artier side of post-harDCore. With a voice that “could shift from a deep drawl to Ethel Merman warblings in a flash,” as Trouser Press
marveled, Merkle delivered caustic rants over spare pop-art-punk generated by ex-Double O gui- tarist Jason Carmer, bassist Vance Bockis, and drummer Dan Joseph. With its distinctive music, live charisma, and vigorous PR work, 9353 soon became one of the city’s most popular punk bands.
By late ‘84, 9353 was also known as a “heroin band,” with at least two of its members in an enduring liaison with the drug. Partly as a result, the group gained a reputation for volatility. “9353 broke up after every show,” one observer later noted. By August, the band announced the first of what would be many “final” performances. 9353 was not the first D.C. punk band to include hero- in users, but its popularity and the relative openness of its narcotic tastes suggested a change in attitudes within the no-longer-teen-punk scene.
“It’s sad, all those little kids who were on skateboards a year or two ago are on heroin now,” Black Market Baby’s Boyd Farrell told Flipside in late 1984. “It’s like D.C. lost its innocence.
[HarDCore] has been deteroriating ever since the end of Minor Threat. It’s lost the sincerity, the energy, and just become cynical.”
The same could have been said of Farrell’s band. He and Keith Campbell, once the group’s creative heart, had largely stopped writing songs. The Sham 69-style idealism that was once BMB’s
trademark was eclipsed by its reputation as a hard-drinking, fist-fighting kind of band. “Black Market Baby could play a redneck bar one night and a hardcore show the next and find acceptance both places,” Blow said. In part, this was because BMB was a good band. But it also reflected the appeal of songs like “Strike First,” “Killing Time,” or “Gunpoint Affection”—a non-judgmental first person account of a rape—that accommodated traditional male aggression and excess.
It took three years, but BMB managed to record and release its first LP.Senseless Offerings