Left of the Dial: Conversations with Punk Icons

“Left of the Dial features interviews by musical journalist, folklorist, educator, and musician David Ensminger with leading figures of the punk underground: Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat/Fugazi), Jello Biafra (Dead Kennedys), Dave Dictor (MDC), and many more.”

Check out this excerpt from the book featuring Ian MacKaye.

Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat, Fugazi)

While independent punk and alternative labels have flourished for the past two decades, Dischord Records, founded by Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson, is still indie music’s most hallowed ground. For twenty years, the DC label, once a tiny operation that documented the music of a handful of friends, has grown to embody the principles of permanent rebellion, the seeds of which were sown during the stifling Reagan era. Throughout the 1980s, Dischord documented some of the most important bands in American punk: Faith (MacKaye’s brother’s band), which inspired both the Beastie Boys and Sonic Youth; Scream, a band that in one incarnation included Dave Grohl of Nirvana/Foo Fighters fame; Dag Nasty, whose guitarist Brian Baker is currently in Bad Religion; and Rites of Spring, whose core members—Guy Picciotto and Brendan Canty—became MacKaye’s bandmates in Fugazi. Not only did the label provide a model, it provided a momentum, a burgeoning sense of possibility. Perhaps more importantly, MacKaye helped form Fugazi, punk’s most beloved, respected, and tireless band. The band’s frontman traded in the punk anger that he forged in the outfits Teen Idles and Minor Threat for an “introspective, almost poetic vision, using abstractions in strongly structured compositions,” in the words of Trouser Press. For nearly fifteen years, the band toured every corner of the globe, insisting that every show they play have a five-dollar admission and be open to all ages. The band has also sworn never to grant interviews to big corporate magazines, and they’ve turned down all the leviathans: Spin, Details, even Rolling Stone. In a bizarre turn of cultural events, Instrument, a video that documents a decade’s worth of Fugazi concerts, practices, and portraits, was recently shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Originally published in Thirsty Ear in December 2000.

Is Dischord’s twentieth anniversary just another moment in the label?

I’m not nostalgic for the glory years, but at the same time I do think there’s something significant. I like the idea that the label has been around for twenty years, because there’s a gravity to it that’s undeniable. From the very beginning, people were telling us that we wouldn’t be able to do the label, that we’d have to move to New York City. They told us we wouldn’t be able to do business the way we do. We don’t use contracts. We don’t follow any of the protocol that most people do. We questioned things. As it went along, people said we should copyright all these songs, and we said, why? What’s the point? And we just asked questions, and did what made sense to us. People told us that we wouldn’t be able to continue, but after twenty years I feel like, Wow, I guess we did continue, huh? When we get the twentieth-anniversary release, I would like to draw a thread from the Teen Idles to whatever the latest band is. I would like to draw a thread because I see a connection between them all. I know why every band is on the label, and I know the people in the bands, and that’s important.

Dischord tried to keep prices down by printing “Don’t Pay More Than $5” on the back of the records. But many merchants covered that up with their own price tags.

It’s impossible to stop the prices in the free market. The idea was to put the mail order price on the outside of the record to create an option. You could get it for five dollars postpaid from Dischord. Why pay more? Here’s the address. Mail order it. All you can do is offer up an alternative, and I never minded if stores charged a little extra because if someone wants the convenience of going down to the corner and buying it for a buck more, who cares? Occasionally, it was really, really abused—people charging import prices because it said “Made in England” on the back or something. That happened. If somebody was really overcharging people, we would call them up and say they were out of line. You can’t stop people; it’s what the market will bear. It’s a philosophy that I completely disagree with, but most of American business thrives on that.

You once said that you don’t think anyone is going to change the world, but at least you want to live your life in the healthiest manner, with as much care, consideration, and love for people around you as possible.

Yeah, I still stand by that. There was a point when I felt that punk rock was all these people yelling about making life better, and part of what I thought making life better was about was being happy. I thought if you really wanted to reach that, then you should not just fight to be happy but actually start allowing yourself to be happy. This is not a trivial thing. I’m not talking about having fun. Fuck fun. I’m not interested in fun. I’m talking about when people are fighting for happiness, or fighting to be free. Then I think that their biggest fight is sometimes with themselves . . . Today I was talking with a guy who thought that the fierce individualism of the punk community is what got in the way of the movement, in the way of things actually being mobilized, because people were so fiercely independent. He really firmly believed in collectives and formal cooperatives, but I completely disagree with him. I feel exactly the opposite. To me, it’s the rigid codification of the formal collectives, cooperatives, and other groupings that get in the way of progress, because they have these rules, and nobody can break cadence. They can’t get out of that, whereas individualists can. I was interviewed by a sociologist guy in 1983 for a documentary they were doing on the DC punk scene. Unfortunately, that whole project went up in flames because those guys ended up in a bitter quarrel, and they split the tapes up, and I think one guy destroyed all the tapes. It was a disaster. They videotaped all these interviews with my mom and dad, and all these other people. It was a huge project. And actually, the Minor Threat [live] video is a remnant of that. They did an interview with this professor who was a sociologist, and he watched an interview they shot of me, and he analyzed me, and he said I was a tragic figure that was going to be so bitter by the time I was thirty.

Now you’re thirty-eight and pretty happy.

I think he can go fuck himself.

You’ve always been an entrepreneur, whether it was a comic book shop, or a skateboard place with Henry Rollins.

I’m always for some kind of social activity. I’ve always been up for building forts or making bike shops. As kids, we were up for whatever. I think it started really early on, the idea of building or doing things. Having a club, having a gang, just doing something that involved a companionship. Keep in mind, none of these things I did made money. “Entrepreneurial” suggests that I was always trying to make money. Actually, what I was interested in was construction work. I was into the idea of creating things. When I was twelve or thirteen, a lot of my friends started getting into drugs, and I just didn’t. A lot of the people early on just tried to spend most of their time getting high. For me, that was so boring, because I just wanted to go do something. We got a day, so let’s do something with it. Maybe their detachment heightened my sense of involvement.

There’s a photo of you in the early 1980s at Dischord House with a Hendrix record, and it caused me, as a punk, to have a gestalt shift. I no longer had to be embarrassed about liking people like Janis Joplin.

She was a total inspiration for me because she put it out there in a hardcore way. When I was around ten years old, I remember arguing with one of my older sisters about whether music could show somebody’s emotions, and I was absolutely adamant that I could hear it in Hendrix. She was like, that’s bullshit, but the idea that I could hear the emotion stuck with me for my whole life. To me, music has that. With Joplin, she was so powerful. I also feel [Ted] Nugent was naked in terms of his emotions. They weren’t always pleasant, but he put them out there. Same thing with Joplin; she took a risk. It’s not very often that people get to just go that hard. I’m thirty-eight and totally happy to get on stage and just completely melt down.

You’re the only person I’ve seen who consistently sweats through their pants on stage.

For me, that’s a great gift in my life. It’s not something that everybody—not that they want to—will try. But it’s worth it. When I was in high school, I was skating, and skating is in part about the redefinition of life. On a skateboard, when everyone else sees sidewalks, I see runways.

Everything is an opportunity?

In high school I couldn’t see how people were going to redefine themselves in terms of life. I was sure that it would all come clear to me, that there would be this underground, subculture movement that I would be involved with that would challenge conventional society, because I was not interested in becoming part of it. There was no way I was going to go to college. At one point I thought I was going to be killed by a car, and if I died, I didn’t want to have spent most of my cognitive hours sitting in school. Basically, when I was in high school, the only rebellion I was seeing kids do was getting high.

Which is really nonrebellion.

Or antirebellion. The political kids, the Yippie kids, were basically all stoners. Getting high was the one thing that anybody could do, but I didn’t want to waste time. In the middle of all this, my friends started listening to punk rock, and I, at first, thought it was a dumb, junky thing. So we argued. And Nugent being the wild man that he was, and having seen his shows, which were so over the top, I couldn’t believe that there was anything heavier. I remember getting in these polemic debates about Nuge versus the Ramones, really heavy arguments about what was what. In late 1978, I was given a stack of records . . .

The first Jam, the Clash.

All those records. I sat down and listened to them and became really intrigued, not necessarily liked them, but they scared me because it did not sound like rock’n’roll to me. They were challenging, like it was a whole new kind of music. The Ramones, at the beginning for me, sounded like a joke. Bubblegum.

You saw the Cramps early in their career, and it’s a powerful memory.

It was something way deeper, and way darker. When I saw the Cramps in 1979, the room was packed with all different kinds of people, not just a room full of punk rockers, though there were punk rockers there of all shapes and sizes. The Bad Brains were there handing out flyers for their first show. There were junky-type people, a huge political contingent, and these crazy redneck hillbilly punker-type kids. It was the first time since the radical 1960s-type stuff that I had seen people like this. And I said, here it is. This is what I’m looking for. It was the people who were on the margins of society, and that’s where I always felt I belonged. There were people challenging political conventions, musical conventions, artistic conventions, sexual conventions, and psychological conventions. People were testing every water there was to be had. It was all there, and the show was a cathartic experience.

After your first band, the Teen Idles, broke up, why did you decide to document the band post-facto and create Dischord?

At the time, there were no labels that were interested in us, that’s for sure. We knew that if we wanted to document it, we’d have to do it ourselves. Jeff and I are crazy about documentation. At the end of the day, we had made this tape and had the money. We felt the music was important and wanted to have a record of it. We had been a part of something that was really important to us. We totally believed in what we were doing, the punk rock or underground. We were like: this is our family, and we need to make a yearbook of this shit. While I think some of the music is great, I’m not saying everyone should like it. I could give a fuck. I mean, I’m happy if they do, but if they don’t, that’s fine. I’m not saying these are the best bands in the world. I will say that for me, it’s some of the most important music.

What was the challenge for the label in terms of getting the records distributed?

I don’t think we ever really worried about that. We just made ’em and sold ’em. We never thought about it in terms of coverage. We just thought we’d make a thousand records and try to sell them. We approached it more like a craft or a hobby. We didn’t think, we’re going on tour, we need to get those records in the store. We just thought we’d better make some records so we can sell them on the road. I don’t think of records as promotional devices. At the time, if you got into punk rock, you quickly learned how to get the records. If you knew about punk rock and could buy a record, you could probably figure out how to get another one. That’s also when mail order came into its own. Mail orders were so important for us, so strong at the beginning. We still have box after box of old mail orders. We didn’t throw a lot of them away. So we still have mail orders from people who ended up being in bands later on. It’s amazing.

What struck me back in the 1980s when I saw Another State of Mind, a film that features footage of Minor Threat, was the scene of you, energetic and polite, working at Häagen Dazs. Most people generally see punk rockers as shiftless, mindless, angst-ridden kids with pink mohawks begging for change.

I always thought that was the media’s version of it. I was faced with the same dilemmas as everybody, and I was dealing with reality. I wasn’t squatting. I was doing the same thing as everybody else, just navigating it differently. At the beginning, we were taking an extreme position and rebelling, but we weren’t rebelling in the way that the media would like us to rebel, which would suggest that all teenagers were idiots who just wanted to steal stuff and get high. But we were actually doing stuff. I had to pay rent and buy food. I wasn’t dependent on anybody. I had no money. That’s what always drove me so crazy when people accused us of being spoiled, rich white kids. It was insane. I was working three jobs at that point. When the tape was shot, I was working at Häagen Dazs, a movie theater, and driving a newspaper truck at night. Plus running the label, plus I was in a band, plus I was putting on shows, plus I was writing for a fanzine. I was going around the clock, but I was up for it. People say to me, it must be nice now. You’re just living off the music. That’s bullshit. It’s what keeps me alive, but it’s not what I’m living off of. I work my ass off all the time. I run the label, I run the band, I drive the van. We work on our own studio stuff, we are the lawyers, we are the managers. So it’s not that our art is our meal ticket. We’ve always tried not to become too dependent on that. Chuck Dukowski from Black Flag said that he’d rather work a day job for the rest of his life than be dependent on his music for his living. That was in a Damaged magazine article called “Apocalypse Now.” That quote fucking blew me away. It hit me exactly where I lived.

Who were some of your punk role models?

DOA were in New York and wanted to play Washington. I told them the only thing going on was that we [Teen Idles] were playing this Valentine’s dance at this high school. If you want to play, we’ll put you on. And they came down and played this Valentine dance. We passed the hat, and they made, like, thirty bucks and stayed at my house. My mom made pancakes and stuff, and they were the greatest guys, and they were so psyched to play. To this day, I’m still an idealist because of that. To this day, I’m always up for a gig. I never blow off a gig. I can’t believe when I hear about bands, particularly bands who align themselves with anything vaguely punk, that blow off a gig because they’d rather hang out in New York or something. Fuck that! If you commit to a gig, then you better do anything in your power to get there. That’s just the way it is. We’re so hardcore about that. Fugazi toured for ten years and cancelled only two or three shows ever, one because Guy was in the hospital and the other two because our van blew up. We physically couldn’t make it to them. It wasn’t until I was in the hospital in Australia in 1996 that we had to actually put down a string of dates.

But it wasn’t necessarily about the shows or just about the bands. It was about the hang, about connecting with people.

To this day, I feel that way. The music is a thread or a currency. It’s the center of attention, the point of gathering, maybe. My memories aren’t really about standing there watching a band. It’s always way more about sitting on a curb outside, or driving to the gig, or waiting in line. I have great memories of seeing the Ramones in 1979 in Virginia, a bit further out in the suburbs at a place run by the Marines. It had almost a Hawaiian theme, an old-school bar/lounge kind of place, with cocktail waitresses and stuff. There was a huge line of people waiting to get in the show, and there was a skirmish at the front of the line, and the word spread like wildfire and came down the line that there was a dress code, and you couldn’t have torn jeans. But you were going to see the Ramones—everyone had torn jeans! It just rippled: dress code, they won’t let you in with torn jeans. Suddenly—it was in a little shopping mall—people made a beeline for the pharmacy and started buying needles and thread. There was a whole fucking parking lot of people sewing their jeans up trying to get in this gig.

Fugazi tries to keep things interesting. We want to play the sock hops. One of the great aspects about booking your own band is the potential you might land in something weird. A person might call and say, do you want to play in an old circus tent? And most booking agents wouldn’t necessarily feel that they could put a band in that kind of situation.

You have tried to play places that have a vaudeville feel to them, not the stereotypical big rock venues.

It’s really one of the most frustrating aspects of music. It has become so difficult. You can’t blame people for not wanting to rent their rooms to punk shows, because people have been so fucking disrespectful to property. Nothing used to make me more angry than people busting up bathrooms. I never understood that. I used to say on stage, “The toilet is our friend—it takes the shit away. So what the fuck is going on? Every show, you fucking idiots break the toilets. It doesn’t make any sense.” And in early DC punk, that was one of the strongest principles: Don’t fuck up the room. And if there was ever an ass whuppin’ to give, it was given to people who broke toilets and stuff. We’d just go after those people. It was not cool. We did not graffiti and we did not break windows. We were tough kids, and we’d definitely step up. There was definitely a lot of fighting going on. We understood that if we wanted the gigs to happen, we had to respect the venues—we couldn’t fuck with them. Actually, I remember a turning point when people starting breaking things up, and it was really the end of the adventure of trying new places, because no one would ever give us a chance again.

In the ’80s, the scene was very regionalized?

We were a DC label, and I saw things very regionally. That’s what I thought was so cool about punk rock. I saw all these different towns had these scenes breaking out. They had their own bands, their own styles, their own way of dressing, even their own way of dancing. I could tell where someone was from by the way they danced. That was so cool, you know. The idea was, we’ve got DC covered, Alternative Tentacles had San Francisco, Touch and Go had the Midwest, SST was doing LA. It was like, everyone do your own labels, and then we’ll be a network. I thought everyone was just going to document their own scene. I thought that was the idea. But actually it turns out we’re the only ones who ended up doing it. We still only put out DC-area bands.

Shudder to Think and Jawbox left Dischord for major labels, but the parting was amicable?

The bands are first; I still stand by that. Even recently, the Make-Up just went to K Records, and that’s their decision. They’re dear friends of mine. Good luck, but they’re not on Dischord anymore. That’s cool; that’s the way it goes.

Why haven’t bands on Dischord, with the exception of the Make-Up, released live records?

For the most part, the idea that you can capture a punk show on a record is an illusion. There are not many great live punk records. Fugazi had a really interesting conversation about live records because we tried to think of live records that are good that didn’t have unreleased songs on them and weren’t historical. In other words, Hendrix stuff is always historical, because he’s obviously dead, so there’s a historical notion to it . . . Well, we did live recordings, and they didn’t sound any damn good. Bands were always out of tune, and the moment, what was going on in this room, couldn’t be captured on a record.

So why pretend?

Right. The initial idea was to go into a studio and just record as live as possible. You have to understand, at least with Minor Threat’s Out of Step, the vocals are live. Everything was done live. I recorded Out of Step standing in this little laundry room and just singing the lyrics next to a washing machine. It was one take. And I sang while they played. And if they fucked up, I just had to sing it again.

There’s a lack of video footage as well.

I think we would have done video. It’s just that nobody had the equipment. We couldn’t afford it. Video cameras also seemed clunky at the time. Things are different, let me tell you. Now there’s videotape everywhere of everything. But they haven’t made the music good, I’ll tell you that. Everyone is documenting every goddamn thing. The problem is now we have everything covered. Everyone knows how to do everything. They have distribution down, they got the labels down, they got the documentation down, and the only thing they’ve forgotten is that there’s so few great songs. It’s interesting because I’ve been asking a few people, who are the ones? In 1981, if you asked me, [Jello] Biafra, Dez Cadena, Joey Shithead, and, without a doubt, Jimmy Pursey . . . These guys were visionaries. People like Penelope, these people were the fucking visionaries. All these people were like gods. I’ve asked a couple fanzine people, who are the visionaries now, the people who you just can’t miss a gig? It’s real interesting because I’m not getting a lot of answers. Some people say, Fugazi, you guys are a good band, a good find. But I know there are other bands that are decent. Yet there are very few people who say, that person, I cannot miss him. I’m curious. I’m always asking. I want to know. I listen to so much music that it’s crazy. Today, I actually had somebody over and we listened to all these different new things, but also a Beach Boys bootleg, the first Queen record, and this human beat box guy.

Your partner Jeff Nelson is a completist?

Jeff is not really into any of the punk rock stuff at all now. He listens to country music, like you. We had an interesting conversation about that today, actually. He just doesn’t feel a lot of connection to the punk stuff. He likes the older stuff, but with the newer stuff, he doesn’t know what to make of it. It’s tough, because I’m still very connected to a lot of bands, and would like to continue working on this stuff. It’s an interesting time.

You’ve said that at some point the community you document will no longer exist; and in a certain sense, neither will the label.

I like the idea of an ending. But, I mean, I’ve certainly underestimated the community because I didn’t realize that it was a constant, steady changing of the guard. That people would keep coming along that I felt so connected to that picked it up and kept rolling with it, although it’s certainly shrunk down quite a bit . . . I don’t want to suggest that Dischord is the only arbiter of what’s important. It’s not. We just documented what we thought was important. At some point, it just stands to reason that our taste, or our view, is just not going to be able to take in what’s important. We want other people to document what’s important to them too.

You’ve said in interviews that, for the most part, you don’t have a problem with major labels. You’ve also said that you ultimately write songs because you want to say “fuck you” to the music industry.

I think you’re confusing that a bit. In the beginning it was like, the rock’n’roll industry, we’re anti-that. We’re punks. We try to operate outside of that system. That’s not the reason we write the songs. But it is a nice effect of that. Do you have problems with major record labels? They’re the musical manifestations of the corporate culture that we exist in, so I have a problem with them on that level. I don’t think of them in the same way as oil companies. I certainly prefer DGC and Interscope over Northrop or Remington Arms manufacturer. I have much bigger problems with those companies and the pharmaceutical companies, which I feel have gone totally insane over profit. They are unethical, because they are not thinking about what’s best for people and for life because it gets in the way of profit. Major labels’ bottom line will always be profit, which is distasteful, but I don’t lose sleep over them. They do what they do, and some of them do a fairly good job. They can basically take something that is pretty tepid and get millions of people to buy it. That’s kind of impressive. People say, Jesus, these records are great because they’re selling so many copies. Now, I don’t have any documentation for this, but I think that for every wholesome soy burger/sandwich, there’s been five hundred Twinkies sold. People have said to me that Fugazi should have signed to a major label, because we would have reached so many more people, but I think that if we signed to a major label, we’d reach far fewer people because we would have broken up and not put out new records. With who we are, and the way we operate as people, I don’t think we could have survived. It would have been too horrible to have been at the beck and call of those people. To feel that we were a point of investment, which bands are, basically.

You’ve also defended the notion of preaching to the converted.

People have used this preaching to the converted thing for so long as a sort of argument, as a kind of negative thing. It’s not preaching to the converted that’s important, it’s what the converted do. I have no problem with preaching to the converted, because then the converted can go out and kick some ass. People try to dismiss you by saying you’re just playing to your fans. Well, of course, that’s what happens, that’s why people come out to see you play. What’s interesting is when you can make a moment happen, when you can take advantage of the great potential of having a crowd and music . . .

You have taken it to places like Chile.

We played fucking city parks in Hong Kong in the middle of the afternoon. Those, I tell you, are not our converted flock. But by playing all these places, you just see yourselves better.

I remember you firing off a letter to Flipside when a girl took you to task on “Filler,” a Minor Threat song. Do you take responsibility for things you have said?

To the degree that I can. I don’t think I can ever reconcile or clear up the straight-edge stuff or the “Guilty of Being White” stuff . [Minor Threat inspired a subculture within punk known as straight-edge, which advocates abstaining from drugs and alcohol. Kids loyal to the trend would draw Xs on both hands with a black marker as a kind of counter-symbol to the marks underage kids receive at clubs that sell alcohol.] A lot of those songs were written at a time when it never occurred to me that anybody outside my [circle of] forty people would ever even hear the songs. You have to understand the context. Anybody who didn’t grow up in Washington, DC, might have a little bit of a hard time understanding what “Guilty of Being White” is all about. It’s a little discouraging to be sort of heralded by Nazi Polish skinheads because they think “Guilty of Being White” is such a great song, a great anthem for the white man. Knowing those lyrics are being posted on some Aryan Nation web site is discouraging, but life has that aspect to it. It’s absurd. I never would have thought it. The same way, I think it’s discouraging that there are kids cutting up other people for smoking cigarettes. That’s totally ridiculous. If somebody is actually interested in my lyrics, I’m happy to explain what I intended. But I cannot control those lyrics. They’re not mine. They’re out there . . . That’s the thing about sticking around—you continually have to answer for stuff. I recently got e-mailed from a kid maybe fifteen years old giving me shit about something. On the one hand, I’m like, fuck you. What the fuck do you know? On the other hand, I’m kind of psyched that I have people writing me saying: well, I understand that you guys are doing records through Caroline, they distribute records that are part of EMI . . . all kinds of shit. But the fact that I respond, I love it. I’m still answering the fucking mail to this day. It’s amazing to me. That’s the punk thing. All the other people, the bands, my earliest peers, I know where a lot of them are, but they’re certainly not singing in bands. They don’t have to answer questions anymore. I see people and I tell them I still answer the mail. They can’t believe it. They never answered the mail!

Even if it’s troubling, it reinforces the idea that you have lived your life a certain way?

When I was in high school, I was not a good student per se. I wasn’t getting good grades, and I didn’t like doing book reports and shit like that. I didn’t read the books, and I didn’t do the homework. I wasn’t interested in that stuff at all. I had to get good grades to the degree that I had to graduate. I did not want to fail. I was assigned One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest for a book report, or I chose it, and I had never read the book. I was trying to come up with something, because I suddenly had two days to do the book report. I was trying to read the book and trying to get through it, but I ended up calling Ken Kesey.

How the hell did you get Ken Kesey’s phone number?

I called 555–1212 and asked for Ken Kesey’s number in Oregon. His wife answers the phone. He’s out of town. But she talked to me for, like, forty-five minutes about the book and what his ideas were. Not only did I immediately write a report and get an A on it, but I fucking read the book because I couldn’t believe she had been so kind to me. I’m doing book reports all the time now. Kids are always calling me about shit. I’m always happy to talk to them.

Be sure to pick up a copy of Left of the Dial to read the rest!