dorm room solo project Big Black. ‘Chicago had such a small punk rock scene and everybody knew everybody. That was a really inspirational period: it seemed like everything was permissible, like all the misfits and losers and people who couldn’t function in regular society could get along quite comfortably with each other and that sort of created a punk rock scene. There was nothing fashionable or chic about it like it was in Los Angeles or New York where you’d have hip socialites dropping in on the punk scene, or where wealthy patrons took bands under their wings. That didn’t happen in Chicago, it was very much a street-level scene and by the mid-eighties it had extended to misfits of all ages. The kids in Verboten would probably have been the youngest kids involved.’
Verboten, in which 14-year-old Bradford was joined by 10-year-old guitarist Jason Narducy, 12-year-old bassist Chris Kean and 11-year-old drummer Zack Kantor, played their first show at Chicago’s Cubby Bear, a dank, dark rock club opposite Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, in January 1982, opening up for Naked Raygun and Rights of the Accused. Video footage of the gig shows Verboten to be a tight little unit, with their young guitarist emerging as the star of the show, ripping out a blistering Angus Young-style solo during a chaotic cover of ‘Louie Louie’ as stage invaders swamp his singer and front row punks take the piss with good-humoured ‘We’re not worthy!’ bows.
‘It was all a big laugh,’ remembers Bradford, ‘all about having a good time.’
As Naked Raygun and Rights of the Accused were back at the Cubby Bear while the Grohls were staying in Evanston, Bradford asked Grohl and Hinkle if they would be interested in coming along to see a punk rock show with her.
‘I had to sit them down and give them the Punk Rock 101 speech before we left,’ laughs Bradford. ‘And they had to look the part so we wouldn’t stand out. I’d dated the drummer of Rights of the Accused and then the guitarist, they were both boys that I knew, so it was important that I wasn’t bringing two little geeks to the show.’
Yet to release a single, in 1982 Naked Raygun were still one of the Chicago punk scene’s best-kept secrets. Influenced by second-wave British punk acts Wire, Gang of Four and Stiff Little Fingers, the band dealt in abrasive, scratchy, teeth-on-edge post-punk, with Santiago Durango’s metallic, drilling guitar lines tempered by vocalist Jeff Pezzati’s keen melodic instincts: the notoriously hard-to-please Steve Albini considered them the finest band in his adopted hometown.
Grohl was also blown away by the band, but more than that, he loved the tumultuous atmosphere in the Cubby Bear and the sense of community within its walls. Tracey Bradford introduced him to Pezzati and her friends in Rights of the Accused, and the Chicago punks adopted him for the evening, filling his head with stories of legendary gigs and must-have records, and scooping him off the venue’s sticky floor when the propulsive ebb and flow of the pit threatened to pull him under. It was an eye-opening, life-changing night for the youngsters from Virginia: ‘When we walked out I remember Dave saying, “That was fucking crazy!”’ says Bradford.
‘I stood there and thought, “I could do this, I can play drums, and you don’t even have to sing – you can just scream your balls off,”’ Grohl recalled two decades later. ‘I talked to the singer and I jumped on someone’s head and I felt completely at ease with the band and the audience. It was just a bunch of people having a good time.
‘Most people who were kids back then, when they talk about their first concert it’s like, “Yeah, I saw Dio opening for Ozzy,” or “I saw Fastway opening for Van Halen,” but mine was Rights of the Accused opening for Naked Raygun. That was my point of reference, and still to this day it remains some sort of reference as to how music should be experienced live.’
Before he left Evanston, Grohl had one more revelatory experience, one which would shape the rest of his adolescence, and provide a moral framework that continues to inform his life. It came with the discovery that, back on the East Coast, one of punk rock’s most vibrant, vital communities was virtually on his doorstep.
‘I remember looking at Tracey’s singles,’ he told me in 2009, ‘and picking up an S.O.A. single or a Minor Threat single – a Dischord single anyway – and looking at the address and going, “Woah, this one is from Washington DC!” And then Tracey said, “Dude, listen to this!” and she played me a Bad Brains record. And it was like, “Holy shit! They’re from DC too?” And then we listened to Faith and Void and all the real cool shit from Dischord’s early days. And a lot of these bands were still going at that time, so now I had a mission for when I got back home, to check out that scene. It took me about a year before I finally found it. And then I couldn’t get out of it.’
If liberal, leafy Evanston, Illinois was an unlikely breeding ground for punk rock revolution, the same could be said of Washington DC’s affluent, elegant Georgetown district, home to politicians, foreign diplomats and some of the city’s most influential, wealthy and well-connected families. Before he was elected as the 35th President of the United States in 1961, Senator John F. Kennedy owned a house in the district; former US President Bill Clinton also lived in the area while studying at Georgetown University, America’s oldest and most prestigious Catholic university. The hub of Washington’s glamorous social scene, Georgetown is best known for its refined architecture, upscale boutiques and high-end restaurants, but it was in this genteel, gentrified district that the punk rock scene which changed Dave Grohl’s life was spawned.
Ian MacKaye is the godfather of that community. A most reluctant punk rock icon, MacKaye’s name has nonetheless become a by-word for uncompromised integrity, independent thought and unyielding, principled self-determination. The Clash’s Joe Strummer once commented: ‘Ian’s the only one who ever did the punk thing right from Day One and followed through on it all the way.’ Dischord, the record label MacKaye co-founded in 1980 to document his hometown’s nascent scene, stands as an inspirational example of the potential of the punk rock underground. Preferring handshake deals over legal contracts, selling its releases at affordable prices and splitting all profits evenly between artists and the label, Dischord is a collective that values community above commerce, and offers an alternative, ethical framework to standard record industry practices. The trailblazing bands Ian MacKaye fronted – among them Minor Threat, Embrace and Fugazi – operated defiantly out of step with the music business; his current group The Evens continue happily to do so.
Like Dave Grohl, MacKaye is the son of a journalist father and a schoolteacher mother: unlike Grohl, one can easily imagine him excelling in either profession. Often portrayed as an austere, intimidating character, in person MacKaye is thoughtful, eloquent and disarmingly direct, blessed with a dry wit and an encyclopaedic knowledge of, and boundless enthusiasm for, music.
MacKaye’s introduction to punk rock came on the night of 3 February 1979, when he attended an all-ages concert featuring New York’s trashy punkabilly ghouls The Cramps and Washington DC New Wave outfit Urban Verbs at Georgetown University’s Hall of Nations. He remembers that night as ‘one of the greatest nights of my life’.
‘At that show I entered into a whole new universe,’ he told me in 1992, as we conducted an interview in a Georgetown café three blocks from 36th and Prospect Street, the former location of the Hall of Nations. ‘I met a lot of really interesting people who challenged me artistically and emotionally and politically and sexually, people who threw up all these different ideas and alternative ways of living. And when the music you listen to challenges established notions of how music should sound, it gives you the message that rules can be broken. It was the most unbelievable, mind-blowing night.’
The Cramps’ show was a benefit gig to raise money to save WGTB, Georgetown University’s radio station, which had recently been shut down after having its broadcast licence and FM frequency sold to the University of the District of Columbia for just $1. With its provocative left-wing political bias and vocal support for gay rights, abortion rights and the anti-war movement,
