Hall of Nations, however, were less concerned about the suppression of the station’s subversive news bulletins than by the loss of WGTB’s eclectic, playlist-free programming, which had brought punk rock to the DC airwaves for the first time. Then a 17-year-old senior at Woodrow Wilson High School, MacKaye went along to the show with friends to add his voice to the protests. Also present was his future Fugazi bandmate Guy Picciotto, then a 13-year-old student at DC’s private Georgetown Day School.
As The Cramps kicked into their ramalama rock ’n’ roll rumble, vocalist Lux Interior went into a frenzy, scaling amps, hurling microphone stands around, diving into the crowd and vomiting on the stage. Urged on by this demented master of ceremonies, the Hall of Nations’ audience responded in kind, its largely teenage occupants pinballing around the room, overturning tables and hurling chairs through windows. For Ian MacKaye, whose previous concertgoing experience was limited to arena shows by hard rock behemoths Led Zeppelin, Ted Nugent and Queen, it was an impossibly thrilling, unforgettable experience, one which instantly transformed him, in his own words, into ‘a punk rock motherfucker’.
Two weeks later, on 15 February 1979, MacKaye and his friends Jeff Nelson and Henry Garfield (now better known to the world as ex-Black Flag vocalist-turned-punk rock renaissance man Henry Rollins) went to see The Clash play DC’s Ontario Theatre on their Pearl Harbor Tour, their first US trek. London’s finest opened up with the provocative ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’ – with Joe Strummer spitting ‘Never mind the Stars and Stripes, let’s print the Watergate tapes’ – and closed with the incendiary ‘White Riot’, during which a frustrated Mick Jones repeatedly smashed his Les Paul guitar against an amplifier stack until its headstock snapped off. MacKaye, Rollins and Nelson were transfixed by the band’s fire, ferocity and fury.
‘They were detonating every song, like “use once and destroy”,’ recalled Rollins in Clash associate Don Letts’s punk rock documentary Punk: Attitude. ‘They were burning through the music like napalm. They weren’t even playing it, they were just chewing it up and eviscerating it as they went through it, like after the show there’d be no more Clash. And we walked out of there stunned. The Ramones were great, but it was like The Beach Boys compared to that … The Clash came through and just went, “Wake up, let’s go!”’
Asked in 2004 to describe Washington’s music scene at the tail end of the seventies, Ian MacKaye responded, ‘There was no music scene in Washington really, that’s my answer.’ As an erudite scholar of his hometown’s cultural history, in the late seventies MacKaye would have been keenly aware of popular local bands such The Razz, Urban Verbs and the Slickee Boys and indeed Washington’s vibrant funk-driven Go-Go scene, but those bands said little to MacKaye about his own life. The Cramps and The Clash gave him the impetus to change that.
Within weeks of attending his first punk shows, the teenager had picked up a bass guitar and formed his own punk band, The Slinkees, with Nelson on drums. The band managed to play one show in a friend’s garage before singer Mark Sullivan quit in order to attend university in New York. Undeterred, MacKaye promptly recruited a new singer, Nathan Strejcek, and changed the quartet’s name to the Teen Idles.
Another young DC band who’d fallen under The Clash’s spell were Bad Brains, four young Rastafarians from the south-east of the city. Formerly a jazz-fusion collective named Mind Power, influenced by Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Chick Corea’s Return to Forever and John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, Paul Hudson (aka H.R.), Earl Hudson, Gary Miller (aka Dr Know) and Darryl Jenifer had been introduced to punk rock by their friend Sid McCray, a fan of The Damned, the Dead Boys and the Sex Pistols. By 1979 Bad Brains were determined to outpunk everyone, mixing fat dub reggae bass lines with blur-speed rhythms, jarring tempo changes and frenetic, feral energy. At that point no band played faster, or swung harder. But Bad Brains had another mission too, to spread a doctrine of Positive Mental Attitude via vocalist H.R.’s empowering, motivational lyrics, themselves inspired by Think and Grow Rich, a self-help, personal development manual written and published by author Napoleon Hill during the Great Depression. To say that DC rock clubs, then more used to hosting coolly detached New Wave acts and rootsy rock ’n’ roll bands, were unprepared for this whirlwind of energy blowing their way is something of an understatement.
‘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
