1980, MacKaye and Nelson hatched a plan to check out the nascent West Coast scene, booking shows for the Teen Idles in LA and San Francisco.
As with the Bad Brains’ proposed UK trip, things didn’t go according to plan for the adventurous young punks. In LA the quartet found themselves sharing a bill at the Hong Kong Café with obnoxious Seattle shock rockers The Mentors, Masque club regulars Vox Pop and brutal ‘biker punks’ Puke, Spit and Guts, who sang of murder and rape and looked like they would happily slit the Teen Idles’ throats for the price of a cup of coffee. More disappointingly, in San Francisco the quartet were bumped at the last minute from their promised slot on a Dead Kennedys/Circle Jerks/Flipper show at the Mabuhay Gardens by promoter Dirk Dirksen, who only reluctantly agreed to rebook them on a bill with New Wave outfits The Wrong Brothers and Lost Angeles at the venue the following evening following lobbying efforts on the band’s behalf from the Circle Jerks.
California nonetheless left indelible impressions on the young band. They took note of how punks from the Golden State – most notably the feared Huntingdon Beach crew who followed the Circle Jerks and Black Flag from show to show – conducted themselves, taking shit from no one: this was a revelation for the DC youths, who were routinely hassled and abused on the streets of Georgetown. They also noticed that the Mabuhay Gardens had instituted an ‘all-ages’ policy for gigs, marking a large black ‘X’ on the hands of audience members too young to drink alcohol to distinguish them from patrons legally allowed to purchase intoxicating liquor. On their three-day bus trip back to the East Coast the young punks talked excitedly about introducing these practices to their hometown. Washington DC was about to get a noisy wake-up call.
Back on home turf, though, cracks began to appear in the group dynamic. The experiences of the past year had left the articulate MacKaye with plenty to say, but he no longer felt comfortable putting his words into Strejcek’s mouth. The band agreed to split, but before doing so the decision was made to document their time together by releasing a seven-inch single on their own label, funded by the $600 they had amassed from their 35 live shows. The quartet had already recorded an eight-song tape with local sound engineer Don Zientara at Inner Ear Studios – a four-track tape recorder set up in Zientara’s suburban home in Arlington, Virginia – and sought advice from Skip Groff, who had his own small record label Limp Records, on the mechanics of putting out a record.
In December 1980, a month after the band played their final show at DC’s 9:30 club, the Teen Idles’ seven-inch Minor Disturbance EP emerged as the first release on the newly created Dischord record label. The cover featured a photograph of Alec MacKaye, Ian’s younger brother, with an inked ‘X’ on each of his clenched fists, an image which neatly captured the defiant mood of the emerging youth community. MacKaye and Nelson pledged that if they managed to sell enough copies of the EP to recoup some of their investment, they would use the money to put out records by their friends’ bands. It was a proud moment for the teenage punks but, never one for nostalgia, MacKaye had already moved on. By the time Skip Groff put the Minor Disturbance EP on sale at Yesterday and Today, MacKaye’s new band Minor Threat had already played their first show.
‘Revolution is not the uprising against pre-existing order, but the setting up of a new order contradictory to the traditional one.’ Printed on the inner sleeve of Fugazi’s 1990 album Repeater, this quote from Spanish liberal philosopher José Ortega y Gasset’s 1929 text La rebelión de las masas (The Revolt of the Masses) offers an insight into Ian MacKaye’s modus operandi since the night he first discovered punk rock. Raised by liberal, free-thinking, intellectual parents, for MacKaye the notion of an independent counterculture was not some intangible pipe dream, but rather a viable and attainable reality. It is this conviction that has driven his life’s work.
In October 1981 MacKaye’s first step towards independence saw him move out of his parents’ Beecher Street home in North-West Washington and take up residence in a rented four-bedroom house in Arlington with Jeff Nelson and three punk rock friends. Dischord House, as the property was known, soon became the creative and spiritual epicentre of the emerging DC hardcore community. An office for MacKaye and Nelson’s label was set up in a small room next to the kitchen, while the basement of the house was utilised as a rehearsal space for bands, among them Henry Garfield’s State of Alert (S.O.A.), Alec MacKaye’s The Untouchables, Iron Cross and MacKaye and Nelson’s new outfit Minor Threat.
When their bands weren’t practising, the young musicians spent their time at Dischord House hand-cutting and pasting record sleeves for Dischord releases (the second of which was S.O.A.’s bruising No Policy EP), designing flyers for upcoming shows, dubbing demo cassettes to trade with penpals, scribbling columns for fanzines and writing letters to record store owners, promoters and college radio DJs nationwide, anything to spread the DC punk gospel. The first Dischord releases were mailed out bearing the slogan ‘Putting D.C. on the Map’, but there was genuine pride and conviction behind the tongue-in-cheek sentiment: MacKaye regarded each release as another stepping stone towards the creation of a truly independent artistic community in his hometown. To MacKaye, Dischord was about nothing if not its sense of engagement, involvement and connection.
‘From the very beginning of the label we were told time and again that the way we were approaching the business was unrealistic, idealistic and ultimately unworkable,’ he recalled in 2004. ‘They said that it couldn’t work, and that it wouldn’t. Obviously it fucking worked.’
Dischord’s most popular, passionate and influential band was Minor Threat, arguably the defining act of the American hardcore movement. Featuring MacKaye on vocals, Jeff Nelson on drums and Georgetown Day School students Lyle Preslar and Brian Baker on guitar and bass respectively, Minor Threat played super-fast, super-tight, morally righteous punk rock that blazed with an incandescent fury which left all who saw them indelibly marked. Though Minor Threat would record just two EPs and one full-length album, their influence on the nascent hardcore movement was incalculable, their commitment to breaking down the barrier between ‘artist’ and ‘audience’ unequalled.
The band’s début release, the Minor Threat seven-inch EP was a revelation. Rather than pointing a finger at the Republican administration in the White House (as was de rigueur in hardcore circles at the time), MacKaye’s scathing, indignant lyrics targeted both his own community and everything it stood in opposition to, sparing no one, friend or foe. The EP’s most infamous song was ‘Straight Edge’, the clean-living MacKaye’s apoplectic response to substance-abusing punk rock fuck-ups who took Sid Vicious’s self-destructive cartoon nihilism as a template for their own lives.
Elsewhere he tackled themes of peer apathy, masculinity, violence and failing friendships, with equally unambiguous, thrillingly direct anger. If Black Flag’s Nervous Breakdown EP was a declaration of independence, the Minor Threat EP was a declaration of war, a war MacKaye was determined to wage all across the nation. To do so meant tapping into what author Michael Azerrad called hardcore’s ‘cultural underground railroad’, an interlinked community of promoters, fanzine writers, college radio stations, independent record stores and alternative venues.
Prior to the arrival of Black Flag there was no national grassroots touring circuit for America’s punk bands. That group’s pioneering attempts to establish a network, using phone numbers bassist Chuck Dukowski copied from the sleeves of the earliest hardcore seven-inch singles, was partly born out of necessity – by 1981 Black Flag’s hometown shows were notorious for pitched battles between punk kids and the brutal LAPD, making it increasingly difficult for the band to secure bookings anywhere – and partly derived from Greg Ginn’s desire to replicate the violent, untrammelled energy of his group’s LA shows in every town and city in the union. For Ginn and Dukowski, the idea of stepping into the unknown to confront and challenge was integral to the punk rock experience.
‘We like to play out of town,’ Ginn told Flipside in December 1980. ‘You’ve gotta threaten people sometimes.’
‘We think everybody should be subjected to us,
