band practised regularly in the basement of Morosini’s parents’ house, hammering out covers of classic rock anthems: Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’, The Who’s ‘My Generation’, some Stones, Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and, perhaps inevitably, that evergreen punk staple ‘Louie Louie’. With a few appearances at backyard parties already under their belts, by the end of the ’83–’84 school year the band felt confident enough to put their name forward for Thomas Jefferson High School’s annual variety show competition – or rather they would have put their name forward had their band actually been in possession of a name.
‘When we registered for the show we were asked for the band name and we said “We’re nameless,”’ says Nick Christy. ‘So that’s how we got billed on this variety show, Nameless.’
The competition saw Nameless pitted against the school’s reigning variety show champions, Three for the Road, a three-piece garage band from the school’s senior year, fronted by Mississippi Senator Trent Lott’s son, Chet Lott. A degree of rivalry existed between the two bands – ‘Three for the Road always seemed like they were better than us,’ remembers Nick Christy – and the entire student body was aware that this year’s competition carried with it a new edge.
‘We had won this contest every year so we just assumed we were going to win it forever,’ recalls Chet Lott, now a 44-year-old political lobbyist working alongside his father and former Louisiana Senator John Breaux at the Breaux Lott Leadership Group in Washington DC. ‘Maybe we were a little naïve. When they showed up it was like, “Oh, hell, now we got some real competition here!”’
On the day of the competition Nameless played well, blasting through raucous covers of The Who’s ‘Squeezebox’, Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and their trump card, Kenny Loggins’s recent Billboard chart-topper ‘Footloose’. Three for the Road followed with a strong set of their own, turning in powerful versions of the Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky Tonk Women’, The Who’s ‘Can’t Explain’ and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s ‘Have You Ever Seen the Rain?’ The fate of both bands lay in the hands of their audience, quite literally, as the contest was to be decided by the volume of applause garnered by each act. Ultimately, to Grohl’s intense disappointment, Three for the Road triumphed once more. ‘All the chicks loved them,’ a rueful Grohl admitted 25 years on.
‘Those guys had some real chemistry in their band, and obviously some great musicians,’ recalls Chet Lott, an accomplished musician himself, with two albums of soulful, country rock to his name. ‘In Three for the Road we were not great musicians individually, but as a unit we were pretty good. And because we’d been around since freshman year that helped us a little bit in the talent show as we already had a bit of a following. I don’t think Dave Grohl has lost out too often since that day …’
The June 1984 Thomas Jefferson High School variety concert was to be one of the Nameless’s final appearances. Just a few months later, following his parents’ divorce, Nick Christy’s mother moved her family back to Massachusetts; without their frontman the band soon petered out. Amusingly, in 2009, when I asked Grohl about the band’s demise, he put his own tongue-in-cheek, mythologising spin on the breakup: ‘We lost a couple of members to drugs, women and fast cars,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Hey, it was North Virginia, it was crazy …’
By 1984 the American hardcore scene itself was slowly disintegrating. Many of the musicians who had helped build the community no longer recognised or respected it. Violence and drug abuse prevailed, younger acts seemed content to ape their heroes rather than search for their own voice, and arguments about politics, sexism, racism and ethics played out in the letters pages of fanzines. The civil war tearing the scene apart was one of the topics under debate when maximumrocknroll brought together Ian MacKaye, Articles of Faith’s Vic Bondi and M.D.C.’s Dave Dictor for a round-table discussion in the summer of 1983. MacKaye’s exasperation was all too evident when at one point he asserted, ‘Punk rock has more assholes, in a ratio sense, than any other kind of music. They don’t have respect for anything, it drives me crazy.’ Something had to give. And in September 1983, as the issue went on sale, his band Minor Threat played their final show.
In truth, the members of this volatile and relatively short-lived group were never the best of best friends, and would argue constantly – about songwriting, about MacKaye’s lyrics, about their relationship with Dischord and their future plans. ‘I have some really great practice tapes with about seven minutes of music and about eighty-three minutes of arguing,’ MacKaye would wryly note years later.
By the time the quartet recorded their début album Out of Step with Don Zientara in January 1983, MacKaye was already directing much of the anger in songs such as ‘Betray’, ‘Look Back and Laugh’ and ‘Cashing In’ squarely at Preslar, Baker and Nelson. Minor Threat may have been out of step with the world, but they were also increasingly out of step with one another, and their status as kingpins of the national hardcore scene only exacerbated divisions within a band that bassist Baker once scathingly dismissed as ‘an after-school hobby for some over-privileged kids’.
‘Part of the split was that Lyle and I – what a surprise, the private school kids – wanted to continue to build and to see where this could go,’ Baker told me in 2010. ‘I mean Minor Threat never left the United States and we wanted to see the rest of the world: we thought that there was potential to keep moving forward. And that really wasn’t in the cards and so basically that’s what split us up. Aspirations tend to ruin the best of intentions.’
On 23 September 1983 Minor Threat played their final show, opening up for DC Go-Go legends Trouble Funk at the Landsburgh Center. They aired a new song for the first, and last, time.
‘Salad Days’ was MacKaye’s unflinching dismissal of a scene he felt had become stagnant and compromised, driven by sounds of fury which came increasingly to signify nothing. The song’s bitter lyrics were all the more powerful coming from a man whose belief in the power of music and art to empower, engage and inspire had been so well documented.
The mood of the song struck a resounding chord with many in the punk community. In spring 1984 maximumrocknroll placed the bald question ‘DOES PUNK SUCK???’ on its front cover. That same spring, 12-year-old Scott Crawford interviewed Ian MacKaye for the first issue of a new DC scene fanzine called Metrozine. Though more than six months had passed since Minor Threat’s final show, the young writer found MacKaye unwilling or unable to drag himself out of his slough of despond.
‘He was so down, so totally over the whole scene,’ says Crawford, now the editor of Blurt magazine. ‘There was no suggestion of him forming another band, he was so disillusioned and disenchanted. It was actually pretty painful to see.’
Interviewed by Flipside around the same time, Black Market Baby frontman Boyd Farrell offered another doomy insider’s prognosis of the DC scene.
‘It’s sad, all those little kids that were on skateboards a year or two ago are on heroin now,’ Farrell commented. ‘It’s like DC lost its innocence. It’s been deteriorating since the end of Minor Threat, though obviously it isn’t their fault. It’s like a fashion thing now. It’s like it lost the sincerity, the anger, and became more cynical. You used to be able to go to the clubs and get a buzz from the bands’ energy.’
One year on, in April 1985, Skip Groff filed Minor Threat’s final single alongside the Teen Idles’ Minor Disturbance EP, State of Alert’s No Policy EP, Government Issue’s Legless Bull EP and Youth Brigade’s Possible EP in the Dischord rack at Yesterday and Today. Recorded on 14 December 1983, almost two months after the band had played their final show, Salad Days felt like the requiem for a shared dream. Yet, typical of the DC punk scene’s capacity for death and renewal, in the same month that the single went on sale another young area band were entering a recording studio
