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, WGTB had long been a thorn in the side of the university’s Jesuit administration.
The majority of those in attendance at the 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,