FR 159: Revisiting Fugazi
Tapping into old feelings—and finding new meanings in records I thought I knew inside and out
The first time I tried to see Fugazi, they didn’t show. It was the spring of 1989, and I was a senior in high school; their debut EP had come out the previous fall. They were booked at a place called the Blue Gallery1, a tiny bar and art space in Northwest Portland that couldn’t have held more than 100 people, with Girl Trouble and Beat Happening opening. (I used to have the flyer; I wish I’d hung onto it.)
I’d been going to punk and hardcore shows for a couple years at that point, but I was still easily intimidated, and never more so than when I walked up to the club and encountered Jerry A, the imposing frontman of local punk behemoths Poison Idea, leaning against the door, smirking. “You know that Fugazi aren’t playing tonight, right?” he snarled, or at least it seemed like a snarl to an easily cowed teenager. I was surprised to find him there; a Fugazi show didn’t really seem like the kind of place the singer of “Hangover Heartattack” would be hanging out. I couldn’t figure out if he was fucking with me.
“Their van broke down on the way up from California,” Jerry told me, his breath reeking of whiskey. (Again, this is how I remember it; I wonder, all these years later, how much of this encounter I imagined, or later embellished in my mind.) A broken-down van seemed plausible enough, even though I still didn’t know whether or not to believe him, or why he was sharing this information with me, a nobody, in the first place. But I was there, so what else was I going to do? I paid my five bucks and went in. I don’t really remember Girl Trouble; I remember being confused by Beat Happening, who definitely were not playing the kind of punk rock I was used to. The night felt anticlimactic—one more moment in a years-long stretch where I felt (self-pityingly and, in retrospect, often mistakenly) like all the good shit was happening anywhere but where I happened to be at the time.
Fugazi were scheduled to play Olympia the following night, and I begged my parents to let me make the two-hour drive up to the show, but the conversation was a nonstarter. There was a lot of parental interference that year. Not two weeks later, Nirvana were on the bill at the Blue Gallery; Bleach wasn’t even out yet, but somehow I knew about them, I suppose through some magic of the Pacific Northwest grapevine, or maybe just Sub Pop ads in the back of some zine. But it was a school night; permission denied. So much for that potentially life-changing experience—apparently there were only 12 people in the audience that night.
I probably bought Fugazi’s 7 Songs EP around the time of its release—as a devoted fan of Rites of Spring and Embrace, I couldn’t wait to hear this new hybrid of two of my favorite bands—and likelier than not I got it from 2nd Avenue Records, where I’d been soaking up punk and hardcore since I’d discovered the shop as a young teen. I don’t remember the day I got the record, but I do remember the effect it had on me. Putting it on today, almost 38 years later, all those impressions keep rushing back.
Everywhere you listen, a wave is crashing and another is building.
“Waiting Room” opens the record like a geode being cracked open in a vice. The first thing we hear is that bassline—bubbling, elastic, a hook I can summon in my head with no effort, which isn’t something I can say for many songs. A fidgety little two-note guitar riff ups the stakes, with fluttery picking movements that they’d make their stock in trade. And then, without warning, they pull the rug out: Eight bars in, they just stop, and they stay silent for the better part of two bars. (Up until that point, hardcore had largely been an arms race of harder/louder/faster; Fugazi shoehorned a snippet of John Cage’s 4’33” into the first 30 seconds of their very first song.)
“I am a patient boy,” sings Ian MacKaye, in that slightly grating voice of his, and he and Guy Picciotto continue in unison, Guy’s voice the sandpaper to Ian’s ball-peen hammer, twisting hardcore’s customary gang-chant singing into a kind of nursery-rhyme refrain: “I wait I wait I wait I wait!” I don’t think I ever really stopped to think about the lyrics, but to a kid who was at the end of his rope with the world around him—the drudgery of high school, friends of convenience, parental expectations, hormonal despair—that refrain must have unlocked something, some latent determination to transcend. There was no going back.
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