Once upon a time, on a foreign planet called Washington, D.C., I wrote what I thought at the time was a barbed but funny screed about Fugazi. In it I said a lot of rather acidic things I meant, and a lot of other things that were intended to be taken tongue in cheek. Not surprisingly people, by which I mean fans of Fugazi, didn’t know one from the other and got pissed. I don’t blame them. In the ensuing hubbub I managed to break all records for hate mail at the Washington City Paper, which amused me at the time because there’s nothing I like more than hate mail. Here at The Vinyl District, I have been known, and this is the God’s honest truth, to write the occasional nasty comment to myself.
But all this is an aside from the point I want to make, which is that my true target, which I kinda sorta made clear but could have made much clearer, was straightedge, and not Fugazi at all. I was actually rather neutral on the subject of Fugazi. I saw them maybe three times over the years, and wasn’t particularly smitten by them. But neither did I run from the club screaming. Their 1989 debut 13 Songs didn’t blow me away either, although I loved “Waiting Room” and “Margin Walker.”
Anyway, all of this brings us to 2014’s First Demo. It is exactly what it says it is, the very first songs Fugazi ever committed to tape. I dared myself to listen to it honestly, without any of the hang-ups I still harbor for all things straightedge, because straightedge really has nothing to do with it. So Ian MacKaye doesn’t drink, smoke, or go in for the occasional one-night stand. That hardly makes him America’s Most Wanted. How MacKaye chooses to live his life is none of my damn business.
The first thing to be noticed about First Demo is that it doesn’t include some of the best songs on 13 Songs. “Bulldog Front,” “Give Me the Cure,” and the brilliant “Margin Walker” are all MIA, as is “Suggestion,” which I am bound by Hippocratic Oath to admit I’ve always found to be just a smidge on the preachy side. And the adjunct to that is also true; these demos include several songs that would not appear on 13 Songs, but either on 1990’s follow-up Repeater, 1989’s State of the Union compilation, or in the case of “Turn Off Your Guns,” not at all, with the exception of some live recordings. So right there is one excellent reason for Fugazi fanatics to buy a copy.
But that’s so much musical groundskeeping. The bottom line is this: while the songs on First Demo vary from good to excellent, I just can’t relate to the anger. Which is odd. If there was anything I loved about such contemporaries as Husker Du, Black Flag, and X it was their rage. Against society, against life, against everything. And all I can think to say about that is this: I never felt like any of the above bands were pointing the finger at me, even though I was a drunk and was well aware that if Black Flag weren’t stridently calling me to account, they were most certainly making me the butt of their joke. But perhaps that’s the issue here—Black Flag managed to convey their contempt for my love affair with beer in a way that even I could laugh at.
But Fugazi weren’t joking. They were deadly serious. And in my pantheon of punk rock heroes—the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, Black Flag, X, the Circle Jerks, etc.—I had no room for a band without a sense of humor. So while I love the demo versions of “Waiting Room,” “Song #1,” “Badmouth,” and “And the Same”—all of which point to MacKaye’s amazing ability to craft catchy melodies and his estimable talents as a vocalist and guitarist—I’m turned off by their earnestness, which brings me back to where I started.
Fugazi was a helluva band—not my kind of band, but a helluva band nonetheless. I may actually listen to demo versions of the savage “Waiting Room,” the furious “Song #1,” and the anthemic “All the Same”—which is much longer and better, I think, than the version on 13 Songs—again. The last tune, especially, blows me away, so long as I don’t pay too much attention to the message. But I’ll never love Fugazi, although there are, I think, valid reasons to love their music.
I would say more on the subject, but I’ll leave the final word to the music critic Robert Christgau, who after acknowledging that the band (or to be specific, Guy Picciotto’s guitar playing) “afforded some kind of pleasure,” ended by saying, “I’m not any kind of puritan. So I stopped buying their records.” Some people can listen to and enjoy MacKaye’s disgust for materialism and all it entails, and more power to them. But I can’t count myself amongst their number. That said, I think Pailhead, the late eighties side project featuring MacKaye and Ministry, rocked!
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
