This is my first dive into the live Fugazi vault. I never got to see them so one’s as good as any. I saw a lot of shows as a…youth. It was mostly a random thing back then. I remember mostly buying walk up tickets to shows that had no hope of selling out. Fugazi shows, unlike the band itself, always sold out, fast. They were popular and cheap. You had to have your shit together to get those tix. I did not, as they say, have the straight edge. Sometimes I think about how things might have been different…if I had gotten into one of these shows. It was that time in life when any little thing can Change Everything. I definitely had one of those moments when I bought my first Fugazi albums on cassette at the local comic book shop. First the Margin Walker EP, then Repeater. Mind-blowing stuff, but not the same as a live show. Certainly not the same as a Fugazi show, which by most accounts was a very guided experience. I used to get pretty wild at shows, not violent—I was not into the hardcore scene—but it got dumb. Crazy. A bit much, perhaps. Maybe if someone I respected gave my a stern talking to I would have toned that shit down. But for a time, getting completely retarded at shows was like all I had. It was a lot of fun. I could imagine instead that whole time just hanging back, shaking my head, feeling superior…everything coulda turned out different!

Or maybe not. I’m basing that whole idea on what I thought these shows were like. It’s a space that lives in my head, built up over the years by second-hand reports, that Instrument movie, bootleg tapes of out-of-context stage banter, and seeing Ian talk in person once at the Wetlands. He’s a completely reasonable man who seemingly can back up every suggestion with both a warm heart and cold logic. But you know he has this wild screaming alter-ego that can swing into this weird recess monitor mode. How did all these things resolve in reality?

I have looked for the answers in YouTube clips, as one does. Of course there’s plenty of live clips, but there’s plenty of Ian talks. They’re all pretty good if you need a general motivation boost, he’s good at that kind of thing, and you know he’s not bullshiting you with some positive thinking nonsense or made-up stories. It’s the real Punk ideas. But it’s even better when he gets real specific:

You’re gonna wanna watch this whole thing, but it’s at around the 40 minute mark that he describes the details of this Kansas City gig. With the magic of the internet and this meticulous archive, the full show was easily found, and upon the clearing of my meager paycheck, purchased and downloaded.

What comes through in these recent talks and the full shows in context is the band’s sense of humor. Even the strictly enforced $5 ticket price, which people are still today having friend and career-ruining arguments over after 20 years of inflation, was originally done because they “thought it was funny” (and perhaps more importantly for any note-takers: “because they could”).

Although there are some serious and practical matters behind some of the banter (around the 1 hr mark in the above talk Ian discusses some very real and unfortunate consequences of show violence), there’s times when you listen to some tapes of the stuff when you have to ask, “are these guys fucking kidding?” YES. When you listen to the whole show it’s clear they are at times actually attempting to lighten the mood. Like this thing with making the audience sign a petition? It happens pretty much exactly like he tells it in the story. And then turning all the lights off is just fucking with people—these guys are having a ball. That is Rock’n'Roll. That’s all Punk is, right? It’s about what’s possible with the reality in front of you. That’s so great that you can hear this story and then hear the actual thing and it all matches.

Oh, and there’s the music. I don’t know if they had any bad gigs, really, but this is good one. Great recording. I’m reminded that, even tho I’ve gotten all the albums over the years, I barely remember the ones that were not on Margin Walker (more commonly known now as the second half of 13 Songs) or Repeater. Played the shit out of those tapes, still have em. I’m also reminded of the song Rend It, which was put on a mixtape for me once. A mixtape I may have missed the point of, but which I also played the hell out of and still have. I’m not really a hidden message guy. It might seem stupid but my message is usually “check this music out”. I mean at times it could be “let’s have sex”, but that really seems better left to the moment, and would be said in those words. Rarely it could be “I am eternally devoted to you and there’s nothing you, or even I, can do about it” but that is almost always taken as deeply creepy, and rightly so. Never would you get that message in a Fugazi song. These guys are on that level level. Comparatively speaking. I’m way off. Sorry.

This is like when, uh, your lover turns over to you on the pillow and says ‘but now I can’t see your genitals’, it’s a lot like that. That ever happen to you?

—Guy Picciotto, on turning off all of the lights

Great version of Waiting Room. Bang, pow, smash.

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