Pitchfork

It's a shame that Fugazi tend to be more revered as a business model than a band. The ethos of charging only $6 for concerts, selling CDs for a flat $12, and never hawking any merchandise you can wear does not guarantee worthwhile music. It just so happens, however, that their sound reiterates why punk rock still matters. The answer lies in their albums, whose radical expansion of punk's defining characteristics confused as many punk purists as it enraptured, and their concerts, which underscored the unusual guitar tunings that sounded like ships crashing in the night and saw Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto barking as if just inches away from riot-cop mace-sprayers.

Earlier this year, bassist Joe Lally began the Fugazi Live Series label to release the band's archived live recordings, which document every concert they've played for the past 17 years. Each cassette or DAT that passed quality control is now being burned to CDR and packaged in a jewel box with generic cover art that shows the band playing for flood reservoirs of people. And, exhibiting a unique sense of posterity, the band has opted to leave the raw recordings untreated-- all wrong notes, tape hiss, missed cues and microphone cutouts are fully intact.

9-3-87 Washington, DC-- just one of 20 volumes the band is selling exclusively at the Fugazi Live Series website-- captures Fugazi's public debut in September 1987 at the Wilson Center, a D.C. community center for teens. Caught by a cassette deck with narcoleptic magnets, it showcases a band still trying to find itself, and hoping that at least someone else digs it. Case in point is their slog-through of the Pointillist-funk number "Furniture", where MacKaye pleads the audience, "Bear with me, please! ...This is the last part and after that we'll stop!" Yet, even in this embryonic stage, Fugazi still concocted punk rock that crossed its arms and glared at the hardcore pep rallies that took over cities across the board during the late-80s. That night, the trio (Picciotto wasn't onboard until several months later) played a hybrid of thrash-funk and midtempo blues which sounded content to sit alone on parking-space barriers outside the hardcore clubs, thinking, while other groups' two-minute testosterone fits raged nearby.

Positive Force D.C. activist Mark Anderson introduces the band; what follows is a snapshot of American punk standing at a crossroads. Here, MacKaye & Co. walk in a careful pace along a war-torn street, stepping over shattered glass, bullet casings and scattered propaganda leaflets selling visions of Reagan's City on the Hill. The guerilla war that hardcore long waged against the empire in America's suburbs and skid rows was at a lull, with infighting and exhaustion setting in. On this street that Fugazi treaded, major-label A&R scouts or carpetbaggers loitered in the local veterans' halls, recruiting the disillusioned with brochures featuring the smiling faces of Hüsker Dü and The Replacements and obscuring memories of fallen heroes Black Flag and the Dead Kennedys.

Fugazi's "Song #1", then, was a rallying cry of a whole other sort, announcing in a bullhorn: "Song #1 is not a fuck you song/ I'll save that thought until later on/ You want to know if there's something wrong?/ It's nothing." They continue: "Life is what you want it to be so don't get tangled up trying to be free.../ It's nothing." Fugazi here recall the European existentialists who cursed the language and sciences that led their countrymen to the Cold War, as aspects of "nothingness." And these critiques reoccur in the songs "Furniture", "Merchandise" and "Word", where MacKaye lectures, "The world has got you down/ Everybody treats you like shit/ What's the answer?/ What was that word again?/ ...The word is 'change.'" It's difficult to imagine the crowd's facial reactions as harDCore's own hero told them that all their scenester posturing and territorial pissing was useless.

Fugazi's confidence in their musicianship spurts in "Word", as they march through a pogoing conversation between bass and guitar, and then slow it down to a dub space-out. Elsewhere, Lally delivers a deft bass solo for a Mashed Potato dance rhythm on "Furniture", while the anti-suicide jaunt "Turn Off Your Guns" remains among the band's poppiest moments to date. The only negative is that the setlist is confined in a narrow palette with chords and rhythms that the band would seemingly repeatedly recycle until turning a sharp left on 1995's Red Medicine. On the other hand, this document not only contains great historical value, but also elicits the excitement of hearing Fugazi realize where freedom-- and the rigor to maintain it-- can take them.