Fugazi's always been there. At least for me they have. My introduction to punk, and basically independent music of all kinds, came through them in high school. I had the excuse of living in Connecticut during D.C. punk's first heyday. Until Fugazi, Rites of Spring was just a piece I'd heard on NPR, and Bad Brains were one of the reasons Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doomhelped to create the PG-13 rating. Luckily enough, I moved to Virginia in time for punk's rebirth. Some friends had a copy of Repeater at marching band camp (really) that we'd blast out of a small stereo in one of the cabins during our afternoon breaks. The music was relentless, and its energy made us dance like crazy; shouting and jumping around while someone practiced "The Star Spangled Banner" on a clarinet somewhere outside.
Seeing Fugazi play live was never difficult in D.C. From countless local benefits to the annual end-of-summer Fort Reno show, there was ample opportunity to stand with a usually diverse crowd of people outside, in church halls, on the mall, you name it. Over the years, I've had the opportunity of seeing Fugazi play several times. From a wild downstairs space in Dublin to a screening ofInstrument in what seemed like an anarchist club in Florence, Fugazi have made fans all over the world with the help of extensive touring and Dischord's international distribution through Southern.
But you know all that. They've been going at it for fifteen years-- long enough for my mom to know them. The Redskins even play part of "Waiting Room" at home football games. Even if you haven't picked up The Argument yet, the chances that Fugazi has played an important part in your musical upbringing are about as good as catching at least one of them standing next to you at any local show in D.C. After a bit of schedule coordination, I cornered Guy Picciotto in his Adam's Morgan apartment long enough to ask him everything I could think of. He sat in the sun with his cat Camille and answered.
Pitchfork: Since you guys just had a new album come out, I'd like to start with the studio. It sounds like you've been getting more comfortable at Inner Ear since Red Medicine. Is that correct?
Picciotto: I think it took us two years to get kind of familiar with each other in terms of the four of us playing together and figuring out what we were trying to do. The cool thing about the band was that Joe and Ian had developed kind of a relationship, and Brendan and I had developed a bit of a relationship because we'd played together for five years before Fugazi. So the four of us coming together was like feeling each other out, and I think it took us a couple years of really constant touring to figure out how to play together.
At that point, we were just touring so much that the records were just... I refer to them sometimes as pitstops because we'd just be cruising so hard touring and then we'd run in and do these records pretty quickly. I don't know if it necessarily made the records better or worse-- I think a lot of people prefer the earlier stuff-- but for us, we just needed some time to figure stuff out. You know, we record live, in the same room, facing each other. We try to maximize that aspect of it, but we also like to be in control of all the things that we do. It took us a while to really be in control in the studio because we just didn't know very much about the equipment. We tried to produce ourselves on Steady Diet and I don't know if we were necessarily ready to do it at that point.
Pitchfork: Is that a control thing where you wanted just to do it on your own instead of having...
Picciotto: Yeah, it's all mediated, you know, you're just kind of channeling the concepts. I mean, we've had great success with the producers that we've worked with like Ted Niceley and Don Zientara all these years. It's not like we had unsympathetic people working with us-- they were totally sympathetic. But it's like, if you're doing surgery it would be nice if you could have your hand on the scalpel, and that's the way it was for us. By Red Medicine, we felt really confident to stick the knife in and get to work.
Pitchfork: And you started spending more time on the records then?
Picciotto: Yeah, definitely. I mean back in the old days-- like Rites of Spring, we did that record in like two days. And then, Fugazi's was a bit longer than that. I think we spent maybe four days on the first ones and gradually increased our studio time. We spent about three weeks, total, on this last record.
Pitchfork: Is that the longest you've spent on a record?
Picciotto: I think so. We record them in installments now. We'll go in and record a bunch of stuff and then we'll take a break from it and work on vocal ideas, and then we'll go back in and book some more time. On this one, there were a few more installments than normal because we ended up remixing a couple of the songs.
Pitchfork: Now that you guys aren't touring as much, what are you doing with the time you have? You've said before that your favorite thing is playing live.
Picciotto: Yeah, it's a frustrating situation because I think we've grown used to being on stage. So it's like, suddenly you get this weird withdrawal where you're not experiencing that kind of adrenaline. It can make you a little bit insane.
Pitchfork: Do you feel that in the studio as well?
Picciotto: No, I really think of the studio as being like craftsmanship time, and then playing is about releasing energy, and the two are really different. But yeah, now with Joe just having a kid-- and Brendan's had two kids now for a couple years-- it's a matter of figuring out ways to make it work, and it's difficult. We've had a really strong ethic of playing all over the world and doing mass coverage of places. "Play every town" was kind of our ethic, and now we have to just be a little more surgical about the way we do things. But it's also given us time to pursue other stuff, which everyone has done. I mean, Joe and I have labels.
Pitchfork: Yeah, your label, Peterbilt-- you're spending more time on that now?
Picciotto: Yeah, a little bit, and we're producing other bands. Brendan's been doing soundtrack work for television. Ian's always got Dischord, which has always been a lot of work. So yeah, there's definitely other stuff that's going on. But I would always rather be working on the band. All that other stuff is stuff I really enjoy doing but I don't consider it... like, I don't want to be a producer. I don't consider that as my life's goal. I certainly don't want to be a record label guy. I just want to play in a band and this is the band I want to play in. One really good thing, particularly for this last record, is that we had a whole lot of time to write. This was the most time we'd spent ever getting the songs arranged and written and I think it really... it was great.
Pitchfork: Some of the songs are pretty old.
Picciotto: Yeah, it's a weird collection of songs. Some of the songs are reallyold. "Epic Problem" is probably ten years old.
Pitchfork: Is that really what the title refers to?
Picciotto: Yeah. Because assembling that song was an insane pain in the ass. In fact, for a long time, there was a moratorium on it. We weren't allowed to introduce the song in practice. If you brought the song back in, everyone would like, you know... we actually just weren't allowed to. It wasn't even allowed to be mentioned.
Pitchfork: How did it come back, then?
Picciotto: Well, there's parts people bring in and we all start laughing. There are probably four or five things that constantly get reintroduced and always elicit a lot of laughter, and that was one of them. But this time, for some reason, we just came up with a new idea for it. The whole verse for that song is different from what we had before, and then suddenly, the chorus. It's like Lego's. I mean, that's really the way that we work. We assemble stockpiles of parts and ideas and then we just kind of just keep clicking them together until something works. There's a song, "Full Disclosure," and there's a song, "Strangelight"; for a long time, they were the same song. But if you listen to the record, they don't sound anything alike. It's hard to imagine that they could ever have been linked, but for a long time they were.
Pitchfork: So one grows too big and then kind of falls apart?
Picciotto: Yeah, or it just never really felt right. We tried playing a version of those two songs live a couple times and it was just a monstrosity, so we went back to the drawing board with it. A lot of the stuff on the [new] record took a lot of revisiting.
Pitchfork: Plus, on this one, you started bringing in more outside people.
Picciotto: Yeah, that was kind of a given because, for one, we knew before we made the record that Jerry Busher was gonna be involved.
Pitchfork: Right, he's been playing live with you guys a bit.
Picciotto: I think he's been playing for about two years. And that basically stemmed out of Brendan and I making demos for the End Hits record on our little eight-track. We were experimenting with overdubbing him playing against himself. We were tying out stuff like him playing a drum track and then speeding up another drum track and having him play against it. We ended up using a lot of those ideas on the album.
Pitchfork: ...towards the end?
Picciotto: Yeah, I can't remember what songs. "Closed Captioned," I think, and "Arpeggiator." There are a lot of drums and it made for interesting rhythmic stuff but we couldn't pull it off live without another drummer. Jerry had been our roadie for so long, he's an incredible musician and such a good friend of everyone in the band. He was such an important element in terms of us being able to function on the road-- he gave the band such new life, and to integrate him into playing music really was just logical.
It started out kind of modestly. We had a really small kit set up for him and he played on a couple of songs, but almost immediately, we just started throwing songs at him and he would start playing on them. Then, when we started writing new songs, we wrote a lot of them with him in mind, with him joining us in the writing process. He doesn't play on everything on the record but he plays on a lot of it. He's now playing drums, percussion, or trumpet. It's like finding a new tool in the toolbox and I don't think it would have worked without his personality and the friendship that he has with everyone in the band. But having Jerry join us has been a seamless transition. Having him play with us in the studio... for the first time we felt relaxed enough to let other people come in and do stuff with us.
Pitchfork: You had [Telegraph Melts cellist] Amy Domingues, [Bikini Kill bassist] Kathi Wilcox, and Bridget Cross [of Unrest and Air Miami].
Picciotto: Yeah, Amy Domingues plays with Jerry in a band called the All Scars.
Pitchfork: She plays with a lot of bands.
Picciotto: Yeah, she plays with everybody. She's incredible. So, there were a couple parts where we thought a cello would be cool. For "Strangelight," Brendan had kind of composed a piano part, and had written out some notes and just kind of gave her a rough idea. She had a lot of ideas on her own, and it was exactly what we wanted. With the vocals, I actually had written the song "Life and Limb" with Bridget in mind singing against me because I've worked with her a lot in the past. I produced some tapes that she did and I've had her sing on projects that I was recording before, like... well, we played in this band together called Miighty Flashlight for a little while.
Pitchfork: Oh, right, with [ex-Rites of Spring bassist] Mike Fellows. Is that post-Unrest?
Picciotto: Yeah, it was after Unrest. We're friends and I've always thought her voice was incredible. I mean, it really records in a way that's like no other vocalist I've ever heard. When she's in front of a mic and you're recording, it's eerie. She really can nail it. When I wrote the song I heard her voice kind of doing the call-and-response part, and it was great that it worked out. She just came in one day and nailed it. Her and Kathi had been playing and trying to write music together for a while, and I knew their voices would sound good together so they came in and did the other song.
Pitchfork: What made you start bringing the clarinet out? Was that around In on the Kill Taker or does it go farther back? Because I think I remember seeing it live around then.
Picciotto: Well, that's actually because of Jerry Busher. He worked in a music store down in Dupont Circle that sold instruments, and when I went in and visited him one day, he said a clarinet had come in and he gave me a serious discount so I picked it up. I was just curious about it.
Pitchfork: Had you played before?
Picciotto: No, I still can't play it. I don't have any idea what I'm doing. He gave me a fingering chart and the instrument and then showed me how to do the reeds and I tried to teach myself how to play it. Basically, it's just a sound for me. I mean, I appreciate the instrument and I appreciate people who can play it, but I'm not trying to fool anybody.
Pitchfork: But it was a good texture?
Picciotto: Yeah, that's the thing. It ended up sounding really cool. In that song, "Version," it sounded really awesome and there's some places it just kind of worked. It's an amazing instrument, I just find it really complicated. I'm trying to teach myself piano right now.
Pitchfork: Do you think that's something you'd like to bring in? You've mentioned how you liked "I'm So Tired."
Picciotto: Yeah.
Pitchfork: Is there a reason that that type of song has never made it to a proper album yet?
Picciotto: Ian and Brendan are both really, really good piano players and they've played piano in the past. In fact, Ian played some piano as far back as "Joe #1," one of our earliest songs. So there's been piano over the years. The main thing I think is that we've never had a piano in our practice space and when we did "I'm So Tired," it just happened to be that there was a piano in the place were recording and it kind of just came together. I'm just trying to teach myself because I'm curious about it. We're all self-taught to a certain degree and I feel like, since I've got some time now, I might as well sit down and try to figure it out. I find it really difficult. I find most instruments really difficult, but the piano-- there's something so unforgiving about it. Same thing with bass. I have trouble with bass, too, because there's a kind of exactitude you have to have. Whereas, I'm a really sloppy guitar player. The guitar gives you a lot of space to cover for yourself, but there's not a lot of room for that on piano.
Pitchfork: So you're pretty much self-taught on guitar?
Picciotto: Mm-hmm. I took a couple lessons after school.
Pitchfork: After high school, or...?
Picciotto: No, in elementary school, there was a circle of us trying to play "Jet Plane" and they wrote down some chords for me. But after that, I had an acoustic guitar that my parents got me and I just knew a few chords and that was about it. I never really thought about being a guitarist until punk rock happened and really until I met Brendan and started playing with other people.
Pitchfork: That was pretty much "the moment"?
Picciotto: Yeah.
Pitchfork: You were going to shows before then, right?
Picciotto: Yeah, I started going to shows when I was around thirteen and then other people my age started forming bands and that's what the conversation was-- the communication was people forming groups. I was onstage playing clubs long before I had any real reason to be. I mean, I could barely play, but that was what was so cool about it. There was like this kind of...
Pitchfork: Energy?
Picciotto: Yeah, that was what the currency was at the time. It was making music. That's why I always tell people that if you want to learn an instrument, the best way to do it is to force yourself into a situation with other people, as opposed to waiting till you've honed your craft on your own to do something. Because for me, it's about the interaction between people in a room when you're practicing-- particularly when you're really young and there's an energy and freshness to everything and you learn really quickly. You end up teaching each other stuff and it's an amazing... for me, it was an amazing phenomenon. I went from someone who was, like, super clumsily playing an acoustic in his room to playing concerts.
Pitchfork: Well, I'd say you guys are one of the tightest bands around that I can think of.
Picciotto: We're not, actually.
Pitchfork: Seriously? It comes across that way.
Picciotto: We fake it. I mean, we know each other really well. We're actually incredibly sloppy, but the thing is we've honed ESP. We know where we're all going with each other and I think that's what makes it really unified... and that's also why the band can't function without all four of us. It's not like a cog you can replace. It's much more than that.
Pitchfork: Yeah, you play without set lists. Is part of the communication that goes on knowing what you're gonna do next? You don't even talk about what you'll be playing each night?
Picciotto: Yeah, we have signals and we have... we have tons of stuff.
Pitchfork: Maybe what you've played the night before you wouldn't want to repeat as much?
Picciotto: Alternating between the vocalists is kind of a template, and right before we go onstage, we pick the first song. So, let's say, "Alright, we're gonna start with 'Break'-- we know Ian's going to sing that, so we know that I'm gonna sing the second one, and people should be paying attention to what I'm doing." And then some songs... like "Number 5" has a hand signal; "Oh" has a hand signal. You know, it's just a weird language that we've developed.
Pitchfork: You've played so many times live.
Picciotto: But that doesn't mean that everyone doesn't have to be paying constant attention. Eye contact and paying attention is what keeps us fresh on stage. I think a lot of bands play the same set list every night, and with that, there's something kind of automatic that develops. Not that they're not great, but you can kind of disappear in your head a little bit. But we really can't because you don't know what's gonna happen and you don't know what the next guy's gonna pull out of his hat to play. There's just this constant edginess to everything because you're really trying to keep it together. There's times where we'll start stuff and one of the guys doesn't know what's going on and we have to cover for him. But the songs have built-in safety nets. There's a lot of room to improvise and there's a lot of room to stretch the songs out, so it's almost like... we've developed a way to cover for each other.
Pitchfork: And all of this is part of why you guys have been able to play so long? Does that make it easier to play night after night after night?
Picciotto: Yeah, but I mean, at this point, we haven't played together live, I think, in six months. So it's gonna take us a while to get our legs back.
Pitchfork: Did you tour after the Fort Reno show last year?
Picciotto: I can't remember what we've done recently. I think it might have been the last show we played but I don't even know. We're in a bit of a bind right now because we actually don't have a practice space. It's one of those ironic things-- we've been together for 15 years but we actually don't have a place to practice.
Pitchfork: What have you used, basements?
Picciotto: We started in the Dischord basement-- Ian's house-- then we moved to my parents' basement for many, many years. And then, most recently we were in Joe's basement, but he just had his kid and turned his basement kind of into an apartment so we had to move out of there. Now someone has to take pity on us and find us a place cause D.C.'s tough, man. The real estate here is just demonic. Our ideal is to have a space where we can set up our eight-track and really just live in there. We've never really had a space like that, so that's our big mission right now-- to find one.
Pitchfork: The house in Connecticut was kind of like that for short periods of time, wasn't it?
Picciotto: That's a house that I believe belongs to Ian's grandparents and we were just trying to get away from town and sequester ourselves there. But that's not really an option anymore-- it's really far away.
Pitchfork: In Instrument, it seems like those were just great times.
Picciotto: Oh man, it was awesome. We would set up in the living room, wake up, have breakfast, play for four hours, go into town, go to the batting cages-- it's a small town, there's nothing going on-- so we'd go to the batting cages, buy some more food, cook dinner, and then play all night. We had our eight-track set up and all the songs for In on the Kill Taker and Red Medicine were kind of crafted in that space. To me, that's like the holy grail. I just really wish we had something like that. With the economic setup that we have as a band, everything is so tight, it's not like we can afford to have a huge warehouse or something. So our means are limited a little bit, but I think we'll find something. It's just a matter of time.
Pitchfork: Why did you guys start playing with two guitars?
Picciotto: Well, Rites of Spring, had two guitars and Minor Threat actually had two guitars for a while-- not the whole time. Faith had two guitars. So there was a precedent for it for sure, but basically, the band formed in installments, like, you know, geologic layers. It started with Ian and Joe playing together for like a year in their basement and they had many different drummers sitting in with them. Brendan and I were in a band called Happy Go Licky, which was basically the same four guys as Rites of Spring with a different name. We lived around the corner from them and we obviously all knew each other, but Brendan started sitting in with them while their other drummer was out of town. At some point, Brendan decided he was gonna join the band right around the time that Happy Go Licky was sort of falling apart.
There was a brief period at the end of 1987 where both bands existed-- there was Happy Go Licky and Fugazi, and Brendan was in both, but I wasn't in Fugazi. They played, I think, one show without me in which they were a three piece, and I was watching from the audience. When Happy Go Licky broke up, I kind of freaked out and went on a kind of road journey and tried to figure out what I was gonna do with my life. Those guys had offered a space for me in the band-- I mean, Fugazi started as a very open minded concept, all kinds of different people would get on stage with them. They had people playing trumpet or dancing or playing drums with them.
Pitchfork: It's just that everyone was friends?
Picciotto: Yeah, it was because everyone was friends, and I think Ian, for a long time, had had a concept where he wanted to be inclusive rather than a band that was clearly delineated by its members. There was an openness where people could feel free to come up and sing with the band. I mean, all kinds of people would come up and play with the group. There were core songs and Ian was the main voice when the band first started, but I think the idea was that it would be kind of loose, and that was the spirit in which they asked me to kind of be in the band a little bit. Like, I ended up singing this song "Break In" with them singing lead, and then there's almost kind of like this Flavor Flav role where I would sing backups and kind of just fuck around on stage.
Pitchfork: "Break In"-- was that early?
Picciotto: Yeah, "Break In" was really early. At a certain point, our sound guy, Joey P., took me aside and said, "Look, if you're gonna be in this band, develop your role or get serious about it to some degree." Around the time the band started touring is when we kind of shut the door in terms of that open interaction and were like, "If we're gonna be a band, we're gonna really try to see if we can make it work with the four of us."
They had asked me if I wanted to play guitar, but initially, I couldn't. In those early songs that Ian had written with Joe, there was this kind of rhythmic foundation that I couldn't understand how to play with. It was just so different from what I was used to playing. It seemed really complete to me, and so I felt like there wasn't necessarily room for another guitar. We toured for another year and a half with me just as a singer and backup vocalist and the one guitar. But at a certain point, I was getting very frustrated. I just didn't feel like I was able to contribute musically enough to the band. I definitely had a role on stage and I had a role singing-wise, but I just kind of felt like, shit, I wanted to write some songs and I missed playing guitar. I'd always been a guitar player. So I think the first song I started writing with them was "Sieve-Fisted Find," which I wrote with Joe and Brendan. From then on, we developed a new role-- Ian and I just needed to get familiar with each other and we found a way to play together. Now it seems obvious.
Pitchfork: How long have you been running Peterbilt?
Picciotto: It's been around since 1987. I started it when Happy Go Licky broke up to put out some live stuff that Happy Go Licky had recorded. I feel funny even talking about the label, because business-wise, it barely exists. I get motivated at certain points if there's something I really want to release. Like, I really wanted Happy Go Licky to have a record out so I created the label and I pressed a few copies and sold them. But my ambitions have never been to keep things in stock a lot. There are certain things that I think really needed to come out. One, there's a Deadline record that I released, which was Brendan's first band. They were the greatest. They were the band that I first started hanging out with, and I loved their songs, and I thought that people should hear this tape that had never come out.
The thing I've done most recently is this project run by Mick Barr from the band Orthrelm, called Octis. Again, he had this tape that no one was releasing and the guitar playing on it was just so extreme that I thought people should hear it. This was a side project of his, and I don't want to do releases with functioning bands who are interested in promotion because I can't do all that stuff right now. I don't have the time or the infrastructure to be a major player for people like that. For me, it's more just about making items that I think are cool and interesting and possibly have a limited audience but should be heard.
Pitchfork: I see you out a lot at shows. Do you pay a lot of attention to what's going on in music?
Picciotto: I don't think there's been a time in my life since I was thirteen years old where I wasn't going to as many shows as I could, just because, to me, it's not like punching the clock. It's like going to a museum every day. I really just enjoy music and I do think that, when you're young and you first start going to shows, there's kind of an electricity to that experience.
Pitchfork: Yeah, the newness of it kind of wears off over time.
Picciotto: Right, but then there's always that time where you get totally surprised and blown away. It's like this band Orthrelm-- seeing them play live, to me, is as exciting as anything, because I watch them play and am wondering, "How are they communicating? How are they making this music that's so amazing?" I mean, that's the way I felt when I saw the Bad Brains or the Cramps or anything else-- just the sense of amazement. Because that's just it, music's a mystery. There's something that happens when people make music. There's an element to it when it's good that's just inexplicable, and that's why you have to experience it in person. You can't just read about it.
Pitchfork: Yeah, it's hard for me to read Dance of Days because it makes me want to just go back and be a part of all these things and be seeing all the shows when these bands were first starting out. Especially the Bad Brains section-- it sounded like a fantastic time to be going to shows in the basements.
Picciotto: I really think they impacted anyone who saw them play live. They created a new template. I think a lot of punk rock had this stance that it was ironic or informed by a reaction against something else. Bad Brains weren't a reaction against anything. They weren't ironic; they were messianic. They were the action, and there was no reaction to what they were doing. Their shows were just incredible. Really, really incredible.
Pitchfork: Do you think that they inspired a lot of bands just to get out there and do it?
Picciotto: I do think that there was something particular to that time. A lot of the bands had formed-- like Faith, Minor Threat... I mean, you're talking about high school kids, and there's a purity to it, because when you're that young, you're not considering it as a career and you're not considering it as this major international statement. It was really about a small community. I think a lot of times, really interesting things happen when people don't realize the impact of what they're doing, that it's really just a shared communication among friends or a limited audience.
And then, obviously, the bands had an enormous impact and the repercussions were huge. But that wasn't the intent, you know? The intent was just to make sounds and just to create something-- it was really unselfconscious. It's so different now. Back then, it really was like terrorist cells. The information was so hard to come by. You'd get a Touch and Go fanzine form the midwest and, you know, it was like eight stapled pages and you'd hold onto it for months and you'd just read it and re-read it. It's really different now with things like the web where there's an ease to the discovery of things. In a way, it's great and there's obviously really positive aspects of that, but it's just very different.
Pitchfork: How does it feel to be a major international statement?
Picciotto: I never think about it in terms like that. I mean, I have a very realistic perception of what our band is. Particularly now, as we haven't played in six months. I can't and I don't sense any kind of big deal. For me, it's all about the actual activity, like getting together and practicing, writing the songs...
Pitchfork: With the improv sessions on Instrument kind of coming out... that's what those mostly are, backing tracks from End Hits, right?
Picciotto: Yeah, those are demos and some of them are from that Guilford house where we just were playing together and ideas would come out loosely.
Pitchfork: Did listening to that change your idea of what you could put on an album or change your idea of what would work?
Picciotto: Well, with Red Medicine, we cut little segue pieces between the songs that we'd taken from four-tracks and practice tapes. I thought that was great because I loved listening to the stuff. I think a lot of times, our records were worried to death.
Pitchfork: But it was more fun.
Picciotto: Well, it's not really fun. I mean, it is fun, I guess. But just the looseness of it was what appealed to me. It just didn't feel so labored and that's why I like the Instrument soundtrack. I feel like it's the most kicked back and least agonized over. It's difficult for us to listen to this stuff because we just play so much live. I think we feel the songs differently than when we have to listen to the studio versions. But something about that practice stuff just feels kind of less agonized.
Pitchfork: You've recorded all your live shows since the early 90s?
Picciotto: Yeah.
Pitchfork: Have you considered releasing any more of them?
Picciotto: We talk about that a lot-- different ways we could make that stuff available. And I think we should soon, because we're realizing that DAT tapes are pretty unreliable in terms of storage. DATs aren't a good way to archive material. They're pretty unreliable with dropouts.
Pitchfork: But at the time everyone thought that would be the way to go.
Picciotto: The stuff is fucked. When you have a mistake on them and all your program numbers start getting scrambled and all this shit starts happening, it's a nightmare. That's the format that we have all these shows on now. I mean, they haven't been played at all so they're probably fine. But eventually something will happen. It's just one of those things like, we always will tend to favor working on new material rather than going back and working through all that stuff.
Pitchfork: You do have all this downtime now.
Picciotto: Yeah, there is some downtime now and there's sure to be more downtime to come.
Pitchfork: The Internet would be a great way to do it. You said once that you'd love for someone to be able to send in, "I was at this show," and be able to get a copy of it.
Picciotto: I would love the stuff to go out and be really reliable and not glitchy and funky sounding. Once it becomes kind of a ubiquitous technology and everyone has it, then I think we definitely will do that. That would certainly be the easiest way to do it. It would be better than having to sit around and be burning CDs for everyone. But that's also an option-- like make just really a generic sleeve and have people send in for the shows. I just think that's a cool idea. I mean, the tapes, I gotta say, they vary in quality-- not just in terms of our performance but in terms of the sound quality of them.
Pitchfork: Are they all soundboard recordings?
Picciotto: We've had different soundmen who've had different tactics for doing it but they've generally involved some live miking and parts of a board feed. Some of them sound great and are really well put together. It just kind of depends on the venue and the room and how the show went. We'd have to charge a nominal fee for them but I like the idea that-- yeah, just like "I was at that gig" and it would be cool to hear some of the raps or some of the stuff that goes on. Eventually, it will happen.
Pitchfork: I'm glad your "Ice Cream-Eating Motherfucker" speech from Fort Reno made it onto Instrument. I remember that show.
Picciotto: You were at that gig? I tell you, that Fort Reno thing has been a blessing. I mean, when we first started doing them...
Pitchfork: Yeah, when did you start? Do you know the evolution of that?
Picciotto: Well, Fort Reno's been around since the 70s.
Pitchfork: The shows going on there?
Picciotto: Yeah, they've been there forever-- since I was a kid. In fact, Brendan met his bandmates in Deadline hanging out at Fort Reno. It's just a hangout. I can't remember if we did it the very first year that Fugazi was together but pretty quickly, we started playing them. Initially, people would always be like, "Aww, fuck, we should do this Fort Reno show, but..." The logistics of the sound there are so funky, and there's those radio towers, and there's all this hassle involved with it.
Pitchfork: And it rains every other year.
Picciotto: And it rains every other year. But it just became kind of a tradition. We just ended up doing it. And it's cool 'cause it's free, and a lot of people, you know, you see them there. You don't see them all year, and then you see them at Fort Reno and it's cool. I think it's an awesome tradition in this town.
Pitchfork: Most of the clubs have moved or changed.
Picciotto: I mean, the great clubs from that era like D.C. Space, the original 9:30 club, even now the Wilson Center, are all gone now.
Pitchfork: The new Black Cat's nice. The backstage is nice to have as an actual venue now.
Picciotto: Oh yeah. Oh, there's great clubs here now. I mean there's, like... there's a lot of stuff in Virginia. There's also still a really strong tradition of house parties and house events, which I think is great. A lot of the early shows-- particularly the early Bad Brains shows-- were done in apartment buildings, row houses. It's cool that that's still going on.
Thanks to Utopia for the picture of Guy, and to Shawn Scallen for taking it.
