"Fugazi does not arrange interviews in advance. Go to the soundcheck and maybe the band will do an interview."

This was the rather terse reply from Dischord Records to our initial inquiry. So Sonny and I made our way to The Grind Skatepark in Sacto after an afternoon at the Noise Festival at the Guild Theater. We didn't know what to expect. This is what we got. 45 minutes of Ian MacKaye's time. We didn't really interview him, he just talked and we listened. I have to mention that not only is Ian the undisputed leader of the punk DIY ethic and no-compromise way of doing things, but he is also a true gentleman who was not only gracious with his time, but a funny and witty person.

-John Botch

Skateboarding:

"This is weird. (The scene at the Grind) For me, when I skate, music works very well playing in the background, but when I'm playing it seems kind of trivialized when people skate and are not paying attention."

"I started skating when I was thirteen. In 1974 I moved to California from Washington DC for about nine months. My dad had a fellowship at Stanford down in Palo Alto and at the time I was more of a BMXer. I started BMXing in Washington, but when I came to California, I found out they had crossbars and all sorts of pads on their bikes. It was such a revelation to me. At home we were modifying our Schwinn Stingrays by taking everything off and experimenting with heavy gauge spokes on our wheels. We also had real primitive tracks and jumps to ride on. After moving to California, I discovered this whole crazy BMX thing. I spent a lot of time building tracks with berms in these lots that were on a hill, which made it easy to go one way but much harder the other. Out here, the soil is very dry so it was hard to make nice jumps. We would build a small jump and dig out the other side so we would have two different approaches which was really fun. Then I came back to Washington and people were skating, using these plastic boards. We used to do this thing called dog-fighting where two people rode down a hill together and tried to knock each other off their skateboards. We also used to do catamarans, that's two people sitting on their boards facing each other and intertwining their legs. You steered by leaning back and forth."

"The first time I saw a skateboarder was in some magazine, so me and my friend John Hargadon started skating along with my brother and a couple of other kids. Then there was this other kid who I had met just before I went to California. He was this cool guy who had a BB gun. When I was out of town for nine months, something bad went down between him and my old friends, my close friends. So I came back and he was out basically beating their ass and stuff. I was getting my ass beaten by him too. As it turned out he also skated and just because of the fact that we skated, we became friends. That was Henry (Rollins). So I knew Henry when we were eleven years old. Our friendship from the very beginning was like, 'OK he has the BB gun, he had the Cheech and Chong records.'"

Sonny: So he was angry even then?

"Yeah, he was a tough kid man. I would be hanging with my friend John and we'd see Henry coming up the street and Henry was after John so we would run, cause he was scary. But when we were skating, Henry and us, we became really close friends. Then we formed a team, Team Sahara in 1976. I still have the T-shirts. Our colors were black and gold and we were all inner-city Washington D.C. kids. Chevy Chase was a neighborhood up the street and kids up there were skating at the same time on their own ramps and we met up with them. That's when we started jumping into pools. We had been building ramps for a while. At first, just one shot deals with one sheet of plywood, then we got two. Then those kids were makings ones with four. These ramps were only four feet wide so it was very scary. So we started getting really busy building ramps and stealing a lot of plywood and that kind of stuff. We built our own little skatepark in an abandoned police station down in Georgetown called cell block 19 and we built all these different kinds of ramps. We discovered how to make curved ramps by wedging a board up against a brick wall and nailing it down to something heavy and we'd see how many bricks we could get up the wall. That was a really cool little park. Meanwhile up in Bethesda, which is a richer suburb, there was this skate shop called The F & R Sunshine House and they had their team. They were these suburban kids who were good skaters. We'd go to contests and there would be other teams from Ocean City and all these little sponsored teams and Team Sahara, which wasn't sponsored by anybody, just a bunch of city kids. But we were good. We had a good team, we had a couple of really good skaters, a couple of really good free-stylers, Henry was a good free-styler. I wasn't that great of a skater, I never won contests. Maybe one time I won a slalom, but we were always out there and we had good presence and everyone was scared of us cause we were the city kids. At the time, it was like, "D.C." Nobody could believe we skated there much less lived there. So what happened was Finnegan and Roberts (The F & R from the Sunshine House) actually came to us and said we want you to join our team and we're like 'no way'. I said if you want to sponsor us and give us discounts, we'll put F&R on our Team Sahara T-shirt. But we don't want to be on F&R, we're Team Sahara and that's it.

I kept on skating until I got into punk. It's funny, I felt punk and skating didn't have anything to do with each other. I was really into skating then I started getting into punk and I was like, "enough skating". And then the next thing I know, Tony Alva cuts his hair and Jay Adams cuts his hair and all these guys were going punk. Then I got back into it and skated a lot. I don't have my board with me to skate now, but I'll still ride at home now and then. It kinda sucks; to me skating is a communal thing and I don't have any friends who skate at all. Most of my friends who did skate don't skate anymore or they moved away. If I go skating, I go by myself and it's kinda bleak. When you're by yourself, you stop and think 'whatever', where as when you're with a friend, you can talk about shit and take a break. It's a real communal thing and meditative but for me, being alone, it sometimes makes me feel like I'm wasting my time."

"There's a school yard in Washington that we used to drive by every day and there was a perfect cement bank about 4 or 5 ft. high, real mellow. But there was this grass field only 3 ft. in front of it, so we were like 'if they would only pave that shit that would be great!' About four years ago, I drove by and it was paved. I fucking pulled right over and got out and looked at it and I couldn't believe it. I went and got my board and came back up. I had my dog with me and my board and came by myself. I got there and there were these two kids with their small boards and skinny wheels and I have my ten inch wide board and about thirty inches long, my big fat fuckin' 80's deck. I don't know if you've noticed but, on the cover of the Minor Threat single, Salad Days, there's a picture with a skateboard in the corner and it has a Minor Threat sheep spray-painted on the grip tape. I still have that same skateboard. So I get to the park and those two kids are skating and I'm like 'ah shit somebody's already here', but I thought 'fuck that, I came all the way over here to skate'. They're doing ollies and stuff and I don't ollie. I have this primitive version of the ollie before ollies were invented. It's this kick I used to do, but I do mostly slides and stuff like that. So these kids are staring at me and I flashback to '78 or '79 when me and Henry were skating this bank and this guy comes over and is like 'hey man I'm a skateboarder', and he's like barefoot and doin' all these old school tricks, and it's funny cause I'm that guy now. These kids are looking at me like what the fuck is this guy's style, his board is so fat. I know how ruthless skaters can be, but I can give a fuck. Then they kind of whisper `Hey he's that guy in that band..'

I try to be shameless in life I think that's really the ticket. I know even hanging for a few seconds you feel that vibe and you get snaked. What a fucked up feeling that is. I can remember, we used to go to the skate park and these kids used to snake. It was a really dangerous approach cause you had to come off this hill before you could drop into the pool. They would come up behind you and snake in front and it was really fucked because they would slam you. They were these locals from Alexandria and they would do this shit and we would get into the push and the shove. We were bad guys too. But I love skating and like I said, I wasn't that great of a skater. I was a very moderate skater. I'm sad for the times in my life when I got caught up with other people and didn't keep going. There were some moments when I can remember doin' some incredible backside carves totally edging along the coping and every time I'd do it, just hitting that same line and totally carving right out of the fucking pool. I would do that for an hour and somebody would say you're insane and I thought about it, but man it's so easy. Then I would think about it some more, 'man how did I do that?', and psych myself out. To this day, and I don't skate a lot now, I still will wake up in the morning, and during this little period of time between being dead asleep and actually getting up, while I'm lying in bed, I'll just dream about riding along the tiles of a pool. I think skating was a really super important part of my life. Mostly because it gave me yet another extremely good opportunity to redefine the world that I lived in. Most people when they walk down the street they see the sidewalk and the street, they see a wall, and a hill up against a parking lot or something, but from my point of view, and all skaters points of view, like you see everything different, concrete is a whole different language to you. Even when I'm driving today its like subliminal and I see a little hill I think that looks pretty sweet. It just gave me an opportunity to redefine the world I lived in and that process of redefinition can actually parlay itself into any area of life. Its about reassessing what's given and making it work for you, that's what skating is all about. It's also making something out of nothing. You got a street and and a skateboard-make something out of it. Go steal a bunch of traffic cones and slalom. We also had our own little company called DC Skates and we made boards, terrible boards though. My favorite board was the speedboard. It was narrow in the front and back with a wide belly so you could kneel in the middle. It had really wide trucks for maximum stability. We would have the trucks tight to keep them from wobbling with these four inch wide Sims wheels. We would downhill a lot, that was really fun. You'd have to do it late at night to avoid some really hairy accidents."

John: Have you ever snowboarded?

"No, I never have. Everybody tells me I should definitely do it and that I'd be a total natural for that because I can skate. Didn't you guys interview Alva?"

John: Yeah, last summer.

"OK, I remember reading that, he's an interesting guy. He was a really big hero to me and Henry and all the kids in DC. I can remember when I met him back in 1980, he was a part of the insane total punk gang, and his brother Mark Alva, totally getting into these crazy fights. He was a HB (Huntington Beach) kid at the time. As a matter of fact, the first time I met Jay Adams I was playing in Minor Threat and we were playing at a place called Dancing Waters in San Pedro. I'm playing and there were all these kids in the front screaming and I fall down and this one guy was screaming along with the song and I put the mic up to him and he just bites me on the arm. 'Motherfucker!' BAM! I gave him a little crack, you know. That was Jay Adams. He was like 'I fuckin' love you!' Jay Adams was insane."

Minor Threat:

"We broke up in 1983. It was time to stop, we didn't like each other enough. That's the thing. It's like a union, the four of us are working on something, and you're always going to have tension, but it's always a matter of the balance. When is it not worth the trouble or when is it not productive? We just didn't agree as a band of what to do with the band. Those guys wanted to get a manager, they wanted to consider signing contracts, and I just didn't want to do any of that stuff. They were also all really into U2 and were writing a lot of songs that sounded like U2. Keep in mind this was 1983, before U2 was really mega-mega, but it was a very bad sign. I was 'naw, I can't go there', and they were like, 'well we have to go there'. Actually I have some really great practice tapes with about 7 minutes of music and about 83 minutes of arguing. Well, you know this band, Fugazi, doesn't argue that much, cause we all have been in so many fucking bands that we know about it , we just know."

Sonny: I like the Minor Threat song, Small Man, Big Mouth. Is that about any one person?

"Almost all the songs are inspired by somebody or some action. Small Man, Big Mouth was initially inspired by this kid at my high school. I went to public school in DC and they were tough schools. It was this one kid who was such a little prick, almost a midget, and he would come to you with all his big friends and fuck with you. You know get in your face and say, 'What you gonna do.'"

John: What were your expectations for Dischord when you started it?

"I didn't expect it to be anything, I just wanted to cut my friends records, actually I still do, it's weird I never thought it would be still going. I think about it when I'm driving, I do all the driving, the whole time, just thinking about all these different kinds of things. It's weird to be here. I was in Sacramento in '83 with Minor Threat and it was one of the weirdest shows of all time. I remember we were playing and I think 7 Seconds opened for us and I remember we were having a problem because the P.A. guy was being a total fucking prick, and treating us very poorly. It made me mad because we're paying for the P.A. and we're headlining and we're the reason people come out to see the show and we're the guys paying him and he's treating us like a bunch of little assholes. He kept saying `dude if you don't like it, you don't have to use the P.A.' So I was like OK, you're fucking with the wrong guy here, cause he was fuckin with me. So right before we went on, I went up to him and told him, `Get your P.A. off the stage.' And he was like, what? `Get your P.A. off the stage. All night you've been threatening me about not using your P.A. I'm not going to even fucking touch your P.A. I don't want it anywhere near me.' He was like `Aw, come on you gotta use a P.A.' `I'm not using the P.A., not going to happen.' Then this big argument broke out and he's like you have to use the P.A. `I'm not going to use it, you're a fucking asshole and you've been threatening me so Fuck You! Your P.A. is swill as far as I'm concerned.' So I agreed to leave the actual stacks, but we covered them with curtains, and all the mics and the wires were off the stage, and I did the whole show with no P.A. I had to do the show with no mic. People were kind of bummed. I said to them there's no P.A. because the P.A. guy is a dick and he thinks he can threaten us, so here's the music, I'll be singing, but you motherfuckers sing too."

Fugazi:

"Fugazi is a military slang word from the Vietnam era meaning fucked up situation. I was reading a book called "Nam" by Mark Baker. It's a book of reflections of Vietnam veterans and at one point, this guy said everything was Fugazi. I looked it up in the glossary and it said, 'fucked up situation'. It was right at the point when we were getting ready to do our first show and I was desperately trying to come up with a name, anything other than Ian's New Band. It was really important for me and the band to not be 'Ian's New Band'. We all have an equal sharing part."

"Minor Threat was a good band and I have no regrets about that band. I also have no regrets about breaking up. I knew right then and there that we could stay together and it would totally undermine the impact of the band. Some people tell me, 'you should do another show.' I'm 33. If the four of us got on stage again, it would be a fucking joke. You don't want to fuck things up; don't let nostalgia fuck with the memories. Memories are awesome. Things that happened are important, but they're just there to be fucking thought about. They're not there to be recreated. They can't be recreated because the context is so completely different.

Sonny: Do you have a family?

"Yeah, my brother just pulled up (A van pulls up to the scrappy lot behind the skatepark). My brother is in the opening band, The Warmers. I got three sisters and a brother and my parents. Do you mean my own family?"

Sonny: Yeah.

"No, I don't have any kids,. Not only do I not have any kids, I don't have any nieces, nephews, in-laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, or grandparents. I have a mom, a dad, three sisters and a brother."

Sonny: Are you guys pretty tight?

"My brother, Alec, and my sister, Amanda, both work for me at Dischord. The actual Beecher St. address is my parents house. That's where I was living when I started the label. The Dischord office is in Arlington, a suburb of Washington DC"

Sonny: So how do you go about writing songs for Fugazi? Is it different than how it used to be in Minor Threat?

"Totally"

Sonny: So how is it now?

"There's really no formula. The four of us sit in a room and throw out ideas until we come up with something interesting. In the beginning of Fugazi, I was coming up with ideas and presenting them to Brendan and Joe. Guy wasn't in the original Fugazi. We were a three piece. The first two or three shows we played as a three piece."

Sonny: 13 Songs was the first record?

"Yeah, but that came out a year after we formed. One of the first programs of this band was to tour like hell with no release because as soon as we'd put out a release, it would become the new 'Minor Threat'. People would always say something about the fact that I was in Minor Threat. We knew that. But if we were able to tour and spend a lot time together, we would actually develop as a band so we would be able to withstand the critique that comes along with that."

John: So what kind of music do you listen to?

"You don't even want to know."

Sonny: Yeah, we're curious.

"I don't listen to current rock at all. Me personally I listen to a lot of sixties punk, like garage rock. I listen to early '80s punk, reggae, and Hendrix. I'm a big Hendrix fan particularly his later era live stuff. We listen to a lot of music, Brendan is into jazz. What we don't listen to is current stuff. These bands that I find playing aren't that interesting. Some are, but most aren't. What's interesting (to me) about music, is never gonna be how palatable it is or crafty or business savvy. What I find interesting is music that comes from a result of having no choice but to create something totally unique or weird, or has some undeniable spirit. When somebody plays music with such a passion, no matter what it sounds like, I don't care what they play, if they play it in a way as if they have no other choice, that to me is what's interesting. When people get involved in business, a lot of times the whole language about that music changes from where they had no choice in the matter into what's a good business deal."

At this point we hear the band beginning to soundcheck.

"Well, I better get going. If you've got any more questions, we can talk later."

John: Nah, that's cool, I think we've got plenty. Thanks a lot for your time and the interview.

"Yeah, it was fun. Not really an interview really, more like a chat. A little chat. I like that."