By Chris Nelson

Whether it was simple luck or divine providence that ensured my interview with Fugazi singer/guitarist Guy Picciotto wasn't quashed by a faulty cruise control and the lawsuit it spawned, I'm not sure.
Of course, the larger question is which of the two prevented Picciotto himself from being quashed when his 1989 Mercury Grand Marquis lunged from a standstill to 60-mph cruise control last year. Picciotto was waiting in the car while a friend ran into a nearby store when, without warning, the vehicle leapt from the curb and barreled into a nearby delivery truck, prompting the suit from the truck's owner.
The night before our interview, Picciotto received a message from his lawyer that he would be required to be present the following morning for a deposition related to the suit (at the same time our meeting was scheduled to take place). He didn't learn that his testimony had been rescheduled until after he'd spent all night replaying the accident in his head.
When I meet him the next morning, Picciotto doesn't look tired so much as consumed -- not just by the lawsuit, but by the innumerable band affairs that seem to keep all four members of Fugazi busy around the clock.

Picciotto: "We're in a really odd position as a group. On one hand we have a certain renown and we sell a certain number of records. At the same time, I don't think people understand that the way the band operates is really, really underground."

Picciotto and I walk at a decent clip from the Woodley Park Metro station over to Washington, D.C.'s Walter C. Pierce Park, north of the bohemian Adams Morgan neighborhood, and not far from Picciotto's home. He's wearing a black leather sport jacket, maroon shirt and brown corduroys, and his black hair, typically scruffy, is beginning to show some gray. It's a fantastically sunny day in April, and the people making their way through the park around lunchtime are moving at a leisurely pace.
But as we sit down at a picnic table with a couple of bottles of juice, Picciotto and I absorb none of the relaxed vibe. That's not to say that Picciotto is preoccupied when we talk about End Hits, Fugazi's sixth album and first in three years, but just that the specter of the band's hectic schedule looms perpetually on the horizon. Picciotto is dead-serious when he says the band's m.o. is strictly underground.
Over the past 11 years, the group -- Picciotto, singer/guitarist Ian MacKaye, bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty -- has toured on five of the seven continents and has released five albums (each of which has sold in the neighborhood of 200,000 copies). While those numbers are nowhere near the multimillion units pushed by bands such as Pearl Jam and R.E.M., Fugazi employ none of the star-machine infrastructure that eases the pressure on those bands.
The group is self-managed, self-produced and self-booked. Fugazi answer reams of fan mail themselves, and members conduct countless interviews, the vast majority with small fanzines. Their entourage consists of one soundman and one roadie, and they typically practice between four and five hours a day. And though they've been approached by every major label under the sun, Fugazi have continued to release their albums on the Dischord label that MacKaye co-founded in 1980.

Picciotto: It's not really stressful, it's just a lot of work, especially for Ian. The greater stress is when you start giving up your responsibilities.

Fugazi command the same respect afforded bands such as Pearl Jam and R.E.M., not simply because of their fierce independence, but because during the past decade they've forged a challenging and engaging brand of political punk that is utterly their own. While their roots lie in Washington's early '80s harDCore scene, Fugazi have taken the blunt energy of that era and channeled it into amazingly complex song structures that draw from jazz and experimental rock in addition to punk. Although in the past the band has drawn some deserved barbs for its didacticism, with End Hits, the lyrics have ventured into delicate and detailed storytelling, limning tales of home and introspection alongside swings at a world turned numb with corporatization. Fugazi's personal lives of late have been as hectic as their band operations, which is largely the reason that three years slipped by between Red Medicine and the new album, and one of the causes behind the band's current, harried state. Two years ago, while touring in Australia, MacKaye contracted a severe case of pneumonia that set the band's live and studio schedules back by several months. Then, during his recuperation period, Canty announced he was getting married; a son, Asa, soon followed. In April, Lally, too, was married. Canty's new role as an active dad and MacKaye's regimen for readying the album and preparing for a short May tour mean that I have to interview them by phone (Lally is left to concentrate on being a newlywed).
It's a bit ironic that my talk with Picciotto is nearly blown, however indirectly, by a defective cruise control; after all, Fugazi have never once set their gears on auto-pilot. While many fans presume that the band's all-encompassing D.I.Y. ethic provides a foundation of strength for Fugazi, Picciotto tells me that maintaining a band of "heavy, heavy control freaks" is no cakewalk.

Picciotto: Psychologically, the band is a very fragile setup. We really, really take this shit seriously. When things start slipping out of our control, we get neurotic about it, which impinges on what we want to do.

Picciotto and I never touch on the question of whether he walked away from the cruise control accident thanks to luck or providence. Our talk is all music, all business. It seems Fugazi's work is never done.
IAN MACKAYE IS "PICKLED"
For a guy who seems to overextend himself as a matter of course, MacKaye returns phone calls with amazing speed and consistency. He calls me late one afternoon, following band practice.
"Ian MacKaye," he announces himself, as always, his voice as confident as a baserunner coming in for a standing slide. MacKaye and I have met on a number of occasions; I helped stage a Fugazi show at James Madison University in 1990, and we've run into each other at various D.C. concerts during the last few years. Perhaps more than anyone I've ever met, MacKaye seems to take pride in every detail of his life, be it performing, running Dischord or returning a phone call. This particular afternoon, MacKaye says he's extraordinarily busy, or "pickled," in MacKaye parlance.

MacKaye: This wasn't a hard album to make. The scheduling was difficult because of many different things that were happening in our lives. It took us a while because we had major changes in our personal lives.
One thing about this band is that you have to sculpt out a year-long plan. You have to book so far in advance, you have to think in terms of when you want to record, when you want a record to come out and all this kind of stuff. We had a very tentative plan at the end of 1996.

That the plan was scrapped by MacKaye's pneumonia and Canty's wedding actually opened up opportunities heretofore unknown to Fugazi, who for years had stuck to a strategy of touring six months out of the year, then taking time off for writing and quick recording.
When I talk to Canty about the process of making End Hits early one April morning, I can hear the family cat crying to get into Asa's room in the background. Canty laughs and asks me to wait while he lets the cat outside. It's clear from his voice that he's happy not only with being a dad, but with the way that his impending fatherhood inadvertently shook up the band's operation.
Rather than blast through End Hits from beginning to end on a concentrated break from the road, Fugazi recorded, mixed and mastered it in spring and fall spurts, taking time in between not only to tour before Canty's wedding, but to evaluate what they had created.

Canty: It was pretty good because when you take your time you get to reassess and listen, really get to know what you've recorded. You get to dislike it a lot and go back in and make it better. But you don't have to make rash decisions about what you think is great at the moment. Clearer heads prevail.

Picciotto: It ended up being an interesting way to record, because we were able to re-evaluate it as we went on. Usually we record really quickly, and then down the line six months, you're like, "Shit, I should have done this, I should have done that." This way we were able to play shows and play some of the new songs and then think about them some more and re-record them when we needed to, or try different overdubbing ideas or different lyrics, depending on how things were going.

MacKaye: That's just the way things lined up. I don't think it necessarily made it any more significant. I do think the birth of Asa, the 10-year mark for the band, and then Lally getting married in April ... of course these things have affected the writing of this album, but no more so that how life affected any of the other albums when we were writing them.

Fans wondering whether MacKaye saw the proverbial white light at the end of the tunnel during his 1996 bout with pneumonia will likely find few answers on End Hits. Not that the illness wasn't severe. During his 16-day stay in an Australian hospital, one of the workaholic singer's lungs collapsed, and he underwent surgery to restore it. But by the time MacKaye's body was in the depths of the illness, his mind had seemingly moved beyond to begin plotting how the band was going to make up for the six months doctors told him to stay off the road. By his account, the pneumonia didn't affect his work, it simply interrupted it.

MacKaye: I don't think it influenced my writing, but I don't pay any attention to that kind of stuff anyway. To me it's like, "I'm alive." It's too hypothetical. I don't think my illness really changed me. If other people want to see that it's fine. But for me, I just am what I am, and I work and I work. It wasn't such a life-altering experience. It just was an experience, like every other thing. I don't put that much emphasis on what happened to me, except for the fact that I was grounded for six months and I couldn't go play concerts. It just changed our schedule.

LYRICS THAT ACTUALLY MEAN SOMETHING
Back in the park, a bottle of mango-orange juice sits on the picnic table, ignored by Picciotto as the guitarist devotes his attention to my queries about the new album. His hands are flat on the table, and Picciotto leans on them instead of using them to gesture and punctuate his sentences.
We're talking about how the songs on End Hits developed over time. Picciotto says that he and MacKaye both knead their lyrics like dough: working them over, evaluating, refining, adding. With all that effort, Picciotto is hesitant to talk about specific songs. He figures that if listeners can't find some meaning in the words he's failed as a writer.
I can see his point. From his first contribution -- "Bulldog Front" on the Fugazi EP (13 Songs on CD) -- Picciotto has penned the band's most nimble lyrics. "Ahistorical -- you think this shit just dropped right out of the sky," he observed on that track. "My analysis: it's time to harvest the crust from your eyes."
On the new album he renders images with particular deftness. "No Surprise," for instance, ends with a beautifully proud stand: "No CIA, no NSA, no satellite could map our veins." "Foreman's Dog" paints a picture of a mass media void of moral grounding: "Cut to the sad and sorry image of some grinning [broad]caster/staring at a sinkhole piling up disasters/marking the footage raw."

Picciotto: That phrase, "Foreman's Dog," was inspired by the Muhammad Ali documentary "When We Were Kings." You know that scene where George Foreman comes off the plane and he's got his dog there? He was just bringing his German shepherds over because they were his dogs and it was a little bit of machismo. But to the people in Zaire, when he showed up with these dogs, they were a symbol of the Belgian colonialists who had been there earlier, they were a symbol of imperial power. So George Foreman's public-relations move was a complete bust because he showed up without having any concept of what he was doing. It was really inadvertent, but it was read by the people that way.
When I was thinking about that song, I was thinking about the way different things function as symbols of power. When you're watching a show like "Cops," it's just an advertisement for state power. It's saying, "This is what happens to you if you're poor and you don't have your shit together. The cops will kick in your door and kick the shit out of you." The thing about "Cops" that's so insane is that you'll have a guy hiding under a refrigerator box being torn up by police dogs, and then at the bottom of the screen at the end of the show they'll be like, "Conviction: Overturned." It always turns out that the guy was innocent or the guy was caught with, like, a joint. It's completely insane. The point of the show is not that a misdeed is being punished -- the point of the show is just to show state power. I started thinking about these things and how they operate on people's consciousness almost subconsciously.

While Fugazi have undoubtedly evolved over their decade-plus existence -- among other things, their rhythms are more complex and fluid, their song structures more experimental, especially since Red Medicine -- they have a reputation for being constant in the music world. Such typecasting is partially a result of the band's confidence in its own vision; there's no Fugazi grunge period, for example, no electronica album in the works.
But much of the perception of Fugazi's consistency has less to do with their music and more to do with their "policies," a somewhat rigid term, but an appropriate one for a band that has established for itself so many guidelines.
Eleven years down the line they still refuse to play shows with a ticket price of more than $5. What I call the "Lincoln Rule" is rooted partially in a desire to curb high concert costs, but just as much in the band's own wish to have some latitude with shows. For five bucks, Fugazi reason, they're under no obligation to provide solid entertainment, play "hit" songs or do anything other than follow their muse.
But the keystone of Fugazi's constancy rests in their affinity for Washington. Local heroes Duke Ellington, Link Wray and Marvin Gaye aside, the nation's capital has never been known as a musical hotbed, certainly not in the tradition of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or Seattle. Since the early '80s, however, the area has nurtured several significant figures in punk (Bad Brains, Henry Rollins) and indie rock (Jawbox, Unrest, Tsunami).
At the forefront of that scene has been Dischord Records. In pre-Fugazi days the label was best- known as the home to Minor Threat -- MacKaye's groundbreaking hardcore band with label cofounder Jeff Nelson -- but Dischord was also the original home of Rites Of Spring, Canty and Picciotto's pre-Fugazi outfit. To this day, the band remains vitally enmeshed in the D.C. scene. Fugazi still open every performance with the proclamation, "Hello, we're Fugazi from Washington, D.C." MacKaye, Picciotto and Canty have individually produced local bands such as Make-Up, Slant 6, Nation Of Ulysses and Autoclave, while Lally has recorded with Sevens and lugged gear for Lungfish. On any given night you may see Fugazi members in the audience at a show by up-and-comers such as Cranium or Krontek.

Picciotto: We're heavily attached to this town. And I think more than that, we think of ourselves as attached to the development of bands here. Not just our own development, but the development of the groups around us, in the context of bands in D.C. We feel really at ease with people thinking of the band as a local band, as part of a context of other bands recording and working in Washington.
The way I experience music is not as a sonic diversion; I experience it as part of everyday life, interacting with the community. I interact with the bands from here. You're not just hearing the music, you're living the music with the people who are making it. You're seeing shows night after night, watching the way bands develop, or people develop as musicians or idea-makers. That to me is a lot more interesting than hearing a record from overseas where you don't know that much about the band.

"OUT OF STEP, WITH THE WORLD!"
The adage is worn but often true: you become what you hate, or the kindred maxim, you become your parents. Fifteen years ago, no one from D.C. to New York would have pegged a member of Minor Threat as a future torch-bearer of the Grateful Dead's legacy. Back in 1980, Ian MacKaye was a skinny bass player slugging it out in Dischord's debut act the Teen Idles, getting banned from various D.C. venues. Teen Idles singer Nathan Strejcek used to step to the mic and mock the '60s icons and their fans: "Trouble behind, trouble ahead/the only good Deadhead is one that's dead."
The Dead's inheritors, however, are not only imitators like Phish, but more interestingly, bands like Sonic Youth and Fugazi. In fact, Fugazi have digitally recorded their every show for the past six years and are trying to assemble a means for distributing particular shows to those who want the recordings. To be sure, as Picciotto points out, Fugazi trace their affinity for touring back to the inspiration of Black Flag's early '80s barnstorming days. But, consciously or not, what transpires on Fugazi's stage shares blood with the Dead aesthetic.

Picciotto: We don't use a set list. We just basically pick a first song, and from then on we create the set as we go. There's a basic pattern, in that we alternate vocals. So whoever's turn is up next is picking the song and creating the cue that threads the segue to the next song. You look around and try to catch each other's eye. At any moment, anyone in the band can start a song from any time in the band's career. It's really important that everyone in the band be really well-rehearsed on every single record and every single song. It becomes like a game: you try to pull one up that you haven't played in four or five shows just to see if everyone's still on top of it. You can be out there wondering what the fuck somebody's starting, and you cannot for the life of you remember.

Canty: It's like catching baseballs in a batting cage. You just have to be on top of it. It really feels like that all the time, and if it didn't, it wouldn't be any fun.

With Fugazi forging full-speed ahead into their second decade, MacKaye is less concerned with where the band has been than where it's going. He essentially prophesied his musical future 17 years ago in Minor Threat when he declared himself "out of step, with the world!" The preface to that proclamation, however, is "[I] can't keep up, can't keep up"; in reality, MacKaye and Fugazi have always been several steps ahead.

MacKaye: Not only have we changed quite a bit in this last decade, but so has the world. The context has changed. People who are just getting into us today or over the last couple years really have no idea of how different it was when we started playing. Every record we put out, people are like, "It's so weird, or so obtuse, or so challenging, or it's so experimental-sounding." But you have to understand that when we put our first record out with "Waiting Room" on it, people thought that was just outrageously weird and experimental within the context of what was going on at the time. In the mid-'80s, the dominant music of the underground was this New York hardcore, metal-tinged, punk- thrash-hardcore. When we started playing, people were like, "Man, you guys are fucking weird." That first record, people were freaked-out about it. It's OK, though, because basically every record we've ever put out, people have said we're getting weirder and harder to deal with or it's really experimental. So by the time we put out our next record, they're going to say that that's weird and why can't you put out classics like End Hits and Red Medicine.

PRANKING FUGAZI (BUT IN A NICE WAY)
If I remember correctly, the arrangement my friend and I worked out back in 1990 was that I would call Northern Virginia information for MacKaye's phone number, and Sander would ring him up to propose a Fugazi benefit concert for our college chapter of United Campuses to Prevent Nuclear War.
I think Sander may have left a message, and we probably got the same assuredly businesslike greeting on the callback that I've been getting for a while now: "Ian MacKaye." We did host the show, and thanks to some aggressive postering from Sander, people came from campuses across Virginia to check it out. MacKaye's only caveat was this: "We just want to make sure the money is going to fund something more worthwhile than a party for your campus group." Done. We decided the recipient organization would be the local Habitat for Humanity, and we pledged with MacKaye to split the $5 door take 50-50 between Habitat and Fugazi.
People not versed in concert promotion have to understand that such pacts are rare when dealing with a band of Fugazi's popularity. There was no contract, no guarantee for the band. As I recall, we had $300 for Fugazi after the show. As Picciotto was rolling up cables and Canty was packing his snare, we took the money over to MacKaye. He paused, counted it, and said, "There's five of us -- four band members and one roadie. We'll take 50 bucks each, and here's $50 back for buying us dinner."
What's truly inspiring is that eight years and roughly a million records later, Fugazi still operate on the same grassroots scale. In May, they're playing a memorial concert for the war protesters who were killed at Kent State in 1970, with proceeds benefiting a tuition fund for activist students. You can bet that there's no contract or guarantee involved.
The only foreseeable modification in the Fugazi game plan is that the band is planning to tour less frequently now that Lally is married and Canty is a husband and a father. For now, Fugazi anticipates booking spurts of concerts like their May mini-tour, rather than the months-long outings they used to tackle.
All of which makes 1998 the ideal year for Fugazi to finally complete the band film they've been making with D.C. director Jem Cohen for the past decade. Cohen was shooting the band in super-8 as early as its second concert. He's since added 16- and 35-mm film -- plus hi-8 video -- to his arsenal, capturing interviews, touring and the entire recording of Red Medicine. Picciotto, a film fanatic, calls the whole assembly a "dub collage" of the Fugazi experience.

Canty: I don't know what it's going to be like in the end. It's really long now, like three and a half hours. Jem got some great interviews with some kids out front, which I really dug. He's always where I'm not. There's times where I've watched myself playing and cringed. There's a lot of that. I can see major differences in my playing night-by-night. That was really illuminating.

Picciotto: Making records is really hard and playing shows is really hard -- making films is a fucking nightmare. It's an insane amount of work, the equipment is ridiculous, it's expensive as hell. It's a completely bankrupting experience on every level: financial, emotional.
But the payoff is really fucking amazing. The whole idea of being able to link music to images in a way that's not music video -- which to me is a really dull and bankrupt form, just making ad spots -- doing something in that line that feels more interesting because it's extended has been really interesting to do.

Picciotto and I are back in the park, and he gets ready to leave our picnic table for band practice. He promises that the still-untitled film, which has been on the Fugazi backburner for years now, will come to fruition in '98. Of course, this is Fugazi we're talking about -- the psychologically fragile band of heavy control freaks.

Picciotto: The toughest thing about making a film about yourself is the knee-jerk reaction to making something that's pompous or self-inflated. It's the huge fear of making "Rattle & Hum."