Interview by Tunde Oyewole

Nineteen hundred and 79 was the year that Guy Picciotto discovered punk rock and left AC/DC, Kiss, and all things glamorous behind. He picked up a guitar at the age of 15, and two years later found himself playing it and singing for Rites of Spring, a band that even Details has had the sense to call seminal. His initial membership in Fugazi threw the punk world into a state of confusion. The reality of two lead singers, two distinct personas-Ian the musician/personality and Guy the disco dancer/soul singer-seemed too complicated at first. Years of basement punk, circle pits, and revolution summers had not prepared the majority of rockers for Guy and Fugazi live. But the kids have adjusted.

This was Guy's first interview in two years-the first one he had done in person in even longer. Aside from his understandable aversion to breaking down the creative process-"navel-gazing," as he calls it-he didn't hesitate to talk about his history, his present, and the magic of making honest music that has united the two. We began with talk of the current band, downstairs in his basement.

ISSUES: 6 Albums and one 45 later. At least 60 recorded songs all told. I'm just wondering if you've had any rest.

Guy: Well, actually this whole last year has been the biggest break we've had. Since we started in the end of '87 we've toured pretty much straight through till the beginning of last year. We were touring about 6 or 7 months a year and recording in the off time. So we worked really, really hard and then last year was the first year where we really didn't do much touring. We went to Brazil for three weeks and we did a couple of parties here in D.C., but for the most part, we didn't work at all. It was mainly due to the fact that our drummer moved to Seattle for a good part of last year, and we were kind of just reassessing things. In terms of years to take off it was probably a pretty good one, because so much of what was going on in music was so incredibly awful. So it was kind of a chance for us to just get out of it for a bit and reevaluate what we were doing. But after last year I feel like we're ready to work hard again. We just finished recording last week. And we're going to start touring again this year. The ethic of this band since we started has been to work hard. This is the sixth band I've been in, and though I was always really into the other groups I was doing before, the one complaint I had was that we never really worked very hard. So when Fugazi started, the idea was that we would really push it as hard as possible, in terms of playing a lot of shows. Basically that's what the band is about. The making of the records is okay, but for us the main thing is playing shows-playing for people.

ISSUES: Have you guys ever articulated progression, as far as growing as a band was and is concerned?

Guy: Absolutely not. We don't plan any kind of trajectory; we just face the immediate future and we decide yes or no, and then we go do it. We make no plans at all. In fact, the group wasn't even formed, strictly speaking-it kind of just started. Brendan was playing drums with Ian and Joe, and the whole thing just kind of started as a project. Then when I joined I only was singing occasionally and I was a roadie. And then when we started touring, I knew I wanted to go out with them; so I was kind of going out to see what it was like and it just never stopped. I kept singing more songs. It was very different from any other group I've been in, just because it was kind of an organic progression.

ISSUES: How old were you when you played in Rights of Spring?

Guy: Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen-something like that. I think the record came out when I was nineteen.

ISSUES: Your lyrics back then were the reflections of someone who had just come of age. You were the "angry son." Where do you feel like you are now?

Guy: Well that whole thing was incredibly different. That group only played nine shows. It was kind of more like an explosion than a band. The whole thing was really direct and very un-self-conscious. Being in a group back then was entirely different. It was very local. There was no sense of a national audience or anyone outside of your friends, so everything that we did was directed to a very small circle of people. But having been in this band where the whole scale is so entirely different, I don't think I could write the same way as I did then. That stuff was really direct and kind of straight. I guess the longer you're in a group, the more of a coward you become in some ways. I feel like the stuff I do now is a lot more labored. There was no distance at all in what [Rights of Spring] were doing-this is thought out more. In a way I don't prefer either one, they're just very different things. The energy was so different.

ISSUES: But with both bands, I've really been impressed and almost shocked by the amount of openness you express in the music you make. How vulnerable do you feel writing lyrics like that?

Guy: I don't know. It's a funny thing having your lyrics on inserts that go all over the place. But getting on stage has never been a problem for me. And even I did try to get away from my voice, what would it mean? You try to hide it, you try to change it, but you always come back to it-your voice is always just there.

ISSUES: Do you ever find yourself fronting though? Punk rock always seems to demand some kind of front, not necesarily a macho one, but a front nonetheless. Do you ever find yourself maneuvering a tight rope, sort of teetering between doing it straight, and fronting?

Guy: Well, I don't really see anything inherently bad about fronting, as long as its generating something genuine-as long as it's not for shtick's sake. When a band gets up on stage and they try to give you some kind of shtick that they can't pull off, it's just bullshit and everyone feels embarrassed. If the band's not embarrassed then everyone in the crowd feels embarrassed for them. But whatever we do as a band, we try to maintain a sense of honesty-we try not to put ourselves in a position where we need to articulate it or justify it, but we insist on only doing what we're comfortable with, and what we can wake up and do everyday. I mean you could take what we do with a song like "Suggestion" as fronting [a song that's stirred some contention because it's sung from a woman's point of view-ex: "is my body my only trait in the eyes of men"]. We've had some very tense live moments when we've played that song. People have come up to us and just been like, where the fuck do you get off singing this song. It's a powerful thing, and that's what makes it so important. It generates ideas and it generates dialogue. So fronting doesn't always have to be a bad thing.

ISSUES: Do you listen to hip-hop music at all?

Guy: A lot. I do. And actually just recently I've been listening to some newer stuff. Generally, I'm just more into the earlier things. I still really love the Furious Five and I still really love the "Criminal Minded" BDP album. But people have been making me some tapes of the newer things, and I dig it. I love the sonicness of it.

ISSUES: Are you ever turned off by the bravado of it?

Guy: Yeah, all the time. That's the weird thing-so much of the shit that sounds the best to me is sometimes so fucking moronic. It's the same thing with listening to rock and roll or anything. Talk about fronting-that is a seriously dangerous front.

ISSUES: Would you ever go to a hip-hop show, or have you?

Guy: Generally, the live thing is a little less interesting, which is kind of a drag. I'd much rather go see a go-go band [go-go: kind of like updated funk with a hip-hop twist] live any day of the week. To me that's much more interesting. Playing with Junkyard Band (his hometown go-go band) was seriously insane. We did a show with them a few months back at a community center, in a really small room, and they came in there and they just fucking wrecked it. They dusted the floor with us. It was unbelievable how good they were. They were doing two shows in one night, and they came out and just played the most physical, incredible gig. They didn't even have all of their equipment, and they came out there and just wasted us. That's a tough band man-they've had members killed and all kinds of shit. When you see them play it's just chilling how fucking powerful they are. So actually live I would say that I definitely prefer the go-go stuff.
The whole way that go-go music goes around is really inspiring to me, because there was a period where everyone thought it was going to "break." But now it's way underground again and the whole thing is just live tapes. That is a perfect example of why there will always be an underground, regardless of what gets exposed or not. There will always be something that has no other outlet and makes its own.

ISSUES: What was you first exposure to the underground?

Guy: When I was in junior high school, there was a radio station at Georgetown University called WGTB and it was a really outspoken radio show. They had been on the air for a while but they started running ads for abortion clinics so the Jesuits shut the station down and sold all the equipment for a dollar. But for the brief minute that I was aware of what they were doing, they were playing the most incredible punk rock music. The whole thing had this really amazing underground feel to it. And that was the first time I got exposed to a different mind-set, away from like arena rock or whatever. I went to a benefit show for that station in 1979. It was the Cramps and a bunch of local bands, like the Chumps and New Wave bands like the Urban Verbs. Being 12 or 13 and seeing those bands play, and just realizing that they were local was terribly inspiring. It was something that made a real impression on me-the fact that there was something going on that was local and contactable and accessible. It was really amazing. I'll never forget that night. Windows being broken. Tables being smashed. The Cramps on stage vomiting. The whole thing was just so fucking over the top-I never looked back after that. I needed to know what was going on. I had been listening to punk rock bands but it was always under the impression that they were English. They still seemed kind of untouchable; it seemed like they were doing something you could consume, but not necessarily create. And it wasn't until I saw local bands and started seeing young people playing and people that I recognized from the street that I realized you could do it yourself. It became a very different situation, and that night was when it first made an impression on me. I never considered myself a musician-I still don't consider myself a musician, but I realized that you could be in music to create community, as opposed to being in music just to create music. And the whole thing was that you were creating a scene. You were creating this army. And when you're young that kind of thing is really powerful. It's you and your friends and you're all playing and you're going into groups. You've got the style thing happening and the dance thing happening and you're going to shows like you rule the world. It's the most powerful feeling. To me that's way more what it was about than putting out records. It was just about having a scene.

ISSUES: Is it still there for you?

Guy: Yeah, definitely. The only thing that really keeps me interested in music is that there's always this kind of fresh thing of young people getting into it. And particularly in D.C. I really feel it's really strong-there's a community that really is constantly renewing itself. I have a really localist vision of music, and that's one reason why the nationwide span of music and the mass-marketing that's gone on in the last ten years is so different from the culture which I grew up in. When a band came through the town from somewhere else, you were kind of getting the injection of their local vision, and it was really interesting, because there would be kind of this clash between what was going on here and what was going on in their town. Now, everything kind of feels so smeared-it's not as interesting to me anymore. There was a certain kind of hard work ethic that went on back then. The bands that actually managed to function to be able to come out and tour. . .like Black Flag for example. The amount of work they put into touring was so mind-boggling, that when they played it was incredibly intense. It seemed like their lives were on the line the way they played. It was just incredible. A lot of times you just don't get that feeling anymore. The road just seems so much more worn down, it seems so much less appealing.

ISSUES: How do you guys feel though-I mean you're a world band, you play world music. You go to Prague and the people break the balconies and hurt each other, they're so excited. Do you feel like a world band or more like a band that's spreading a localized vision?

Guy: Well, it's interesting. Going to places like Brazil kind of puts me back in the mind-set of some of the earlier shows, because when we go there, people don't really know who we are. It kind of feels like we're working some new ground there. So it continues to be interesting. We draw our inspiration from a local concept and I think that the music we put out kind of comes out of the interactions that we have with the community here, and the other bands here. But when we go out and play in other places, we're presenting that. To be in Brazil, it might just seem like we're an American band or we're just these guys but I think for us we always kind of feel like we're just an extension of the community on the road.

ISSUES: What kind of people show up for a show in Brazil.

Guy: Man, I tell you, it was different every night. Some nights we were playing in tiny villages, like one-generator towns, and then other nights we played in big cities. So it was incredibly different every night. But the kids there-I mean the whole situation down there was just incredibly strange. Just really, really strange. I would say Brazil was a serious mind fuck. It's the most extreme place I've ever been, on every level. You go there and you'll see the most intense natural beauty and the most intense pollution of nature that you've ever seen in your life. You'll see the most incredible rich communities, and you'll see the most unbelievably fucked up poverty. It's really strange down there. And so the shows were kind of the same way. It was just very weird.

ISSUES: Where's your head when you get up on stage in front of an audience like that?

Guy: I don't know. Cause when we play, it's kind of like a blur, man. When you get on stage it's like falling off a building, and that's the way I feel about performing. And it wasn't hard to get into that. Performing didn't feel strange down there, it just felt different.

ISSUES: Have you ever thought about making music anywhere else?

Guy: No. I've never thought about moving from here. I mean I love to travel, and the fact that we're able to travel as much as we do is incredible, but I would never move. As fucked up as D.C. is, I just have a real affection for it.

ISSUES: Do you ever think punk rock might be turning into a novelty there? It seems like there was a time when every show had a cause. Now you guys are all having parties.

Guy: That's kind of a good point. But the party thing is an incredibly valid venue. It's more about the local conversation. It shouldn't be the only venue, but I think that it's an interesting one. And for a long time that element had been missing. There weren't any shows in houses and I think shows in houses are a fucking good thing. You get used to it. It needs to go both ways. But it is true; even just in our case it's really fucking hard for us to play in D.C. We always end up playing outdoors in twenty degree weather because we can get into a park, but its really hard for us to find a room that would do the gigs that we need to do. We're talking about trying to have a show about what's happening to D.C. right now regarding the takeover and the closing of the clinics-there's definitely some plans. But I'd say that our ratio is better than other cities in terms of benefits. It was an amazing phenomenon. For a long time there was just not a non-benefit show.
And that is what's frustrating about this period of time. There's not a lot of political venues. There is a lot of anger, and particularly a lot of anger with young people, but it's really difficult for people to find ways to focus it. I just think people should wreck shit. It's going to happen. It's going to happen.

ISSUES: Any idea of the release date for the new album?

Guy: We're talking about it now. We went in and did this tape really kind of quickly, and we need to discuss if we need to do more work on it or not. Hopefully, we'll have it out some time by May or June I think. Recording is a fucking weird thing. I enjoy the work, but it really is just difficult. It's so much different than a show. Shows are all about moments, and they evaporate, which I think is great. Records are just too weighty, man. It's just weird. I don't enjoy listening to them.

ISSUES: When do you?

Guy: I don't listen to our records hardly at all. I think that I'd much rather go play the songs than commit them to tape. We look at the records as a type of menu: people read the menu, and then if they want the meal they have to come to the shows, because we are definitely a live band. That's one thing we've worked really hard on making happen in the studio. We produced this last thing ourselves, because, like with everything we do, we try to be as control-freak oriented as possible. We're really trying to learn how to do the studio and how to work the knobs. So even if the record isn't successful in some ways, it is an accomplishment, because it's about us trying to learn, trying to teach ourselves how to do this stuff on our own. And that's important-the studio, the mixing board is an extension of all the stuff that you always feel isn't really your province. When you're growing up, you don't think about making records, you don't think about writing songs. You think about consuming them. It was the same way with us-for a long time we really struggled with the idea of production and learning. It's just like with everything-you just have to get your fucking ass wet. You just have to get in there and do it. That's why I feel pretty good about this record, because it really was the four of us standing around scratching our heads, just trying to figure out how to do it. And we've produced ourselves before-we did "Steady Diet" which was kind of universally acknowledged as this huge sonic failure. But at the same time it was an attempt at learning, and this record is another step in that direction.

ISSUES: Well, that's odd, because I really liked the sound of "Steady Diet." I really thought that it had a distinct feel to it-

Guy: Yeah, that's because there were a bunch of apes producing it. We really didn't know what we were doing. Our thing is always, how can we reproduce this sound that we make when we practice and when we play, once when we get in this weird scientific room, and it's a struggle, man. All this shit [Guy pointing] this is our eight track, and we've been recording here at the house. Just setting it up in the living room, and recording in here, and it taught us a lot of really good lessons about how to get things down. And actually, we record a lot of bands here, which is really cool. We're learning, we're definitely learning.

ISSUES: Regardless, "Steady Diet" is still the hippest.

Guy: Thanks, but I truly can't listen to these things. Every now and then we'll sit down as a group and we'll try to figure out like, "what does this record sound like in relation to the other ones." With this last tape, we wanted to compare it to the first one and we put the old record in and-oh my fucking God, it just sounds like it's coming from another place. We've played these songs a thousand times each on a stage. Your vision of it is this incredible power, this live sound, or kind of a live feel. And then you listen to something on a compact disc, or you listen to something on vinyl and it's just like you can't believe it's only that. We just have a weird relationship with our own music. It's just really different. I can't believe that that's what we sound like, it just seems so weird to me. So I definitely don't enjoy listening to it, and I try to avoid it if I can. Whenever I hear it come on somewhere, it just fucking freaks me out.

I do listen sometimes, with the intent of getting a feel for how we've come along. We're not quite done yet. When I do listen to our albums, and I think about how we play together-it's not everything that I want it to be; our sound isn't quite what we want it to be. We definitely have a lot of work left to do.

ISSUES: And that goes for both what you record and what you do on stage?

Guy: It goes for everything, but, again, we are a live band. Nothing really compares to what can happen when you get on stage. Performing live is like falling off of an 8,000 foot building. I really can't explain the feeling in any other way. When we get on stage-it's all or none. There's a real special dynamic that exists between us. There's this genuinely supportive tension that's there between myself and Ian. It's a tension that just generates shit and gets things going. We never have to work with a set list. Usually someone will just go into a song and the rest of us will follow along. Sometimes when we're touring, we get into a certain kind of rhythm, and you can start to get a sense of what song will be next. But we really do try to keep it as fresh as possible.

ISSUES: Well, from the crowd reaction alone, you seem to be doing a pretty good job. In particular, your encores can get a little fucking intense.

Guy: Well, the end of the set can be an incredible time. It's a lot like the early days. Without the guitar, I get to move around, I get to dance. I don't know; I just blow up. There really is no middle ground for us. When we're bad, we're horrible-which is why we're comfortable with $5 door prices. You get what we have on that particular night. When we get up there on one of those nights that we don't have much, we don't feel like we're ripping off anyone who paid to see us. And if it's on the right night, then we just fucking give everything. It's all or none.