Publication Date: Friday Feb 19, 1999
by Jim Harrington
The '90s popular music scene has been marked by an increasing number of acts that feel justified in taking their fans for every nickel and dime available. Rock 'n' roll is big business, and if the Rolling Stones can get $300 a ticket for an "intimate" show at the cavernous San Jose Arena, they'll take it, thank you very much.
Then there is Fugazi. While it obviously inhabits a different commercial league from the Stones, it is still one of the most influential bands of this decade, having set the stage for all the platinum grunge rock bands like Nirvana that would rule the charts in the mid-'90s. Fugazi has had plenty of opportunities to cash in--lucrative record deals, a lead position on the once-mighty Lollapalooza tour, merchandising options, articles in Rolling Stone and other major music magazines, and MTV-style videos--but it has turned them all down while keeping ticket prices very affordable. When the band plays The Edge on Sunday, tickets will be just $6, with nary a Fugazi T-shirt, bumper sticker or key chain for sale.
Ironically, Fugazi vocalist Ian MacKaye and the other three members of the band have become celebrities, at least in part, by resisting the patented rock 'n' roll fame formula of signing on with a major label, landing in Rolling Stone and on MTV and cranking up ticket prices. But MacKaye, a former Palo Alto resident, says the band doesn't set its independent coda out of disrespect for the music business. Rather, the four just operate the way they feel most comfortable making music.
"A lot of people think our music is about politics, but really our politics is about our music," MacKaye said in a recent phone interview. "We don't do all the stuff we do to get back at somebody. We just do it because we want to do it."
MacKaye is to the Washington, D.C., hard-core punk scene what Jerry Garcia was to the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury hippie scene. He was raised in the capital city and has never lived anywhere else, except for a brief period in the mid-'70s when he lived in Escondido Village at Stanford University, while his father was on fellowship.
MacKaye got involved in the thriving D.C. music scene early on and still remembers the first interview that he gave, in 1979, with an area music magazine. Without a trace of sarcasm, the reporter asked him whether he entered the music business for the money or the sex. MacKaye was blown away.
"It had never occurred to me that anyone would be in a band for either of those reasons," he remembered. "I thought people were in a band to play music."
In the early '80s, MacKaye formed Minor Threat, one of the most important punk bands of the period. Minor Threat's music could rage as fiercely as any band on the hard-core scene, but there was also a sense of humor and irony to be found beneath the grinding guitars and punishing drums. Punk rock was not big business in those days--quite the opposite--but if you polled punk bands that would later go platinum in the '90s, they would likely list Minor Threat as a major influence.
After Minor Threat split up, MacKaye went to work on various band projects before forming Fugazi in 1987. Touring for months at a time while independently releasing acclaimed works like "Fugazi," "Margin Walker" and "Steady Diet of Nothing," the band built up a sizable following on both sides of the Atlantic. When Nirvana--whose late lead singer, Kurt Cobain, was a major Fugazi fan--hit in the early '90s, the opportunities for MacKaye's band rocketed. But Fugazi straight-armed the music biz types, preferring a do-it-yourself formula that still includes mail-order CDs and tapes, low ticket prices and no interviews with the music magazines.
Could these guys get their music out to more people if they played the game? Probably. But they refuse to come out and play.
"I think it's crazy when people ask us, 'Don't you want to spread your message to more people?'" MacKaye said. "The answer is 'No, we don't.'
"The message spreads itself."
What: Fugazi in concert; Ex opens.
When: Music starts at 8 p.m. Sunday
Where: The Edge, 260 California Ave., Palo Alto.
How much: Tickets are $6.