A short shpiel about a Fugazi documentary
Object Permanence by Leor Galil
I introduced a screening of Jem Cohen's Fugazi documentary, Instrument, the other night at Facets in Lincoln Park. Raphael Jose Martinez organized the screening and very kindly invited me to participate after I messaged him about my plans to write an essay about the movie for the Reader. I never got past that beginning stage for the piece. (Hey, it can still happen!) The screening snuck up on me, but I still managed to throw together a brief intro for the movie despite the ambient distress I've felt watching my industry collapse hanging over me. (I wrote a little about this for my most recent contribution to the Reader's daily newsletter.)
Anyway, I still managed to put together a little shpiel to read before the Instrument screening. The documentary is one of my favorite movies, and Fugazi is one of my favorite bands, which means it's very easy for me to get lost in my head when faced with the task of writing anything about it. I'm also hyper-aware of how much this band means to other people; few folks are going to trudge out to Lincoln Park late on a Thursday night to watch a documentary about a band they're only casually into.
Raphael told me they had more ticket pre-sales for Instrument than any other Facets screening (I would love to know how far back that dataset goes). A lot of old Fugazi fanatics showed up along with kids in their teens and 20s. Before I read my speech, I asked who'd seen the movie; maybe a third of the crowd raised their hands. I told the folks there I tried to write something they might not already know about. I didn't want to hammer away at the same Fugazi script anyone who has a fleeting knowledge of In on the Kill Taker already knows. I told them anyone who is disappointed with my speech should write me a sternly-worded email. So far, I've heard nothing back. I'll take that as a win. Here's what I read:
I recently ordered the 13th issue of Fluke, a long-running zine by Matthew Thompson. He runs a small publishing company in Phoenix, Arizona, but his zine’s roots go back to Little Rock, Arkansas. Matthew cofounded Fluke back in 1991 with two of the only other teenaged punks he’d managed to befriend in Little Rock: Steve Schmidt and Jason White. Steve and Jason also had a band called Chino Horde, who played a feral, melodic style of post-hardcore heavily indebted to D.C.’s Dischord Records. Chino Horde burned out after a few years. Jason joined Monsula, a Bay Area band tied in with the burgeoning punk scene at 924 Gilman Street in Berkley; he’d eventually become a touring guitarist for the biggest band to break out of that community, Green Day. But that’s another story.
The 13th issue of Fluke commemorates the zine’s 25th anniversary. (It’s a zine; I don’t expect or demand Matthew follow any schedule but the one he sets for himself.) As such, Matthew took the opportunity to print a sprawling reflection of his native punk scene’s infant beginnings, largely through a series of interviews. Booker Fletcher Clement, who began organizing punk shows in Memphis and Little Rock in the late 1980s, spent roughly half of his conversation talking about the relationship he fostered with Dischord’s Fugazi. Fletcher’s relationship with the band began in early 1990 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he first met guitarist-vocalist Ian MacKaye. Fugazi first played Little Rock on May 3, 1990.
When Fugazi came to town, Ian and guitarist-vocalist Guy Picciotto met up with Steve Schmidt at Vino’s, a pizza place that opened in a blink-and-you-missed-it punk venue called DMZ. A year later, Steve, Matthew, and Jason published the first issue of Fluke. Steve’s conversation with Ian and Guy made the cut, of course. At the top of the interview, Ian tells Steve about making dinner at Fletcher’s place.
None of this comes up in Instrument. But Jem Cohen’s documentary about Fugazi, which he made in collaboration with the band, gives a visual language to all the tangle of connections that allowed the national punk underground to exist, then thrive, and ultimately bleed into the mainstream. If you knew about Fugazi when the band began to play out in 1987, chances are you were a participant in this loose and fragmented community. Participation didn’t require being on stage; simply posting an ad in the back of MaximumRocknRoll asking to trade tapes with other punks made this world richer.
Instrument opens with the Ian bluntly telling a crowd, “We’re Fugazi from Washington, D.C.” “We” is Ian, Guy, bassist Joe Lally, drummer Brendan Canty, and, occasionally multi-instrumentalist Jerry Busher (depending on the era). I also like to think “we” refers to anyone in the room in that moment. The band never used set lists, preferring to let the mood guide them into and out of songs, whose shapes would shift and shrink depending on the performance; they had no singular leader. The crowd imparted a great deal of weight upon the direction of the shows, as Instrument frequently demonstrates. A Fugazi show could be equal parts catharsis and negotiation.
One of my favorite scenes in Instrument shows the four members of Fugazi seated at a dining-room table, steadfastly refusing to talk for Jem’s camera. Eventually, they open up to air their grievances about the public’s perception of their band. Fugazi’s steadfast ethics became a thing of legend that sometimes overshadowed their powerful, overwhelming music: they released records on an independent label Ian co-founded and turned down seemingly every major label in existence, they refused to sell merchandise, and they played all-ages shows for a fraction of today’s Ticketmaster surcharges. To those outside the underground, Fugazi seemed mythical. Instrument undercuts the aura around Fugazi by treating the group’s functionality as what it was: a means to exist but not the entirety of their being.
Jem worked on Instrument for a decade. Instrument is a rock documentary like Fugazi is a rock band. The film has the basic elements of a rock documentary: arresting performance footage, intimate scenes offstage, and visually compelling archival clips. But Instrument is also a work of collage. It’s an art piece that masquerades as a documentary. Its experimental touches absorb the tension, power, and magnetism that’s won over anyone who has ever loved Fugazi. When Guy’s shirtless, wiry, and sweaty torso first flashes on the screen in a yellow, washed-out haze, I imagine what it’s like to be right up front during a set at Fort Reno, home to the long-running summer concert series where I first saw Fugazi perform in D.C. I can also picture myself viewing this scene in a darkened screening room at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
When Punk Planet contributor David Wilson asked Jem about Instrument’s unusual structure, the director had this to say: “We knew we didn’t want to take a traditional documentary approach, that it wasn’t important to us to be exactly chronological or to tell the band’s history in a didactic way. But aside from that, we didn’t really know anything except that the concentration would be on the music.”
Facets' small theater was mostly full, so I stood in the back for about 40 minutes once the lights went down. Facets screened a documentary short about the barber beloved by a bunch of D.C. punks in the early '90s, Fugazi's Barber. I'd initially learned about from a graphic designer who did some work on the doc, Nolen Strals, who used to front Baltimore post-punk band Double Dagger. I found myself getting a little weepy watching Brendan Canty talk about his childhood in Cleveland Park. A photo of the Uptown Theatre flashed on the screen; the last time I went there I watched The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King with my friend Andy some 20 years ago.
I didn't experience Brendan's Cleveland Park, exactly, given our age difference, but I was struck by the feeling of losing the distinctiveness of a place you grew up in. Cleveland Park is certainly more expensive now than it was when Brendan grew up—what city neighborhoods are less expensive now than several decades ago? And for how long? I'm sad not about the change necessarily, but the sense that these enclaves are no longer capable of being welcoming to so many of us who could once afford them. The sense of community—the kinds Fugazi grew out of—feel more fragile than ever.