Misunderstood and discontent, D.C. hardcore was born from local youth and the resentment they felt in Ronald Reagan’s America. Tired of feeling ignored, aspiring punks turned to music to make people listen.
Scott Crawford, who came of age amid D.C.’s blossoming punk scene, had no intention of taking viewers on a nostalgia trip when he made his 2014 documentary, Salad Days. Rather than looking back at the city’s hardcore movement of the ’80s and ’90s with the rose-colored glasses typical of music documentaries, Crawford sought to capture the grit of the culture. He also wanted to explain the origins of the sound that has served as a template for countless genres, from grunge and emo to metal.
“All those things came from D.C. It came from this music” Crawford tells City Paper. “At the very least, if you don’t like the sound, at least acknowledge where it came from, and the importance of what went on [here] culturally.”
Out of our punk underground came groundbreaking bands such as Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and Fugazi. Salad Days is a visual history of punk’s trajectory in and orbiting D.C., featuring archival footage and photos, as well as original interviews with icons in the scene such as Ian MacKaye, Henry Rollins, and Dave Grohl. It also features interviewers with genre admirers, including actor Fred Armisen and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore. Put together, the documentary is a testament to the history and long-lasting impact of punk music and culture in D.C.
There was no better place for discontent to bubble over than in the nation’s capital, according to Crawford, who describes ’80s and ’90s D.C. as increasingly riddled with violent crime and poverty, while also home to some of the most powerful people in the world. D.C.’s punk revolution sought to capture the absurdity of that juxtaposition.
Youth Brigade’s song “It’s About Time That We Had a Change,” which is featured prominently in Salad Days, is a shining example. The track features a repetitive chorus of Nathan Stretjek shouting, “I’m sick of things the way they are.”
Stretjek’s words—full of an intractable, aching dissatisfaction—encapsulates the ethos of early punk. The message wasn’t initially well-received, especially by fans of the feel-good tunes of the late ’70s and early ’80s, personified by pop, disco, and some rock bands.
Minor Threat and Susie on Dischord House front porch, 1982 by Rebecca Hammel
In the documentary, Alec MacKaye of the Faith (and today’s Hammered Hulls) tells Crawford that he and his friends were often targeted by college kids and suburban jocks and beaten up for looking like punks while walking around Georgetown. But as a community began to materialize and mobilize behind the music, punk’s messaging against the commercial and political establishment became more concise.
Fans started attending shows in droves, circulating homemade zines documenting the scene, and interviewing artists on the root of their frustrations, which stemmed mostly from D.C.’s growing state of neglect. Crawford started one such DIY publication, Metrozine, when he was 12 years old.
To many, punk became more than just calling out problems in society. Musicians did what they could to address the racism and capitalism identified in their songs. Many bands chose to forego profits from their shows and put on benefit concerts for various causes instead.
“Somewhere along the way, [we] were saying there’s got to be something that we can do,” Onam Ben-Israel (formerly Tomas Squin), of bands Red C, Beefeater, and Fidelity Jones, says in the film. “So I said, ‘I know what we can do, we can make some noise!’”
Fugazi were a prime example of that positive noisemaking. During their nearly two decades as an active group (they went on an indefinite hiatus in 2003), the band played around 80 benefit shows, mostly in D.C., raising roughly $250,000 for local grassroots organizations supporting everything from abortion rights to housing funds.
According to Crawford, the lasting resonance of punk culture’s zeal and camaraderie has enabled him to take Salad Days on a nationwide tour to commemorate its 10th anniversary, which kicked off in September in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. After a few months on the road with the documentary, Crawford is stopping at the Black Cat on Dec. 28 for a screening.
As a sign of Salad Days’ and punk’s lasting impact, the local event will feature performances from the current bands of the film’s subjects, but also their children. While Alec MacKaye (Ian MacKaye’s younger brother) will be playing with Hammered Hulls, his daughter Isabella will be playing bass with her band, Birthday Girl DC, alongside singer Mabel Canty, whose father, Brendan Canty, was Fugazi’s drummer.
Alec MacKaye with the Faith. Credit: Jim Saah
A slew of guest speakers and vendors will also be in attendance to honor hardcore punk’s roots and its continued prevalence in the District. What’s more, the screening will offer new insight since Crawford will be showing the new cut of the documentary.
The updated Salad Days features a number of tweaks, substitutions, and additions. Among these amendments is a new interview with Lyle Preslar, the guitarist of Minor Threat who Crawford wasn’t able to conduct during the original production period. Crawford is excited to feature Preslar’s interview in the latest rendition, in which the guitarist offers another perspective on the band’s breakup.
Crawford made several other additions to the documentary—a film he initially thought would only interest a select few who were tuned into the deeper lore of D.C. punk. As the tour continues, he’s finding that this group is larger and more far-reaching than he thought.
“When I [screened] the film originally [at DOC NYC in 2014], I really thought some folks from D.C. would show up, and that would be about it,” says Crawford. “It kind of took on a life of its own all over the world.”
Before D.C., the new director’s cut was screened in both London and Tokyo. What Crawford wasn’t expecting was the screening invitation he received from the Avalon Theater in Easton, Maryland. He assumed the area—a little town on the Eastern Shore over an hour-and-a-half drive from D.C.—had been untouched by punk’s milieu, but dozens of enthusiastic viewers were in attendance, many of whom were D.C. expats who were eager to get together and salute the punk movement.
In one breath, Crawford says he’s not a fan of hyperbole; in the next, he says D.C.’s punk scene changed the face of music. He’s not far off, considering the punk zeitgeist was embodied by bands such as Nirvana, whose drummer, Dave Grohl, spent his teen years in D.C., playing with the punk band Scream before their breakup in 1990. “The reason why I got into Nirvana was because they liked Scream,” Grohl says in Salad Days. “They saw me play and were like, ‘Man, if we could get a drummer like that, we’d be set!’”
Scream were one of the many punk bands that found a home at the 9:30 Club’s original F Street NW address. The venue quickly became a bastion of the burgeoning scene in 1980, before it moved to a bigger location around the corner on V Street NW. Years later, Grohl, with his current band Foo Fighters, played the inaugural show at the Atlantis, a venue that pays homage to the original 9:30 Club space at its same F Street location. Grohl rallied his former Scream bandmates to play a special opening set, which they kicked off with a cover of the Bad Brains song “At the Atlantis.”
As Salad Days outlines, it was Ian MacKaye and his then-band Teen Idles (pre-Minor Threat, Fugazi, and Dischord Records) who convinced 9:30’s original owner Dody Disanto to mark the hands of under-21 concertgoers with Xs. The mark, typically made in black marker, would go on to become a symbol of the straight edge movement (a phrase coined by MacKaye in the Minor Threat song “Straight Edge”), which sought to disassociate punk rock from the use of drugs and alcohol.
Ian MacKaye lent an authoritative voice to Crawford’s Salad Days, and has worked to chronicle punk’s past, on his own and with archives like the University of Maryland’s Punk Collection and the DC Public Library’s DC Punk Archive, which recently celebrated its own 10th anniversary. (In keeping with efforts to preserve and document local music history, the long-awaited Go-Go Museum officially opens in Anacostia this winter.)
“I see these archives as pottery shards, proof of a civilization that otherwise goes unnoticed and unreported,” says MacKaye. “Because the people who report largely are under the auspices of the industry.”
To MacKaye, punk is less about the sound than it is a free space where new ideas can come together without the influence of rules or profit. These spaces are still numerous in D.C.—from the Punk Archive’s shows, or independent venues like Takoma’s Rhizome. As long as such strongholds exist, and there are people around to document them, punk will never die in D.C.
Salad Days 10th Anniversary Party with Hammered Hulls and Birthday Girl DC starts at 8 p.m. on Dec. 28 at the Black Cat. blackcat.com. $20.
Correction: Nathan Stretjek is the singer on Youth Brigade’s “It’s About Time That We Had a Change,” not Shawn Stern.