Fugazi at fifteen.

• Author: Crone, Thomas

Recently, a friend of a friend went on tour. A musician in an inventive rock band The Potomac Accord, he and some of his compadres were passing time by riffling through a stack of contract riders at a Midwestern club. One of the hot punk acts of the moment had just been through town, and its day-of-show contract reflected the group's perceived needs for life on the road: lots of liquor, along with the other, usual adds-on, like food and towels. Continuing to parse through the stack, they found a rider from Fugazi, the legendary punk band from Washington, D.C. The rider for this act requested only "some water, if you have some available."

Unceremonious offstage, strident and energetic onstage, Fugazi (Ian MacKaye, Guy Picciotto, Brendan Canty, Joe Lally) has a sensible work ethic and a heart-on-sleeve approach to songwriting. With part of the membership running Dischord Records, the group has been able to foster a scene in its hometown, while maintaining a healthy distance from the recording industry that has enticed, and often destroyed, its contemporaries.

Currently on an unplanned hiatus, the group may play only one show this summer in Washington before setting out again in the fall. The downtime has allowed MacKaye to catch up on business in the Dischord world. He's also looking ahead.

"We were actually supposed to be in England right now, but we had a death in the family and so we had to postpone the dates," MacKaye says. "We're home all summer, actually. One aspect of this band--and we're going to be turning fifteen in September--is that for the first ten years, we devoted enormous amounts of time to the music. The band was really the center point of our lives. It became clear in 1997 or `98 that we would have to make our lives the center point of the band. People are getting married, having children. Our parents are getting sick and dying. Life is allowed."

Buy them up and shut them down / Then repeat in every town /Every town will be the same / This one's ours, let's take another.--"Five Corporations"

Fugazi formed from the ashes of other D.C. punk groups in 1987, melding a sound--muscular, angular, spiky--with an ethic of pure, yes, progressive politics.

Starting out as a recording unit with the release of the 1988 self-titled E.P., Fugazi released a steady run of influential seven-inch singles, E.Es and LP.s through the late-`80s and into the `90s. The pace dropped a bit about four years ago, with the release of an album and...