God save the scene.

• Author: Connolly, Matt
• Position: TEN MILES SQUARE - Punk rock music

D.C. punk has thrived for decades with the help of churches, activists, and even the library. Can it survive the city's rapid redevelopment?

Eight hours before my first-ever show in Washington, D.C., I was standing in the cold while a bearded man from AAA shook his head and explained why I'd never make it. My band, Jet Jaguar, had just played in New York and we were living that rock-and-roll tour life--except our cheap motel room was my parents' house in suburban New Jersey and our rust-bucket tour van was a decade-old Volvo sedan. We had awoken that morning to find that the usually reliable Volvo was refusing to turn on.

For our work-shirt-clad doomsayer, though, the mechanical failure wasn't the problem. The battery was shot, but it was a simple (if pricey) fix, since he had a replacement in the truck. He was just certain that even with a new battery we wouldn't be able to make the drive in time. He assured me I could trust him on that, since he "had some family down there." When I told him we didn't have much of a choice because our band had to play, all sense of urgency disappeared. Did we sound anything like Rush? And did we want to hear a bunch of stories about the dozens of Rush shows he'd been to? The answer to the first question was no. The second question was rhetorical.

Despite a traffic jam outside Baltimore, we made it to the Adams Morgan bar in time for the show; I can neither confirm nor deny that a number of speed limits were broken along the way, though I will say that I'm a better guitarist than driver. We'd played in New York and Chicago before, but I was the most excited to play D.C. I had recently moved back to the city after some time away and, like many others who grew up listening to a certain strain of punk music, had an idyllic picture of the music scene. If your image of Washington stops where the monuments and government buildings end, you may not know that the city is hiding a hugely influential and uniquely accessible punk scene that stretches back more than three decades. I was ready and eager to join in.

Although that show turned out to be kind of a mess.

To understand the attraction of D.C. to a wannabe like me, you have to go back to 1985. That was the year of "Revolution Summer," a season of protest and performance that put the District's scene on the map. While the shouts were aimed at targets like apartheid, militarization, and Ronald Reagan, the revolution had turned inward as well. Washington was a hotbed for punk and hardcore music in the late 1970s and early '80s, but many found the scene violent, sexist, and inaccessible, both in the mosh pits and out. A new activist group called Positive Force and a wave of musicians who rejected those values set out to change that. "Positive Force together with a new generation of bands had a critique of that kind of destructive version of punk," says Mark Andersen, a Positive Force member who literally wrote the book on the D.C. punk scene. "It was an insurrection."

Bands like Rites of Spring (who were hugely influential despite existing for all of two years), Fire Party (whose singer, Amy Pickering, actually coined the term "Revolution Summer"), and Mission Impossible (whose young drummer, Dave Grohl, would go on to be exponentially more famous than everyone else in this article) took part in this pivotal era. But the movement's biggest band, Fugazi, emerged just afterward. Fronted by the D.C. icon Ian MacKaye, Fugazi was known for their staunch independence and dedication to low-priced, nonviolent, all-ages shows. They toured nationally and internationally in the late 1980s and '90s, cementing the city's status as a hotbed for ethical do-it-yourself punk rock. Andersen, who interviewed Grohl right after his new band, Nirvana, had changed the landscape of rock music with Nevermind in 1991, remembers, "He was talking about how at the outset his ambition with Nirvana was that he just hoped they could be as popular as Fugazi." To put things in perspective, Nevermind's original run was about 50,000 records. Fugazi's Steady Diet of Nothing, which came out that same year, had an original run of 160,000. (Nevermind has gone on to sell thirty million copies worldwide.)

For punk rock in the District, this wasn't just a period of increasing popularity. It was also a time of institution building, which would help the ethics espoused by bands like Fugazi take root in the scene and last well into the future. Later generations...