This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl. Paul Brannigan
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hardcore scene only exacerbated divisions within a band that bassist Baker once scathingly dismissed as ‘an after-school hobby for some over-privileged kids’.
‘Part of the split was that Lyle and I – what a surprise, the private school kids – wanted to continue to build and to see where this could go,’ Baker told me in 2010. ‘I mean Minor Threat never left the United States and we wanted to see the rest of the world: we thought that there was potential to keep moving forward. And that really wasn’t in the cards and so basically that’s what split us up. Aspirations tend to ruin the best of intentions.’
On 23 September 1983 Minor Threat played their final show, opening up for DC Go-Go legends Trouble Funk at the Landsburgh Center. They aired a new song for the first, and last, time.
‘Salad Days’ was MacKaye’s unflinching dismissal of a scene he felt had become stagnant and compromised, driven by sounds of fury which came increasingly to signify nothing. The song’s bitter lyrics were all the more powerful coming from a man whose belief in the power of music and art to empower, engage and inspire had been so well documented.
The mood of the song struck a resounding chord with many in the punk community. In spring 1984 maximumrocknroll placed the bald question ‘DOES PUNK SUCK???’ on its front cover. That same spring, 12-year-old Scott Crawford interviewed Ian MacKaye for the first issue of a new DC scene fanzine called Metrozine. Though more than six months had passed since Minor Threat’s final show, the young writer found MacKaye unwilling or unable to drag himself out of his slough of despond.
‘He was so down, so totally over the whole scene,’ says Crawford, now the editor of Blurt magazine. ‘There was no suggestion of him forming another band, he was so disillusioned and disenchanted. It was actually pretty painful to see.’
Interviewed by Flipside around the same time, Black Market Baby frontman Boyd Farrell offered another doomy insider’s prognosis of the DC scene.
‘It’s sad, all those little kids that were on skateboards a year or two ago are on heroin now,’ Farrell commented. ‘It’s like DC lost its innocence. It’s been deteriorating since the end of Minor Threat, though obviously it isn’t their fault. It’s like a fashion thing now. It’s like it lost the sincerity, the anger, and became more cynical. You used to be able to go to the clubs and get a buzz from the bands’ energy.’
One year on, in April 1985, Skip Groff filed Minor Threat’s final single alongside the Teen Idles’ Minor Disturbance EP, State of Alert’s No Policy EP, Government Issue’s Legless Bull EP and Youth Brigade’s Possible EP in the Dischord rack at Yesterday and Today. Recorded on 14 December 1983, almost two months after the band had played their final show, Salad Days felt like the requiem for a shared dream. Yet, typical of the DC punk scene’s capacity for death and renewal, in the same month that the single went on sale another young area band were entering a recording studio to record their début EP. This would be the first seven-inch single to bear Dave Grohl’s name.
Chaotic hardcore underage delinquents
For bands in Washington DC a career in music was never the intention. The motivation was, ‘Let’s get together and fucking blow this place up …’
Dave Grohl
On the afternoon of 21 January 1985 Ronald Reagan stood in the magnificent Capitol Rotunda for the swearing-in ceremony that would begin his second term as President of the United States of America. Re-elected following a landslide victory over Democratic Party candidate Walter Mondale, Reagan promised a new dawn for a nation emerging from the deepest recession since the Great Depression.
‘My fellow citizens, our nation is poised for greatness,’ he told the American people in his second inaugural address. ‘We must do what we know is right and do it with all our might. Let history say of us, “These were golden years …”’
In the same month that President Reagan was filling a cold January day with hot air, across the Potomac River, in Arlington, Virginia, a new band was formed. For vocalist Chris Page, guitarist Bryant ‘Ralph’ Mason, bassist Dave Smith and 16-year-old drummer Dave Grohl, Mission Impossible represented their own new beginning, as all four band members had previously played together in Freak Baby, one of the new acts who had emerged on the DC scene in mid ’84, around the time maxiumumrocknroll published its contentious ‘Does Punk Suck?’ issue. Freak Baby were by no means the best of DC punk’s second-wave bands – indeed Dave Grohl fondly remembers them as being ‘awful’. But the quartet were possessed of a boundless energy and a knack for short sharp shock pit anthems, the best of which (‘Love in the Back of My Mind’, ‘20–20 Hindsight’ and ‘No Words’) rang out like Stiff Little Fingers played at 78 rpm. In 17-year-old skatekid vocalist Page, Mission Impossible also had a frontman with genuine charisma and presence.
Now a married father of two working on environmental education projects in his native Seattle, Chris Page discovered punk rock in 1983, when he heard his Yorktown High School classmate Brian Samuels blasting Bad Brains’ self-titled ROIR cassette on a boombox in the school playground: ‘As with Dave, my dad left the family, and I was angry and confused at the time,’ he recalls. ‘And this was like nothing I’d ever heard before. I thought it was amazing, just incredible. That and the first Minor Threat record were my introduction to this world.’
Samuels helped Page navigate his way into Washington DC’s underground punk network: on weekends the pair would ride the DC Metro’s Orange and Blue lines from Rosslyn into the city to check out the scene. Page recalls his initial journeys into the heart of DC being ‘an adventure’ – ‘There’s all kinds of dark stuff in the city that you don’t see in the suburbs,’ he notes – and the shows being characterised by ‘pure, explosive, sweaty energy’.
‘There was definitely something special happening in DC at that time,’ agrees Hollywood film star and 30 Seconds to Mars frontman Jared Leto, who lived in the city from 1983 to 1984. ‘That scene was really vibrant, and the characters in it were such individuals. I worked in a nightclub right across the street from the 9:30 so I could walk in there every night and we saw some crazy shit. The shows were just free-for-all madness, with the singers jumping off the stage into the audience and passing the mic around. It was definitely a fun time.’
For Dave Grohl, the 1983 Rock Against Reagan show helped shine a light on this underground community. That July day was the first time he saw flyers advertising all-ages punk shows, hosted in off-the-beaten-track venues never listed in the Washington Post’s Arts section or DC’s newly established free listings paper the City Paper – hole-in-the-wall city centre clubs like dc space and Space II Arcade, suburban community centres such as the Wilson Center and hardcore gig-friendly restaurants such as Food for Thought in Dupont Circle. Emboldened by memories of his night at the Cubby Bear, he stage-dived headlong into the scene.
‘No one was sniping my neighbourhood with Black Flag flyers on the weekend,’ he remembers, ‘so initially that scene stayed pretty underground. But as soon as I found out about these shows I was like, “Man, if I could just get a ride …” All day long I’d mow lawns to make enough money to go into the city at the weekend: I’d have my Walkman on, blasting out Dead Kennedys In God We Trust and Bad Brains Rock for Light and Minor Threat’s Out of Step and the Faith/Void album and I’d be wondering what the weekend would have in store.
‘I’d get dropped off or take the Metro down to the shows in inner city DC on my own, and initially I didn’t know anyone. At that time in Washington DC there were three or four people getting killed every night over drugs: there was crack cocaine and a new drug called Love Boat – nobody knew what the fuck it was, it could have been embalming fluid, but you smoked it and it would burn white hot like an electrical fire and make you feel like you were sitting in your own blood for about four hours. It would make people kill each other. It was fucking crazy. So here I was, a 14-year-old kid on my own, on a Friday night in the murder capital of the world …
‘But then you’d go into these shows, and they’d be amazing. There was always the sense that anything could happen. There were people selling fanzines and people giving out stickers, and there’d be broken glass and