Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways (2014) s01e02 Episode Script

So, Scream is from Bailey's Crossroads, which is right down the street.
"Put together with a troubled groove," is Trouble Funk.
This is all about the Revolution Summer that happened here.
That's the reference to the Chocolate City riots, which started on 14th and U.
This is taken from a quote from the Bad Brains.
They said their school they went to was like a prison, there were no fuckin' windows in it.
It was one door in and one door out.
And then "check yourself and wreck your brains like the Bad Brains.
Where's your 'P.
M.
A.
'"? - They're great.
- Pat? Yeah, really good.
- Check that out.
- Wow.
That's a lot of fuckin' words.
Let's play.
What the fuck are we doing? Everyone's just sitting around, talking.
That's some bullshit.
Hey, how you doin', man? How you doin'? - Oh, yeah? - Yeah, yeah Oh, really? All right, come on in.
Come on in.
We're one big happy family here.
You guys good? - Yeah, yeah.
- All right.
Where to, sir? Club LeBaron.
Every city has its past.
Good gracious, this place bring back memories.
But you have to know your past in order to know your future.
Direct from our newsroom in Washington.
In color, this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.
Good evening.
Dr.
Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.
Martin Luther King, 20 minutes ago, died.
It was insane.
I mean, I can remember hearing about it in school.
My friends said, "Oh," you know, "there's gonna be a race war, and we're gonna get killed.
" I just remember everything going crazy.
Frustration just reached a boiling point.
I knew when it happened, I said, "Folks gonna burn this town down.
" How I happened to be with my dad, and we were going down U Street and there were just people fighting in the middle of the street, you know, people being pulled from their cars.
You know, my dad was, "Don't even worry.
" But I'm like, "Whoa.
" They shut the whole shit down.
National Guard was in.
Tanks going up and down the damn street.
Boys like that.
Their M-16s and helmets and shit.
We couldn't quite understand why we couldn't go out.
So I have this memory of smoldering buildings and broken windows smashed out, and police and firemen, and I started to wonder if maybe I had This was something I had created in my mind to tell a story.
When you're a kid, your environment is your main influence.
But you don't know that until you grow up and start finding out about yourself.
Whenever I felt lost, I would go back to Virginia.
To my mother's house.
To the room where I grew up in.
And it just pulled everything back into perspective.
I remember that watch, it was a Mr.
Peanut watch.
- Oh.
- I liked that watch.
God, I couldn't just take a nice picture, you know? I always had to be the jackass.
- Pre-punk.
- And then, I lost all of my I never thought that I would move away from Virginia.
I thought I would spend the rest of my life there.
Like all of my friends that I grew up with.
Charles Dickens, I think, called Washington, DC "the city of magnificent intentions.
" But the gap between the dream and the reality is excruciatingly wide.
DC is naturally a transient town.
There's not that many people who were born and raised here.
Even today, I was like, "There's people from DC, then there's a 'Washingtonian.
'" People come and go.
And a lot of the money and a lot of the change is from the people that come and go.
I think so much of what happened in DC makes more sense when you look at the way an often ugly reality is juxtaposed so close to this dream.
Growing up as a white kid in Washington, DC, I felt really marginalized.
Because Can you name a '70s Like, a popular '70s rock band from Washington, DC? Name one.
You grew up here.
Name one.
It's, like, very hard Like "Average White Band"? No, they're not from here.
What's the one who did "Afternoon Delight"? Starland Vocal Band? They're from here.
That's about it, right? Gonna drop the bomb on 'em, baby! DC really didn't have a sound until the go-go thing broke out.
This is go-go, the sound of Chocolate City.
If you had to describe go-go for someone that has never heard it before, - how would you describe it? - Exotic drum patterns.
Raw and tribal, that's all I can say, just 'cause that's how I felt when I first heard it.
It was just like the rawest thing ever.
Bap! The art form that should have been popular instead of rap.
A lot of it is credited to Chuck Brown.
In the early '70s, he was playing Top 40s.
All Top 40 tunes, you know, you had to sound just like the radio.
People didn't like bands doing their own original tunes if they hadn't been played on the radio.
He would play something by LTD or O'Jays, and in between those songs, he wouldn't stop.
When you stop playing, you lose the crowd.
He had a beat that he played in between those Top 40s.
It's like this.
That's the bottom of the go-go beat.
Everything else is taken from that.
It's called a pocket beat, right? A lot of drummers still play it.
But mainly, like myself and other drummers of, I guess, the new era, we kind of mix it up.
Instead of playing the basic we'll switch it up.
One of the things that people don't understand or recognize about this go-go movement, is that before it became a music, it was just that.
It was a atmosphere.
You know what I'm sayin'? The club was actually what they called a "go-go.
" I didn't fall in love with the music till I went to a go-go when I was like 15, 16 and then like, saw it.
And I'm like, "Now, like, I completely understand everything.
" Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers come on, all these kids start comin' from out of nowhere.
Before they can hit one note, they goin', "Wind me up, Chuck!" - Wind me up, Chuck! - "Wind me up, Chuck!" And the drummer just "Mm-pow!" Boom! Right in the pocket! Yeah! That's what I'm talking about.
I was like, "Man, you know, we need to try to open up for Chuck.
" Sounds so good, you gotta do it again for me now! And we did! Come on, now! My earliest memories of DC and their sound and go-go was Trouble Funk.
When a multitude of drums are played at the same time in unison, it becomes hypnotic.
Mesmerizing.
And then you got the call-and-response thing.
"Are y'all tired yet?" They go, "Hell, no!" "You tired yet?" "Hell, no!" "Do you want some mo'?" "Hell, yeah!" "You ain't ready to go?" "Hell, no!" It kind of made everybody that came to see a go-go act feel like they were a part of what was goin' on.
Chuck Brown went to the owner and said, "I don't want them boys playing with me no mo'.
They stealin' my music.
" We didn't steal his music.
We stole the idea.
You know what I'm sayin'? It just kind of grew just from the street.
You go to see a Chuck show or a Rare Essence show or one of these shows, these kids take their tape decks in and they tape the show.
And all over the city, during the day, they're listening to these local bands.
You can't stand there and not pat your foot.
It had a certain repetitiveness to it that just got you movin'.
Even the mayor of Washington, DC had Chuck Brown play at his inauguration ceremony.
That says a lot.
The go-go sound, which Chuck created has helped to define what Washington, DC What the District of Columbia is today.
The greatest city in the world! Know what I mean? DC is go-go.
Go-go is DC.
You know what I'm saying? I mean, I would assure you that even Obama probably got a go-go tape somewhere up in there.
You know what I'm saying? Downtown Washington, DC was alive with its own music.
But something else was happening in the suburbs of Virginia.
- Should we go through here? - Yeah! One local Virginia studio produced the entire soundtrack of my youth.
- Was that in your back yard? - That's the back yard.
That's Rites of Spring's sessions.
Oh, wow! There's Ian in dress-ups.
There's a good picture of Henry with a dress.
- Look at that.
- Before tats.
These are all the heroes of like, the Washington, DC punk rock scene.
This is sort of like a Hall of Fame, this whole thing.
Inner Ear is the right person in the right place at the right time.
Don Zientara is that guy.
Don himself is an artist, a musician, an activist.
He was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.
I was drafted, went through basic, and they had a program where you can get an education through the army, so I got an electronics training.
I was always involved in that.
I had a phonograph and I had an amplifier, and I needed a phono preamp, which nobody needs anymore.
So I told my friend Bob, and Bob said, "No problem.
" He comes over with a paper bag, just full of parts.
He says, "Here's the drawings, make it.
" And so that's how I learn.
When you see Don Zientara's name on the back of every punk rock record coming out of Washington, DC, you just imagine him to be this gnarly punk rock guy with a mohawk and a leather jacket and tattoos.
So when I first met him, I was totally surprised that he is a 6'6" surfer with a nerdy voice, like, "Hi, how you doing, I'm Don Zientara.
" I took one look at him and thought, "Wait, you're the guy that recorded the fuckin' Bad Brains?" A lot of bands, they had their songs and all, but they're rocking and rolling, having a good time.
To me, it was competitive.
Like, I literally said, "If they think they playing fast, watch this.
" The Bad Brains were really one of the first hardcore punk bands.
They were the first band influenced by punk rock, taking it much further musically.
Much faster.
Much more aggressive.
They brought me in a homemade demo tape on a reel-to-reel and they were accomplished musicians, but they had their own idea of what they wanted their sound to be.
So did you grow up in the city? Yeah, I grew up Southeast Hartford Street.
Projects.
What was DC like back then? Separate.
DC's a weird town, like this beltway that's around DC is almost like a wall here.
DC is a very segregated city.
They built the school that we went to.
- It was a brand-new school.
- Like a prison.
Well, that was our frickin' school.
With the slotted windows and stuff? It was crazy.
They locked the back door.
Only way in and out was If a fire broke out, everybody's dead.
You know, we lived in the suburbs.
So downtown was a place where you went on field trips to the Smithsonian and if you went with your parents, you know, you had the windows rolled up, and that was not a place you got out of the car.
Only white people we saw was teachers or people who owned stores.
Here's all the governmental white buildings, and everything was black all around it.
And I remember being in Hartford Street as a kid in the '60s.
My mom had a Polaroid picture of a house with a yard.
I saw this picture, and I'm like, "Wow.
That's like The Brady Bunch and shit," you know? I think sometimes The Brady Bunch had a lot to do with what I thought of What the world You know, how it's supposed to be.
I mean, everybody was in bands at the time.
When people wanted to make a demo tape, they saw, "Hey, you've got a tape recorder.
" So, I recorded my friend's band.
The man who was sort of the executive producer for them, he said, "Well, I've You know, I've got a few other people bring over.
" I said, "Well, you know, I'm open.
" You know, "We'll give it a shot.
" I was impressed enough with the Bad Brains to pay for a recording session over at Don's studio.
The night before, where I'm working at the store by myself, H.
R.
comes in Nobody else from the band and he sits there, across the counter from me with his hands crossed like this, staring at me menacingly.
And I freaked out.
I got this session tomorrow with them.
I can't do it.
This guy's scaring the hell out of me.
What were your first impressions of the Bad Brains? I had to become acclimated to their style of music, which is was quite a quite a shock to the system.
I remember when I was 14 or 15, seeing a piece on the Bad Brains on the local, like, news magazine show.
And they showed H.
R.
doing backflips on the stage.
And I was like, "Wow.
Who the fuck are these guys?" They started playing in Madam's Organ, which was this hippie commune on 18th Street.
It was pretty much like a flophouse, really.
You walked in, there was people everywhere.
There'd be a couple mattresses there, whatever.
Always beer, always pot.
People were throwing up.
That was sort of their home base.
We saw these guys walk in The coolest-looking punk people we'd ever seen in our lives.
These guys used to wear suits all the time in high school.
Some "Cooley High"-type shit? My man took the suit, threw that shit Paint on that shit, glue.
Put glass All kind of shit.
Tear up everything.
Now we Bad Brains.
They'd walk around Georgetown, to hand out these flyers.
"Are you ready? We are! Bad Brains.
" "The punk rock explosion with the roughest punk band in the world.
Bad Brains.
" I remember the day I saw them.
I mean, we were all waiting for them to start playing, and then H.
R.
just kind of busted through the audience from behind us and came right up on that stage.
And then they just kind of exploded.
So you had H.
R.
moving like, you know, Cab Calloway or whatever, but on steroids.
H.
R.
, like, you know, one of the greatest things about watching him was when he would turn around to you guys and do his little conducting thing.
You know, there was part of me watching that, thinking like, "Wow, is he Like, is he conducting the band right now?" - Yeah, it was that.
- Backflip.
But not even in a contrived way.
Frenetic.
It was insane.
When he start doing that shit then we really poppin'.
It's like a weeknight, I've snuck out to go see the Bad Brains, right? We go and we're probably two of Let's say, 10 people there.
It was the most amazing show I had ever seen.
That was the greatest band that ever existed as far as I was concerned.
It's just like I realized you know, I'd found my home with the Bad Brains.
There was very little crossover I think, between communities then.
They had no hang-up about being black.
We're not on no black shit.
We're not on no "black punk" shit.
We're not no Afro shit, we're just youth.
The shit turned into a youth movement.
It's this whole, like, confusion about being "punk" that they take it into this "black" shit.
When I was a punk, I was a punk.
I think they gave me a set list of what they wanted to do.
It was 14 songs or 10 songs It was an enormous amount.
This is one afternoon.
They said, "Well, we'll probably not get a chance to mix them today.
" I said, "Still, come on.
" We were recording in his house, so that's why you hear on that recording I was in the basement doing my tracks.
Original Inner Ear was on Ivy Street.
I don't know what the address was.
Don started his own studio in his house.
You know, just a regular suburban house.
I had the control room on the side porch.
But then we ran a snake down to the basement.
He was in the friggin' bathroom.
Earl was in the living room.
H was Outside.
They had crickets and shit, kids watchin' and talkin'.
He's in the back yard, like And he's jumping around and dancing around.
I mean, you just have to wonder what the neighbors made of this.
You can't hear it on the "Black Dots" record, but I have this other version where you can actually hear the kids going like, "What's going on here?" Like, then they'd cheer and stuff.
That is okay.
This is all happening over 30 years ago now that that stuff was recorded.
At that point in time, people needed something new.
That is as fresh and dynamic as the day that they recorded it.
When I was a kid, I thought, "I'm not gonna be a musician.
" You look at people like Peter Frampton or Jimmy Page or Jimi Hendrix, like, they're just at a level there's just no way.
So I became a skateboarder.
We just started skating.
Me and Rollins and all of the neighborhood kids, and we listened to a lot of rock.
I loved rock.
And then Ted Nugent.
Have you ever seen footage of him in the '70s? He's got a beard and long hair and he's wearing a loincloth and a tail, and moccasins.
And he is going crazy! Screaming.
We would argue and argue like, whether the Ramones or Ted Nugent Who was better? And I said, "Ted Nugent!" And I'd just argue and they told me, "What about The Clash?" "Fuck The Clash.
Ted Nugent.
" Punk just seemed kind of a joke to me.
If punks have a home territory, it is here on the same street that launched the miniskirt and the look and mood of the Swinging '60s.
Because the media treated it like a joke.
Having seen the Bad Brains, we decided like, "We're gonna do this.
We're gonna fuckin' be in a band for real.
" That's George.
Jeff.
Ian.
And Nathan, this guy.
You have to introduce yourself.
What was the first record that you made? "Teen Idles.
" I was in high school.
The reason we recorded was to make a yearbook.
'Cause we were breaking up.
We knew we were gonna break up.
So we just wanted to document the stuff 'cause it was important to us.
And the first recording experience was pretty terrifying for us.
And we were not good, I can acknowledge that.
But, fuck, man.
We were trying.
So we were tracking and another band had come to see the studio.
And there was a small window into the control room.
And the other band would stand there with him sitting at the control desk.
And we're playing, and he's pointing and they're all laughing at us.
And I remember thinkin' like, "This is fucked up!" There's so many people saying, you know, "Why don't you stop this noise and play some real music?" The punk music intensity, or Call it what you want You had to break through so many barriers to get shows, to play, to get people to listen to your music.
So much of my work, I think, really came out of feeling we were being dismissed.
So much of the energy, I think, I was like, "Okay.
" Like, "Fine, I'm a piece of shit.
Watch what this piece of shit's gonna do.
" I was gonna keep on going.
In '79, I had started going over on buying trips to England because we weren't getting the fill from our distributors of the kind of records that I knew were coming out in England.
Henry and Ian would always be among the first to come out and help me unpack the bags so that they could get the next copy of the Satan Rats' "You Make Me Sick" .
45.
Or the next UK Subs .
45.
I don't think these punk rock music scenes began as music scenes.
I think these scenes started as a group of misfits People that didn't feel accepted in society.
I was told if I wanted to be a punk, I should move to New York.
'Cause you can't really be a punk in Washington.
Which I was like, "Well fuck that, I'm not moving to New York.
" Here's Ian.
Hey, Ian.
What's up, buddy? We got in last night.
We got drums up and we got sounds and so we're just gonna start tracking today.
Come by! Okay, bye.
It's a challenge to go into a different studio every week and bang out a song.
Hey! Guitars are too fuckin' loud! Say what, Shifty? - My guitar keeps getting really loud.
- The guitars are way too loud! - Dave's guitar? - Yeah.
Especially when you haven't been in there before.
Hey, is there any way that, uh, we could record? James is gonna check one thing, and then we're gonna go again right away.
Everybody kind of has to rise to the occasion, adapt to the sound of the room.
What they're hearing coming back from the speakers.
I've never met Don, I've never been in to Inner Ear.
But I've been looking at the name "Inner Ear" on album sleeves since probably 1983.
This is the studio that I was most looking forward to visiting.
It's like my bedroom from when I was a teenager.
I knew about this place and all the bands that had made records here.
And then just being here today, and Ian MacKaye comes and hangs out all day, man.
- All right.
- Excellent, you guys.
God, dude.
Queen and Thin Lizzy, in one fuckin' night, dude? My sister took me and we went down, and I was 14 or 15 My sister took me to my first Queen concert.
so I sat down, and then I looked behind me and there was these kids from my neighborhood.
Turn around and there's this one girl, who's a little older than me.
And she said, "Hey!" And she just has the word "fuck" written across her forehead in Sharpie.
And I was like "Okay.
" When that guy's around, you just want to sit down and listen to him talk, man.
When I was in 11th grade, I went to the prom, with a A senior invited me to prom.
And the band that played was a band called "The Mighty Peacemakers.
" And they were a go-go band.
Then I realized, "Wow, this is happening here!" And someone said, "Yeah, Friday night go-gos.
" Every night, like 4,000 or 5,000 kids come out to the go-go there.
Trouble Funk and other go-go bands Experience Unlimited, Rare Essence, Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers They're playing these giant shows.
The whites don't really know what's happening, most of them.
But these bands had been doing this thing for 10, 12 years.
No one even knew it was happening.
It was really inspiring for us.
We thought, "Fuck, man, like, nobody knows about it, and yet they got it going on? We can get it going on, too.
" No one would put out Teen Idles.
No one would put out Bad Brains at the time.
Some groups just were simply unknown.
And a lot of people wanted to keep them unknown or considered their music not music.
We just thought, how many labels are lining up to put out, like, a pretty okay teenage punk band from Washington, DC that's already broken up? And then someone said, "Fuck it, let's start our own record label.
" I was like, "What?" Because I didn't know anything about a fucking record label, honestly.
The record business stinks.
But we're like, "Our necessity.
We gotta do this.
" How many 18-year-olds are like, "Let's start a fucking label"? The ones who had no choice.
That's how many are fucking doing it.
I can't even think of another community that preceded us with that attitude of, like, "Well, we can put out our own single.
And we're gonna make our own covers and we'll press 100 or whatever.
" - We took an English single.
- We pulled it apart.
Unfolded it to see how the flaps looked.
Took it to a print shop.
And just said, "Can you print a thousand of these?" And then, we got them back, and I'm using scissors and glue.
We fucking hand-cut and folded the first like, 10,000 to 12,000 records by hand.
I remember hanging out at Dischord and putting together those Minor Threat records 'cause they'd have the folding parties.
They were homemade.
I mean, they were like Not even totally shaped like singles and the guys in the band would write shit on them.
And you know, it was just 100% homemade venture.
It's an approach to life.
Do it yourself.
"P.
M.
A.
," to quote the Bad Brains.
"Positive mental attitude.
You can do it.
" Our first poster said, "The Bad Brains, the greatest punk rock band in the world.
" I don't think we ever even had a song.
If you see something you think needs to be done, go do it.
Don't wait for anybody else.
Do it yourself.
Dischord gave to Washington what it would not otherwise see musically or philosophy-wise.
I didn't have a problem thinking that you know, we could do it in Iron Cross, because I had just seen the Teen Idles do it.
I'd just seen the Bad Brains do it.
And so you get this sort of snowball of creative energy 'cause people realize, "He did that? I can do that.
" We made records.
That's what we did.
These bands might not be the most famous bands in the world, but these bands influenced some of the most famous bands in the world.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beastie Boys, Jane's Addiction, Green Day.
We were all brought up and influenced by these bands from Washington, DC and Dischord Records.
How many records, in total do you think Dischord's has sold? I dunno.
Four million, maybe? - Fucking A, man.
- Yeah.
- I had no idea.
- A lot.
I just wanted to document music that I thought was important.
And then to try to show some responsibility about it.
I still feel that way.
Hey, Ian, when everything was, like, you know, "alternative rock" got popular and all that stuff, how many big labels came to you and said, "Can I buy you?" I mean, in theory, all of them.
- But we never had lunch with anybody.
- Right, you didn't They asked for lunch.
We got a lot of lunch requests.
- Yeah.
- But it just was nothing to talk about.
Right, right.
It's such a different world than I'm from.
When I was a kid, I didn't know that you could put a band together, print your own records, you know, I didn't really know that that existed.
The only thing I thought you could do was, you know, play, like, maybe in a wedding band or go to Hollywood and get the big record deal.
This is fucking rad.
Rad.
So there's a certain angst I feel when I'm here in DC.
We lived here for a while to record "Nothing Left to Lose" and "One by One.
" I struggled learning how to record drums on a record.
Everybody ready? - Yes.
- Yeah, yeah! I don't know if I've learned yet.
Here we go! Everybody thinks we're from Seattle.
We're not.
We're from everywhere.
California, and Washington state and Washington, DC and Los Angeles.
But if there's anywhere where you could say we're from, to a certain degree, would be here, possibly.
'Cause most of our germs of our ideas come from Dave and he's from here.
I like it, but I can't hear me.
Come on in and listen, y'all.
Come on in.
Butch has a Southern accent now.
"Come on in and listen, y'all.
We're in Shirlington, Virginia.
" If Dave had grown up in Los Angeles, he wouldn't be who he is.
I think in the nature of him growing up in DC and in Virginia, you're sort of forced to find your own path.
Pretty darn good, Dave Grohl.
I fuckin' hate what I just did.
Oh, God, it's perfect! Most of the albums from the Dischord label were recorded at Inner Ear Studios.
This studio was so important to me as a musician.
Not only because it became the soundtrack of my youth, but these albums were my teachers.
Ian MacKaye has been my hero since the day I met him.
Dave told me about your interview was you were schooled on Ted Nugent when you started out, man.
That just fucking rules so much.
One of the most honorable things about him is his evolution as a musician, from being the bass player of Teen Idles to being the singer of Minor Threat to being the guitar player of Fugazi.
In the Teen Idles, my proficiency It wasn't great, you know.
I was learning.
The Bad Brains, I think they really were the ones who said, like, "Don't waste time on the stage.
" Like, if you're gonna do it, do it right.
I love Minor Threat.
I think the reason they were so good was most of the other punk rock bands were influenced by English punk rock, which talked about political things and class struggle and things that didn't really apply to our American life.
And Minor Threat, I think, was the first band that talked about, like, sociological issues that really did matter to us.
"My friend lied to me.
" You know "You didn't do what you said you were gonna do.
" Much more personal and relatable and the stuff you could really get behind.
Yeah, I remember, like, Teen Idles I was writing to 25 kids in Washington, DC, never thinking, really, that it would be a song that would ever be heard outside of the city.
Because let's face Who would ever listen to some punk band from DC? So this is the example of the power of the DC punk scene Its reputation reached even Montana.
By the early '80s, I knew about Bad Brains, I knew about Minor Threat.
Henry Rollins, of course, was in Black Flag at that point.
I bought Black Flag records in Montana.
I actually came to DC 'cause I was going to graduate school.
Looking back, it was my effort to grow up.
Found an apartment near Dupont Circle September of 1984.
I put my stuff in the apartment, walked across the street to the pay phone to call my mom to assure her that, yes, I was in Washington, DC, but no, I had not been killed yet.
I had not been robbed.
But what I saw spray-painted on the wall next to the pay phone was "Nazi punks rule.
Oi, oi, oi!" Honestly, I felt in In those moments like it might have been better if punk rock had never been invented.
I went and visited all those beautiful monuments to our national idealism.
Everywhere I went there were homeless people, people asking for money.
And I thought, "Wow.
'Government of the people, by the people, for the people.
'" It's heartbreaking.
I'm not ashamed to say I cried.
Here we are in Washington DC, probably the single most affluent metropolitan area in the entire country.
At the same time, a community with a gaping wound at its heart.
Thank you so much.
Good to be here.
I remember the first time I met him.
Mark was like, "I'm really disappointed in this scene.
" And we're like, "Who the fuck are you?" "I'm Mark Andersen.
Punk activist from Montana.
" Mark Andersen is really earnest, and he loves everyone.
And he wants good for the planet and will fight for that.
Everything I believed in Montana about punk rock was a lie.
You want the truth, you don't want fucking lies.
That's kind of how I felt.
One of the very first signs that made me feel like I had some brothers and sisters in this scene was a little cassette tape I picked up at Smash! Records in Georgetown.
A band called Mission Impossible.
I remember Dave being just like the most insane drummer I'd ever seen.
When I listened to the tape, I was like, "I have to find these guys.
" And then he fucking, like, buys a demo tape of my band and comes over to our rehearsal space.
- Really? - Yes! I think I was 16.
What I discovered was a window into a universe of possibilities.
When Mark Andersen came to Washington, DC, all of a sudden we were going to protests in front of the South African embassy.
This whole thing called "Revolution Summer" was building.
There was definitely a lot of political awareness developing with a lot of the people in the music scene.
Sort of the politics of, "Well, the world's a little bigger than just our little subsect of people and maybe we should care about that.
" Revolution Summer all came together in the mind and the heart of Amy Pickering over at National Planning Council.
The NPC had a summer program to keep teens engaged or something.
Somehow I fell into this job.
And I hired all of my friends to come work there, too.
But I'm not sure what we did all day.
It was very straightforward.
Mostly what they were doing was fucking around and getting paid for it.
We started making ransom notes.
I remember seeing flyers around Washington, DC that said "Revolution Summer.
" There were a lot of things like apartheid that we thought were wrong and we should be actually acting against.
She was watching TV one day, and she saw pictures from South Africa and the incredible courage of folks rising up against apartheid.
But apartheid looked like a system that would never fall.
That's how strong the South African white regime was.
But what struck Amy was the youth of many of the protesters, and their courage.
She was watching this and all of a sudden, she started feeling ashamed.
The idea that we should act for the greater good outside of our own issues in our community inspired me and a number of other people to say, "This is Revolution Summer.
Let's do something about this.
" Spring ended today.
And the Revolution Summer began today.
One of the ways to draw the community together was to have shows.
I feel like half or more of the shows that happened a few years running there were all Positive Force shows.
Seeing the gigs go from 50 people to 5,000 people and all of them connected by this message, I guarantee you that the people that were at these shows were inspired to go on and do something with their lives because of Positive Force.
It was the idealism of Washington, DC, it was also the idealism of punk rock.
And Positive Force, for me, was a way to live out all of that.
I remember going to the local punk rock record store and finding the Scream album, "Still Screaming.
" There was a PO box address, and it was from Falls Church, Virginia, which was only two miles from where I lived.
Scream became one of my favorite bands in the world.
Not just from my neighborhood, but in the world.
So, when I saw a flyer in our local music store that they were looking for a drummer, I immediately called that phone number.
We needed to find a drummer because our drummer was getting ready to have his first kid and he didn't wanna go on tour anymore.
I was still in fucking high school.
I couldn't imagine being the drummer of Scream.
I was just in that moment, jamming with my heroes.
When he abruptly left to join Scream, I understood why Dave did it.
Besides the fact that they were his heroes, he just wanted to tour and go out.
Just be in a band that's working and on the road.
My first show with Scream was a Positive Force benefit for Amnesty International.
And it was triumphant.
Great show.
I remember it.
I remember it well.
I remember the show.
The band and audience all marched up the street.
Everyone brought a drum and we stood across the street from the South African embassy and played as loud as we could.
We were protesting apartheid, which made you feel like a human being, but you also felt like the luckiest person in the world because your hero from your favorite local band was standing next to you with his drum and we were all doing it together.
It was about us as a community taking action.
Mark took the sentiment of Revolution Summer and put it into action.
You were challenging the world and yourself to do something really hard.
Which is to live out these glorious dreams.
Dreams that we like to put on monuments and then kind of forget about.
You could never live them out alone.
And by the time you came along, there was like, a scene, right? You could go fucking see how many bands? It was just like, a reality.
It didn't exist five years earlier than that.
When you were young, did you know much about the local music scene? When I was in my first band, I was obsessed with finding out about everything from Dischord and DC hardcore and, like, we respect it so much.
But I just remember everyone was following that model and making their own CDs and passing 'em around.
We learned from that.
You know, we started doing that ourselves.
The way that like, record labels work like an antiquated process, it slowed that band up.
I think that they're on their way, it's just that they've got to go touch the people, man.
Figure out who you are and establish a rapport with your group of people.
Music, it takes a certain amount of willpower.
Not only us, any band in this town.
We was, like, recording this music, man.
We was putting out music like every other week.
And the music was like, spreading like a disease.
The DIY thing carries through a lot of different music scenes in DC.
I'm sure you've experienced this where you run into some guy who's like a jazz guy or some funk player.
You're from the punk scene and you guys relate in a way that's very A Washington, DC-like language.
I saw a real parallel with the go-go thing, but never could connect with them, 'cause they were a totally different world.
And then we decided, like, "We should play with Trouble Funk.
" They headlined, we opened for them.
Big Boys, Minor Threat, Trouble Funk.
Trouble Funk were interested in it, 'cause they heard about the punk scene.
We were into it, 'cause we loved the go-go thing.
Then there's these punk-funk shows.
Yeah.
They both are like, two underground type of sounds.
And it just goes together.
You know what I'm sayin'? We got there This is real culture clashing.
I remember again, Minor Threat playing and just looking out at the soundboard, seeing all the Trouble Funk guys, just going like Look at us like, "What the?" Like laughing and pointing.
It was pretty amazing, I gotta say.
Where the real power is The real revolution, if you will, is simply getting people who otherwise might never encounter each other, to know each other.
Man, we should get together and do something - like a go-go/rock project.
- Tony, I'd love to.
I think it'd be so much fun, man.
It'd sure be nice to do some of them big money shows, man, with the Foo Fighters and stuff.
Welcome to Big Tony's birthday bash! Everybody ready? One of the best things about growing up in this area is the fuckin' music and you know that's true.
If it weren't for Washington, DC and the music scene here, I wouldn't be standing up here with a mic right now.
What we've done is we've put together an evening of entertainment that celebrates generations of Washington, DC musicians People that have inspired the next to go on and do better things and keep the tradition alive.
And I consider myself a Washington DC musician.
For life, no matter where I am.
Just so you know, it's gonna be a long fuckin' night.
The experiences that I had here in this city from the age of 14 years old set this foundation for the rest of my life as a musician.
The community, the support, the love that was here in the DC music scene has carried over into what I do now.
The way the Foo Fighters work as a band, we're like a family.
And we try to treat everyone that way.
I honestly feel like that comes from Ian, that comes from Dischord Records, Don Zientara and all of the bands I saw when I was young.
The message wasn't "We were rock stars and we are better than you," the message was that "We're people and we're all in this together.
" I got that from Washington, DC.
And it makes its way into our music.