"Dude, I heard Ian was tripping the whole weekend they recorded this."
--one of my friends, freshman year of high school, 1988

It was the rumor that brought hippies and punks together: Ian MacKaye dropped acid with Al Jourgensen, and the results had us asking Deadheads for Egyptian Eye. Like most of MacKaye's work, Pailhead's Trait has aged well, but the same can't be said for dozens of bands he's supported via Dischord Records, the label he started with Jeff Nelson in 1980. Most of those new to Dischord's past will listen to these songs and move on, unimpressed because they're sloppy, simple, and their choruses don't explode with nine hundred tracks of compressed guitar. What is lost on them may be lost to the rest of us: the sound of adversity.

In the face of the best UK and American punk acts being bandied about indie rock the last few years-- even in the face of their key inspiration, Bad Brains-- Dischord's formative material simply doesn't hold up. While The Untouchables penned a classic with "Nic Fit" (included here), and Minor Threat recorded any number of scream-along favorites like "Out of Step" and "Guilty of Being White" (certainly not included here), the remainder of the label's early talent was long on passion, short on hooks. History has been no less cruel to other early 80s punk bands from Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, where as few bands rose to the top of the heap as did in DC. History makes fads of genuine, burning passion. History turns life-or-death dedication into (This Is Not A) Fugazi T-Shirts.

What you can't get on these discs are the jocks that would kick your ass for listening to them, the girls that wouldn't look at you for dressing like these bands did, and the Friday night keggers at Brad Johnson's house while his parents were up at Stowe. Movies like Better Off Dead and The Breakfast Club seem laughable now, but the division between teenagers was once that great. Dischord fought a war, and they deserve your respect. Unfortunately, they can't command it, as this collection of teenage rebellion requires you to tap into the drama of that history, to relive the struggle-- few among us can. But fear not: the music is accompanied by a 132-page booklet that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about every band that ever existed for ten days and recorded two songs. Alongside Cynthia Connolly's legendary photo documentary Banned In DC, you can piece their story together.

Over the years Dischord has walked a thin line, erring just this side of self-aggrandizement in the beginning, just that side of self-martyrdom later. As Dischord's appeal spread beyond Washington DC, their image was retranslated, first to jocks in punk clothing-- alpha males that found plenty of machismo fuel in the shaved heads and studs-- and later to the skinny skate rats standing bug-eyed at the back of the pit, ducking windmills. In each instance Dischord bent based on their audience-- first ousting the meatheads with a few bands that put more than mindless chants in their hardcore. Dag Nasty, Marginal Man, Gray Matter and Rites of Spring have received more attention in the last five years than Fugazi and Black Flag combined-- bands and fans were screaming about them as soon as the Internet was up and running; how they'd started emo, predicted everything. Their apolitical, traditional lyrics moved the American punk scene away from the Cold War sloganeering that had become caricature by the mid-80s, fusing the dynamic thrash of Hüsker Dü with what by then was a well-established DC punk sound. Along with Three, Soulside and the short-lived One Last Wish, they're the bands whose material has aged best in Dischord's catalog, yet they represent a period when the label was at its creative apex and popular nadir.

The valley stretching between 1985 and 1988 that connects their early by-the-numbers punk with the assured, angular rock and roll they would all but invent in the early 90s is home to some of the most remarkable music in Dischord's 20-year history. The songs One Last Wish recorded were only recently made available on CD (1986, Dischord/Peterbilt), but they put nearly everything else on Dischord, up to the release of Fugazi's 7 Songs, to shame-- the acoustic guitars, lightly flanged electrics and reverb heard on "My Better Half", "Burning in the Undertow", and the chaotic punk waltz "This Time" (featured here) are ten years ahead of their time at least. But then, so were Fugazi.

It's fitting that Dischord rose to prominence with its co-founder, on the back of his most celebrated collaboration. Fugazi's position as the torchbearers of American punk rock is impossible to contest: MacKaye's rabid DIY business ethic and Guy Picciotto's soul-of-the-underground scream have been the foundation of as many record labels as teenage romances. Their legacy overshadows Dischord's, as the first disc of this set is largely a history of bands Fugazi used to be: The Teen Idles, Minor Threat, Deadline, Grand Union, Rites of Spring, One Last Wish, Egg Hunt, and Embrace. Disc 2 plots out the second era, as MacKaye used Fugazi as a vehicle to reject the mindless and increasingly violent hardcore punk scene, full of jocks trying to clear the pit to the sounds of Gang Green, Slapshot, the Gorilla Biscuits, Youth of Today, and the ungodly embarrassing Warzone. Their first 13 songs (two EPs compiled as one CD in the fall of 1989) changed the landscape at high schools and colleges nationwide. Hardcore was getting dumber and dumber-- skinheads were popping up all over the East Coast-- and Ian MacKaye did something about it: he turned Fugazi shows into referendums on courtesy and respect for your fellow man. He had entire audiences laughing, pointing at skinheads-- he empowered the insecure in his audience, and played a huge part in stabilizing the punk underground, which by 1990 had deteriorated into open brawling in the guise of mosh pits.

With the success of 13 Songs and its jaw-dropping successor (released just after the former CD compilation), Dischord had access to previously unimaginable sums of money. They signed some sure bets-- Jawbox and Lungfish, whose first and second albums predict most of what happened in indie rock during the last half of the 1990s-- but they weren't selfish. The Nation of Ulysses, a Cramps/Gun Club hybrid fronted by the un-fucking-believable Ian Svenonius coated their new-soul screams in faux-paranoia, once perpetrating a rumor the FBI had branded them a revolutionary threat. Autoclave followed Fire Party as the second all-girl band on the roster, recording songs that would inform most of the rest of what happened in indie rock during the second half of the 1990s, by which time Dischord was releasing math-rock (Branch Manager), straight-ahead pop (Trusty) and Smart Went Crazy (a sorely overlooked group, one of few to incorporate cello as a primary instrument without falling victim to neo-classicism).

Following a slow period in the late 90s that saw releases from Ian Svenonius' pure-soul revival The Make-Up and DC stalwarts Bluetip (formerly of Swiz, the hardcore band that screamed, "You lie to me, bitch!!!"), Dischord tried to modernize for the millennium with Faraquet and Q & Not U. The former, an offshoot of Smart Went Crazy, lives in much the same space as Don Caballero: the shadow of Bitch Magnet. Q & Not U have managed to fuse a number of different styles-- Fugazi's start/stop screams, Sonic Youth's walls of guitar-- in much the same way as And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, but thus far, they've either rejected or been ignored by the majors.

Where this collection shines is exactly where it should-- its third disc of unreleased material, the selling point for the label's existing fanbase. Though most songs have been egregiously spiced up in remastering, The Untouchables' early version of Minor Threat's mainstay "Stepping Stone", and the Teen Idles's hilarious first-takes are how history should remember these bands: young, excited and trying hard. Giving us Minor Threat's "Asshole Dub"-- a jab at Government Issue and the increasingly Jah Bad Brains-- and the "Rozzlyn Rangers" studio goof completely defuses the over-the-top severity Dischord has often been associated with. Had they had this sense of humor in public, who knows how different things would be-- it's possible the indie and punk rock bands of the last ten years wouldn't have taken themselves so seriously had they known how much fun their inspirations had recording their favorite songs.

-Chris Ott, September 27th, 2002