This is an interview I did via mail with Fugazi's Guy Picciotto in Jan 1998. Lots and lots of thanks for Cynthia from Dischord for organizing this and to Guy for taking time out to do the interview. The general idea was that this interview would come out before the new Fugazi LP End Hits did but I guess you will have heard the new LP by now. I first heard it over the PA at a gig by Bob Tilton and it was amazing, a real continuation of the ideas of Red Medicine.

What have you personally been up to since the end of touring for Red Medicine? I noticed you'd done some production work for the mAKE-UP...

Most of what I do is kind of wrapped up in Fugazi. We kind of operate underneath the scope of the radar so it might not seem like we've been that busy but really there has been a lot going on: 2 tours of Australia (the second to make up dates cancelled when Ian got ill with a collapsed lung the first time round), a tour of Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile) and the on and off again process of recording our next record which took us from March to December of 97, interrupted as it was by the aforementioned tours and our drummer Brendan's marriage and birth of his son. But when the band wasn't so active I had a bunch of other stuff going on. I do a lot of recording sessions in the basement of my old group house using 8 track equipment Fugazi bought a few years back. This year I did stuff with Blonde Redhead, mAKE-UP, Crom-Tech, Mighty Flashlight, Machetres and a bunch of others. I also run a small label called Peterbilt which had been on hold for almost 10 years due to Fugazi time-overload but this year I got it back up and running with a couple of releases: a co-issue with Dischord of a Happy-Go-Licky CD (the band Brendan and I were in before Fugazi) and a vinyl 12" by a band called Black Light Panthers which contains some of the first bedroom recordings Brendan and I made in 1982 plus some 1997 faux-jungle chaotics. Oh yeah - last year I also had some Super 8 movies screened about (Silly Game and Please Cry even showed over in London at the ICA)...I'm sure a bunch of other stuff went down but looking back over the last year it all comes back like a swirling disjointed chaos.

Would you tell us a little about your history? Did you grow up in DC?

Yeah - I'm a DC hometowner. Born here in 1965, went to school here and am fully in love with most aspects of this town. In some ways it's a strange place to live because the outsider's postcard perception of DC is so at odds with the reality. The local culture that thrives here has always been amazing, from the Go-Go scene to the punk scene etc. but politically speaking it's a kind of a hell hole. The crux of the matter is that DC has never been granted statehood so it kind of functions as a vassal province without representation in congress and at the mercy of a local government which is both corrupt and incompetent.
On the positive side, museums are free and we have lots of trees.

What kind of music were you first influenced by? I remember reading an interview with Ian and he said the first show he was really struck by was The Cramps, what about yourself?

Funnily enough Ian and I shared the same first punk show. I was also at that Cramps show in 1979 and though I didn't know Ian at the time I think our experiences were pretty identical. The event was a benefit for a local college radio station that was being shut down by the university's jesuit college president for running abortion clinic public service announcements which ran against the Roman Catholic doctrine. It was a really explosive event not only because of the political nature of the issue but also because the station itself was so amazing, playing shit no one else in the area would touch. (It's the first place I ever heard bands like The Adverts, Stiff Little Fingers, The Cramps, all the great sounds of that era.) Anyway, the show ended in a complete riot with tables smashed and shoved through windows, Lux Interior vomiting on stage, their guitarist Bryan Gregory projectile spitting lit cigarettes into the crowd etc. It terrified me totally but also made me realize the energy potential of what a band could do. After having only seen groups like Kiss and Aerosmith, who were great in a way but totally removed, safe and vicarious, this was a primer in having something explode directly in front of your eyes. From then on I was hooked in and hit shows all the time, seeing The Clash soon after, then the Bad Brains locally and pretty soon the local scene with tons of pre-teens forming bands and taking over.

How did you come to meet Ian (MacKaye, guitar/vox), Joe (Lally, bass) and Brendan (Canty, drums)? Correct me if I'm wrong on this one hut weren't you the last to join Fugazi?

Ian was a major player in the early punk scene of 1980 on and I knew of him from the Teen Idles his first band and just from sharing space with him and his crowd in what was then a very small universe. When Minor Threat formed (his second band), I went to high school with his bassist and guitarist so I went to a practise of theirs after school and that was the first time we were properly introduced. Brendan was also a figure on the scene and I was a huge fan of his first band Deadline I would hang with those guys constantly and he and I hit it off immediately, making music together almost from the start. After Deadline broke up in 1982, Brendan and I began playing together in what has been an uninterrupted sequence of bands from the age of 16 on to now. They were: Black Light Panthers, Insurrection, Rites Of Spring, One Last Wish, Happy-Go-Licky then Fugazi. Fugazi actually formed without me and played a show as a 3 piece but the fusion of Brendan and I up to that point made it almost mandatory that I weasel my way in. Joe and I met much later probably in 1985 when he was roadie-ing for the Dischord band Beefeater. He and Ian hit it off famously and Fugazi was really born from their long practising as a 2 piece.

I think that often the music of Fugazi gets overlooked in the rush to make a dual about the political aspects of the band, the political nature of Fugazi is vital hut you make some pretty amazing music consistently...how do you go about writing songs? Does 1 member have an idea and then the rest of you work on it or do all the songs happen from a practise format?

Yeah it is a weird phenomenon how little our music is discussed in favor of the more "juicy" aspects of the group. At one time it threatened to give me a complex but what can you do? The way we write has changed a lot over the years. Initially, the early stuff was predominantly put together by Ian and Joe as the stuff they had been working on prior to Brendan and I joining the band, and for the first 2 years I didn't play guitar but functioned almost like a toaster - doing back-ups, singing lead and dancing around. But once I started playing guitar the way we write changed dramatically - it became completely democratic with every song bearing everyone's imprint. The only thing unshared is the lyrics which are almost always just the product of the person singing them. One thing that people probably don't realize is how much of the music (basslines, guitar figures etc.) is chipped in by Brendan who is by far the most musically adept member of the band. But basically we hole up with each other and throw stuff back and forth and hammer them out as a band. We are merciless over-arrangers.

How much guitar do you play on the records? I've never seen you live, although I've seen you on video and your playing was pretty incredible and quite violent as well. Also, is it correct that you contributed some clarinet to Red Medicine, there's some strange noises going on on that LP at times...

Basically from Repeater onwards I've played guitar on every song we've recorded. Live, when we play old material off 13 Songs I'll put the guitar down and revert back to my old role which I enjoy as it gives me the chance to get down as it were. I think seeing us live is the truest expression of what we do. We have slowly come to grips with the studio but we almost look at the records as a rough blueprint for the structure we build on the stage. We've never used a set-list and must retain knowledge of every song we've ever written because in the heat of the show someone can start anything, plus we enjoy the freedom to extend and re-arrange the songs as we play them out. And yes, I did play clarinet on that song Version. I am unschooled and lousy on it but the sound worked out. Every now and then I play it live and we bury it in effects to hide the awful (glorious?) truth of my ineptness.

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