How Ian MacKaye saved D.C. hardcore from itself
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Credit: Alamy
When Ian MacKaye first met Henry Rollins
Ian MacKaye is the master of everything great about punk. One of the main driving forces behind the D.C. hardcore and straight edge movements, punk and life would be very different to what we know today without his work. An artistic genius whose creativity never ceases to amaze, he was the mastermind of Minor Threat and Fugazi, and alongside his musical work, he also runs Dischord Records, the ultimate independent record label.
Enjoying a fruitful career and almost flawless back catalogue, MacKaye has always led by example, leading an ethical life, and the tenets of this bleed into his work, preaching to millions of young kids that the key to a happy life is one thing: don’t be a dick.
MacKaye grew up in Washington D.C. in the 1960s and 1970s, which was rife with social strife enacted by the problems that the era’s sclerotic economics dictated. This bleak outlook lit the fire of rage within him that inspired him to form Minor Threat and change the world in the process. Existing from 1980 to 1983, what the band achieved in their short career is arguably the most consequential in punk, with their effect spreading much further than that of first-wave bands such as Sex Pistols and Ramones.
Furious yet artistic, Minor Threat expanded the boundaries of punk in what it meant and what it did, broadening the horizons for those who were to follow in their wake. Later, MacKaye then formed Fugazi, alongside members of accidental emo progenitors Rites of Spring, and together they became the most fascinating band in the entirety of punk.
While MacKaye and Fugazi co-frontman Guy Picciotto are two of the most lauded figures of the hardcore scene, another figure revered as one of the most influential characters in the development of the scene – despite how polarising he is – was Henry Rollins. The former frontman of California-based hardcore legends Black Flag, Rollins grew up in D.C. and fronted State of Alert before joining Black Flag in 1981.
Unsurprisingly, MacKaye and Rollins knew each other well before they became punk legends, and when speaking to Loud and Quiet in 2015, the former Minor Threat recalled first meeting Rollins when they were kids. MacKaye said: “I started skating about 1975/76 and though I had met Henry Garfield who became Henry Rollins earlier on – I met him when I was 11 – we really bonded over skateboarding. We had this gang of kids and we decided to form a team so we just formed our own skateboard team even though we had no sponsor – it was like a street gang for us.”
He continued: “It was a tribe thing. I think I deeply desired a tribe, and the skateboarding thing gave me really good practice on how to define the world around you… [then] what I got from punk was this sense of… a call for self-definition. That you can make your life what you want it to be, that you didn’t need somebody else’s approval and maybe even that you needed somebody’s disapproval.”
