Notes From The Record Room: 30 Candles for Fugazi’s Red Medicine & Some Personal History
Fugazi
Red Medicine
Dischord Records
Released: 6/12/95
Record Room: Saturday, 6/21
To whom it may interest,
Some albums are hard to revisit.
Fugazi released their fourth LP, Red Medicine, on June 12th, 1995. I was 18 years old when I procured my copy on CD, yanked from the racks of the long-defunct (and sorely missed) Rainbow Records in Norristown, PA. I was a high school graduate, (or soon-to-be; I can’t recall the exact date of the ceremony, nor do I remember anything about that night), with art school only a few months away and no clear understanding of how the years ahead would play out. I was just ready to move on. Uncertain and anxious, but ready to start my life.
This is a quote from “Do You Like Me?,” the first song on Fugazi’s Red Medicine. It’s one of many song lyrics that I jotted down in a sketchbook / journal I kept throughout 1995. A drawing on the other side of the page bled through a little bit.
It would be dishonest to say that Red Medicine was the only album I’d truly connected with that year, (Mike Watt’s Ball-Hog Or Tugboat?, Faith No More’s King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime, Mad Season’s Above were all regularly spun and sourced for mixtapes), but I did find myself gravitating to it more than any other album I heard that year, dually at odds with how strange it sounded when compared to Fugazi’s prior works while also caught beneath the weight of an emotional resonance I’d experience anytime I decided to sit and listen. So much of Red Medicine felt personal to me, admittedly in the way that one reads into art when they’re young, finding symbolism where it was likely never intended, deciphering meaning when the work probably means something else…
The clunky instrumentation that opens the album just before the band launches into “Do You Like Me?” sounded to me like the error-strewn and clumsy way I’d lived and progressed up to that point, no sure-footed navigation but a series of face-into-brickwall swings and murky, naive improv. To hear drummer Brendan Canty throw in that shocking snare fill JUST before Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto throttle their guitars with their signature partnered resolve filled me with relief and elation. It had seemed that the two-year gap since the Fugazi had set a high bar with their excellent third LP, In On The Kill Taker, had been productive and that the bar was being met with something promisingly on par and sonically different.
“Bed For The Scraping” shows up as the band’s Guitar Hero moment, pairing showman-leval licks with corrosive, grinding stabs. MacKaye’s outro screams would’ve permanently damaged lesser throats. “Latest Disgrace” reduces the temp a tad, some grease deprived metallic squeals preceding Joe Lally’s eerie bass work. Overtop, a steady guitar chirp with the rapidity of a ticking stopwatch generates tension. Picciotto’s vocal sounds sinister.
This was only three songs in and I was this album’s captive.
I still am.
Up to this point, I hadn’t considered Fugazi’s environs. As champs of the D.I.Y. doctrine, to my ear, work ethic laces every note this band has played. That’s not to say that the art itself is somehow only characterized by discipline and stick-to-itiveness, but that there’s no interest in wasting time or money with recording. Red Medicine, and later on with the Instrument soundtrack and the First Demo release, introduces the studio component of Fugazi’s process. It’s a playful, albeit odd, aspect of the album and omnipresent throughout most of its runtime. As with “Do You Like Me?,” “Birthday Pony” has a false start, crude piano strokes slowly build out a rough draft of the song’s key musical theme while maniacal laughter interrupts the playing. I remember thinking that this album, out of any that Fugazi had released up to that point, was as much about the journey as it was the destination. “The farther I go, the less I know,” MacKaye states in the song “Long Distance Runner.” “One foot goes in front of the other.”
The impassioned and melancholic “Forensic Scene” (“The defense rests and sorry's just… a ‘no shit, Sherlock’ mouth talk con job”), and Tenor Saw-quoted “Fell, Destroyed” build out the rest of the A-side, along with the funk-laden instrumental “Combination Lock.”
The first time I heard “By You,” my blood turned to ice, my gaze didn’t waver. If it had happened that I was staring at a person while being held spellbound, and slowly deafened, by the song’s winding, off-tempo drones, busy drum fills, and immersive low end, I may have been met with physical violence. With Lally on the microphone, his voice steady and pensive, Fugazi generates non-chemical, cacophonous psychedelia that he’s somehow able to break through. “You’re in control like you don’t know,” he sings. “Don’t say… you’re along for the ride.”
Personal note: That lyric has stayed with me for years and I’m grateful for it, the denial of personal autonomy and any claim to my own time something I’d been experiencing for years up to that point.
“Version” follows as a loose instrumental take on “Long Distance Runner,” sort of an early introduction to the album’s closer that features Picciotto on clarinet.
From there, it’s a three-song block of aggression with “Target,” “Back To Base,” and “Downed City.”
With hindsight firmly in mind, I consider 1994 to be the end of the 90s. To clarify, because this belief has set up many arguments with my 90s brethren, 1994 marks the tipping point when the Alterna-avalanche began to settle and the tone of what seemed to be a time of constant discovery shifted pretty quickly into a cynical onslaught of badly rendered, fully-smudged, grunge Xeroxes. Following Kurt Cobain’s suicide, sights that were once set on Seattle’s impactful rush of plaid-clad guitar heroics—not to mention the mining and signing of indie rock standouts like Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Helmet, Jawbox, The Jesus Lizard, etc.—turned to Green Day’s Dookie and an ensuing deluge of aging hardcore acts were suddenly admitted past the velvet rope so they too could capitalize on the youth’s sudden and fickle interest in another era of music subculture. And, since alienation was no longer interesting, hardcore went pop. Additionally, Korn released their self-titled debut, so nü metal was in its infancy and set on its eventual course to dominate MTV for the next five or six years.
Anyway, digression aside, Fugazi called much of this out with “Target:”
“It's cold outside and my hands are dry
Skin is cracked and I realize
That I hate the sound of guitars
A thousand grudging young millionaires
Forcing silence sucking sound
Forced into this conversation…”
While the major labels were still scavenging the underground, targeting (hint, hint) labels like Touch & Go, SST, Amphetamine Reptile, and Sub Pop for the next Nirvana-level piggy bank, Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, who was very interested in signing Fugazi (even prior to the release of Nevermind), was famously turned down by the band even with $10 million on the table. Firm in their commitment for creative control and true self-governance over their financial independence, this act alone kept them safe from being eventually discarded by the music industry, an occurrence many of the bands who’d signed the dotted line experienced once it was made clear that dividends weren’t yielding to the industry’s falsely-calculated (based on Nevermind) and naively-built expectations (also based on Nevermind).
This is why Fugazi could write a song like “Target,” calling out the major-labels “For marketing the use of the word generation / A false alliance of money persuading.”
And, it’s also why they could charge $5 a gig. That’s what I spent to see Fugazi on April 1st, 1995 at the Trocadero, which, on the rare occasion I was permitted to go, was my second, and preferred, home.
The Make-Up and Metamatics opened that night. Some of the ink has worn away from this treasured ticket stub, but thankfully the key info is still visible.
“Long Distance Runner” is one of my favorite closing tracks on any album. While no stranger to passion, MacKaye’s vocal in this song has a desperation to it that I find specific to this song, like a broken soul pondering his need to carry on. “I can't keep your pace / If I want to finish this race,” he solemnly declares. “My fight's not with you… It's with the gravity.”
As interpretations go, “gravity” seemed to me analogous to physical decline and humanity’s perpetual conflict with time. We’re all moving forward, unsure of when our finish line will come into view: “One foot goes in front of the other.”
A series of seasick drones enter the third act, the song set to a crawl just before it closes out.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
