Over the last 15 years, Kansas House, a tiny four-bedroom home in Arlington, has seen members of bands that recorded for almost every D.C. record label—Dischord, Teenbeat, Slowdime, Simple Machines—crash on its floors, perform in its living room, or be thoroughly revolted by its rat-infested basement.

Kansas House is not a club. Shows happen there once or twice a month. But the experience of seeing a show at Kansas House is different. At the Black Cat, for instance, you buy a ticket and see a band. But anyone who’s crammed into Kansas House’s tiny living room to watch Black Eyes, Q and Not U, or Trans Am could be forgiven for feeling  like they were part of a movement.

You can still feel that way, at least for a few more months. On Dec. 1, Kansas House’s epic run will finally come to an end. The building is in the process of being sold to an Arlington development firm. Eventually, the house will be demolished to make way for mixed-use development.

Really, though, it’s a miracle  Kansas House lasted this long. Whether because of angry neighbors, freaked-out landlords, or the complicated lives of their residents, punk houses tend to have a short shelf life. Kansas House, however, has been blessed with a particularly favorable set of circumstances–easy Metro access, relative isolation from other houses, and a landlord who was, to say the least, not very nosy.

Throughout the ’80s the Kansas House property was occupied by a thrift store. Ian MacKaye, then living at the nearby Dischord house, shopped there from time to time. “That was my secret Christmas spot,” he says. Among his purchases: a 100 percent accurately sculpted rubber cabbage.

In the mid-’90s, Margarita Metaxatos acquired the property and started renting it as a residence. This was during the heyday of Arlington’s indie-rock renaissance—when labels like Teenbeat, Dischord, Slowdime, and Simple Machines were in full stride. It didn’t take long for enterprising rockers to see the property’s potential.

Derek Morton, then playing in Ex-Atari Kid, was among the first musicians to move in. “It was between ’96 and ’97,” he recalls. “When we moved in it was a bunch of college kids. We were probably the first band.”

At the time, Morton didn’t use the house to host performances. Instead he and his housemates used it as a practice space and a home base for his fledgling record label, Rocker! Supernova. “It wasn’t a band house in the sense that bands played every weekend,” he says. The house frequently put up bands that were on their way through town and needed a place to crash. Word got around. “I remember getting this phone call from Gerard Cosloy [co-owner of Matador Records], he was looking for a place for one of his bands to crash,” says Morton. “But I had never given him my number, I have no idea how he got it.”

As with any group house, roommates flowed in and out pretty casually, but there were a few staples that stuck around. Bob Massey, of the groups Telegraph Melts and Gena Rowlands Band, put in five years, living at Kansas House from ’96-’01.

“We consistently had shows there for that whole five year period,” recalls Massey, who now lives in Los Angeles. “We started out us just throwing shows for our friend’s bands. Then people started calling—Most Secret Method, Dismemberment Plan, they came along pretty soon.”

The list of bands that performed at Kansas House during that first five or six years is a who’s-who of post-punk and indie-rock. The Faint played there. So did the Rapture, Japanther, and Golden.

“I was at a Locust show at the house; I might have even set it up” says Frodus drummer Jason Hamacher, who lived in at Kansas House during the fall of ’00. “It was totally nuts. I had a fur collar that I had bought in West Virginia and a sword. At one point I was shirtless with a collar and a sword running around the living room.”

“There was another show–that band Sloar Floor, from Florida. It wasn’t packed. I took my friend Nate to the show and they were just so heavy. Every person in the band played with a full stack, in that tiny room. Nate said he felt semi-nauseous.”

Despite the noise, run-ins with the cops were few. For years the house’s only neighbors were a halal meat market and a gas station. Across the street was another house (since demolished) occupied by members of the ska band the Pietasters. Nausea-inducing heavy rock from Florida was not an issue.

Kansas House lacked in the accouterments of a professional concert venue. There was no backstage. There was no stage! Hell, there was only one bathroom. Bands that played there often had to supply their own PAs and usually their own refreshments. What Kansas House did offer was flexibility. It was the perfect place to hold off-beat events that would have wilted in a bar or club environment.

In the early ’00s Massey ran a series of performances called “Punk Not Rock,” which asked local musicians to develop site-specific musical compositions to perform at the space. “Some people were straight up, others really imaginative,” remembers MacKaye, who attended several of the performances. “Vin Novara did a performance on bowls with varying amounts of water. There was another guy who came in and claimed to be a classical whistler.” A few people got a little more ambitious. “Alberto Gaitán, he had some music going on in the living room, but it was synced to a car with one of those pimped-out stereo systems,” recalls Massey. “It was thudding in time while the car was outside going around the block.”

There were non-musical happenings as well. “Hugh McElroy [bassist/singer of Black Eyes], had these kids from Rhode Island, they had this thing called a party tour,” says Jason Barnett, who lived in the house from ‘01-’08. “They were going to different cities and bringing a party with them. We bought a keg and they brought big balls, blow-up animals, and different costumes. And they cleaned up afterward—that was the best part.”

At this point the house has been in action for so long that Collin Crowe, one of the currant tenants, can recall going to shows there when he was a teenager. “I was like 17 or 18. Nate from Frodus had this solo thing that played [Out-circuit],” says Crowe. “It’s totally weird that I live here now. It used to be this cool mysterious awesome house for me. If I was 17 and talking to my past self, he would be like ‘That’s awesome.’ But really, it’s kind of whatever.”

Fifteen years of band practices, animal-costume parties, keggers, and hardcore shows has taken its toll on the property. If the wrecking ball weren’t on the way, Kansas House might just implode from exhaustion. “It’s an old house,” says Barnett. “If you went into the basement during a show, you could see the floorboards moving.” Not to mention that the area itself has changed into a sprawling yuppie paradise. “Dudes who would be bar-hopping from Ballston and Clarendon, would crash in” during shows, says Barnett, “Yuppie-type dudes who would come over for the keg.” At this point, Kansas House has become a bit of a stranger in a strange land.

“It sucks that houses like this vanish, bands can’t practice,” says Crowe, who hopes to start another punk house in the District, noting another one in Northeast that’s “insane. There’s a schoolbus in the yard, a couple people live there. All bike co-oppy.”

“I’m sure this is tragic, says MacKaye. “But it’s not the building that’s important, it’s always the people.”

As to a reunion beyond the confines of late-night television, Robbins wrote: “I don’t think that doing the Jimmy Fallon show would really be a likely catalyst for that sort of thing. Or would it? I think we are all just playing this by ear and we’ll see how much fun we have. But it’s still unlikely given our number one condition, which is not to suck if we got onto a real stage in a room with people who give a shit about seeing us play. I think we’re all a bit taken aback that anyone is paying attention.”

A few days before all this, I spoke with Robbins about the upcoming reissue of For Your Own Special Sweetheart, Jawbox’s 1994 major-label debut.

Washington City Paper: So why reissue this record now?
J. Robbins: Originally the idea was just to do a vinyl reissue of Sweetheart. We pressed it to vinyl on Desoto when it first came out—an eternity ago—but that was it.

When we started talking about that and then the other piece of the puzzle was that I record bands—that’s my work now—and Bob Weston has mastered a few records I recorded. I really love his work as an engineer, particularly because the stuff I’ve sent to him–Wino’s record, the new Clutch record—on both of those there’s a real focus on low end. Bob is really good with the low end.

In both cases everybody was super happy with the low end. That was pertinent to Sweetheart. Our one misgiving about it—I mean, that record meant a great deal to all of us in Jawbox—but you know, when I would listen back to it I would think “What’s up with the low end on this record?” The original version is a really interesting sounding record—there’s this extremely abrasive agitating upper midrange—but I always thought I’d be so psyched if it had a tougher low end, some meat to it. It kind of haunted me. If I could go back and change anything about it would be to give it some oomph. And when we decided to do that, why not just go for it [do it on CD, too]. You know, revisit the record in a way that kind of where we can address this longstanding misgiving. We just listened to the test pressings. We’ve just been listening it with headphones and comparing it to old version. Sorry, that’s a little esoteric to be fired up about. It’s not that the original mastering was anemic sounding—the original recording, we loved it. But you put the master tapes up, the original just sounds like the mixes. Having this extra heft in the low end feels more like our band felt when we were playing. Mastering has this awesome depth and clarity. It makes me really happy.

Everybody always said you took a lot of heat for leaving Dischord, that it was a scandal. Is that really true? Or is this something that got blown out of proportion by rock critics looking for an easy lede?
Nah, I don’t think it was quite like that. Our friends were supportive of our decision. Everybody who knows us knows that we really agonized about it. We worked overtime to make sure we could make that move without feeling that we were compromising what we were about as a band.

It’s such a dead subject, though, because mainstream music industry is heaving its dying gasp. It would be really weird to make that choice in ’09. The people that would tend to make a stink about a decision like that they’re the people who tend to get wrapped up in trivia. And their opinion was not something we would lose sleep over. It was an opportunity to have greater resources and reach. It was also, really, an opportunity to continue doing our band. Without that decision Zach…he was starting to think about doing other things beyond playing drums in a band.

There were a lot of factors. Had we not gone to Atlantic our band might not have been around and make that record. Also we had never had the budget to hunker down in a studio for six weeks. It forced us to learn and to focus on things we hadn’t focused on before. There were a lot of [technical] things we didn’t realize we were glossing over. We had never had Ted Nicely sitting there, forcing us to think about how we were playing. We came out of it a much better band.

It’s sort of a philosophical argument: One argument says if we’re on MTV and we’re on the radio and we’re using corporate sponsorship to put something good forward that we can change the culture. Another philosophy says if you’re on TV and using those same conduits, you are the same as Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears and that whatever you have to say is as meaningless.

I think both those points are valid. With the benefit of hindsight…I’m automatically more interested in something that comes up from below. But there’s no doubt that we benefited tremendously, and I’m not even talking about we got a big budget.

The other funny thing was that after we signed to Atlantic, you get this contract with these huge numbers. The numbers look ridiculous, it’s easy to see why people get so passionate about it. But now that it’s all said and done I look back at the money that I personally took away from our Atlantic deal and It’s a laughably small amount of money for an adult to live on. It didn’t mean I could move out of our band group house or buy a car. For Your Own Special Sweetheart is by far the best Jawbox record. We were able to make it turn out because of all those other factors. There were other things that were a pain in the ass but it was good for our band.

What did you do in the studio that made Jawbox a better band?
Working with Ted [Nicely] was very fascinating to me. I think we were a sloppier band than we realized. Musically there was a dividing line in my life—before and after Sweetheart. Before that I had no conception of being before the beat and behind the beat. But after a week of working on Sweetheart…I knew. Ted was a real stickler about it. It was tremendously hard work a lot of times and sometimes really discouraging. But then it was like a switch turned in my head and I could hear when Zach was playing behind the beat. I notice that there was an emotional impact to it.

Sweetheart was really us battening down the hatches. Once we figured that out, then that became a platform for all of this nuance. It opened up a lot of things about musical performance to me. But yeah, that was it. We were not sitting in there thinking about how to write a song that sells more records.

I guess that was one of the reasons we were able to get the record back so easily. By our estimation it was a huge success. By theirs, it was a flop. We sold at least three times as many as we had ever sold as many as we did on Dischord and we did pretty well on Dischord. Atlantic looks at a number like that and they’re like “Sorry, not a gold record, you’re going to have to go.”
Was there some kind of plan/goal when you went in to make that record?
I don’t think there was a plan so much that we just wanted to make the best record we could make. What was in my head was dissatisfaction with previous recording experiences. Any time that I ever went into a studio before Sweetheart it was like, “Whoa! I’m in the magic kingdom, how am I gonna get it all done?” You feel the pressure of time. I don’t think we ever spent more than a week making a record up to that point. The excitement eventually gives way to anxiety. You’re looking at the clock and thinking “Guess I didn’t really finish writing these lyrics, I’ll just sing this, but I can’t sing it, but I have to nail it by 8.”

Listening to those [early] records, they recordings are not equal to the songs. I can’t listen to old Jawbox records without thinking “This could have been so much better if we didn’t have to rush it through.” So with Sweetheart we thought “This time we’re not going to have misgivings.”

Did you have any expectations for how the record was going to be received? You know, rock stardom expectations?
We were just like, “Lets take this opportunity and see what we can get out of it.” It was a weird moment where majors were just signing everybody. After Nirvana the majors were completely confounded and thinking “Sign everything that comes from that same underground because we don’t know why it worked but it worked.” So, I think every band that got swept up in that. Every band suddenly believed that there were no rules about what would tweak people’s imaginations. My biggest memory about Nirvana was just that it sounded so fresh, you’d hear it on the radio and think “Wow, the mainstream was really mired in a world of crap. There’s something that really doesn’t suck. It’s pretty different.” We never would have admitted this to ourselves, but I’m sure that deep down we thought, Why couldn’t it be huge? But we were never like “Now’s our chance!”

How did “Savory” become the record’s single?
It’s weird to me that everybody heard “Savory” and said that was the single. I’m proud of that song, but the thought that anybody heard anything single-worthy on that record makes me chuckle. It was a good song, though, a real step forward. It was one of the first songs that we wrote with Zach. To start playing with him was a tremendous musical change for our band. He had such a strong personality as player and writer. The drums are half the story in those songs.

They really wanted us to rerecord a song that was called “Novelty,” from last Dischord record, and that song is a much more conventional boom-bam rock song. And we were just like, “Why are we going to rerecord a song?” We said no. After that I remember the other discussion that there was going to be a single and if we didn’t choose, the label would choose something.

What happened with your second Atlantic record?
The second Atlantic record came out and the only reason you would know is, like, I can show you a copy. Atlantic didn’t put any energy behind it. That coincided with us burning out. We had been a band for eight years. We were burning out on touring so much. We had figured out our thing and it was hard to know how to expand upon it.

So, would Jawbox be willing to get back together? Everybody’s doing it now. Maybe just to play some shows?
I don’t think so. We’ve entertained the notion of playing some shows. But that’s as far as its gotten. We’re all very involved in our own lives. And our lives are a lot different than they were then. For us to reunite and be a band again…I can’t see it happening. It’s conceivable, but only remotely, that we could play some shows. Part of the reason that we were a good band in the first place is that we had this maniacal dedication and total immersion in our band life. We could not have that again. It might be fun to play some shows, but I don’t think it would serve any of us to try and recreate that band. Definitely not a plan. Our lives are all very full and trying to do it means trying to do it well, which means putting in time that maybe we don’t have. And half-assing it is just not an option.

Jawbox

Sources close to the band say that Jawbox will reunite on a late-night TV show to coincide with the reissue of the band’s third and finest LP, For Your Own Special Sweetheart. This is not a prelude to a tour, the same people say. I spoke to J Robbins last week, and he didn’t mention anything about this, but he did admit that a few one-off shows weren’t totally outside the realm of possibility. “We’ve entertained the notion of playing some shows, but that’s as far as its gotten,” said Robbins. “It’s conceivable, but only remotely, that we could play some shows.”

But playing on somebody else’s show? Looks like that’s a little more of a possibility.

Update: According to Billboard, Jawbox will appear Dec. 8 on NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.”

“Savory” video after the jump:

Perhaps you’ve heard there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. If you haven’t, well, there’s a lot of free shit going down this weekend. Most of it revolves around the Kia Soul Collective tour, which has set up shop in a warehouse at 3330 New York Ave. NE, with free parking as well as a free shuttle from Union Station. Wale performs in the space tonight at 7 p.m., with DJs Stereofaith, Reed Rothchild, and Chris Burns spinning from 4 p.m. Tomorrow night belongs to Dan Deacon, The Creepers, and Nouveau Riche DJs; the music starts at 8 p.m. And MGMT is headlining an 8 p.m. show Sunday night following DJ sets by DJ CA$$IDY and Dave Nada. To get tickets to this last concert, however, you have to test drive a Kia first, which you can do all weekend, if that’s your thing.

And Future, Army Of Me (in an acoustic iteration), Laughing Man, and The Mighty Heard are all performing outdoors at the H Street Festival on Saturday, all along H Street NE. Brightest Young Things is also hosting a free party that night in the Rock & Roll Hotel’s upstairs bar. Baller.

Dischord Records is now distributing releases by Windian Records, a new label started by The Points drummer Travis “Cobruhhh” Jackson. The band’s new Beat In Hell 7″, whose 6-minute B-side is about four times longer than every other Points song, is available now.

This is a few days old: Dischord and DeSoto Records are rereleasing Jawbox’s 1994 career highpoint For Your Own Special Sweetheart, and they’ve included a few bonus tracks from the very rare Savory+3 EP. The remastered album drops Nov. 23.

The Velodrome dance/not-dance party is back from summer vaycay this weekend.

Local way-beyond-left-field hip-hop band The Cornel West Theory has a release show at Liv next Friday for its new album, Second Rome, and apparently the eminent Princeton African American Studies professor and group namesake will be there.

Image courtesy of Dan Deacon’s MySpace page.

The duo will be celebrating the record’s release tonight with–appropriately enough–a performance at Galaxy Hut alongside Eyes of the Killer Robot.

Aquarium/Eyes of the Killer Robot
Galaxy Hut
Mon., 8/24 @ 9 p.m.
$5

“Every Little Bit Hurts”–which also features former Georgie James players Michael Cotterman and Andrew Black, as well as Pash’s Meredith Munoz–is a pretty sturdy piece of power pop, the kind of song Elvis Costello might have written back when he was still angry.

One of my favorite local bands, Andalusians, will be releasing a three-song 7-inch single, “Do the Work,” on February 16. Dischord recently announced with a bit of info. The downloadable version will include three extra tracks!

Dischord also reports that the band will soon be touring with a stop at the Black Cat: “The band will celebrate the record release and begin a tour of the south and mid-west United States with a show in DC at Black Cat on February 5th.”

You can listen to “Do The Work” on the band’s myspace page.

After a paragraph about the influx of out-of-town prostitutes dropping into DC to take advantage of the influx of party-minded tourists, the reporter chats up a drug dealer who is apparently relaxing in the back room of Rock & Roll Hotel doling out bags of cocaine to venerable European journalists. More interesting, he isn’t just any run of the mill hood–he’s a Dischord fan!

“The dealer, who grew up moshing to D.C. punk, laid out $3,000 to stock up because he plans on moving “serious weight.”

Judging by his language–later on he confesses that he’s going to need to “re-up”–my guess is that he’s also a guy who really enjoys watching The Wire. Whatever, who doesn’t love a story where the guy with the straight edge tattoo gets caught drinking at the bar, or in this case, dealing narcotics?

But the article also states that said slam dancing drug dealer is only 29-years old. If that’s true, then he was born in 1980–which means he was roughly 7 years old when Fugazi showed up and outlawed moshing forever! Was he getting thrown around the pit in diapers? A Little Lord Fauntleroy outfit? Or was he really just doing-the-standing-still in the back of the Dismemberment Plan concert?

There once was an audio format called mp3
Where parts of the digital word were sent off to sea.
The data was minced,
for the song that convinced
us that vinyl more pleasing, you see?

Don Zientara is owner of Inner Ear Studios, and has engineered records for such bands as the Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, Scream, Nation of Ulysses, Fugazi, Lungfish, Jawbox, the Dismemberment Plan, Q and not U and many others.  He also writes and performs his own music, and has released two solo albums, Sixteen Songs and Clocks & Watches.

All contributors to this series were guests on DISSONANCE, a DC punk oral histories show on Radio CPR. Don Zientara’s interview can be heard here.

We spoke this week with Alec Bourgeois, spokesperson for Dischord Records, to get his take on the year in music.

I’d say one of the coolest developments in 2008 was the return of the independent record store, fueled in part by the 12″ LP’s refusal to obey the grim reaper’s call. It’s not that places like Smash, Red Onion, Som and Crooked Beat opened in 2008, but more significantly, they seem to have thrived . Even Rick at Orpheus Records, who has been trying to call it quits for the last year, can’t even close his doors—though he keeps threatening! Chain stores, on the other hand, continue to whither and fail. With a tin ear to the format preferences of music lovers and with no loyal community to rally around them they have become irrelevant. All the better. One of my favorite things about 2008 has been shopping for punk records in Washington, D.C.!

—Alec Bourgeois

Cheers to Alec and co. for the launch of their digital catalog and a nice set of vinyl reissues.