Refused are no longer fucking dead.

It’s only Wednesday, and this week has already brought two '90s punk stalwarts back from retirement. Both At the Drive-In and Refused will play this year’s Coachella, prompting many gray-bearded music journalists to reinsert their plugs. Bands here in D.C. are certainly not immune to the musical seven-year itch, but one thing we lack is a fancy, multiday music festival to facilitate (and underwrite) these types of reunions. Still, in case any local punk groups need an excuse to get back together—other than the fact that At the Drive-In and Refused owe a debt to a certain revolution-minded D.C. post-hardcore group—here are a few low-key suggestions.

Reunion: Nation of Ulysses
Hiatus: 20 years
Occasion: Passport DC
Justification: In a brilliantly choreographed tie-in, bewildered guests will be escorted into a shadowy, makeshift Embassy of the N.O.U.,  an event that perfectly dovetails with the 20th anniversary of the band's posthumous release The Embassy Tapes.

Reunion: Fugazi
Hiatus: 10 years
Occasion: 2012 Crafty Bastards Arts and Crafts Fair
Justification: An explosive rendition of "Merchandise" rings out with irony and serves as a helpful reminder of how many quality, homemade goods are still up for sale.

Reunion: Tuscadero
Hiatus: 13 years
Occasion: Tuesday at Haydee's
Justicification: The degentrification of Mt. Pleasant.

Reunion: The Dismemberment Plan
Hiatus: Eight, five, or one year, depending how you're counting
Location: 2012 National Book Festival
Justification: To promote You are Invited: A Collection of Breathless Reviews of Dismemberment Plan Reunion Shows, Volume 1.

Photo by Bert Queiroz

25 more Fugazi shows! Have been added to its massive Live Series! They are the following!

05/02/1990 Memphis, TN USA, Antennae Club
08/14/1991 Winnipeg, MB Canada, Duncan Arena
05/14/1992 Manchester, England, Irish Centre Ardri Hall
05/31/1992 Barcelona, Spain, Zeleste 2
06/16/1992 Munich, Germany, Theaterfabrik
07/25/1992 Washington, DC USA, US Capitol Plaza Supreme Court
02/13/1993 Orlando, FL USA, Edge
02/20/1993 Greensboro, NC USA, Trim Shop
11/20/1994 Silver Spring, MD USA, Long Branch Community Center
04/03/1995 New York City, NY USA, Irving Plaza
04/09/1995 Burlington, VT USA, Memorial Hall
06/20/1995 Rome, Italy, Forte Prenestino
07/04/1995 Hamburg, Germany, Fabrik
07/05/1995 Nijmegen, Netherlands, Doornroosje
11/08/1995 Los Angeles, CA USA, Shrine Auditorium
04/11/1996 Nashville, TN USA, 328 Performance
11/27/1998 Louisville, KY USA, Highland Hall
03/02/1999 Springfield, OR USA, McKensie Ballroom
04/27/1999 Reykjavik, Iceland, National Radio Building
01/18/2000 Fort Lauderdale, FL, Chili Pepper
09/30/2000 Umea, Sweden, Galaxen
10/08/2000 Lund, Sweden, Mejeriet
10/10/2000 Helsinki, Finland, Nosturi
04/20/2001 Indianapolis, IN USA, Knights of Columbus Hall
04/20/2002 Boston, MA USA, Mass Art Gymnasium

You can buy those downloads here.

Hume, "Inverse Fireworks" ("Inverse Fireworks" single)
The psych-inflected pop of this early 2011 track sounds miles away from the infinitely spaced-out Hume of late 2011, but its relative restraint makes the song all the more memorable.

Meredith Bragg, "Birds of North America" (Nest)
The haunting folk of Meredith Bragg doesn’t really belong alongside the more Americana-focused singer-songwriters in the area, even though that's often who he shares bills with. The ever-persevering troubadour traffics in quiet subtleties, and the slight changes in timbre and instrumentation throughout "Birds of North America" reinforce a simple, repeated melody without becoming stale.

Oddisee, "Skipping Rocks" (Rock Creek Park)
With the kind of beats hip-hop heads dream about, this mostly instrumental record is like hearing the ‘90s in soft focus. Oddisee seamlessly blends live instruments with choice, ‘70s-style samples, and the result is a soundtrack to your favorite summer memory.

More Humans, "Mason-Dixon" (Demon Station)
The harmony-laden post-punk of More Humans’ Demon Station was one of the year’s more pleasant surprises. This track somehow feels both breezy and urgent, showcasing both craft and accessibility.

Mason-Dixon by More Humans from NIGHTTIDE on Vimeo.

The Caribbean, "Mr. Let’s Find Out" (Discontinued Perfume)
One of the densest, strangest pop releases of the year (can you really call it pop?), The Carribbean’s Discontinued Perfume continues to occupy a strange, dark corner of my record collection. The hooks in "Mr. Let’s Find Out" aren’t especially obvious, but its texture-driven, stream-of-consciousness melody quietly refuses to leave.

yU, "If U Down" (the EARN)
I may be a bit late to the Diamond District’s party, but this yU record has me stoked about whatever those three put out next. Smart, effortless delivery, conscious lyrics that aren't pedantic, and warm, understated beats.

Deleted Scenes, "Bedbedbedbedbed" (Young People’s Church of Air)
This song is inescapable. While the live version packs more punch, the recent single off the effects-drenched Young People’s Church of Air softly plants itself in your skull for the rest of eternity.

Deleted Scenes "Bedbedbedbedbed" from Stephanie Wuertz on Vimeo.

Poor But Sexy,  "Fool Runnin’" (Let’s Move In Together)
Despite featuring familiar guitar work by ex-Dismemberment Plan guitarist Jason Caddell, Poor But Sexy doesn’t quite fit into any particular D.C. scene...which is fine by me. Their funkiness recalls the golden days of yacht rock, and while their frank, straightforward relationship lyrics are somehow startling, they’re also weirdly bold and endearing. Oh, and the sample that kicks off this tune is totally Plan-worthy.

SPRCSS, "Ours is Expanding Light" (05/2010)
The primal urgency of SPRCSS, replete with constant 16th notes, creates a constant forward motion. On “Ours Is Expanding Light,” an extended, slow build leads to a cathartic release that somehow feels longer than its mere four and a half minutes. In a good way.

Joe Lally, "What Makes You" (Why Should I Get Used To It)
Three records deep into his post-Fugazi career, Joe Lally displays fresh confidence with “What Makes You.” It’s a mid-tempo rocker with an expectedly groovy bassline, and Lally’s understated vocal delivery adds heft to the song's sultry attack.

For my feature this week on Fugazi's new online archive of live shows, I discussed some of the subtle changes you can hear in live version of the song "Repeater." Since then, I spoke to some of the people involved with the song about its inception and development. According to MacKaye, it all started with drugs. During the late '80s in D.C., “Crack came in, and then guns—there was a serious bloodletting, a big spike in gun homicides,” says MacKaye. “It was such a repetition. In the papers, they started to take a count. People would become numbers....it was a repeating situation.” The frustration spawned the searing song that would become a hallmark of the band’s live show. Lyrically, MacKaye takes on the persona of a dealer. Chad Clark, who worked on the 2005 remaster of the album of the same name, notes, “People love this line, ‘You say I need a job. I’ve got my own business. You know what I do? None of your fucking business.’ It’s actually an authentic reading of that character—that’s exactly what he would say. The capturing of that voice is such a profound accomplishment.”

LISTEN: "Repeater," Frederick, MD, Weinberg Center, 2/16/90

The song goes on to address the detached response of someone reading the papers. “With every death, there are people who had lives,” says MacKaye. “There are people around them being forever changed, and the tendency we have as a culture to stand back and blur our eyes, I saw that being exercised in a really intense way in our city.”

While the song is no doubt a heavy post-punk anthem, Clark notes that the musical elements were actually influenced by the hip-hop coming out at the time. “The musical style of the song was inspired by Public Enemy and the Bomb Squad,” he says. ”All those squalling bursts of guitar are kind of impressionistic versions of samples.“

LISTEN: "Repeater," Copenhagen, DK, Umdomhuset, 7/4/92

Guitarist Guy Picciotto confirms the band was seriously interested in what Chuck D. and his crew were doing. “‘Rebel Without a Pause’ would be specifically one song that we all looked to,” says Picciotto. “The main ascending, whistle-y sample on that one was so nuts. It’s hard to remember now how hardcore that song sounded when it came out, but it really was shocking and so bad ass.”

Imitating those climbing bursts of noise, Picciotto developed an unusual technique. “It’s a sound that came out of playing a Rickenbacker, which has a really long gap between the back of the bridge and the thing that holds the strings at the base of the guitar,” he explains. “If you play back there instead of over the pick ups like a normal human being and find the right notes on the fretboard, some weird dissonant harmonics shoot out.” Of course, it’s not all dissonance. “There’s this really simple clean arpeggio that’s so simple at the heart of the chorus. It’s so light, it’s like a Smiths song,” says Clark.

That contrasting chaos and melodic simplicity reinforce the lyrical themes of gun violence and detachment butting against real human loss of life. It’s a duality that makes for a powerhouse of a tune. “I was trying to write the D.C. anthem,” says MacKaye.

LISTEN: "Repeater," Mechanicsburg, PA, Decibels, 8/19/93

It’s hard to pinpoint the very first live performance of the song. The earliest recording of the song in the archive appears in February of 1990, but the song likely debuted before that. Searching his memory, MacKaye recalls, "Greed magazine—Kurt Sayenga used to edit it and he did graphics on some of the early records we did—he hosted a ‘Greed Night.’ I have a recollection of us playing the entire Repeater album instrumentally. While I kept rather copious notes of the tour dates, I just didn’t write some stuff down. I don’t know when it was, and it was unannounced so there are no fliers."

From that night the track went on to become a major crowd favorite, a definite show highlight for many audience members. Clark says, “All Fugazi songs to some extent sound like alarms—they have a charge, which is why they’re famous and why we love them—but here, it’s got this instant reset button effect on the show. I just remember it as such a blast of cold water and frantic energy.”

LISTEN: "Repeater," Dayton, OH, Dayton Fest/Brookwood Island, 8/21/93

Every night wasn’t as intense, because so much depended on the moment. The makeup of the crowd, the feel of the room, the personal situations of the band members all contributed to the particular execution of the song each night. "Sometimes it would flatten out and feel like we weren’t playing it correctly,” says MacKaye. “And then it would snap back.” Picciotto’s guitar sound was heavily dependent on the physical interactions between his guitar and his amp, so the space could seriously affect the song. “Sometimes it would depend on the room–it depends on feedback, and rooms have different acoustic properties. Some have soundproofing, so when we played that song, you'd get a skeletal feeling, like you can’t find the heart of the song,” says MacKaye.

There are moments throughout the archive, where the song indeed feels like it pulls back, like the guitars aren’t quite as screeching and Brendan Canty doesn’t hit his crash cymbals with as much ferocity, but often in those moments, the strength of the actual songwriting shows through. Joe Lally’s bassline stays remarkably consistent from show to show, and the locked-tight, Bomb Squad-enamored rhythm section comes to the forefront.

LISTEN: "Repeater," Adelaide, AU, Adelaide University, 11/12/96

As the band progressed over its 15 years, the meaning and vibe of the song would mutate. “Obviously as we got farther away from those particular years, that specific [crack epidemic] situation wasn’t on my mind as much,” says MacKaye. “But I actually think it’s a condition that’s a permanent condition for society. If you look at our military situation, there’s a constant count of American dead.” When situations changed for the band, the song would transform bit-by-bit. "If I’m playing that song to someone in Washington, D.C., in 1990, it’s probably different than in Brazil in 1994," says MacKaye. In this 1999 performance in Milan, the guitars scream less and chug more while Canty focuses on more tom work than usual.

LISTEN: "Repeater," Milan, IT, Leon Cavallo, 10/2/99

At the end of their live career, Fugazi were still at the top of their game. With a deep and complex catalog at their disposal, they still managed to bring nuance and dynamics to their older work. This 2002 performance of “Repeater” in Leeds, U.K., showcases the kind of subtle strangeness that the band made their name on without losing the urgency of the song's core.

LISTEN: "Repeater," Leeds, UK, Metropolitan University, 10/31/02

"For me to really lean into my music, I have to feel it, I have to believe it," says MacKaye. "It’s just my nature to think about my world, the city I’m living in, and write about it."

Everyone's Talking 'bout Black Cat Bill: First, make sure you read Ryan Little's WCP revelation that, contrary to some posts on local blogs last week, Black Cat Bill is indeed alive. Then check out the corrections and apologies it inspired. Then, check out the media criticism that followed. Then, bring William "Willy" Turner some tunes.

Everyone's Still Talking 'bout Michael Kaiser: I can't believe we're still on this. In a Huffington Post column, contributor Rob Bettmann responds to the responses (including ours) to Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser's recent ham-fisted HuffPo column about the withering state of arts criticism. What does Bettmann say? Essentially, he defends the gate-keeping, canon-defining role of critics, quotes a bunch of New York Times essays, fails to address any particular criticism of Michael Kaiser, confuses the editors of the New York Times' Book Review with its editorial board, attempts to invoke behavioral psychology, lambasts the Internet for being too big, and wraps up by plugging an initiative by the magazine he edits. To borrow some words from one of my favorite critics: "It stinks! It stinks! It stinks!"

Today on Arts Desk: More on Black Cat Bill. How D.C. fared in the Grammy nominations.

Photo by Bert Queiroz

In 2009, a 45-minute MP3 of audio from Fugazi concerts cropped up on punk and indie-rock blogs. But it wasn’t a musical recording: Instead, James Burns, the fan behind the file, had cobbled together choice clips of outrageous stage banter. The collage not only affirmed the band’s reputation for hardline punk diatribes (“Would the gentleman in the middle, would you please stop being so unpleasant to the other people around you?” admonishes singer-guitarist Ian MacKaye). It re-affirmed it to a ludicrous, almost comical extent, again (“I’m 40 years old and yet I still have to treat 27-year-olds like little fucking children”) and again (“What else can I do for you, you little MTV-generation piece of shit?”) and again (“No, we are not playing Lollapalooza”). The recording captures a slightly weirder Fugazi, too: In one snippet, co-frontman Guy Picciotto asks the crowd if it read a recent Scientific American article about the mating habits of bonobo apes.

The MP3 went viral. “People sent it around and I remember listening and being like, ‘This is bullshit,’” says Picciotto. “This is nowhere even close to as fucked up as the stuff we have.”

Tomorrow, Dischord Records is unveiling the Fugazi Live Series, a website where fans can download 130 of the D.C. post-hardcore band’s shows for a suggested price of $5 each. The site will eventually contain more than 800 concerts taped by the band, and perhaps more recorded by audience members. Unlike most commercial live albums, these recordings vary widely in audio quality, and have a gratifyingly warts-and-all wholeness to them. “If people want to get into it, they could make a much much better [compilation of banter],” Picciotto says.

There’s plenty of Fugazi’s punk-rock asceticism on offer here. But more surprising are the archives’ aesthetic treasures. Fugazi is frequently remembered for its business ethics, its lifestyle, and its fury, but the website offers a wealth of subtle, surprisingly detailed instances of musicianship—the kind that might lead particularly diehard fans to compare, say, how “Argument” sounded in Milan on Oct. 2, 1999 to how it sounded in Leeds, England, on Oct. 31, 2002. (Different!)

Fugazi, it seems, is finally having its jam-band moment.

LISTEN: Fugazi plays "Argument" in Leeds, UK, 2002.

–

Tons of bands sell live concert recordings. Pearl Jam did just that throughout the 2000s. But jam bands are the true kings of the concert-recording market—thanks in large part to their fans, who have been swapping unauthorized (but implicitly approved) bootlegs since Grateful Dead pioneered the genre and ethos in the ’60s. “Certainly, the Dead and the jam bands and the bands that do that, the idea that the community is as important as the band is something that we definitely feel sympathetic to,” says Picciotto.

You can find plenty of fan-made show recordings at sites like Wolfgang’s Vault and Archive.org, and in more obscure online communities. Jam bands like Phish and Widespread Panic have set up their own live-show shops, with varying degrees of thoroughness. (Picciotto also sees a more local connection: P.A. tapes, the live recordings made and sold by go-go bands. “That’s actually music that we do like and music that we were much more involved in, in terms of being fans and in terms of finding tapes,” he says.)

What sets the Fugazi Live Series apart from most online recording archives—aside from its lack of guitar solos—is how utile and uncluttered it is. Although it’s centered around a list of every show Fugazi played, the site has an uncomplicated design and is searchable by song, date, and location. It also includes show photographs, set lists, ratings of audio quality, and even estimates of crowd size.

The archive’s origins go all the way back to 1987, the year Fugazi started. “In the beginning...we didn’t have any records and hadn’t done any recording yet, so it was just a way to hear songs presented in their full form,” says MacKaye. “When Joe [Picuri, the band’s original soundman] would set up a P.A. to mix a show, he set up a tape deck and just made it a habit.”

Photo by Bert Queiroz

In addition to making a cassette recording from the soundboard, Picuri would also set up two room mics. “Because it happened every night, it was never something we ever reflected on,” says Picciotto. “The tapes, we would just bring them home, annotate them a little bit, and put them in the closet.” The recordings piled up inside Dischord House, the label’s home in Arlington. At one point, the band considered making copies for fans who mailed in blank cassette tapes, but decided it would be too much work. After Fugazi went on hiatus in 2003, Dischord began selling CD recordings of about 30 of the concerts. “We thought, maybe if the Internet ever becomes something, we’ll try to get everything up there,” says Picciotto.

LISTEN: Fugazi plays "Waiting Room" at their first show, in 1987.

The pricing is in line with Fugazi’s ethics: The band typically charged $5 per show, and is asking for the same here. Most other artist-hosted archives sell shows for $10 to $15 a pop. Fugazi is also allowing fans to pay more or less for each recording—anywhere from $1 to $100—provided they explain why. If you go cheap, you’ll have to tell MacKaye why you think the show is only worth a buck—a clever psychological tweaking of the pay-what-you-want model popularized by Radiohead in 2007 with the album In Rainbows.

For more serious fans, there’s also a $500 All Access pass, which delivers every show currently on the site plus anything that gets uploaded in the future. “I don’t think we would’ve had the balls to offer it for $500, except that with the CD series there was a steady drumbeat of people that wanted all of them,” says Alec Bourgeois, Dischord’s publicist and Web designer.

Dischord has to recoup the tens of thousands of dollars it spent on the archive, but charging for shows is also philosophical: Fugazi put in the work, so it ought to be compensated. “There were all these arguments about digital music years ago, but Dischord didn’t get killed by that,” says Bourgeois. “People wanted to steal Metallica records, but they wanted to buy Fugazi records. Everyone felt respected by Fugazi. No one’s ever heard Fugazi complaining about not making enough money.”

–

Unedited live shows aren’t glamorous. There are no production tricks to hide behind, but for the band, that’s a plus. “Wrecking the mystery was kind of the point for us,” says Picciotto. He says the band made several high-end live recordings at one point, but wasn’t happy with them.

What’s appealing about the Fugazi Live Series is not extended improv sections or complete reinventions of recorded material; Fugazi is not a jam band. Conversely, the band doesn’t stick to tight album re-creations or repeat the same sets night after night; Fugazi isn’t a pop group, either. It’s the organic, subtly mutating moments in each song that make the archive worthwhile.

You could spend a fair amount of money chasing down the life of your favorite Fugazi tune. Take the live mainstay “Repeater”: It always clocks in around three minutes, but the band uses a whole variety of techniques to achieve the squealing burst of dissonance and feedback that kicks off the crowd favorite. At a 1990 Frederick, Md. show, MacKaye gives a short spiel about gun violence and says the name of the track. Then, the guitars begin a thin, scraping ascent up the fretboard and remain in ultra-high range for the verse. At a 1993 festival in Dayton, Ohio, an improvised, low-register drone builds until MacKaye screams the song’s titular refrain, which is followed by a heavy, particularly frightening onslaught of aggression. At one of Fugazi’s last European shows—Leeds in 2002—MacKaye’s howl leads into a noticeably more dynamic, more controlled barrage of shrill guitar squalls and dives.

LISTEN: Fugazi plays "Repeater" in Dayton, OH, 1993.

The site’s appeal is as much about the performances as each particular experience. The band’s very first show, which is available for download, was a Positive Force benefit pegged to a local compilation CD. That’s a part of the Fugazi iconography, too: The band’s dedication to benefit shows, its preaching of nonviolence to occasionally violent crowds, and the unusual social conflicts that sometimes arose at its concerts are all a part of the story. The recordings each give a sense of that vibe—a crowd of prisoners in Virginia is very different from a crowd of skinheads in Pennsylvania, which is very different from a hometown crowd at Fort Reno.

What you really notice listening to these recordings are the strange, small spaces Fugazi built into the structure of its songs. From night to night, what the band chooses to do inside them has a lot to do with how the members are feeling, and how the crowd is acting, and what brought everyone together. And Fugazi’s brief improvisational changes are always of a piece with the mood of the show.

Of course, there are plenty of exciting extra-musical moments, as anyone who downloaded that 45-minute MP3 knows. Listen to any show in the archive and there’s a solid chance you’ll hear MacKaye lecture a rowdy showgoer on how to treat his neighbor. It goes deeper, though: drunk guest vocals from a large Danish man, the band politely declining to cover Bob Marley at a youth correctional center, angry rants about George W. Bush’s foreign policy.

Plenty of bands have clever stage banter, but few have such direct interactions with their fans. There’s a sermon-like quality to MacKaye’s words: He preaches anti-authoritarianism with the fire of a big-tent revivalist, and if his audience isn’t heckling him, they’re cheering in awe. MacKaye’s ethical-punk homilies sound both absurd and necessary.

But the Fugazi Live Series is also notable for what it doesn’t capture. During the archives’ uploading process, the band’s unofficial fifth member and the mastering engineer for the series, Jerry Busher, brought one tape to MacKaye’s attention.

“We did a show in Mechanicsburg, Pa., at a place called Decibel’s, and I remember this, security was beating up the crowd,” MacKaye says. He jumped off the stage, and soon found himself outside the venue facing a wall while a policeman yelled at him. “For $5, and this is one of the weird side aspects of low ticket prices, everyone is welcome. They’re not gonna spend $25 to beat up someone, but for $5 [they will]. At that time, that was something that was in place. Security responded somewhat in kind. They were really jacked up. When we booked shows, there was some emphasis put in—we expected all venues to recognize human rights; they were not to attack our guests. Conversely, we had to remind our guests not to attack security. Occasionally, you run into a situation where it’s just young men fucking with each other. You cannot have security officers beating up fans, you just can’t. So, I confronted them about it, but you don’t hear any of that. All you hear is me leave the stage.”

LISTEN: Fugazi addresses the venue and crowd in Mechanicsburg, PA, 1993.

In news that should make Phish jealous, The New York Times reported yesterday the long-brewing Fugazi live archive will finally on launch on Dec. 1. The site boasts a complete list of all 1,100-plus shows the band played, along with audio for 130 of them. That number should steadily climb as Dischord Records continues to upload the 800-plus board tapes the band compiled over the years. Each show is available for a suggested $5, but in the true spirit of the Internet, the site also offers a pay-what-you-want system, with a minimum cost of $1. For the serious fanatic, there's a $500 all-access membership that will get you a download of every future addition to the site.

Dischord employees are still scanning and uploading a seemingly endless supply of posters and photos to post alongside each show, providing an impressively exhaustive document of the band's career. The site is soliciting material from fans as well, in hopes of eventually closing all the gaps in content. The band provides ratings of audio quality of the shows, and an integrated commenting system should help fans guide each other toward the best recordings and offer them a chance to document their own recollections.

It's possible all of this has to do with MacKaye's need for more closet space—he's a well-known archivist of things related to his bands and his label. Nevertheless, the site is sure to stand as one of the largest digital repositories of a single band's music. I'll have more thoughts on this in a feature in Thursday's paper.

Kropp says there are plenty of recordings that get sucked into a black hole only to pop up at some point later, including some reel-to-reel promos for the station by The Beatles. In fact, he says he found a copy of that Elliott Smith session back in 2004. So, he did what any curious crate-digger would do: He ripped a copy of it. But Kropp "never thought to share it with any of my friends," and he didn't know that the recordings he found contained an unreleased song. He was just pleasantly surprised to find a copy of the session after hearing whispers about its existence.

The same goes for former WMUC live music director Chris Henry when he found a CD copy of the performance back in 2009. As live music director, Henry was responsible for running Third Rail Radio, the program Smith appeared on in 1996, but he discovered the CD before he ran that show. Henry wasn't even trying to find a recording of Smith's set when he decided to go digging through the archives, though he'd heard about it—he was actually hunting for a rumored WMUC performance by Will Oldham. But when he found it in a binder, he opted to do the same thing Kropp did some five years prior. "I had an engineer make a copy for me and I brought the copy back to my apartment and ripped it to my computer," Henry says.

Henry placed that CD back in its original file, where it probably still remains. ("It sort of surprised me that nobody touched the CD after that, which I think is kind of odd," he says.) He named the 10 tracks he ripped onto his computer as best he could, and gave the lead-off tune the title "Division Day, Take 1." That's because on the recording Smith began playing "Division Day" for about 20 seconds before stopping, mumbling, and eventually performing that impromptu version of "Misery Let Me Down." Like Kropp, Henry wasn't aware that the tune that followed his aborted take of "Division Day" was an unreleased gem. He learned that last Friday, long after he passed the digital files along to WMUC co-music director Vaman Muppala.

"It's always been a legend at the station," Muppala says of the Smith session. It landed in his lap in the form of a curious package from Weisholtz. As Malitz wrote, Muppala found a MiniDisc marked "Elliott Smith/Braid" in the package. But he couldn't do anything with it: Muppala hadn't seen anyone use a MiniDisc player at the station. Ripping the session from the disc got added to a future "to do" list, but nothing could be done then. That's where Henry came in.

When Muppala realized Henry had a digital version of the tracks—albeit a rip of a rip of the original MiniDisc—he asked him for a copy. Henry passed it along and uploaded the session to WMUC's digital music archive. In the wee hours of Oct. 17, Muppala sent an e-mail about the session's availability to the station's listserv with a subject that captured his rapt excitement: "Live at WMUC! on the music Archive and ELLIOTT EFFING SMITH." DJ Leila Mays played one of those songs almost two weeks later, and her public playlist helped lead to the realization that the session contained an unreleased tune.

Since the news of the session went viral, Muppala has been swift to try and set the record straight and give proper credit to Henry. That's because the session he uploaded to the digital archive didn't come directly from the MiniDisc Weisholtz sent him, but the copy of a CD copy Henry made in 2009. After Malitz's piece went live, Muppala wrote a humorous, scatterbrained post on WMUC's Tumblr explaining how the tracks got online and included a link to an edited version of the session. And the story keeps evolving: Muppala says that WMUC record librarian David Taylor is working on ripping the original session from the MiniDisc in order to obtain a higher quality version of the recording, and Muppala adds that Braid singer-guitarist Bob Nanna called the station to clarify that his band did not perform with Smith as Muppala's post indicates.

Discovery stories aside, Smith fans got their wish: a digital file of his WMUC show. Yet, it appears that new, slightly edited versions of that session dilute his set into listenable clips. (The above YouTube clip only contains the "Misery Let Me Down" cut, while the Click Track piece contains a slightly longer version with Smith introducing the tune saying "can I like warm up and play a song before we tape?") The reality of the performance is quite different.

"It's kind of a sad thing to listen to," Kropp says. Some on-air sets can be rough around the edges, but Smith's stripped-down show is messy to the core. He stumbled through the rest of the session after playing "Misery Let Me Down": He made two more attempts of "Division Day," a couple takes of "Say Yes," and also performed "Thirteen," "2:45 AM," and "Alameda." Along the way, you can hear him break-off mid-song, pause to fix his headphones, mumble, profusely apologize, and anxiously pick at his guitar. On Click Track, Third Rail Radio creator Eric Speck relates his impression of Smith, saying "He was SHOCKINGLY shy and it became clear he had on air jitters. He pretty much locked himself in the promotion office—alone—to tune and practice. He was super nice, but very sullen and soft spoken."

"I think he was wasted on cough syrup, this is how the story is told," Kropp says. In fact, between his first try at "Division Day" and "Misery Let Me Down," Smith mutters, "I just need to wake up. I took some Nyquil." That could also partly explain his erratic behavior during the session, and why "Misery Let Me Down" abruptly ends seemingly mid-song. Looking back on it, it's hard not to re-contextualize the event in regards to the painful personal issues Smith grappled with and his early death in 2003.

Needless to say, it's an interesting document, and perhaps one of many waiting to be dug up at WMUC. Muppala says there are plenty of recordings from now-legendary bands like Q And Not U sitting in the station, and he's heard rumors of a Fugazi MiniDisc floating around. "There's definitely more shocking MiniDiscs to be found," he says. And finds like the Elliott Smith session remind old WMUC members the joys of their own musical treasure hunts. "It's fun to see that happen, because everyone gets to relive that discovery," Kropp says. For Kropp, it's stories like these that help build a special mythos around the station. "It's like Hogwarts with music," he says.

Office Envy: For its annual "Work Issue," Washingtonian included a spread of lusty photos of nice offices around town. Some, like Canadian Ambassador Gary Doer's are sleek and modern. Then there's National Gallery of Art curator Mark Leithauser's which is festooned—literally, there is barely a square inch of wall remaining—with posters and other artifacts from the show's he's developed over 38 years at the museum.

First the Humphdashians, Now This?: Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard are over. Somewhere, there is a sad panda.

Yesterday on Arts Desk: Secret art show, and maybe a sex party. Edie vs. the Jean Reno lookalike. How to get on Bad Girls Club.

Edsel photo by Tim Owens

Next week Universal will reissue Nirvana's Nevermind to celebrate the album's 20th anniversary, which will put a nice cherry on top of the grunge-nostalgia sundae folks seem so eager to devour lately. But as anyone who lived in Seattle in the late '80s and early '90s—or anyone who spent a couple hours Googling bands after watching Hype!—could tell you, grunge was bigger than Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Sub Pop. Plenty of musicians helped build the scene and the "Seattle sound."

Edsel was one of those bands, but in Washington, D.C., not Washington state. On Monday, New Jersey label Comedy Minus One digitally reissued a couple of the band's albums: 1993's The Everlasting Belt Co. and 1994's Detroit Folly. History hasn't been so kind to the group (see Andrew Beaujon's TBD piece "Edsel will reissue its albums to prove it existed"). In Mark Andersen and Mark Jenkins' local punk history book, Dance of Days, Edsel is merely described as "former members of teen-core bands Kids for Cash and At Wit's End...[who] had moved beyond that aesthetic to create a Wire-y art-punk style with spare lyrics." Hopefully, these reissues will help flesh out that memory a little bit.

As a bonus, the music rips. As the band says in a new write-up for Everlasting Belt Co., the Edsel sound evolved beyond Wire worship to combine arty guitar licks, D.C. post-hardcore-funk, and a smattering of shoegaze. The songs on Everlasting Belt Co. are muddy, they pulse and swell in odd angles, and they're more similar to Jawbox than Wire, especially on the album's lumbering opening tune, "Checkering." Edsel cleaned things up a bit for Detroit Folly, but kept the headstrong, often molasses-paced propulsion of the first album. It's daunting to jump into both records at once—Everlasting Belt Co. alone has 18 songs—but it's easy to get immersed in them.

So what caused Edsel to slip through the cracks? It could be that, though the group's sound lends complexity to D.C.'s late 80s/early '90s scene, it never conformed to what's known as the "D.C. sound." Which is what makes these reissues feel all the more special.

Edsel – "Buckle" by comedyminusone
Edsel – "Draw Down The Moon" by comedyminusone