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.

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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.”

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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.

Morning, y'all! 1.) Jerry Fuchs, drummer in many, many bands, fell down a goddamn elevator shaft yesterday and died. His amazing drumming will be missed. 2.) Anybody watch the season finale of Mad Men? I have yet to watch a single episode of that show, but I hear last night was a doozie! Feel free to spoil shit in the comments, if you feel so inclined. The lunacy and brilliance of James "Mij" Cameron, 50 Cent's scent, Malcolm X's bisexuality, the highest paying job any deadhead could ever expect, and "The Top 20 Most Powerless People in the Art World," after the jump.

- Did not know this: Malcolm X went both ways, but Civil Rights advocates do not like to talk about it. Why? Maybe because "Malcolm X's bisexuality is more than just a question of truth and historical fact. There has never been any black person of similar global prominence and recognition who has been publicly known to be gay or bisexual." (Also: This is from the Guardian; shouldn't an American have written this first?)

- Who doesn't love Terminator I-VI? Who didn't love Titanic, at least the first time through, when that big boat snapping in half was enough to take your breath away? Better question: Who will love Avatar and how will it fare? It cost a fortune to make and FOX is already strategizing ways to keep from closing up shop, should it suck. After reading Dana Goodyear's profile of James Cameron in the New Yorker, I have much hope for this movie, even though watching Up in 3D gave me a massive headache. Money quote: “It’s all just an excuse to do helicopters versus pterodactyls,” [Cameron] said.

-"DETHKLOK" creator Brendon Small based his insanely weird heavy metal cartoon on the Marx Brothers.

- "Power by 50" is the new cologne from rapper 50 Cent, reports Creative Loafing alumnus-turned-NPR wunderkind Brian Reed. If you have ever terrorized the perfume counter at the mall, as I have, you will not find this surprising. What I didn't know, however, is that the New York Times has  a scent critic. This is morbid, I know, but will Chandler Burr end up on the "essential" list when the NYT has to cut 100 people by the end of the year? Burr thinks Britney's perfume is better than Britney's music; this amateur scent critic agrees.

- Apparently, the art world has both powerful people and powerless people; why else would Hyperallergic have made a list about the people who have it the worst? My favorite is number 12, which is actually an entire nation of people, because it makes fun of Damien Hirst, who is the kind of person that freaks out over pencils: "The faceless miners in Sierra Leone who procured the 8,601 diamonds for Damien Hirst’s sparkling skull–they may fear for their lives every day as they work in hazardous work conditions and subsist on less than 1% of the value of a pencil in a Hirst installation, but they sleep well at night knowing that a silly sculpture that represents the pinnacle of the latest gilded age exists." Read the whole list at Hyperallergic and feel better about your own shit-stained perch on the socioeconomic ladder.

- Can Glenn Beck save the publishing industry by enticing his wingnuts to buy books about wolf hunters?

- CALLING ALL DEADHEADS: If you bathe regularly and can sit still for eight hours straight without having a flashback and/or licking a coworker's feet, there might be a job for you in California: "The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive." The gig pays pretty well, too: "$52,860 to $68,892 USD Per Year."

- EMI is really wising up to the impending creative destruction of the record industry, and has decided to make concert bootlegs a thing of the past in an effort to stay relevant. From WIRED's Eliot Van Buskirk: "Showgoers can buy professionally recorded concerts as they exit a venue on USB stick, CD, DVD or as a digital delivery. While by no means the first, EMI launched a major initiative in this area Wednesday: Abbey Road Live, which builds on the legacy of Live Here Now, which was launched by EMI’s Mute Records label in 2004, and forms the core of EMI’s nearly-real-time live music sales program." Is this as fun as surfing around message boards, begging for links to megaupload while people half your age force you to answer trivia in order to verify that you are not a narc? Probably. Then again, those USB sticks costs money, which is the whole problem with the recording industry: paying for things.

- Every Time I Die, Buffalo's hirsute hard-rockers, are famous for lots of things: Being on Guitar Hero, hating the cops, hating each other, and being able to spit huge loogies up in the air and catch them. Turns out, lead singer Keith Buckley is also a pretty good writer of personal narrative-ocumentaries. This one, in which he talks about riding a Harley up and down the Cali coast, is well-paced, touching, and all about the joy of the bike. Buckley is no Robert Pirsig, but I highly recommend you spend six minutes of you day listening to this anyway.

- In time for the 10th anniversary release of Fight Club, the New York Times' Dennis Lim explores the movie's cult following, as well as the millennium anxieties that almost kept the movie from seeing the light of day. Money quote: "'People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture,' Mr. Palahniuk said."

Got a suggestion for a future Arts Desk roundup? Post it in the comments or shoot me an email at mriggs@washingtoncitypaper.com. And follow me on twitter!

Ever the bearer of bad news, I'd like to alert BPB readers to another rock 'n roll fatality: This time it's Merl Saunders, who passed away last Friday at the age of 74. Complications from a stroke sidelined him in 2002, effectively ending a remarkable career that included luminous collaborations with Miles Davis, B.B. King, Mike Bloomfield, and Jerry Garcia. His keyboard stylings combined an earthy rhythm-and-blues approach with a jazz aesthetic and, in the early 90s, a surprisingly unregrettable foray into New Age-style fusion.

For anyone interested in the remarkable, decades-long, "let's make David Grisman jealous" collaboration between Saunders and Garcia, check out the Legion of Mary sessions and the Keystone concerts. Of special note: Saunders' fat, swirly Hammond on Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street" (below, from the Keystone). Troppo largo, perhaps, but a textural improvement over the already lovely Kooper-era original.

I surveyed the gift shop. A large woman with a hairnet and a dancing-bear muumuu was browsing. This was the world premiere performance of Lee Johnson's Dead Symphony No. 6, "An Orchestral Tribute to the Music of the Grateful Dead"—not to mention Jerry Garcia's 66th birthday—and the store's silly musical trinkets and pretentious classical recordings seemed ill-suited to the evening’s proceedings. That is, except for one small novelty book, an edition of the "Wisdom from our Elders" series entitled Age Doesn't Matter Unless You're a Cheese.

Steve Harq–a short, smiling, gray-bearded man in purple tie-dye who was a beacon of ebullience as he bounced around the lobby–proudly embodied that philosophy. "Jerry's what brought me here," he said. "That was the best chapter of my life, 25 years on Dead tour. I think it's great that someone took that spirit–the spirit of Jerry and Robert Hunter—and is using it, which is what Jerry would've liked. He was so diverse in his music. He—I'm sure he's smiling and saying, 'That's fucking cool!'"

More on the concert, plus audio tracks, after the jump.

Steve paused, and his friend tried to show him a copy of the program. Steve refused to look. Under no circumstances did he want to know the set list before the show.

"You ever see them in concert?" he asked me.

"No, unfortunately," I said. "Too young."

"Well then, you have an especially good time tonight, my friend," he said. "Because, you know, it doesn't live too many places like this anymore."

I did have an especially good time, although I have to say that the performance was surprising. I expected a certain amount of stilted interpretation, and I was prepared to feel estranged from some otherwise familiar musical moments. But many of the movements had a remarkably darksome tenor to them, taking on some serious emotional heft in an orchestral context. Part of this is attributable to a largely misguided visual presentation behind the orchestra, which alternated between screen-saver visuals straight out of Windows Media Player and old photos of the Dead. These tribute elements imbued the music with an overwhelming nostalgia, and at points distracted the symphony from standing as its own creation. As one audience member noted after the show, "It was like a eulogy rather than a birthday."

Some pieces, however, really had the house spellbound–in particular "If I Had the World To Give," which was masterfully done in string quartet, and a heartbreaking rendition of "China Doll," the song that first inspired Johnson to compose the symphony. In the best moments, the levels of elegy were tempered by the music's unbending relevance–not to mention the fact that it's just so darn pretty. During "Blues for Allah," when a single hand, in the formation of a single peace sign, emerged slowly from the sea of silent heads in the front half of the hall, its silhouette falling against the conductor's white tuxedo jacket, I found myself awestruck by the peculiarity of the cultural moment: here I was listening to these songs now, this way, so many years later, after all these things had happened

Steve was right—it doesn't live too many places like that anymore. I don't go to the symphony often, but I can't say I've ever seen a packed house, never mind one hooting and hollering the way this did. Nor had I heard someone shout drunkenly in the middle of an orchestral piece, until a woman yelled "Sugar Magnolia!" in the middle of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story Symphonic Dances, which comprised the first half of the program. (She did it during "Maria," and I have to admit, she was on to something. After all, wasn't Maria Tony's sugar magnolia?)

Other than a few unseemly outbursts, most people were enthusiastic but well-behaved. Behind me, a woman apologized to a man who had to stand up so she could get to her seat. "Don't be sorry," he said. "Be joyful! You're here!" The man, I discovered later, had gotten tickets to the show from his children for father's day. He was wearing a Dead T-shirt they bought him for Christmas. By the end of the evening it had hit me: like its creators, like its listeners, like its country, for better or for worse—music too grows up

LISTEN: "If I Had the World to Give"

LISTEN: "Blues for Allah"

LISTEN: "St. Stephen"

Photo by Valerie Steinberg