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."

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.

Kay Bozich Owens and Lynn Owens' new book, Lost in the Supermarket: An Indie Rock Cookbook, includes recipes from the likes of Black Dice, Belle and Sebastian, Country Teasers (still keepin' it classy with a drink called "Red Headed Sluts"), the Mountain Goats, Xiu Xiu, Sonic Boom, and more. I know practically nothing about cooking, and I'd be pretty careful about ingesting anything prepared by a former member of Spacemen 3. But Guy Picciotto's recipe for rhubarb crumble does sound appealing. Reprinted with permission of Soft Skull Press.

Guy's Rhubarb Crumble

Serves 6 to 8

Filling Ingredients:

4 cups diced rhubarb, cut into smallish chunks

3 Granny Smith apples

3/4 cup of honey

1-1/2 tablespoons of cornstarch

1/8 teaspoon of cardamom

Crumble Topping Ingredients:

1/2 cup unbleached flour

1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon kosher salt

5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into tiny cubes (put butter in freezer briefly till cold and hard)

2 tablespoons of sliced almonds, crushed walnuts, or crushed pecans or all of the above

Preparation

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Dice the rhubarb into small chunks and peel, core, and cut the apples into thin slices.

3. Combine all the fruit in a big bowl then mix in the honey, cornstarch, and cardamom.

4. Dump the fruit concoction into an 8 x 8 inch baking pan and then smooth out the top with a rubber spatula so it's nice and even.

5. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, brown sugar, salt, and cinnamon.

6. Take the cold butter and dice it up into little mini butter squares.

7. Toss the butter square tidbits into the dry topping ingredients. Rub the butter bits into the mix with your fingers just till it forms crumblets. Don't over rub—you want nice crumbs. Add the nuts and then spread the crumble topping over the fruit filling in the pan.

8. Bake for 55 minutes till the top is nicely browned and the fruit filling is bubbling up like a tar pit.

9. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream or as is. Refrigerates nicely.