On Oct. 24, 2000, Dischord Records released No Kill No Beep Beep, the classic debut by Q and Not U. The cover is an arresting, whimsical snapshot of the punk-rock community that spawned the record—the band asked its friends and peers, most of them under 25 at the time, to pose for a portrait that would show D.C. wasn’t just a town of old punks. In this week’s Washington City Paper, Q and Not U’s members reflect on their rookie achievement. On Arts Desk, we’re catching up with some of the community Q and Not U immortalized.

Left To Right: Jacob Long, Hugh McElroy, Daniel Martin-McCormick, Dan Caldas

From the start, the musicians who would later form Black Eyes were involved with the boys in Q and Not U. Back in 2000, most of the Black Eyes crew played in a go-go-inspired punk band that shared the stage with Q and Not U now and then. "I was in a band called No-Gos with everyone from [Black Eyes] except Daniel [Martin-McCormick], and we were sharing a practice space with Q in the Resin Records house," recalls bassist Hugh McElroy.

At the time, Martin-McCormick says, "I was living at my parent's house in Northwest D.C. I was 16, and that was the summer in between my junior and senior years of high school. I grew up there, but I was happy to stay after high school precisely because of the scene and infrastructure. It baffles me now thinking about how easy it was to start playing shows. I submitted my first demo to Fort Reno when I was 15 and immediately had a show about a month and a half later. The year after that was kind of a whirlwind of hanging out, meeting bands and everybody at shows. The scene was exceptionally supportive and fun and being in a band was a piece of cake."

McElroy was still home at the time as well. "I was living in my parents' basement between living in a group house with Jacob Long and Caroline Hostetler (also on the cover) and living in college accommodations at St. Cross College, Oxford. I was as old as my nose and a little bit older than my teeth." McElroy met the musicians who would later be his Dischord labelmates in 1997. "I met them through the Resin Records dudes," he says. "I think I met them first at that Annapolis basement show. Better Automatic played, and I know Matt Borlik's old band The Challenger Commission played that show, and I think Harris [Klahr]'s The Glenmont Soundsystem played that show. I can't remember if Chris [Richards]' old band Tilden Shirtwaist Fire played that show, but I think he was there... That was before he was in The Elusive with John [Davis], I think... Treiops Treyfid, which was Treiops from Pitchblende, also played that night."

The photo shoot was a pleasant representation of the house show attendees of the time. "Pretty much everybody knew each other," said Martin-McCormick. "With the exception of a few people who couldn't make it out, that was pretty much everyone you saw at every show from '99-'01." The top of his skull is all that appears in the photo, but McElroy postures this may be his own fault. "I don't remember much, except that I violated the primary color theme of the shoot by wearing black. There was a lyrical reason I wasn't supposed to do this, but in violation of the spirit of the occasion, I decided I wasn't comfortable being garish; this is perhaps why only my forehead appears on the cover."

After the record was released, it was actually hard for some of the most loyal show-goers to handle. "It's funny," says Long. "I don't know if I should say this, but I was kind of disappointed with this record when it came out. I had seen Q play shows for a while at this point (and played shows with them in a few bands), and I loved these songs live, but I always felt something was lost in the translation to recording." Martin-McCormick echoes the sentiment. "At first I was a little disappointed in the album because Q and Not U had been such a huge deal for me," he says. "Of course, any band that makes a name for itself playing crazy house shows is going to have a rough time translating that energy in the studio. As I got a little more distance from it, though, I came to enjoy the album more and more... You can feel the time and place (nobody dresses the way we dressed on the cover anymore, there are so many fewer rock bands without synthesizers, there's no reverb on the vocals etc etc) and that's a truly beautiful thing." As he looks at the front, Martin-McCormick says, "I don't think [the cover] came out like they intended, but it's pretty perfect. You can tell that none of us were very cool, you know? Everybody just hung out and were kinda nerds but also very enthusiastic and jazzed about music. And Q felt very much like our band."

McElroy met Mike Kanin (later of Black Eyes) in '96. He was playing in a riot grrrl band called A.K.A. Harlot #1 (with author Sarah Marcus, among others), and Kanin was booking Fort Reno with Carleton Ingram. Years later, while McElroy was at a vegan potluck at Katy Otto's place, Kanin called him up and asked him to join him in the No-Gos. He agreed. Eventually, McElroy headed off to Oxford for some higher education, but not long after No Kill came out, Black Eyes started to coalesce. "I was in England from 2000 to 2001," says McElroy. "I got home and Jacob, Daniel, and Mike Kanin were in Trooper. Paul Jickling was also in it, and I think Amanda MacKaye and Sean McGuinness of Pissed Jeans also played in it briefly. When I got back I roadied with them for a while—I had a van, and they needed one to go on tour." After those tours ended, McElroy ended up with the other members of Black Eyes playing music at Martin-McCormick's house and their noise-heavy sound began to take shape.

"We played shows with [Q and Not U] early on, and we were all super tight. When we made our first record, they took the single on tour with them. In 2003, Black Eyes went on tour for seven and a half weeks, and we were with Q for six and a half of those weeks." As a teenager, getting to be so deeply a part of the punk scene was an enormous deal to Martin-McCormick. "I felt like I was a part of the biggest thing in the world," he says. "I had no idea about the internet or about what was happening in New York or anywhere else. I mean, I knew about other music, like Kraftwerk and Fela and stuff, but I had no concept of what the national scene was like. It seemed so full and complete, this amazing band right in front of us and everybody was into it, going wild and having a great time."

The Black Eyes/Q and Not U shows were rife with odd anecdotes. "When we were all in Providence, RI in 2003 with El Guapo," says McElroy. "We stayed at the space we played at, and all three bands had an extended jam with the people who lived there. People where just switching instruments. It was in the morning, people had had some coffee, they were in different rooms, and it started an idea that never happened, where were going to have a 3-way split collaboration. It was a really cool coffee-fueled jam." Caldas recalls: "We did a lot of fun percussion jams/collaborations at the end of [Q and Not U]'s sets. Some of these would end with us leaving the stage and kind of drum line style marching into other rooms or outside on to the street."

"In '03 Chris got really into wearing uncomfortable clothes live so that he would be pushed to play harder," says Martin-McCormick. "But they also became costumes, big ugly sweaters with rips and stuff, and then a tie." Caldas adds: "Chris wore a brown sweater that looked like a toddler had cut arbitrary pieces out of it with scissors."

McElroy remembers, "At an early show in Norfolk at this weird-ass arty-bar space that No-Gos played with them (and I think Engine Down) they had so much energy that I remember them seriously flying across the stage. I can't remember if it was because they were psyched or pissed off. I think Harris walked up a wall. Chris broke his guitar and we had to trade guitars for the rest of their tour and we took his broken guitar back to D.C. "

The entire punk experience left them all changed. McElroy says: "This may sound hokey, but it gave me a place where I felt comfortable being my weird, queer, anarchist, classics-geek, bass-playing self and the comfort to carry that self into the world outside of punk rock." Says Martin-McCormick: "Punk was the ultimate confirmation for me: that you could be the person you were and run with that; do your own thing, make your own music, and there was a space for you in the world." He continues: "Before I found punk, it seemed like all the people doing weird cool stuff were as distant as could be, and that the best I could do was to squeeze the stuff I loved in between the cracks of what would ultimately become a rather dull life. Punk, and especially the scene in D.C. at the time, gave me so much hope and relief and excitement. I still feel that quite a bit and still think about a lot of conversations I had or shows I saw at that time." Looking back on that now, especially considering his age at the time, he realizes: "A lot of my life has been trying to make good on the promises of youth."

Now the scene has changed, and the city is different, but the former members of Black Eyes aren't without hope for the District. "D.C. feels way less exciting musically to me, but I think a lot of that is my age," Caldas says. "There is a big difference between being 19 and everything feeling fresh and exciting versus being 30 and having experienced a lot more, as well as having different interests and focuses in your life. There is music I like in D.C., however. Title Tracks, Insect Factory, Protect-U, and America Hearts are making great music."

Long admits: "I know very little about D.C. at this point. I don't want to be one of those 'things were better in my day' people—I mean, things were great for a number of years when I lived there but a lot of that had to do with having a huge group of awesome friends that was always around/hung/went to shows/etc. and it was great. I'm sure for some people that might still be there. It just happens that I, along with most of my friends from that time, have moved on. That said, I know there are some great friends from back then really doing some great things in D.C. and really building there own scene, it just happens to be different music-wise."

"It seems (from San Francisco) like most of the people from that era have moved or settled a bit," says Martin-McCormick. "Between '03-'05, a ton of people (myself included) skipped town, mostly for NYC but also Chicago and the West Coast. The upside to such a small, supportive scene was that it was easy to feel included and play a lot of shows and hang out without tons of pretension. The downside was that if you wanted to expand your musical palette, you were kinda stuck with the same small pool of musicians. So at a certain point, it made sense to leave. I know the Future Times crew is doing a lot there, and that's awesome. But it seems like the 'D.C. sound' that got so much attention in the late '90s kinda went the way of the dodo along with so much punk-based music some time in the last decade. Some old D.C. heads are doing really well with their music, though, and that's such a nice thing to see."

Now Caldas (whose band Authorization will be releasing an album soon) is living in New York, after living in D.C. for 12 years. "I'm currently working in television as an assistant video editor and trying to play music whenever I can. I recently did some music for a friend of mine's experimental film called 'Crusher,'" he says. Martin-McCormick (who now plays in Mi Ami and Sex Worker) and Long are both in San Francisco at the moment. "I left town because I wanted a change of scenery and to try some new stuff. I had an opportunity to study classical guitar in San Francisco and thought it might be cool, but I also wanted to see if all the ideas and energy I had picked up in D.C. would hold elsewhere. So far, life has been exceptionally good," says Martin-McCormick. McElroy is still living in D.C., playing in Cephalopods, and running Ruffian Records (which has lately partnered with Sockets Records on a number of releases). McElroy notes: "It's nice to look back, as long as it doesn't take our eyes off all the beautiful things people are making and doing now. It's way too easy to be nostalgic instead of engaged."

In case you missed it, here's the rest of the series.

“Do not. Remove. The matchbox.”

That was the advice Aaron Leitko, Hugh McElroy, and Sean Peoples received five years ago when they bought their white, nearly windowless 1995 Ford Econoline 150—a hulking, utilitarian shell of a vehicle that had spent much of its previous decade hauling some of D.C.’s most tour-hardened indie-rock outfits across the country.

Here’s a partial list of those bands: the Make-Up, Faraquet, Trans Am, the Warmers, HiM, the Sorts. And here’s a partial list of shit found in the van at the time of its death three weeks ago: a basketball; some cassettes; a mic stand; numerous parking tickets; an even dollar in change; a pink, rainbow-adorned Care Bear.

And, of course, the matchbox, which had sat on the dashboard ever since the van’s original owner, successful indie-rock manager and former Warmers bassist Juan Luis Carrera, placed it there some 15 years before, when he bought the van on tour in Arizona.

"The matchbox is a mystery,” says McElroy, an ex-member of defunct Dischord outfit Black Eyes. “It was pointed out to us that the matchbox had to stay in the van—that there would be consequences to the matchbox leaving the van.”

Despite the van’s exhaustive repair history—written partly on a Crownhate Ruin flyer—the totem must have served the Econoline well. “[I]t was really in good shape until it wasn’t,” says Leitko, an editorial aide at the Washington Post, freelance music critic, and purveyor of druggy-sounding post-disco with electronica duo Protect-U.

The van, whose health had been declining in recent years, met its end the way it probably should have: on the highway, coming back from a show.

McElroy, who’d been road testing his new group Cephalopods in New York and Philadelphia, was returning to D.C. on I-95 when, around Baltimore, the van began to wobble. The band pulled over and smelled burning rubber; that night they made it back to D.C. on back roads. Several days later, a mechanic told McElroy that repairs to the brakes would cost around $1,200.

“It was sort of a not-worth-it situation,” says McElroy. The van’s insurance was about $1,000 a year; it was a magnet for parking tickets; the owners had been using it less.

So they signed the vehicle over to the auto shop and walked away from this unassuming artifact of D.C.
music history.

“My most resonant memory of the van is how decadent it was,” says former Warmers drummer Amy Farina, who now plays in the Evens. “Especially for a band like us. It wasn’t like we were paying the bills.”

Decadent? Only if you’re in an indie band, for which cramped transportation with unidentifiable odors is de rigueur. The Econoline was stripped-down—but also new. “After being on tour with a few bands the years prior and lacking the mechanic’s ‘touch,’ I wanted something reliable,” Carrera writes in an e-mail. During one period in which he left the van unlocked but with a Club on the steering wheel, would-be thieves left strange objects inside it. One time, he found someone sleeping in it.

Once, when Warmers guitarist Alec MacKaye was driving down 16th Street NW after a show in Philly, two teenagers in a coupe pulled up next to the Econoline at a red light. “This kid in the passenger seat was giving us this hairy eye, just being this aggro kid,” MacKaye recalls. “He was really young. I gave him a look like, ‘What’s the problem?’” The light turned green and MacKaye drove on. The teens just sat there. “They’re behind us, and they just floored it.” MacKaye stopped at the next red light. “And they just drove right into the back of the van, at maybe 40 miles per hour, and just destroyed the front of their car....They had lights hanging out and wires—man, it was weird.” The teens sped off.

The van was basically unharmed, and the band returned home to Mount Pleasant, then walked to a 7-Eleven and reported the incident to a policeman there. “And immediately he got the call back that they stopped the car and they have some suspects,” MacKaye says. The Warmers followed police to where the teenagers were being interrogated. The band identified them, and the driver was arrested. The cop decided to let the passenger—the aggro kid with the hairy eye—go. “They told him tonight’s your lucky night, and the kid’s like, ‘How do I get home?’....And the cop says, ‘Why don’t you ask these guys?’”

“I can’t remember if we give him a ride; I don’t think we did,” MacKaye says, laughing. “But we might’ve.”

The Warmers broke up in 1997, but by then Carrera was operating a record label and managing bands. He frequently lent the Econoline to other groups. The Make-Up took it out on one tour, although frontman Ian Svenonius can’t remember which. “[I]t was...necessary since renting is so expensive (and often impossible for the marginally employed) and...most groups aren’t going to lend their wheels,” Svenonius says via Facebook. “For a while Make[-U]p was proud that we had a ‘shorty’ or more diminutive Chevy van but as soon as we opted for a full size bass rig we had to find another one.”

Trans Am has less fond memories. Someone tagged the van in Montreal during a tour around 2000. “Just to let you know, Trans Am is traditionally a Chevy band,” writes the group’s Philip Manley.

Faraquet borrowed the van several times before member Jeff Boswell, now the operations director at Washington City Paper, bought it in 2000. The group used it for only around 20 shows before breaking up in 2001. The van then became Boswell’s main ride. In 2002, he packed it with Dischord merchandise to sell on a Fugazi tour. That was the year of the Beltway snipers—who were initially described as traveling by plain white van. “Every time I drove around I felt like someone was watching me,” Boswell says.

In 2005, Boswell sold the van to Leitko, then an editorial aide at Washington City Paper who played in A Day in Black and White, and Peoples and McElroy, who were playing together as Hand Fed Babies. A Day in Black and White did some touring in it but soon broke up; Hand Fed Babies barely drove it. Leitko then used it for a noise project, for the group SPRCSS, and Protect-U; McElroy and Peoples used it for their respective labels, Ruffian and Sockets, as well as other projects.

“In my own world, it had a new life. It became the Fatback van—it was very helpful with that,” says Peoples, referring to the vehicle’s role in lugging around gear for the popular funk and soul dance night he helps run. “It’s as if it mirrors the D.C. musical trajectory, which is less and less well-known bands and now these dime-a-dozen DJ nights,” he says, only somewhat jokingly.

Leitko, McElroy, and Peoples never opened the matchbox until they had to clear out the van. Says McElroy: “Inside it’s got a number of small objects. I guess I shouldn’t say—well, small wooden cylinders wrapped in thread. Maybe small, tiny effigies?”

The Econoline’s former owners “got their money’s worth,” says a mechanic at Adams Morgan’s J&N Auto Body, where the van was deposited. If a band could swallow the $1,200 bill, he says, the van probably has another tour or two in it, despite its odometer reading of more than 200,000 miles. “Honestly,” he says, “it’s not that big of a repair.”

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

Hugh McElroy (Ruffian Records, ex-Black Eyes): Right now I'm working on an Imperial China remix and planning on practicing cello for a bit, assuming I don't meet some other teachers from school for snow-football and a drink, that is. I've mostly been playing medieval tunes honestly, so the remix will give me a chance to dub it up.

Bernard Farley (Outputmessage): I was working on a ambient remix earlier, something like Aphex Twin's "On."

Ryan Holladay (Bluebrain): I'm actually working right now on something for a magazine in New York—it's a bizarre amalgam of harp music. It fits perfectly with this weather, I must say. I've been really interested in exploring solo harp music recordings for a while and love that I have an excuse to be holed up and doing it right now.

Noam Elsner (True Womanhood): Thomas [Redmond] and I played dubstep all yesterday till it started really snowing and I had to get home. If there's no power, all I can do is pots and pans remixes or, you know, play Satie and Ravel on the piano. Cos I'm so sofistikated.

Young Raven (hip-hop producer): Most of my music is pretty dark anyway, but the snow tends to smooth out the darkness a little. It's like Sade meets Radiohead over some boom-bap drums.

Matthew Taylor (Tennis System): I'm actually sitting in front of my computer recording/writing now. I'm writing poppy drive-y stuff. It's very MBV meets Guided By Voices. This weather is such a downer sometimes and I need something positive to keep me going. It's a blessing in disguise. I don't have to work and cannot go outside. So I lock myself in my room and write and record. Some of it might never get used, but some may.

Jess Matthews (America Hearts, Edie Sedgwick): In between sledding and drinking hot toddies, I've been recording demos of some new songs. One is about a race car driver.  It is not at all inspired by the cars I've seen on the streets today.

Andrew Field-Pickering (Beautiful Swimmers, Maxmillion Dunbar, Food for Animals): I feel like snow makes me make nostalgia music. I'm definitely trying to channel some childhood/sleeding/snow-covered hills vibes when I sit down to make tunes in the snow. I'll bet my snow tunes are more heavy on the melodies. Today I'm working on Max Dunbar tunes, making food and coffee, cleaning up my house, and chilling! I just finished an album, so the "next wave" of Max tracks sort of begins within this blizzard, which is cool.

Chad Clark (Beauty Pill): The forced isolation and silence is inspiring to artists. Speaking for myself, I'm on fire. Who can resist the dreamlike reverie of a blizzard howling just outside your window? Right now I am working on a song called "Ain't A Jury In The World Gon' Convict You, Baby."

You can get a small sense of how that sound emerged at Hugh McElroy's Ruffian Records Web site, which recently posted some free MP3s from two of McElroy's pre-Black Eyes projects, A.K.A. Harlot #1 and Exaspirin, as well as a 1996 session McElroy engineered for New York art punk outfit the Vestpocket Psalm. While you're there, you can also grab (for free) every song that Horses—McElroy's 2004 band with Black Eyes members Dan Caldas and Mike Kanin—ever recorded, as well as Hume's Wyfe EP.

Ruffian also announced a pair of upcoming joint releases with Sockets Records: Phosphenes, the debut full-length by aggro post-rockers Imperial China, and a compilation LP featuring local bands. In an e-mail, McElroy wrote that the labels are hoping to release the compilation in the spring.

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."