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.

*Elizabeth Berkley plans to write a self-help book to help boost young girls' self-esteem. Presumably it'll skip the whole section about doing a movie where you snort coke, have sex in a pool, and push the lead showgirl down the stairs so you can take her place in a topless Vegas extravaganza. Though hopefully it will reference this little "live and learn" nugget from the greatest moment in the best series that ever aired on television:

*Joss Whedon is almost probably pretty close to maybe definitely directing Marvel's latest superheroes flick, The Avengers.

*Nicki Minaj announces she's pulling out of Rihanna's summer tour to work on her own debut album. Ke$ha remains on the bill. (If the three of them recorded a song together, it'd be the best worst catchy song ever.)

*A blog called Stupid Fight determines which celebrity followers are more... well, stupid. Qualifiers for the less astute include calculating the number of excess exclamation points, "OMG"s and the like. According to some recent battles, Lady Gaga fans are dumber than followers of Justin Bieber, Insane Clown Posse's fans are more intelligent than those who tweet Green Day, and Slayer and Metallica fans are pretty evenly matched. (Rachel Maddow fans come out on top when up against Glenn Beck, and Stephen Fry's fans are pretty smart when compared to Kim Kardashian's "dumb as a bag of hammers" crowd.)

*HBO announces its newest drama Treme has already been renewed for a second season. Is anyone truly surprised this new series is also awesome?

*Producer DJ Premier says Kanye West is ditching electro and going back to pure hip-hop for his fifth album.

*Scissor Sisters announce via Twitter that they'll have a new album out at the end of June.

*That TV show about awkward singers with the high ratings and a cast of continually skyrocketing popularity came back from its hiatus last night. So if you don't want to read about Glee, I suggest you steer away from your Facebook feed.

Arts Desk contributor Brandon Wu photographs a lot of shows, but for our Music in Review issue, he did a 180 and pointed his camera at the crowds. His photo essay includes fans of Metallica, Lady Gaga (above), Britney Spears, Mates of State, Mudvayne, Yo La Tengo, and more. Check it out here.

Channeling late '70s bands like the Jam and the Beat, D.C.'s Modest Proposal was a fixture of the city's early-'80s mod and ska scenes, and the group performed for several years before disbanding in 1986. The few songs it committed to vinyl, on several singles and compilations, are charming, catchy examples of a movement that—with its a blend of punk and the R&B-inflected rock of Small Faces and the Who—never quite took hold but inspired countless later bands. OK, so Modest Proposal's name didn't quite amount to a Swiftian act of wit, but at least it's slightly less obvious than the Mods. Modest Proposal—led by WTOP reporter Neal Augenstein—performs tomorrow at Comet Ping Pong with another reunited mod act, the Reply. The show is sold out.

More genre-identifying band names after the jump, including classic ska, acid-caked funk, and syrupy power-pop!

The Skatalites: You'd think the two-tone motifs and ratchety guitars would be adequate signifiers, but apparently ska bands really feel the need to self-identify—think names like Mephiskapheles, Bim Skala Bim, and Skankin' Pickle. There's really no reason to single out the Skatalites, other than that the band was one of Jamaica's most popular ska bands of the 1960s, and that it's been making music, in various incarnations, ever since.

Funkadelic: To be fair, there's also no shortage of funk bands with "funk" in their names (counterexample: MOR rockers Grand Funk Railroad). None are better than Funkadelic, the acid-caked sister group of George Clinton's more single-friendly Parliament. The "-delic" was as important as the "funk": The songs on the group's best album, Maggot Brain, are druggy, genre-bending portraits of a dystopia where misery's no excuse not to party. Plus: If your favorite blogs pointed you to the buzzy New York duo Sleigh Bells recently, you should know that the guitar sample in "Ring Ring" is from Funkadelic's "Can You Get to That."

Rockpile: Nick Lowe made a career out of smart guitar-pop that often satirized the recording industry, so you have to take the somewhat grating name of his Rockpile project—which often did backing-band duties for Lowe's solo work—with a grain of salt. Rockpile, despite its knack for writing hummable power-pop hooks, wasn't trying to rock too hard. Take this song, driven by a nondescript classic-rock riff but built around the lyric, "If sugar was as sweet as you, honey/sugar just couldn't be bought":

Metallica: Well, obviously. But the use of Ennio Morricone's "Ecstasy of Gold" in this performance in Russia is so metal:

If you want to mellow out a monkey, play him some Metallica.

That's the surprising result of a new study by Charles Snowdon, a
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor. The researchers played clips of music— including Metallica's
"Of Wolf and Man," Nine Inch Nails', "The Fragile," Tool's "The
Grudge," and Barber's "Adagio for Strings"—for cotton-top tamarins.

Humans generally find the Nine Inch Nails and Barber pieces to be calming, with their slow tempos and descending pitches, like sighs. The Tool and Metallica songs, in contrast, tend to make people feel excited, as a result of their faster tempos and machine-gun bursts of
notes.

The monkeys, however, barely responded to any of the pieces, though they did seem to calm down and relax a bit while listening to Metallica and Tool.

"I don’t have a good explanation for that," says Snowdon. "They are usually very active animals, and their movement got minimal after they heard those two pieces."

The practical upshot? Monkey keepers may want to play heavy metal rather than classical music to calm their colonies. However, they'd do even better if they played "monkey music" — pieces composed specifically for tamarins by study co-author David Teie, a University of Maryland cello instructor and member of the National Symphony Orchestra.

Teie mimicked the contours of tamarin calls and wrote songs that had a muchbigger effect on the animals' behavior than human music did. One piece, with a slowly rising whistle-like melody, caused the monkeys to groom one another and engage in other leisurely, social activities. Another, with short, staccato notes, sent the animals into a frenzy of anxious behavior including scent marking and head shaking.

High on Fire and Converge will open the 34 shows–one of which will be at GMU's Patriot Center on Oct. 31.

Electronic Arts is sponsoring the tour (which is sort of odd if you consider the new Dethklok video game is a Konami product), thus every concert will have console stations where audience members can try out Brutal Legend, EA's new video game featuring voiceover work by Jack Black.

More deets after the jump.

Ticket ordering information, from the press release:

[A] ticket pre-sale that begins on Tuesday, August 4 at 10:00 AM EST, while the full allotment of tickets will go on sale to the general public starting Friday, August 7.  For more information about the tour including the pre-sale ticket password, price ranges and how to order, please visit www.adultswimpresents.com.

And a few East Coast tour stops/dates:

10/24 The Fairgrounds, Buffalo, NY
10/25 Armory, Albany, NY
10/27 House of Blues, Boston, MA
10/30 Hammerstein Ballroom, NY, NY
10/31 GMU Patriot Center, Fairfax, VA
11/1 Electric Factory, Philadelphia, PA
11/5 Tabernacle, Atlanta, GA

Punk leftovers-cum-merchandising powerhouse the Misfits have announced a fall tour, stopping at Jaxx Sunday, Oct. 25. It's not quite Halloween, but close enough.

The Jersey-bred musclemen/metal punks emerged in 1977, developed a crude catalog of '50s B-movie themes banged out and recorded with even less tact,  and, technically, disbanded by 1983 (when head howler Glenn Danzig left the group). But since 1996, a Frankenstein-ian composite of aging shredders and hangers-on have been keeping the monster alive. Founded by the incomparable Danzig and Jerry Only, Marky Ramone and Black Flag's Dez Cadena were once part of the deciduous line-up.

Throughout the years, reissues, and coffin-shaped box sets, the (theoretical) band has  gained a cult following its current members refer to as the Fiend Club, bearing the Misfits' signature logo and genius graphic design feat. the fiend skull. Their songs have been covered by Metallica ("Last Caress") and Guns 'n' Roses ("Attitude"). Now, Jerry Only is the last founding fossil standing and most new material, quite frankly,  sucks. (Exception: 2003's Project 1950 for its kick-ass cover of "Great Balls of Fire.")

The Misfits haven't released an album since 2004's Fiend Club Lounge, so who the  hell knows what to expect on Oct. 25. I'm not even sure what to expect from the line-up. Rudimentary research indicates Only and Cadena are in, backed by Robo on drums, and Danzig is still out. Such shaky circumstances make me think I should sit this show out too, but I'd probably pay to see a Misfits cover band anyway, and by now that's just about what the Misfits are–an amoebic group toiling in the shadow of their former, better catalog.

Earthless w/ J Mascis: The San Diego-based psych-rock trio, augmented here by Dinosaur Jr guitarist J. Mascis, basically improvised a 30-minute space-rock crescendo that never stopped, it just got louder and louder.

Metallica: Metallica is pretty much the last of the superhuman mega-bands, at least in my opinion. Any personal obligations that they might have as grown men with families seem totally secondary to their lives as rock stars. Metallica will always go the extra mile for rock. Like, if you're sick and dying and you love Metallica, I feel like there's still a chance they would show up in your hospital room and surprise you with an autographed guitar. Not a lot of bands will do that anymore, certainly not a lot of the bands playing at SXSW. But the line was long–all the way around the block–so I skipped the show.

Eagle Twin: DC might be where I live, but Salt Lake City will always be my hometown. And Salt Lake City only really has three nationally recognized musical acts: The Mormon Tabernacle Choir, The Osmonds, and Iceburn, the now defunct progressive-atonal-jazz-metal band. So, I kind of feel like it's my duty to listen to any Iceburn related project that drifts my way. Guitarist Gentry Densley's duo Eagle Twin was performing over at the Southern Lord showcase, so I went to check it out. It was heavy, of course. Three giant Earth amplifiers and a drummer who pummeled his kit with every ounce of his body-weight. Watching Eagle Twin, it occurred to me that Utah–with its mountains, wastelands, toxic weapon testing ranges, and relatively affordable rent–must be a pretty great habitat for heavy metal.

Mi Ami: My second Mi Ami show of the trip, this time at Touch & Go showcase. Awesome show. The New York Times agrees, apparently. So was Captain Morgan, who strutted through the club doling out shots of rum and greasing the party vibe. This seemed weird at first, given that Daniel Martin-McCormick was screaming his head off and beating his guitar to death on stage. But given Mi Ami's swampy and sub-tropical vibe, the Captain's presence made a little bit of sense, or at least more sense than, say, Bartles & Jaymes.

Wino: There must have been some sort of band/gear screw-up, because Wino–the Maryland stoner-guitar hero–wound up having to perform a solo acoustic set. Maybe he couldn't get that Orange speaker-cab securely strapped to his Harley. He seemed a little grumpy about it too, or maybe it was just that the intimacy of his performance didn't pair very well with Emo's monster PA, which was constantly feeding back. Wino made due, though, plucking out a few adequately furious songs, despite the circumstances.

All The Saints: Initially, I liked All The Saint's Fire On Corridor X because it tapped in to several things I had forsaken, like early Verve records, and made them seem cool again. But the live show was something else, something heavier and angier. Eventually guitarist Matt Lambert jammed his guitar into the blades of the ceiling fan and that was is. So ended, barring unforeseen circumstances, the final Touch & Go label showcase. But between All The Saints an Mi Ami, not a bad way to go out.

Major Stars: Major Stars played so loud that I felt like the PA was pounding my face in, sort of like that scene from The Godfather where Sonny trounces Carlo. Eventually I admitted defeat, backed off, and took a seat outside of the fray. So yeah, victory for Major Stars, who played a brutal three-guitar psych rock. The audience may have maxed-out in the low 20s, but that didn't stop Wayne Rodgers from rocketing back-and-forth across the stage amid squealing and screeching guitar solos. Kind of wanted to check out the late night Dinosaur Jr show, but after this, there really wasn't much point.

Crystal Stilts: Watched two songs and got sleepy, so I called it a night. Guess I'll catch them in DC.

(Full set of photos at Flickr.)

In my City Lights pick of The Sword at Rock & Roll Hotel, I didn't really have particularly glowing things to say about Metallica. Like many metalheads, I'm a big fan of their early material, up to and actually including the Black Album, but they completely lost me after that. Death Magnetic was clearly better than any of their other recent work, but at this point I've moved on to other kinds of metal and was left largely unmoved by it.

Still, last night's show proved one thing: they've still got the knack for performance. I didn't have a ticket so I couldn't stay past the first three songs that I was allowed to photograph, but from what I saw and heard, this was probably one hell of a show. Energy levels through the roof (the stage was in the round with eight mics set up in different spots, and all the band members were constantly bouncing around between them), and they sounded great. The first two songs they played were the first two songs off of Death Magnetic, and while I'm not crazy about either of them, the performances were pretty much flawless.

The crowd was into it too, all 20,000 of them – the arena was sold out all the way to the upper decks. Dinosaurs past their prime maybe, but people do love a good dinosaur, especially when they're still this vicious.

(Full set of photos at Flickr.)