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.

Having lived such a strange life, Bob Dylan has always been hard to pin down. He provoked a certain anti-authoritarian sentiment in both his words and his mannerisms, and he penned the all-too-accurate lyrics, "Don’t follow leaders/Watch the parkin’ meters." That just about sums up life around here.

The persistently dark Radiohead might be at their most fearful in "Wolf at the Door." The always-paranoid Thom York doesn't just riff on some mythical social monster,;here he actually gives a semi-autobiographical account of a mugging he experienced a few years prior. It's enough to make you want to avoid walking through alleyways and maybe stop leaving the house altogether.

Local crooner Benjy Ferree brings it all together with "Fear," a somewhat apocalyptic track about so many bad things. Of course, with such a sweet voice it's hard to believe he's singing about anything so heavy, but that's the charm of it all. Be sure to catch him perform with Danielson on Saturday at Red Palace.

It wasn't all perfect, of course. Rafer Roberts, the editor of D.C. Conspiracy's paper, Magic Bullet No. 2, writes:

For the most part it was a mixed bag. Riders on the "end of the line" stops in Shady Grove and Takoma seemed a lot more receptive to the paper than those on the "end of the commute" riders of Foggy Bottom and Farragut. I am awaiting word from our Medical Center guy. [At] the Point of Rocks MARC, where I was, riders were themselves a mixed bag. As the day progressed, riders were more receptive to the paper. Earlier riders seemed more concerned with sleep, while the riders later in the day were much more interested in the additional reading material. Those who took the paper were generally pretty cool with it, while some of the people who didn't seemed suspicious and frightened of it.

Comic books! Scary!

Thankfully, nothing disastrous happened—you know, like sending 30 fans to the wrong location. Also: "No one got arrested that I know of," Rafer writes, "which is always a plus."

Mo' Math Problems, Mo' Money: The price to sweat one's face off in a dark, stuffy warehouse while taking in a quirky play just went up, The Washington Post reports. The Capital Fringe Festival, which returns July 7, upped its prices yesterday. The buttons, mandatory for all Fringe activities, will be $7, up from $5, while actual show tickets are jumping from $15 to $17. "What we do has value," Fringe executive director Julianne Brienza told the Post, "and the math isn't working."

Wu-Tang Jazz: After seeing a graphic designer mash up Wu-Tang Clan album covers in the vintage style of jazz powerhouse Blue Note Records, Gerald Watson was inspired to commission a mash-up from the DJ 2-Tone Jones, mixing Wu with classic jazz. NPR Music has the story, as well as a sample track, "Astral C.R.E.A.M."

Yesterday on Arts Desk: How Fat Trel and the Board Administration fell apart. Scena Theatre's "genuine Irish production" of The Weir.

Radiohead fumbled the L'Enfant Plan, and these fans suffered the consequences.

"I was expecting it to be at a record store," said Gage Muckleroy, an environmental engineer who drove down from Bowie, Md. to the sleepy corner of Brightwood at Jefferson and 7th Streets NW, hoping to grab a copy of The Universal Sigh, aka the Radiohead newspaper.

As Alex Baca predicted earlier today, while Radiohead knows many things, the L'Enfant Plan is not one of them. There was no Radiohead rep to be found at 784 Jefferson; in fact, the address doesn't even exist. The closest edifice is the Brightwood Park United Methodist Church at 744 Jefferson, where nearly 30 Radiohead fanatics—some using their lunch breaks, others just playing hooky—gathered in wait.

"It makes me not want to listen to Radiohead," mused Carla Vizzini, a special-needs teacher at a nearby school who used up her lunch hour in futility. She joked that she'll be making more room for Lady Gaga on her iPod.

Jon Fies and Ben De Laurentis drove up from Lynchburg, Va. with three of their friends. "We're Radiohead freaks," said Fies, who along with De Laurentis plays in a band called Steal the Prize. Their friend Jonathan McMillan took an entire day off from his job as a web designer to make the 400-mile round trip.

As much as the crowd of castable Radiohead fans—plaid shirts, corduroy jackets, and wayfarers abounded—could have felt played like chumps for following what turned out to be a map-making error by their beloved art-rockers, the mood was far from dour. Some got excited when a white hearse slowed down, hoping it was all part of the elaborate scheme. The stretched-out Cadillac disappeared into a driveway across the street.

Jonathan McMillan of Lynchburg, Va. took a day off from work to obtain a copy of The Universal Sigh.

"Fuck them for not giving us something for free!" someone blurted out to a chorus of laughs, though no one would claim the exclamation as their own.

As more people arrived and the minutes passed, it became less and less hopeful that someone would come by with copies of The Universal Sigh. I tried to explain Baca's reasoning, that whoever chose the locations did not account for the existence of both Jefferson Street and Jefferson Drive.

"But they had the ZIP code right," one young woman pleaded, noting that Radiohead's website did, in fact, list the block's ZIP code of 20011.

Eventually, Chloe Rice, a 24-year-old architecture student at Catholic University, got a call from a friend near the Hirshhorn Gallery at 7th Street and Jefferson Drive SW. The modern art collection was in fact the place to be. The crowd dispersed as people piled into cars or scrambled over to Georgia Avenue to catch a No. 70 Metrobus. A few decided to remain on the church's stoop, holding out hope that Radiohead did really intend to distribute its paper in a random neighborhood. Taryn Joswick, a self-described "Radiohead freak" who told the Bethesda pharmaceutical company she works for that she was going to a medical appointment, exchanged phone numbers with a young man rushing down to the mall who offered to confirm the actual location.

Perhaps De Laurentis put it best. Upon realizing he had been hoodwinked by shoddy maps, he offered a clever, albeit obvious, bit of commentary:

"This is the universal sigh."

At 1 p.m. today, editions of the much-heralded The Universal Sigh will hit the streets of Washington, D.C.

The thing is a newspaper, compiled by the dudes of Radiohead and distributed in tandem with the release of the physical copy of The King of Limbs, the band's latest full-length. Says its website: "To commemorate this momentous occasion, Radiohead have produced a newspaper which will be given away, free, gratis, without cost to the consumer by accredited vendors from a multitude of locations WORLDWIDE!"

On the subject of those locations, we are totally confused. The website lists "Washington, DC, Jefferson and 7th: 784 Jefferson Street NW Washington, DC DC 20011" and "Washington, DC, Union Station: Historic Downtown, 830 Jefferson Dr. SW., DC 20002" as points of distribution.

But 784 Jefferson Street NW is in an overwhelmingly residential part of Petworth, edging toward Brightwood Park. And Union Station is definitely not on the National Mall; its proper address is 50 Massachusetts Ave. NE.

We suspect that the Brits, however well-intentioned, might have fallen prey to the totally confusing L'Enfant Plan. While it's charming to think a Radiohead flack will be posted up with a pile of newspapers in Petworth, it's much more likely that they'll be on the Mall and at Union Station.

But, that's our guess. Radiohead's representatives did not respond to a request for geographical clarification.

Radiohead, those masters of head-scratching decisions, released a "newspaper" today—though it won't be available in D.C. until tomorrow at 1 p.m. It's called The Universal Sigh, and it's a collection of odd images and abstract verse, intended to supplement the band's newest album, The King Of Limbs. The paper showed up today at various locations around the globe, and there are two spots you'll be able to find it here in D.C tomorrow. It's unclear how many copies are available, but according to the Universal Sigh's website (which seems to be having trouble handling all the traffic its receiving), those interested in the free faux tabloid should head to either the intersection of Jefferson and 7th streets NW or to Union Station. If you find one, be sure to register your impression on Twitter, as the band's website is aggregating tweets with the hashtag #TheUniversalSigh.

It looks like Thom Yorke handed out the paper personally in London today; perhaps he'll make an appearance in the states tomorrow?

UPDATE: Radiohead might be confused about D.C. geography!

Thursday, March 24
You could be forgiven if his nearly 20-year association with Jay Leno made you think Kevin Eubanks was a mediocre hack, too—forgiven, but you wouldn't be correct. Before he Jaywalked, guitarist Eubanks (the second of three musical brothers from Philadelphia) was a member of the M-Base Collective, the Brooklyn-based pool of musicians who made revolutionary musical and rhythmic structures in the 1980s. As a soloist, though, he's tended toward the fusion domain, albeit with a refreshingly progressive current running through it. The rock-ish textures still fool some critics into thinking Eubanks has watered his sound down, labeling his latest album, Zen Food (Mack Avenue), as pop-jazz; if you're tempted to agree, listen to Zen Food yourself...and try to hum any of the tunes you hear. Better yet, go see him play! Kevin Eubanks performs at 8 and 1 p.m. at Blues Alley, 1073 Wisconsin Ave. NW. $30.

Friday, March 25
Donvonte McCoy first appeared in this column two weeks ago when he was appearing in a solo set at Twins; at the time, I praised his "fluid, bouncy legato line, blinding speed...and hearty quicksilver tone on his horn." Having heard that solo set, I have to qualify my description. No question of his fluidity or legato (though McCoy also has some staccato tendencies), but his playing also has a tremendous capacity for languid, deliberate pace, and his tone has a smoky undertone both on trumpet and flugelhorn. His range, in other words, is wide and magnificent. That's apparent in the sets he performs weekly with his quintet at Eighteenth Street Lounge, where large insertions of funk and hip-hop, and the soulful stylings of singer Mavis Waters, infiltrate his spacey jazz music. It's something special. The Donvonte McCoy Quintet performs at 10:30 p.m. at Eighteenth Street Lounge, 1212 18th St. NW. $10.

Sunday, March 27

One of my items in this week's Best Of D.C. issue ("Best Instrument: Bass") inspired an open question from walking jazz library Larry Appelbaum: "What ever happened to Marshall Hawkins?" What an opportune time to ask! Hawkins is performing at a homecoming concert this weekend. He's sharing top billing with New Orleans clarinetist Evan Christopher; both of them work with Christopher's ensemble Clarinet Road. Christopher is a deep scholar of the clarinet styles that flourished in the early jazz of New Orleans, and has built his career on extending the elements of those sounds into the contemporary jazz milieu—accordingly, he calls his music "contemporary early jazz." Christopher got his musical education at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts near Palm Springs, Calif.—which is how he met Hawkins, the D.C. native and bassist who has been the school's jazz head since 1985. Teacher and student bring it home at 4 p.m. at All Souls Unitarian Church, 16th and Harvard streets NW. $20.

Tuesday, March 29
It's probably no surprise to anyone who watches jazz these days that Radiohead's oeuvre is popular and fertile ground for jazz musicians. Brad Mehldau's piano renditions are the stuff of myth at this point, and on the best album of last year, Christian Scott's Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, the best track was a cover of Thom Yorke's "The Eraser." Well, D.C.'s jazz musicians are as eager to blaze those trails as anyone else, and a group of the most adventurous among them— tenor saxophonist Bobby Muncy, trumpeter Joe Herrera, guitarists Rodney Richardson and Greg Loman, bassist Blake Meister, drummer Larry Ferguson, and vocalist Lena Seikaly—have come together under the auspices of the "Radiohead Jazz Project." Their mission, obviously, is to explore the British band's work in depth. Given the players involved, it can't help but be a stirring encounter. The Radiohead Jazz Project performs at 8 and 10 p/m/ at Twins Jazz, 1344 U St. NW. $10.