I love Fugazi. My high school and college years are infused with the tracks from the first two albums. Turns out the band has been recording all their shows. They are going to release the audio of all 850 live show recordings to the public. The advantage is to hear some of the awesome songs, but also to get some of that patented Fugazi-audience interactions on tape.
“There’s a really great show from Munich, in I think the early ’90s, ’93,” MacKaye says. “At that time, it was pretty typical for the audience to say things like, ‘Get on with it!’ and ‘Play the music! Just play!’ I remember we had come back on stage for an encore, and somebody was lost or confused, or I don’t know; something had happened and somebody needed help. So we were trying to say, ‘Hey, there’s a woman back here, she’s lost and she’s looking for her friends.’ And some guy was just yelling, ‘Get on with it! Just play!’ And at that moment, I understood the dynamic, what was going on in this relationship, where he was a consumer and wanted to consume. He wanted sound. So at that moment, we just all turned on our guitars and started feedback, and it was a wall of feedback. And it was like, ‘Okay, here’s sound. You just want sound.’ There was no actual engagement with the music; it was just sound they wanted.
“So it’s maybe five minutes of just feedback. It was a totally surreal moment, and when I hear that, I can smell that moment. It’s so visceral to me, but it’s one of my favorites, because we go right into a song from that. I’m not sure that’s even up yet, but it’ll show up.”