So... Alright - This is Not a Fugazi Episode

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

Geoff talks about Fugazi. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Introducing the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, built for breakthroughs with personalized workout plans, real-time insights, and endless ways to move. Lift with confidence, while Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects form, and tracks your progress. Let yourself run, lift, flow, and go. Explore the new Peloton cross-draining tread plus at OnePeloton.ca. So this is not a Fugazi episode, although I think it's going to seem like one, and I guess it kind of is. It's actually an episode about a documentary about Fugazi. and maybe just the time it takes for someone to understand something from a different perspective.

The other night, Saturday, to be exact, I was in my living room watching sports, playoffs probably, or I don't know, maybe basketball. There's sports going on in every direction right now, and it's truly a feast for a guy like me, and I've been loving it. But while I was sitting on the couch or in a commercial, I was browsing TikTok, and I landed on a live performance of Fugazi, who if you're not familiar with Fugazi, they are a punk rock band, I guess is what their genesis would be, from Washington, D.C. that existed from, well, they're not technically broken up. They're on indefinite hiatus, but they existed from 1987 until they

went on hiatus in 2003, so about early 2003, so about 15 years. I don't think there was any such thing as a super band in that world at that time. But if there was, it probably would have been Fugazi. Every member of that band came from other great, similarly important bands. I'm not going to get too deep into that, because once again, this is not a Fugazi episode. I'm going to keep saying that to myself. Also, for the record, it's kind of, I'm saying that tongue in cheek, because if you are familiar with the band Fugazi, then you know one of their core tenants. I wouldn't say a political band, but very politically minded band, politically ethosed band, in the sense that they truly live what they preach. I think it's one of the things that makes

them so unique in the space, but they don't sell merchandise. They sell their music. And so there's never been a Fugazi T-shirt, right? Never been able to go to a Fugazi show and buy a Fugazi T-shirt. So bootlegs came about. People started making bootlegs. I don't think that was super exciting for them. But somebody created a shirt that just said, this is not a Fugazi shirt. And I guess that was okay with them. Maybe they thought they would have been hypocrites if they had an issue with that because it was clearly not a Fugazi shirt. Maybe they thought it was clever and funny and appreciated the joke. I don't know. But that became the only Fugazi shirt you could buy. And you could buy it on SST, mail order catalogs and stuff. It was available in stores, but it was never officially

authorized by the band. It was none of the proceeds ever went to the band. I never actually owned one, but most of my friends did. Just a white t-shirt that in like blueish letters, I believe, said this is not a Fugazi shirt. Hence the tongue-in-cheek nature of the episode title. So I'm on my couch watching probably the playoffs, browsing TikTok, and I land on a live performance of Fugazi playing one of my favorite songs. It's a song called Shut the Door. And they are playing it in Olympia, Washington in 1995. So the year I turned 20. And I stopped on it. I love Fugazi and I love to watch like a quick 45 seconds of a live performance. But it was the whole song and it was like a seven or eight minute performance. And I got so sucked into it. I muted the TV and I watched this performance. And listen, if I prefaced every episode with telling you guys about something, I'm not, something I saw that made me tear up. It's all we would ever talk about. Let me just say that it was a, as I'm getting older, as I get older, as people get older, they get full of tears, I guess.

I was watching this and something about seeing it and seeing them, a band that I love dearly that I, you know, I haven't seen live since, I'm going to talk about this in a little while, 1995. I saw them live twice, two nights in a row. And I got to meet Ian McKay and interview him for my punk scene. I think I talked about that many episodes ago. Regardless, a band that I, you know, I still listen to pretty often. I really gotten into the argument and end hits and red medicine and instrument as I've gotten older, the soundtrack instrument, as I've gotten older, and really have kind of exclusively listened to the back Fugazi catalog in my later years and really just learn to appreciate it. So anyway, I'm watching this TikTok. It's this performance

of shut the door, which is one of their best songs. It's an early song, but it's one of their absolute best songs and the performance is so fucking powerful and Ian and Gee are so in sync in this just there's it's it's a song of highs and lows right it's it's a dark troubling song and it's rhythmic and pulsating and it really like it gets into you it gets under your skin and something about watching them play it and play it with such ferocity and and intense and then also in such sync, like this fucking video, you've never seen four people more in sync. And as I'm watching it, I'm remembering it and realizing that I've seen the performance before. I wasn't there, but I will get to that. But I've seen this performance

for it, and I'm falling in love with it, and I just become mesmerized by it. And about halfway through the song, they start to deconstruct them. the song on stage. I don't know how else to describe it other than that. They are four musicians, four artists in every sense of the word, who have taken this beautifully crafted song that's rhythmic and just bubbling with emotion and dark and you feel like you're surfing a wave kind of when you listen to it. Maybe that's not right. You don't feel like you're surfing a wave. You feel like you're almost rocking in a violent sea on a boat when you're listening to it. It would be how I would describe it. And then watching them take that song and then on a dime, take it apart in front of

the audience and you can tell it's improvisational. There's no way this is scripted or rehearsed. And they just go somewhere with it. And you watch them follow each other and lead each other through this just insane breakdown that goes all these crazy places. And then after a few just like intense minutes, it just comes back together in like the strongest way and the most purely cohesive moment you've never seen four people recreate their own art live in front of an audience in quite the same way. I've seen a ton of experimental bands, and I don't mean to be disrespectful to any of them. I'm just saying that something happened in this performance that if you a Fagazi fan will blow you away.

And if you're not, I don't know, it's hard for me to say I'm a Fagazi fan. It is easily, it's about seven, eight minutes, the best performance I've ever seen. I obviously wasn't there, the best recorded performance, live performance I've ever seen in my entire life. And as I'm watching it,

and I'm just being blown away by it, I keep realizing that this is something that I've seen before, and I recognize it. And it hits me, oh, this is, I know this. This is the beginning of their documentary. which I saw in 1998 when it came out and did not like, except for this and a few other performances in it. And I thought, fuck me, man. I got to watch that right now. So I turned

off sports. And I went to, I don't know, Amazon or wherever I was able to get it from. And I watched their documentary instrument. That was 11 years in the making. Ian McKay was good friends with this guy named Jim Cohen, who is a director, photographer, cinematographer, artist, like a real multi-hyphenate creative dude in the grand scheme of things and has done a lot of really interesting and weird stuff. And I am super not well versed in his career at all. But he had access to the band for about 11, 10, 11 years. And he filmed them during that time and created this documentary that is, I mean, I guess it's a documentary because it is documenting a time in their lives, right? It is documenting a creative process and how they work together. But I wouldn't say

it's a documentary in the sense that it gives you a full story or you truly walk away with an understanding. I remember at the time, a lot of people called it self-indulgent. We can talk about that in a little bit. People thought it was a little full of itself, had its head up its ass. I won't say that I felt that way, but I will say when it came out and I was 23 years old, I did not enjoy the documentary. However, when I turned off the playoffs to watch it on Saturday night, I was really planning on just watching

that performance from the beginning of the documentary again, just in a higher quality, you know? And I did, but then I'd just watch like another minute, another two minutes, another three minutes. Oh, let's see what next song they play, you know? And before I knew it, I had spent two hours on my Saturday night with Emily doing something else. I think she was upstairs in her office.

And I just got locked in laser, focused and spent my entire Saturday night watching this documentary, pausing it, rewinding it, watching stuff again, and seeing it in an entirely different light than I saw it when I was a 23-year-old, go figure, right? 27 years later, I have a different interpretation of the documentary. But it left such an impression on me, I started taking notes. And as I was doing it, I kind of got into this idea that maybe I would be making a Fugazi episode for you guys. I genuinely am not making a Fugazi episode for the simple reason that I, it's too big.

Fugazi is too big for me to tackle in an episode of Saw Right. They mean too much to music and to too many people and there's too much of a story to tell. You know, these are the guys that created, once again, if I ever get into it deeply, uh,

Guy and Brendan, I created emo with Rites of Spring. And Ian created, created straight edge with Minor Threat. These guys created foundational tent poles of our music world, at least my music world, my music scene, and were never satisfied when they planted those flags and moved on. Wrights of Springs is one of my favorite bands.

Minor Threat's one of my all-time favorite bands. But that's nothing. They also, they have Embrace, they have Egghead. They have one last wish, which we won't get to today. But I was just talking about with Eric the other day, it's but one of both of our favorite albums. It's happy-go-licky. Did all the post-Fugazi stuff like Kourriki and the Evens.

Anyway, my point is they have been too much to music to cover in like one 38 to 45-minute episode on this podcast. But what I can do, I can talk about a documentary that I watched that was two hours long and the impressions I took away from it. So this is going to be linearly in the sense that I'm watching the documentary and taking notes. And the documentary is roughly linear. It does some time skipping back and forth. But it starts around when they do in 87, late 87, and it has footage going all the way up to probably 95, 96, maybe later than that. I know it came out in 98. I don't know how long it took them to edit it. Maybe I should take one second, though, to talk about how I came to Fugazi and maybe why they have an outsized importance in my life as opposed to some

other punks or fans of similar genres. Although I doubt it. I think they are about as influential and respected and beloved of a band as you can get. I've talked in the past about how I got into punk when I was 15, 14 or 15, a friend Brian. It's called Brian B because I don't want to Doc's the dude. I also want to talk to him in 30 years, so I wouldn't want to blow up his world unintentionally for some old friend from high school who he doesn't remember. I had this friend named Brian. He was, we were same grade, same age, same poor side of the tracks. But he loved Dungeons and Dragons and he loved punk rock. He was also incredibly smart, a brilliant dude who got a full scholarship to Brown.

He was so fucking smart and so cool and such a great dude. And the things that he gave me that I will have for the rest of my life were obviously an appreciation for Dungeons and Dragons. I had fucked around with it before when I was younger in Florida and fifth and sixth grade and I was into it, but he brought it into focus for me. He made it a real tangible thing that I wanted to pursue. He also became my punk rock library. He had been into punk for a couple of years at that.

point, and so I borrowed everything I learned from him. The first three punk bands I ever listened to were from Brian, probably the fourth and fifth and sixth and the seventh and the eighth, etc. But these are the ones I remember. He gave me two tapes that I went home and copied. He gave me 13 songs by Fugazi, and he gave me bad brains, the roar sessions, the yellow album, as we call it. I've mentioned that in the past, too. I borrowed those. I fell in the last. I fell in love with them. Both of those bands are to this day in my top five favorite bands of all time, probably. I don't know if it's because of receiving them in that moment or if that would have always shaken out to be the case because they're just that good. But I've talked a lot

about how bad brains opened up my world. Fugazi was right there. I actually listened to 13 songs first, which means that waiting room was the very first. punk rock song I ever intentionally listened to. It's the absolute sonic beginning of it all for me. I said there were three because I quickly returned those two tapes to him to ask for more, and the next tape he gave me was an exploited tape. I think it was their first album. And that similarly blew me away,

although I learned much later in life not to like the band as people and individuals as much. And I will say that album fucking rocked, exploited, Barmy Army. That blew me away as a 15-year-old kid. I'd never heard anything like that. And those three bands became a triangle of culture that I sat right in the fucking middle of and spun around and soaked up every bit I could. And quickly that triangle expanded and I discovered the descendants and I discovered bad religion and bad religion really changed my life.

I really connected with them. fits and circle jerks and you name it. It continued and it continued and it grew and grew. Something that's interesting to me looking back on it now is I'm thinking back on it. I remember pretty clearly how I felt when I got those tapes. And when I fell in love with punk rock in general, I had no idea that it was a thriving existing scene because it wasn't where I lived. There was Brian. He was into it. And there were one or two other upperclassmen that were into it. But when I discovered it through him, I was listening to, you know, this Bad Brains album from 1981. And I was listening to a descendants album from like 1981. And I was listening to the Buzzcocks from like 1977, you know, and sex pistols from like 1977 and 76 and the clash and all these old bands.

I felt like for most of my childhood, I viewed punch. punk rock as this thing that had happened and that had already gone and that the people that were enjoying it now were enjoying it from a historical perspective right i lumped fugazi in with that uh at the time because it was all this this big ball of something that existed in the 70s and the 80s that didn't anymore you know and a lot of that was because i was in alabama and i didn't recognize that there were healthy and thriving scenes. But I spent most of my childhood feeling, most of my, most of my early life feeling like I had been born about seven to 10 years too late and that I, I just missed the mark. Like I was meant to be 14 years old in 1977. If I could

have done that and I could have fully enjoyed the SoCal Punk explosion and the DC hardcore explosion, you know, if I could have, if I could have been there and been old enough at that to enjoy it and to experience it when it happened, that would have been, I felt like that was my, like that was my purpose in life, was to have hit that mark and I just fucking, with bad luck, missed it by a few years. And it felt that way for a long time. Because like I said, outside of Brian, it was such a solitary and solo thing for me. And even after I joined the army and I discovered Austin and there were punk bands and I was going to shows, a lot of that early days, it felt almost like

this word didn't exist in my vocabulary yet, but it felt like cosplay to me. It felt like we were a bunch of people going, dressing in clothes from bands for 15 years ago that we were children when they played, you know, and going to a show to watch other kids

in the same clothes play songs that sound like those songs and then covers of those songs. It took me a while to understand that punk didn't die in like, punk's not dead. I thought it was a joke. I didn't understand that punk didn't die until probably I was like maybe 18 before it finally

clicked that, oh, this is a thing that's growing and continuing. And even some of these bands are still together. Most of them are not, but even some of these bands are still together. I bring that up as I spent my childhood thinking I was enjoying a scene that had already burned out because I didn't realize that Fugazi was a current band. It kind of, I mean, I know that now, and I've known that for many years, but it kind of came into focus when I'm watching the documentary. 13 songs came out in 1989.

I borrowed 13 songs from Brian in 1990. That album was maybe less than a year old when I listened to it, but I listened to it under the idea that it was just as old as Milo goes to college and that first Bad Brains album. And I don't know why it didn't click with me that at least at the time, I don't know, it wouldn't have mattered.

I didn't realize it. The point is, I didn't understand that Fugazi was even an existing band when I got into them. Everything was through the lens

of the past to me. And I thought it was funny to think back on that and realize that, you know, I was there at the ground floor of Fugazi. You know,

I discovered them three years into them being a band. I discovered their first album before their second album came out. And I didn't even understand that.

But, much like Jobbreaker, you know, it's cool to look back and realize that I was there for the whole deal, you know? I got to be there essentially at the beginning, damn near the beginning, and I got to be there at the end, and I got to enjoy the entirety of that run. And that was a really cool realization that never really crossed my mind. Also, you think about guys like Guy and Ian especially, but Brendan and Joe, obviously, as well. You think about the lineage of their stuff. I mean,

by the time Gee joins Fugazi like in week two or whatever he's already done Happy Go Licky he's already done Rites of Spring which is a huge deal he's already done one last wish and in addition to other stuff right

and Ian has already done minor threat he's already done egghead he's already done embrace you know like these guys have already pale head I think he did at that point like these guys already had a catalog of music before Fugazi

happened. And so in your head, when you're a kid, it's all just the same thing. Ian McKay's been making music since about 1980, so in my head Fugazi's been around since about 1980. It was a funny realization, watching instrument that I had had that so backwards when I was so young.

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Like I said, it's pseudo-linear. But what it feels like more than anything is an art piece. And I don't know why anyone would have expected anything different from Jim Cohen. I read a lot of reviews of when it came out and people had some positive and negative things to say about it. And even the positive stuff, I think somebody said, like, if any band deserves this self-indulgence, at least it's Fugazi. They do actually deserve it, you know. But looking back on it, like I said, I didn't get that impression at all anymore. What I did see was a band that lived the way they played and they played the way they lived.

They were, and probably still are to this day, the most true to their roots DIY band in existence. From only playing benefit gigs in their hometown, to refusing to charge more than five bucks for a concert, to refusing to allow record stores to charge too much for their CDs, to refusing to merchandise, they lived what they said. They lived and breathed it. And you get the sense of that in the documentary in a way that I didn't when I was younger. Another impression that I got throughout the documentary was just that I don't think another location in America could have spawned this band. I think that they are uniquely D.C. It's in their, it's in the fiber of their beings. It really is. And, you know, they say that they are not a political band. And I think that that's essentially true. They are politically minded people who live their ethos and their ideology and it bleeds through into their music.

but it's not necessarily what their music is about, if that makes any sense. If you're not intimately familiar with Fugazi, I don't know how accessible this documentary is going to be. They do some really interesting stuff. They do some really kind of fun fuck you stuff in it. A lot of the documentary, as you would expect, a lion's share of the documentary is them playing music.

However, it is concert footage of them playing punk rock, screaming, writhing around, playing the hardest most insane music you can imagine, under this beautiful weaving instrumental soundtrack that they created for the film. And so the juxtaposition of this introspective and interesting and almost shoegazy kind of instrumental music with just the harsh imagery of them playing their hearts out. It's, really wild. And I think this is what a lot of people had an issue with. And I think why people thought it was maybe self-indulgent. But looking back on it now and watching it, it is just who they are. You know, it's who they are in 1998. They say in the first five minutes,

I don't remember who says it. I think it's Joe or Brendan is in the first like five minutes of documentary says like, maybe it was gee, I don't know, says we don't want to stand still. We are constantly moving. We want to constantly move forward. You know, They talk about how they, like, we created this hardcore scene. We're in this hardcore scene. And then it became kind of wrote and full of rules and non-experimental. And they're like, we don't want to be stuck in that. We want to move on to the next thing.

We want to evolve. We want to grow. And they continue to do that. And I don't think I understood that. I don't think a lot of people understood that watching it. They do all of these interviews interspersed throughout. Well, actually, interestingly enough, for the first like three quarters of the documentary, or maybe the first half of the documentary rate,

they don't do these interviews. They do this cool thing where they just film kids in line. They'll just pick like two kids, put them up against a wall, and just film them for like three seconds. They don't say anything. They don't talk. It's just live footage of the people that are going, kids that are standing outside Fugazi shows.

And that's kind of wild because this is 89, 90, 91, you know, etc. These are, these kids look like me, and they look like every kid I was friends with. It's wild to see just, just see myself. And my friends, over and over and over again in the images of these kids, because it was the exact, I was the exact same age and in the exact same scene as these kids. You get kind of used to that. It becomes a part of the background noise. There's just like this instrument of music playing over these like montages of these kids. And then about halfway through these kids start talking. And they're the fucking worst. The kids just, they get interviewed and they're like, what do you think of the new Fagazia? I'm I fucking hate it. I think Red Medicine sucks. I think Ian's got his head up his ass. He's full of himself. He's too big for his britches now. I just hope they play the old music.

Why are you guys even here? I don't know. What else am I going to do on a Friday night? You know, fuck them. And it's just people paying to go see Fugazi to hate them. Very reminiscent of the jawbreaker stuff I talked about in the past, but not as intense. And I thought it was really cool that Jim and Fugazi put that stuff in the documentary. You know, they interview a lot of people.

Some people have some really wonderful and glowing stuff to say about them and their entire career, the span of their careers. People have some great stuff to say about the new direction they're going in and their current music. But a lot of kids are just there going to play waiting room,

play repeater. I don't want to watch you guys play guitar for seven minutes. You know, you're not Led Zeppelin. I want to watch you play Bulldog Front or whatever. Which is a sentiment that I felt when I watched the film, but not to that degree.

And certainly, not that disrespectfully. It was more of like, that's cool what they're doing, but I just don't like that stuff as much as the old stuff, and I was hoping there'd be a little bit more old stuff in the documentary. But I think that's kind of what's awesome about it, is a lot of the documentary is people, not even a lot, but the portions where there are people talking about this stuff,

there are people that just wanted to be the band from 1989, you know? And they're like, hey, it's 98, and that's not who we are. And you get to see these windows into their creativity, which I think is the best part of the documentary, these little moments, these little vignettes of them recording red medicine in Ian's grandmother's house, I believe, or just working on stuff here and there, and you get a sense of the true art in what they're doing

and how they're pushing and growing and just turning everything that they've done on its head and continuing to just push forward. And it's really fascinating to watch and impressive and beautiful. And I think that they're a band that doesn't do a lot of talking, and they look like a pretty,

serious, unfund bunch of guys. And I think that that's not entirely true, but I think they are a pretty serious and professional bunch of guys who take what they do incredibly seriously and with a tremendous amount of respect for what they're doing. And I really appreciate that about them. And I think that that really comes across in this documentary in a way that maybe I didn't understand it when I was younger and also just wanting to see them play waiting room in the documentary, you know? I think at the end of the day, the problem is, Because they'd never stood still, and they continued to grow and challenge themselves, that you got a bunch of people who think that they're minor threat and 13 songs, and these guys

have evolved so far beyond that musically, I think they just became too good and too talented for a lot of the audience who wanted the simpler earlier stuff. And I think that that theme was woven pretty interestingly through the documentary and I appreciated the honesty of Fugazi putting it in there. I mean, they didn't sugarcoat anything.

They let people talk shit about them in their own documentary. And I think that they're part of the reason that they did that was to show like, A, we're not bothered by it, but B, this is what we're putting up with.

This is what we're dealing with, you know? We're busting our asses. We're touring the world. We're staying in roach-infested motels in our 30s away from our families. And this is some of the response. I think it's probably pretty disheartening. I don't know that it mattered at all to them, but it was disheartening to me.

And the way you see them play and interact together, you can tell that they want and love nothing more than to do that together. And I think that just maybe after years of the audience just, not even the whole audience, some of the audience misunderstanding them or refusing to give it a chance and being willfully ignorant of them. There's also moments in the documentary because they're like, I'm not going to listen to that new thing.

Fuck that. It's like you don't even understand what you don't like, you know? I think it was all, it must have been very demanding for them and it must have been exhausting and I think that in some ways I wonder and I'll never know, but I wonder if maybe they just evolved

past needing to express themselves in front of an audience or needing an audience because as I understand it from reading a ton of interviews and stuff throughout the years, they still play together as regularly as they can. I don't think they all live in D.C. anymore. But when they're all in town together, they all get together and they practice and they play and they, I was reading interview with Joe, I think earlier, we said that they laugh and get dinner and it's wonderful. And it was from like 2018. And I don't think there's any sense that they're going to come out together or come out of a hiatus. I think that they seem to, I really understood what I read in one

of the interviews where he said, like, that's not who we are. We can't, we're not the kind of band that could come together and practice for two hours and then go out and play the hits. If we're going to get together and play music, we're going to do it in the way that we do it, which is, you know, a very time-consuming, all-encompassing, feeling each other out, learning about each other and who we are and what we're playing right now, imbueing that into the music and turning it into something bigger. And I don't know that anybody has the time for that. And I think that they have this idea that if they were ever to do Fugazi again in earnest, it would have to be everybody being all in. And I think that just gets harder and harder. The older you get, the more your families grow, the more you slow down,

the more your other ventures take off. It just, it really does get hard to get the band back together again. And a band like that, I think there's only one way to, I think they think there's only one way to do it. And I think they're probably right. And I'm doing a lot of supposition that, you know, I shouldn't be, but I'm just basing all this off context clues and stuff that I've read in interviews about them. I do think it's funny that outside of shut the door and a few other moments, almost everything they play in the documentary is either from the instrument soundtrack or much, much, much later into their career where they are and who they are now representing who they are, not who they were. I really do appreciate that aspect of it.

And it's kind of funny because in my old age, I have listened almost exclusively to back half of their catalog, whereas up until I was like maybe 30, I listened to almost exclusively to the first half of their catalog. Also watching it, watching these four people be at the absolute height of their ability and their cohesion and watching them, I think the thing that if you're a Fugazi fan and you've never seen it, that I would hope you would take away from it, is just how brilliant they were and how impressive it was. that they were able to deconstruct their own art in front of the world

and then turn it into something so discordantly beautiful and then bring it back together. It's... I don't know... I don't know that there's a band that can do it like they did it. I know that there's, at least in my world, in my scene, there's a lot of bands that have, that have tried.

Very few have done passably good imitations at times. I would say Nation of Ulysses, which is interesting because I think Brendan's brother was in Nation of Ulysses, so that would make sense. Refused to have some stuff at the drive-in, of course. Unwound is another band that I can think of that kind of does a passable Fugazi imitation. but that's about it. And those were all, by the way, really good bands that I just mentioned that I like a lot, but none of them hold a candle to what Fugazi was doing at the end. And I'm so happy that I got to see them play when I did.

I got to see them play two nights in a row at Liberty Lunch in Austin way back in 1995 and got to experience their brilliance firsthand. I wish I could go back and do it again now that I'm older and understand the world better and could appreciate it in a totally different way. But I don't think, I genuinely don't think they will get back together.

And I don't think we'll have the opportunity to see that those four guys play live together. You can have a pretty good shot at going and seeing those guys individually in other bands, but I don't think we'll see a Fugazi reunion. I'd love to be wrong about that. And if there is one, I will be the first person there. I did discover mentioning those two Austin shows

I went to way back in 1995, they do something very, very fucking cool, all right? If you go to Discord.com, which is their website, D-I-S-C-H-O-R-D, that's their record label because they self-produce everything. At the top, you've got links to bands, tours, the shit they sell, media, whatever. And all the way on the right, they have a thing called the Fugazi Live series. And if you go there, it's a portal where they have every show they've been able to recover from the history of the band. They say in the little synopsis here that from 937 to 2003, Fugazi played more than 1,000

concerts across the world, and more than 800 of those shows were recorded by the bands on sound engineers. And so they have this initiative to clean up, remix, and release every live performance that they can, audio, at least audio version. And I looked up the two shows that I went to. You can, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Looks like they played Austin eight times from 1980. to 2002. And in the fall of 1995, they went on their U.S. Canada tour. They played Austin

November 16th, 1995. They played Austin November 17th, 1995 at Liberty Lunch. And I was at both shows. And for $5, I can download those performances. And I can't fucking believe that that exists. I am going to buy both of these Fugazi performances. I don't know if their audio or video, I think they might just be audio, but I am so fucking excited to go back and listen to these two performances that I was at when I was 20 or 21 years old with my friend Jason and his wife, who I believe was even pregnant at the time. It was, I remember it was such, such a big deal, and we were so excited. And to get to see them play two days in a row, oh my God, they have the set list here and everything, which is just so cool. And what a world we

live in, where at 50 years old, I can go by for $5 a digital version of a concert I went to when I was 20 years old. 30 years ago. I wonder if I'll recognize it. I wonder how much of it I'll remember. I do remember him throwing some kid in a red shirt out. I remember him going, you, boy with the red shirt, boy with the red shirt. We don't fight here. Get out of here. Which is a whole thing. They do not allow violent dancing and fighting at their shows. They want their shows to be able to be safely enjoyed by everybody. I think that pissed a lot of people off in our world. I get it. But at the same time, I totally fucking understand where they're coming from and respect what they were doing, you know? And that was pretty much the documentary. Those were those were the

notes I had written for it. If you're a Fugazi fan, I highly recommend you watch it. If you're not a Fugazi fan, I don't know that I can recommend it for you. I think it's brilliant and I think it's a high-minded art piece, and I think that there are layers to enjoy it on. If you are a Fugazi fan, though, watching them in the middle of a song take a left turn, take that song completely differently, somewhere so far away from where it began, and all be just cohesive and in sync when they do it and just leading and trusting and following each other. And it is, I said, I talked about all this earlier, but it is just, It's something to behold, and it's something to behold when these people are obviously at the absolute apex of their craft and doing it.

And just from enjoying the purest expression of art you can standpoint, it's worth watching. And I never meant to watch it again. Like I said, I watched it in 1998, didn't like it, watched it in 2025, absolutely loved it. Probably won't be watching it again anytime soon. But I got to say, if you get a chance, whether you want to watch the documentary or not, watch the fucking performance of shut the, door at the beginning of it. It is maybe the best live recording of a performance my eyes have ever seen. I can't speak for you. This has not been a Fugazi episode. This has been an episode about me watching a Fugazi documentary and understanding it in a different way 30 years later

than I did originally. It would be podcast malpractice if I don't give you a Fugazi song of the episode. Pretty sure I've thrown a few your way in the past and I'm scared of repeating myself. So I'll do three songs. I'll do night shop. I'm so tired.

God, which I listen to a lot. I really, really enjoy. And you know what? It is a little bit older. of Steady Diet of Nothing, but let's throw in Long Division because I think that's one of the best songs ever made. There you go. There's your three Fugazi songs for this episode, Night Shop, I'm So Tired, and Long Division. Hopefully you enjoy one or even all of them. More importantly, I hope you have a fantastic fucking week, and I'll be right here in seven days with some other

bullshit to talk about. Love you dearly. Don't forget to listen to the Regulation podcast. Don't forget to listen to Clutch My Pearls and check out. our Patreon over there, regulation, if you get a chance. Love you. All right.