Scavenger's Garden

Former Fugazi Bassist Joe Lally Has Been Mapping His Own Territory, Expanding The Boundaries Of What Was Into What Could Be

originally published February 13, 2008

A few years ago, it seemed that independent music took a long, hard look at itself, and then somehow froze while gazing at its own reflection. With the reemergence of navelgazing as the underground pastime of choice, our attention has turned inward via catharsis or introspection. Be it the uncomfortable truths of Xiu Xiu or the brotherly reassurance of Panda Bear, indie-rock has by and large become a parlor for the personal, an endless examination of psyche and self. It feels like the world outside of ourselves has been forgotten.

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So if that's the case, where does Fugazi fit into the world we've built for ourselves in 2008? As popular recorded music continues on its cycle of self-cannibalization, Fugazi's grave has remained relatively untouched. After bowing out with the truly graceful The Argument in 2001, all has been pretty quiet on the Fugazi front. No blog-blessed dilettantes are pillaging the group's sound; there has been no reunion at Coachella. Do young music listeners know what Fugazi was, what sort of weight that band carried?

Maybe, maybe not. It's possible that some memories have survived stronger than others, the surface concepts held intact but the substance therein somewhat diluted. Something about $5 shows? Well, Fugazi was a rock band from Washington, DC. The ensemble's guitar players were named Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto. The drummer was named Brendan Canty, and the bass player's name was Joe Lally. In 1987, Fugazi (quasi-sort-of) formed out of the ashes of pioneering hardcore band Minor Threat, a band of teens whose reverse-rebellion of clean living inadvertently spawned an honest-to-god youth moment; it's called straight edge. At the outset, Fugazi abandoned hardcore and "straight edge" (at least in their most dogmatic forms), but the band retained a very important aspect of both: a pure, unilateral mode of outrage.

Political activist Angela Davis once said, "'Radical' simply means 'grasping things at the root.'" Fugazi's rejection of age-restricted shows, random violence and unchecked consumerism was, on the surface, a first-offensive attack. But the songs were really just insistent battles in support of what the bandmembers cared about and what they believed in. The battles were natural to them; it was a pursuit in which they felt the need to subsume themselves. These guys saw seemingly worldly, even ephemeral political issues as being symptomatic of greater, more innate problems with our own internal systems, and they attacked them viciously.

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Fugazi, upon examination of its 15-year, seven-album creative arc, approached revolution backwards: first and foremost, the band's members became more well-known for demanding answers for crimes of unabated capitalism than for the music itself. Indeed, although their music was a lithe, rhythmically lean take on punk rock - what later became, y'know, indie-rock, post-punk, emo, etc. - that stood solidly on its own, the members of Fugazi became a symbol of ethical stoicism.

But by the time they reached their endpoint, a hiatus begun in 2002, their lyrical focus turned somewhat towards their own "epic problems," their own personal revolutions. And their music had evolved to a dubby, studio-as-instrument, tension-boiled style spiked with sporatic anthemics that was practically a genre unto itself. They were in their late thirties. Fugazi has scattered into different corners of the globe, and its members have taken up new projects and pursuits. But natural battles are not something that end easily.

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"There were basslines... lyrics, melodies, words... all these things, I guess they just... kept coming," muses Joe Lally from his home in Rome, Italy. "Knowing that I couldn't work with [Fugazi], and the difficulty of having gotten used to working and writing songs with the same three people for so long… it was just very hard." Lally moved around America, settling briefly in Los Angeles (a mistake, he says - not his decision to live there, but the city itself) and struggled to determine what to do with a brain that was still creating content but had no apparent vehicle for output.

"I spent most of that time with the beginning of my first record in my head - most of it, the bulk of it - but not understanding how to get it out," he says, "and I really didn't understand how to get it out until I was making my second record."

There is Here certainly bears that mark, the strange counterbalance between the veteran musician and a man perhaps somewhat shell-shocked by his newfound freedom from editors or collaborators. Lally's knack for eerie calm is documented sparsely over the course of the latter Fugazi albums, but stands out among the more forceful vocals of MacKaye and Picciotto. On 1995's Red Medicine, Lally sang lead on the smoldering slow-burner "By You," and he provided a vivid horror story of modern indoctrination on The Argument's "The Kill." The songs on There is Here are very much in the same vein, but maintain an even more reserved mode. Several songs are a bass guitar, a vocal, and some spare rhythmic elements. That's it.

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"It just began without me, in a way," Lally claims of his creative process. "It just kind of started and I had to follow it. [In the studio,] we realized that some of the quieter things would make more sense just to play with a percussionist playing light drumming, which after the initial recording, I started doing live."

The years of writing, recording and - some would say most significantly - touring Lally had experienced were to continue, this time naturally. Joe Lally began touring with friends, adopting them as his back-up groups, sometimes only the drummers. Audiences were treated to renditions of Lally's minimalist rock via groups as varied as Philly spazz jazz act Capillary Action and the double-drum corps of the modern-day Melvins.

"[Melvins members Dale Crover and Coady Willis] were behind a city of percussion," Lally laughs. "I'd look behind me, making this sort of personal, quiet music, but I couldn't even find them behind the drums."

Members of Capillary Action (along with former members of Fugazi, as well as John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) have gone on to accompany Lally on the aforementioned second album Nothing is Underrated.

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The music that Joe Lally traffics in could possibly be in the same pool of sound as similarly low-key, sparse bands like Morphine and The For Carnation. But this is barely cosmetic: the sinister twilight mood these bands evoke is really just a vehicle for the personalities producing it, and so here instead of Mark Sandman's wry smooth talker or Brian MacMahan's deadpan dread, we have Joe Lally's plainspoken doomsayer. Over a bed of drum-tight, dry-as-dust rhythm-and-bass, Lally presents himself as the lyrical calm in the storm of rapidly dissipating culture and rampant amnesiac politics. With a decidedly global attitude, Lally examines our ideas and our forgetfulness, and isn't judgmental but is keenly fair. The attention-span gap and the white noise of modern living are appraised, even in the album title. Explaining Nothing is Underrated, Lally pauses and says, "Literally, doing nothing is underrated. You always have to be doing something, producing something… your mind has to be chattering away to feel like there's some sort of accomplishment." It wouldn't be a stretch to call his two albums collections of protest music.

"If I'm going to express myself about something that I feel strongly about, it just happens that I feel strongly about… well, I guess there's a lot of things I feel strongly about," Lally says. "But my feeling about society is that things are essentially wrong with the way things seem to be set up. I don't know what kind of life we are really - people who live on the planet Earth, because I don't think it really matters where we are - I'm not sure what we've designed for ourselves in modern civilization."

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Despite his assertions to the contrary, it might be telling that the sole genre chosen for Joe Lally's MySpace page is "Folk." Documenting worldviews, the building block for basic pop-music songwriting, derives from folk music. Folk music derives from journalism: a first-person account of someone's life and times, their grievances; culture examined and historically preserved according to someone with a modest sort of firmness in tone.

"Pieces of string fall from fingers of authority," Lally sings, and with almost two decades of post-Cold War repositioning of allies and puppet states, he's not kidding: look where forgetfulness has gotten us. The folk artist will continue to be someone who believes in the important of remembrance.

Jeff Tobias

WHO: Joe Lally, Edie Sedgwick, Martyr & Pistol
WHERE: Caledonia Lounge
WHEN: Tuesday, February 19
HOW MUCH: $6 (21+), $7 (18+)