Road warriors

Fugazi versus Radiohead

by Matt Ashare

Fugazi

Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye and Radiohead singer Thom Yorke sorta look alike. They're both little guys with big mouths, round faces, and the kind of receding hairlines that bring to my mind Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects. Phil Collins probably deserves credit as the pop star who invented this look, but that's not Yorke's fault or MacKaye's. Besides, unlike Collins, Yorke and MacKaye don't smile very much, which is another connection I wouldn't have made if I hadn't watched two new films back to back. The first was Meeting People Is Easy, a souvenir from the crucial year on the road with Radiohead that followed the release of the band's critically acclaimed 1997 album OK Computer (Capitol) and made Yorke an international star. The second was the punkumentary Instrument (on video from Dischord), which chronicles the first 10 years of Fugazi's career, a critical decade in which the indie-punk underground MacKaye's band helped forge became a major-label hunting ground.

The two films actually have a lot in common. Both were shot by guys who had previously directed music videos -- Meeting People Is Easy's Grant Gee did Radiohead's "No Surprises" clip, and Instrument auteur Jem Cohen's credits include less commercial efforts for R.E.M. and Jonathan Richman, as well as short films about Elliott Smith and the Butthole Surfers. Cohen obviously had less to spend on his 10-year project than Gee did on his one-year effort, yet in both films the viewer is treated not to a seamless, flowing narrative but to an impressionistic collage of performance footage and behind-the-scenes shots edited with intentional vérité roughness to create the illusion of candid immediacy. You're made to feel as if what you're seeing hadn't been fully processed, even if the opposite is true. And Cohen and Gee both mix color to black-and-white footage, as if to reinforce the implicit idea that somewhere over the real world's rainbow there exists a Platonic rock-and-roll plateau where there is no room for compromise, where things really are black and white.

I wasn't without my own preconceived notions about the two bands. Radiohead -- whose music had become beautifully bleak by the time of OK Computer's release and who tend to put up a stoic front on stage -- I took to be the kind of band who might guardedly enjoy jet-setting success in the same way that, say, R.E.M. or U2 initially accepted fame without necessarily embracing it. With Fugazi, though, I've always had this feeling -- call it a cynical wishful thinking -- that behind the saintly façade of earnest indie attitude there had to be a few human fissures: a greedy bass player; a jealous drummer; a general frustration that the world still hadn't changed, or, at the very least, a porno-reading, pill-popping roadie who doesn't recycle. Oh yeah, Fugazi don't have roadies. Well, I'd have settled for finding out that singer/guitarist Guy Piccolo never helps bassist Joe Lally lug his gear.

No such luck. For starters, Cohen never shows one of Fugazi's legendary load-ins, though we do get to see MacKaye squeegeeing the van windshield at a pit stop (Fugazi are DIY even at the gas pump). Instead, what emerges over the course of dozens of bristling one-song concert excerpts (which are featured, along with incidental music from the film, on the Dischord Instrument soundtrack CD) and off-stage shots of the group is a portrait of a band who enjoy their work and have a sense of humor about their saintly reputation. At one point, with the boys seated around a table at MacKaye's grandparents' home, good-natured drummer Brendan Canty giggles infectiously as he recounts the story of a guy who'd heard a rumor that Fugazi live in a group house and "don't use heat." Later, he playfully demonstrates how he used a soap bar to jury-rig the broken shower head at a dive motel, proving that the band do use running water.

Radiohead's Yorke nearly drowns in a tank of water during a video shoot in an unsettling scene from Meeting People. He's suffering for his art, which is actually a form of commerce, and even he seems depressed by the irony. Mostly, though, as I wrote in my review of the film last week, Yorke and his band are just plain miserable as they trudge from humiliating photo shoots to tedious interviews to lame backstage meet-and-gropes with industry folks. Those are the things that Fugazi have managed to shelter themselves from. And it wasn't until I saw Instrument that I had much the same revelation that Cohen recounts in his liner notes for the film: many of the "sacrifices" Fugazi have made for the sake of some alleged punk ideal were actually rational selfish decisions based on the band's desire to play, in Cohen's words, "whatever they wanted to play how and whenever they wanted to play it, with no obligation to provide spectacle entertainment or even bow to audience demand." And now, I think I understand why Fugazi seem so happy and Radiohead so desperately bummed out.