Provenance: Human Head Records
I’ve got a weird relationship with DC hardcore and the whole “Revolution Summer” thing. I got into Minor Threat in high school, just like everyone else, eventually branching out into Embrace and then Fugazi, but I mostly missed Rites of Spring as a Youth. (I’m not sure why. I think I stalled out at Fugazi, who basically blew my mind and are still on my shortlist of The Greatest American Bands.)
As much as I dig solipsism and introspection, there’s a part of me that shies like a spooked horse at something like Rites of Spring’s debut, the aural equivalent of a raw nerve. Black metal, death metal don’t scare me, but Rites of Spring scares me. Maybe I’m just afraid of remembering being the kind of person who might have made music in this vein and placed their emotions so nakedly on display without the remove of years of internet-honed irony.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? Guy Picciotto — first name Greatest, last name Unibrow Ever — was barely 19 years old when Rites of Spring recorded this album. Nineteen! And it’s funny to me that, with literal decades of doing this shit ahead of him, he was already as concerned with looking back as inwards, singing shit like, “I woke up this morning / with a piece of past caught in my throat / and I choked.” The world is controlled by the old, but it belongs to the young, even if they’re as preternaturally emotionally wizened as Picciotto. I don’t think a work like Rites of Spring is even supposed to resonate with a 33-year-old except as a reminder of what it was like to be 19. It’s a musical snapshot of a feeling; a feeling that ages like a Polaroid in reverse — the colors get less intense the longer it’s out in the world.
Whew, okay, that got a little heavy. Onto the music!
(Quick necessary aside for anyone not invested in the particulars of D.C. punk rock: Ian MacKaye was in foundational hardcore punk band Minor Threat and started the now-legendary independent record label Dischord. He, Picciotto, and RoS drummer Brendan Canty would go on to form Fugazi; during the in-between, they were all in like, 16 other bands.)
Rites of Spring’s opener is more or less its whole thesis statement. The song is called “Spring,” and the lyrics…
“Caught in time so far away
From where our hearts really wanted to be
Reaching out to find a way
To get back to where we'd been
And if summer left you dry
With nothing left to try”
… quickly map out all the classic “emo” signifiers: Time, hearts, summer. (I know Picciotto and MacKaye have both talked about how much they hate that word and their reputation as godfathers of the movement; sorry to these men.)
I tar the British music pretty heavily as being unduly obsessed with class, but as someone who’s also too focused on the socioeconomic side of music, there’s something a little precious about the relentless navel-gazing of the Revolution Summer bands. Of course, that’s just what young people, especially white-collar and urbane young people, do. But there is an element of idleness — and not just because one of Ian MacKaye’s bands was called The Teen Idles — to their solipsism. I realize that’s pretty unfair of me — you could never accuse Picciotto of being anything less than a truly progressive individual — but as opposed to a band like Black Flag, whose music is so relentlessly grimy and street-level, Rites of Spring seem … removed from those concerns. Making rent is not an issue to them; “[building] a wall around these hearts and hands” is.
Canty was also around 19 when he played on Rites of Spring, and he’d only been playing drums for four years. But I think this album is as much his as it is Picciotto’s: He’s already basically got his Fugazi style — minus the dub/reggae touches — pretty much in place. There’s a great snare roll that intros the song, I hear some John Bonham-style fills … (According to this great interview, Fugazi bassist Joe Lally’s nickname for Canty was “Jazz-bo Flash,” which I love.) Here, he hasn’t yet acquired the enormous church bell that characterized his kit with Fugazi; apparently, Picciotto bought it for him in their short-lived and terribly named post-RoS band Happy Go Licky.
So much to love here: the aforementioned “piece of past” lyric, an interesting production flourish in the double-tracked guitar solo in the back half, and a great singing, melodic bass part from Mike Fellows. I feel bad for Fellows and other RoS guitarist Edward Janney; Picciotto and Canty went on to become alt-superstars with Fugazi, and their bandmates … didn’t. (Janney also did the extremely cool woodcuts for the record.)
I feel like Picciotto doesn’t get enough credit as one of the great all-time vocalists in alternative music, or maybe I just haven’t read enough shitty listicles about it. So often, people focus on his Iggy-Pop-as-sex-panther stage presence with Fugazi — I love watching him casually jump the three feet or so onto a Marshall half-stack in Instrument; dude had hops — but he demonstrates an amazing grasp of his voice for a 19-year-old in this band, knowing just when to push it into a snarl or scream.
Are you really a musician from the D.C. metro area if you don’t have a song making reference to a park in the area? John Fahey did it, and RoS’s contribution to the canon is “Hain’s Point,” which is a misspelling of Hains Point, an artificial park built from material dredged from the Potomac River in the late 1800s. It’s named for an Army Major General, Peter Conover Hains, who was actually more known for his engineering efforts than his military career. (He laid out the Panama Canal!) I wonder, given the focus on the military-industrial complex by Picciotto in Fugazi, if this song is making reference to him … or just the park and I’m reading way too much into things.
Also, it’s got a great bass line, and the kids can dance to it!
One thing I haven’t talked much about yet is Inner Ear Studios, which is basically a wing of the Dischord house at this point. Don Zientara’s Arlington, Virginia studio saw pretty much every major — and minor — D.C. band pass through its doors, and boy howdy does Zientara know how to record some bass guitar. I’d always loved the sound of Lally’s bass on the Fugazi records, but man, when you compare Zientara’s work in the mid-’80s to something like Hüsker Dü’s New Day Rising, out on SST in 1985, it’s like comparing a Blu-Ray to a VHS. (That said, the digital versions of Rites of Spring do have the bass a bit more present, which is a nice advantage to the modern era.)
(Incidentally, the fact that we will probably never get decent remixes of the SST catalog because of Greg Ginn’s whole … thing is such a goddamn travesty.)
“Drink Deep” is the RoS cut that sounds the most like a Fugazi song, and that’s not just because of MacKaye’s chesty baritone singing background vocals. The bass is doing some nifty octave moves — though Joe Lally would absolutely not have biffed that opening figure the way Fellows does — and the drums have moved away from the more bog-standard hardcore beats. One thing that Picciotto has always stressed about his joining Fugazi is how out of place he felt at the beginning of the band, because MacKaye, Lally and Canty had already become such a solid unit. But something like “Drink Deep” — with all those aforementioned elements, its amorphous, noise-y bridge, and unhinged outro — is a direct antecedent to Picciotto’s stuff with the band.
And then all that frou-frou shit is dispensed with on “Other Way Around,” which just flies out the gate with a great unison guitar/bass riff. Fellows is a great bassist; I’m inclined to chalk up his upper-register stuff to being influenced by Joy Division and New Order’s Peter Hook, though he may also have been listening to the Cure and Bauhaus at the time. (Any bassist playing past the 10th fret on the D and G strings in the ‘80s was influenced by goth bassists.) Even if New Order were in somewhat of a lull in 1985, I also hear Hook’s influence on Chris Bald’s playing with Embrace, who recorded their sole record in late ‘85-early ‘86.
Hmm, I probably should have saved my spiel about Hook’s influence on bassists in D.C. in the mid-’80s for this song, which opens with a bass part that is very nearly Hook’s iconic intro to New Order’s “Age of Consent,” which came out on their Power, Corruption & Lies in 1983.
(Side note after watching New Order clip: The only bassist other than Hook who comes as close to looking like he’s playing in a completely different band than the rest of his bandmates is original Weezer bassist Matt Sharp, seen here doing Pete Townshend moves on the bass behind a virtually immobile Rivers Cuomo on Letterman.)
Cool guitar layering on this track, in any event.
One knock against this record is that Picciotto does tend to go back to the same lyrical well over course of the original record’s 12 songs. I am entirely too lazy to do this, but I suspect that parsing this record’s lyrics would reveal an over-reliance on “time,” “heart,” and “hands,” which is some freshman English major shit. Whatever, I’m nitpicking, especially because he was actually a freshman English major at the time.
(And while I’m nitpicking, there’s an absolutely glaring bass clam on this track at 1:22. I had to go find the timestamp on a digital version to point it out because, frankly, Joe Lally would never.)
Great bridge to this one, too, with a ton of pick-slides and crashing, overlapping chords.
I’m not quite enough of a nerd to know which U.K. pressing plant Dischord was using in 1985, but hot damn this is a great pressing. It’s not quite 180 grams, but it’s a solid platter, and — gratingly for a sequencing dork like myself — has the gnostic utterance “there is no A or B side” scratched into the run-out groove … despite the both the record’s label and sleeve both clearly reading “Side One and Two.” On Side Two, the etching reads, “I love it when you try not to laugh,” the meaning of which I’m not interested in gleaning at the moment, though it’s apparently a consistent message for this pressing.
Okay, I know I’m digressing a bit from my expected formula of bass-playing critiques and D.C.-area minutiae, but the titular lyric to this song, “I am the victim of a persistent vision / It tracks me down with its precision,” reminds me of a line from the short-lived and only intermittently good Jonathan Ames-scripted pseudo-noir HBO series Bored to Death. At one point, Jason Schwartzman’s Ames-surrogate character has an exchange with indie director Jim Jarmusch; Jarmusch says to him “You must really suffer from the terrifying clarity of your vision.” (Schwartzman/Ames’ response: “Thank you. I do suffer. Thank you.”)
Anyway, I feel like someone — possibly Jem Cohen — may have said that to Guy Picciotto at some point.
Bonkers drumming here from Canty and some more MacKaye backing vocals as well. The brief and crazy tape-effect vocal effects at the track’s end also presage the experimental leanings of Happy Go Licky and late-era Fugazi. They also remind me of the first Mission of Burma record in 1982; MoB had a full-time tape manipulator in their lineup. )
Guy’s vocals seem to be treated slightly differently on this track; they’re a little more buried in the mix and there’s either doubling or a slapback effect on them. Not sure why they went with that treatment on this track and this track only; if I’m absolutely talking out of my ass, I would conjecture that it’s because his vocals for this one may have been tracked at a different studio or at a later date with a different setup and masked this way in the mix to obscure that fact. I am not in the weeds enough on this record to know if that’s the case.
Further giving the lie to the run-out groove’s “no side A or B” hogwash, “End on End” is 150 percent a swing-for-the-fences-ass album closer if I’ve ever heard one. There’s not one, but two spoken-word samples that bookend the track. First, someone saying “Wide-eyed innocent boy” at the beginning, which must have been an inside joke because I cannot for the life of me find out what it’s referencing by Googling. Then at the close, a rip of one of those classical records with contextual narration layered in, speaking about Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring — Stravinsky used a near-exact version of the passage himself when talking about the piece; I assume the differences come down to some quirk of translation.
Anyway, this track’s length and structure seem like A) an attempt to capture the group’s legendarily intense and chaotic live show in the studio and B) an early forerunner of Fugazi’s habit of breaking a song down to whisper-quiet, extended bass-and-drum goove, only to upshift into a Very Loud Part. Guy pulls out every one of his vocal tics including some weirdly sexual heavy breathing; the vocal take as a whole is easily the most bananas performance on a record full of them. Someone probably should have been keeping a firmer grasp on the timing of the whole thing, though, because the finish of “End on End” is clearly just the sound of the master tape running out while the group is still going full-steam. But in its way, it’s perfect; you get the sense they could have just kept breaking things down and building them back up into peak after ecstatic peak until the end of time.
It’s hard to judge what Rites of Spring might have meant to me had I come across it as a teen; I could easily see myself parked in my car listening to “For Want Of” on repeat before school the way I did with “Blueprint” or the Embrace record. But that’s not what happened. I can appreciate this record’s moth-to-flame intensity, its scorched-earth inward glance, but I’m equally baffled by it, being so much older now than the band was when I made it and with so many other concerns. It’s a feeling like watching a film projected slightly out of focus, disintegrating as it spins around the reel. And you know what? It’s beautiful.