Teen Idles is one of many influential bands in the film.
Punk is not dead. That’s the takeaway from a documentary featuring key members of the Washington, D.C., hardcore scene.
“There are always going to be high school kids getting beaten up by jocks. That’s the reason punk continues to be relevant for kids who feel like they don’t fit in, especially in smaller cities or towns or rural areas,” says Jeff Nelson, former drummer of punk staples Minor Threat and Teen Idles, and co-founder of Dischord Records. “If you’re into a certain kind of music, you still band together in the same ways as the earliest days of the D.C. punk scene.”
Nelson and the makers of Punk the Capital: Building a Sound Movement will be at Communication Oct. 12 to present their origin story-meets-family tree of the capital city’s hardcore scene, which grew out of underground rock rooted in folk and the counterculture. The movie intersperses concert footage with interviews with musicians, zine publishers and venue operators. And it makes use of found footage of the D.C. area at the time, an unlikely location for a punk scene to spring up.
The music took root as early as 1976 in the straight-laced government city, disconnected from the more glamorous New York City punk scene, which identified more with a hedonistic lifestyle. Young, local scenesters fought for their territory and built something out of nothing in an environment that sneered at their dyed mohawks, spiked leather jackets and dog collars. Youthful idealism and all-ages shows bred a strong ethos of activism and a DIY ethic. Eventually, it led to straight edge (a subset of punk that eschewed drugs and alcohol). Early bands like the Slickee Boys gave way to fast-playing hardcore groups like Bad Brains.
“Hearing a band play at breakneck speed with such precision was very electrifying. It’s exhausting for me to watch [videos of past performances],” Nelson says. “It’s hard to believe the energy that was necessary to play some of that stuff.”
The players in the capital city deeply influenced modern music and culture. Dave Grohl, a D.C. native, says he learned to play drums by listening to Minor Threat. Grohl later dropped out of high school to join D.C.’s Scream before joining Nirvana. The rest is punk (and grunge) history.
“When Nevermind came out, all of the music that came before it in the punk world was all of a sudden legitimate,” Nelson says. “The bands and the music that’s created today is still reverberating. Which is amazing because I would have thought punk would have died years ago.”
