Do you feel responsible for the D.C. scene in a way?
What do you mean by that?

Not that you created it, but that you’re somebody who exerts influence in your hometown and is in a position to nurture young bands.
I can’t say that I take care of things going on in my hometown, but I do try to lead by example by being proactive and keeping things moving. I like to think of Dischord as a gyroscope in that we are a point of some kind of energy that a lot of people can spin off of, whether it’s directly or indirectly. The point of keeping Dischord as an actual label with mail order and so forth is that something is happening and it’s real. There’s a heart to the body. A lot of labels are just someone at a desk at another label’s office. But we actually function as a label and we cut the cardboard together and we do the do. I like to think that creates a sense that there is something behind the curtain.

At the very beginning of the label, we were the punk scene, that’s all we knew: SOA, Minor Threat, Government Issue, Untouchables, Youth Brigade. So we were going to put out all the D.C. stuff. This is largely influenced by this label Dangerhouse, which was from Los Angeles in the late ‘70s and they did a series of seven-inches of L.A. punk bands with a really beautiful consistency to all their records. It really blew my mind and I thought that would be cool to put out all these seven-inches and that’s why the first six releases are seven-inches. And everyone was playing such short, fast songs—the first one was an eight-song seven-inch, the second was 10 songs—why do a 12-inch?

And those early Dischord bands were recording in spurts. It’s not like you were going to wait until a band had a whole album to release something.
We never had a goal, we never thought of the long range. We wanted to put out our friends’ records and document what was important to us ... I never took into consideration that starting the label would then perpetuate the scene, but of course it’s going to have an effect. (Jello) Biafra once said to me something very interesting that I’ve never forgotten: In D.C., the documentation ethic is so strong and it makes it so unique. And he said that in San Francisco and other towns he’s been to, that none of the bands wanted to pay for a recording session. They wanted to just record a couple songs to shop it around and get a deal. And therefore, most of those bands broke up without ever recording their songs. Whereas we never had a sense that a label would sign us. So all the bands here, we recorded all our songs. I have hundreds of tapes of D.C. bands and all their songs—it’s very well-documented.

There’s a book that came out last year, Dance Of Days, that really proves how many people in D.C. were documenting things back then. I mean, there’s photographs of all these bands, people writing about them in fanzines. I go to shows pretty regularly here in Philadelphia, and I rarely see someone taking a local band’s picture.
I don’t know why it’s such an important thing down here. On the side of that book, there’s a thing that says “Putting D.C. On The Map.” That was a very tongue-in-cheek slogan of ours in the very beginning. Obviously, Washington, D.C., is well-found on any map.

In fact, I think it might be the nation’s capital.
And ostensibly of the world, according to some. So it was an irreverent joke on our part, just some smartass shit. But there was a kernel of truth to it in my mind, because in 1980, D.C. was just not thought of as a music town at all. Nobody came to Washington to play music, nobody came to Washington to hear music and in fact, people who lived in Washington told me that if I wanted to be in a punk band I should move to New York. I’m a fifth-generation Washingtonian, so I wasn’t about to move to New York. This is my town, I’m of this town. Frustration and anger and creativity and passion—these are not geographic designations. We are who we are, where we are. So we said, “We’re not moving anywhere. We’re gonna do it right here. We’re gonna create something.”

It’s interesting to think of the definition of the word “record”: It is a historical record of music being played. If you want to talk about music in Washington, D.C., in 1981, all you have to do is listen to one of those records and it is that exact moment.
That’s the thing: For me, on a musical level, I’m always interested in documentation. I’d much rather hear the more recent issues of the Hendrix stuff that’s the actual tapes of his work with the flaws included, as opposed to the commercially doctored-up things that (producer) Alan Douglas was doing a few years ago. He brought in other artists to play the backing tracks and tried to present a more saleable product in the market. To me, well, blasphemy is too strong a word, but I’d much rather hear the raw tapes. One of the reasons I find so much current popular music so discouraging is because so much of it seems to be overwhelmed by studio technology, and that’s a real shame. It makes for really soulless, uninteresting music. I want to hear the flaws and missed beats and surge of the tempo. That’s life—our hearts don’t beat the same all along; they speed up and slow down, too.

It takes away the performance aspect. There’s a documentary coming out soon called Standing In The Shadows Of Motown, about the Funk Brothers, who were the sidemen on all those great Motown records.
That sounds fascinating; I’ll have to look for it. I’m sorry for going off on all these tangents, by the way. I’m just sort of blowing my horn. Good luck fitting all this into a tiny news piece in the magazine.