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Banned in D C: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground
Sometimes being a Washington DC insider means access to political movers and shakers--sometimes, as in the case of photographer Cynthia Connolly, it means access to a great collection of photographs from the glory days of DC hardcore punk. Taken both by Connolly and an assortment of punk enthusiasts, BANNED IN DC is a set of vibrant shots that portray the anarchic spirit, pure energy, and camaraderie of the DC scene in a series of 450 black and white photographs. Major figures in the hardcore movement, like Dischord Records co-owner and then-Minor Threat member Ian MacKaye and Bad Brains vocalist HR, share space with naked musicians, ubiquitous scenesters, shaven-headed audience members, and riotous punks, in a freewheeling combination of pictures and quotes. Vividly capturing the scene's idealistic intensity, BANNED IN DC is an invaluable document of Washington hardcore's exuberance and aspirations.
176 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1988
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
July 14, 2008
My initial review of this was 15160 characters - 5160 over the limit. I have to cut out over a 3rd of it. Looking thru it is like looking at a high school yrbk that's for the outcasts & rebels.
Around 1972, when we were both 19, John Duchac & I went to a concert called The End of the World Show. A group played that I sometimes credit w/ being Baltimore's 1st punk band: The Grand Poobah Subway. The latter were completely irreverant, they used styrofoam guitar props that they destroyed. It was cacophonous & bombastic. I loved it, John hated it. I think it was too 'amusical' for him, too 'tasteless'.
John moved to LA shortly thereafter where he became John Doe of the band X. John wd come back to Baltimore from time-to-time & by 1976 he'd turned me onto Devo's 1st single. But it wasn't 'til roughly 1977 that I personally felt punk as a new phenomena when I heard the Sex Pistols & when some friends in Baltimore started a band called Da Moronics.
The Sex Pistols were ANARCHIST, as was I. That, in & of itself, was exciting. At the time, I only knew one other anarchist in Baltimore. But the music? Dullsville. I'd already long since left rock behind & this was basically the same old same old.
But Punk Rock was saved by a few obvious things: a sortof fuck-it! attitude that encouraged DIY raw flying-by-the-seat-of-yr-pants. & Da Moronics exemplified this. For me, they were Baltimore's 1st punk band. Tom DiVenti was the guitarist & a prominent poet/performer. He had a big carriage house space that he turned into the Apathy Project. This was a great place for shows. Tom was making things happen. Bill Moriarity was the singer.
Da Moronics probably did songs about the most miserable shit, like cancer, w/ a great deal of irony & fuck-it!-that's-the-way-it-is! frankness. They were totally ragged at 1st but, as w/ most punk bands, they didn't let that inhibit them. They were fun. I remember one nite behind the Apathy Project a guy tried to rob a petite lesbian friend of mine in the nearby alley at gunpoint. She was in an early all-girl punk band called the 45s. She punched the wd-be robber in the face. He ran off.
Bill got sick of being in Da Moronics pretty quick b/c one of the main places they'd play was at the Oddfellows Hall in Towson (a pretty fascist suburb to the north of Baltimore) where the jockier members of the audience wd throw full pitchers of beer at him. He didn't get it - why the fuck did they think it was ok to do that do him?!
In 1979, I created a series of events under the name Crab Feast - the 1st of wch was a guerrilla installation. On January 24, 1980, 4 of us played as a band at the Telectropheremanniversary - the 1st anniversary of an underground phone network that I'd cofounded.
Crab Feast performed songs about herpes (wch I'd recently gotten), telephones, the Krononautic Society (a time-travel society many of us were in), some experimental instrumentals of mine, etc.. Thinking back on it now, that one gig was pretty historical.
There was very little connection between the DC & Baltimore punk scenes at this point. Bands like the Slickee Boys & Judy's Fixation played in DC but they were really from south of Baltimore rather than from the city proper. Judy's Fixation was from Annapolis. So was Sam Fitzsimmons who was one of the best party organizers & an all-round good natured guy. DC had the rep in Baltimore as being straight-edge - eschewing drugs & alcohol. B-More was definitely the opposite & most of the B-More punks were a bit contemptuous of straight-edge.
Baltimore's punk scene was strongly nihilistic, punks were into getting as much out-of-their minds as they cd, as often as possible. We were all freaks & outcasts & we were flaunting it w/ a middle finger to all the people who tried to terrorize us into obeying. One way of doing that wd be to be so fucked-up that we'd be genuinely dangerous out on the streets. Of course, having fun was a big part of it too. Sex & drugs & rock'n'roll.
& the Marble Bar in the Congress Hotel was the perfect venue. The Congress had been an upscale hotel earlier in the century. Stars wd come & stay there & perform in the Galaxy Ballroom on the 1st fl. By the time the Marble was a punk club, the hotel was a halfway house for prisoners freshly released & a cheap fuck pad for married art school teachers to fuck their students in.
The Marble Bar was great - a sortof free zone where cops never came & most of the straight people who harassed us the rest of the time were too afraid to go. Once you went in there it was safe for all sorts of weird behavior. Still, I was thrown out twice but I was allowed back, there was an attitude on inclusiveness. All the freaks that the rest of society hated were welcome there.
The Galaxy Ballroom was where the more experimental stuff happened. Sam & I co-organized the 3rd Convention of the Church of the Subgenius there in September of 1983. At the SubG Con, the lead singer of Judy's Fixation participated in the "Sex? Straight? To Hell?" panel discussion. He'd recently plunged whole-assedly into the Gay Dungeon Master scene. On the panel he proclaimed that AIDS was to help you, not hurt you! He suffered from a ruptured internal organ shortly thereafter after being fist-fucked & then died very quickly from AIDS.
Around this time, I was living w/ Stoc Marcut, the lead singer of Fear of God. At one point he bought a pig's head to use in a performance but the performance didn't happen, or some such, so he just left the pig's head rotting.. in his car trunk.. in the summer.
By 1984, I'd started a new group called "t he booed usicians". We premiered at the 5th anniversary of the phone network, "t he Telectropeheremoanin'quinquennial" where our set involved phone sex. By today's standards we were a 'noise group', but I've never thought of it that way. The other groups on the bill were Sam's Motor Morons & Harp's P.A.B.L.U.M. - wch was a parody group referring to Infant Lunch - a great B-More band who'd played at the SubG Con.
The Motor Morons were great! One guy played cans on a grinding wheel, another played electronics by pouring beer in it. A staple intrument was the one-string bass. A related group of Sam's was Oral Fixation. They played prop instruments, w/ tapes providing the actual sounds - except for the vocals, wch were live.
In 1985, I toured & performed at a place in CT called "Cafe Anthrax". There I was, a naked 31 yr old guy showing weird movies to a mostly much younger crowd & the cops came in. They didn't harass me about my nudity at all. Amazing. I'm told that Cafe Anthrax is a legendary punk club by now.
For me, punk was more or less dead by then. I didn't see much new coming out of it & heroin was creeping in to ruin things. I remember being at a Dead Kennedys show where some of us drew the DK logo on our hands to get in for free. We were told by someone associated w/ the band or w/ organizing the gig that that "wasn't cool". I thought: "This is an anarchist band?! Fuck these people!"
Another time, I was w/ my ex-girlfriend, Valerie Favazza, at a show where a film crew was touring. Valerie used to spend hrs putting her make-up on. People called her the "grandmother of punk", or some such, even though she was young, b/c she was so visibly out there. I was wearing a completely uncool white linen suit w/ pictures of lepers on it that I'd specially made & my hair was in a circle going sideways around my head. I was very 'uncool' b/c punk was already stylized & codified by then. Fuck that. Then the documentary guys asked us if they cd shoot footage of us. Valerie agreed & they went back to her place to shoot her elaborate make-up process. I declined. Punk was too dead to be associated w/ anymore. Too conformist. Now I kindof wish I'd done it. It wd be a nice record of the times. I'd still like to see the movie someday.
Then, yrs later, "BANNED IN DC" came out. People were excited! A bk about the punk scene! There was triumph in the air! As if by having a bk to document DC's scene, punk in general was validated as somehow REAL - rather than just the ephemera of a bunch of suicidal losers. I didn't care, I'd long since moved on, I'd never REALLY been a punk anyway - I was too extreme even for the punk scene. Still, though, looking thru this bk, I feel how important it was all over again.
To an outsider looking at this bk, the punks might look deranged, fascistic, riotous, dangerous - but to an insider, we were people who were trying to live freely & to the fullest. Most of us were barely surviving, the music was one of the only fun ways to make some extra bucks, to possibly escape from the deadend jobs. I'm grateful that "BANNED IN DC" exists. How much of that intense era has really survived? The music, sure, but that seems somewhat secondary to me in contrast to the hell-raising so many of us did. "BANNED" at least shows the people. Seeing them in the bk makes them seem somehow 'normal' in context - but in the rest of the world life cd be pretty dangerous for us given that the hatred for deviance was being expressed violently.
Thank you, Leslie.
Around 1972, when we were both 19, John Duchac & I went to a concert called The End of the World Show. A group played that I sometimes credit w/ being Baltimore's 1st punk band: The Grand Poobah Subway. The latter were completely irreverant, they used styrofoam guitar props that they destroyed. It was cacophonous & bombastic. I loved it, John hated it. I think it was too 'amusical' for him, too 'tasteless'.
John moved to LA shortly thereafter where he became John Doe of the band X. John wd come back to Baltimore from time-to-time & by 1976 he'd turned me onto Devo's 1st single. But it wasn't 'til roughly 1977 that I personally felt punk as a new phenomena when I heard the Sex Pistols & when some friends in Baltimore started a band called Da Moronics.
The Sex Pistols were ANARCHIST, as was I. That, in & of itself, was exciting. At the time, I only knew one other anarchist in Baltimore. But the music? Dullsville. I'd already long since left rock behind & this was basically the same old same old.
But Punk Rock was saved by a few obvious things: a sortof fuck-it! attitude that encouraged DIY raw flying-by-the-seat-of-yr-pants. & Da Moronics exemplified this. For me, they were Baltimore's 1st punk band. Tom DiVenti was the guitarist & a prominent poet/performer. He had a big carriage house space that he turned into the Apathy Project. This was a great place for shows. Tom was making things happen. Bill Moriarity was the singer.
Da Moronics probably did songs about the most miserable shit, like cancer, w/ a great deal of irony & fuck-it!-that's-the-way-it-is! frankness. They were totally ragged at 1st but, as w/ most punk bands, they didn't let that inhibit them. They were fun. I remember one nite behind the Apathy Project a guy tried to rob a petite lesbian friend of mine in the nearby alley at gunpoint. She was in an early all-girl punk band called the 45s. She punched the wd-be robber in the face. He ran off.
Bill got sick of being in Da Moronics pretty quick b/c one of the main places they'd play was at the Oddfellows Hall in Towson (a pretty fascist suburb to the north of Baltimore) where the jockier members of the audience wd throw full pitchers of beer at him. He didn't get it - why the fuck did they think it was ok to do that do him?!
In 1979, I created a series of events under the name Crab Feast - the 1st of wch was a guerrilla installation. On January 24, 1980, 4 of us played as a band at the Telectropheremanniversary - the 1st anniversary of an underground phone network that I'd cofounded.
Crab Feast performed songs about herpes (wch I'd recently gotten), telephones, the Krononautic Society (a time-travel society many of us were in), some experimental instrumentals of mine, etc.. Thinking back on it now, that one gig was pretty historical.
There was very little connection between the DC & Baltimore punk scenes at this point. Bands like the Slickee Boys & Judy's Fixation played in DC but they were really from south of Baltimore rather than from the city proper. Judy's Fixation was from Annapolis. So was Sam Fitzsimmons who was one of the best party organizers & an all-round good natured guy. DC had the rep in Baltimore as being straight-edge - eschewing drugs & alcohol. B-More was definitely the opposite & most of the B-More punks were a bit contemptuous of straight-edge.
Baltimore's punk scene was strongly nihilistic, punks were into getting as much out-of-their minds as they cd, as often as possible. We were all freaks & outcasts & we were flaunting it w/ a middle finger to all the people who tried to terrorize us into obeying. One way of doing that wd be to be so fucked-up that we'd be genuinely dangerous out on the streets. Of course, having fun was a big part of it too. Sex & drugs & rock'n'roll.
& the Marble Bar in the Congress Hotel was the perfect venue. The Congress had been an upscale hotel earlier in the century. Stars wd come & stay there & perform in the Galaxy Ballroom on the 1st fl. By the time the Marble was a punk club, the hotel was a halfway house for prisoners freshly released & a cheap fuck pad for married art school teachers to fuck their students in.
The Marble Bar was great - a sortof free zone where cops never came & most of the straight people who harassed us the rest of the time were too afraid to go. Once you went in there it was safe for all sorts of weird behavior. Still, I was thrown out twice but I was allowed back, there was an attitude on inclusiveness. All the freaks that the rest of society hated were welcome there.
The Galaxy Ballroom was where the more experimental stuff happened. Sam & I co-organized the 3rd Convention of the Church of the Subgenius there in September of 1983. At the SubG Con, the lead singer of Judy's Fixation participated in the "Sex? Straight? To Hell?" panel discussion. He'd recently plunged whole-assedly into the Gay Dungeon Master scene. On the panel he proclaimed that AIDS was to help you, not hurt you! He suffered from a ruptured internal organ shortly thereafter after being fist-fucked & then died very quickly from AIDS.
Around this time, I was living w/ Stoc Marcut, the lead singer of Fear of God. At one point he bought a pig's head to use in a performance but the performance didn't happen, or some such, so he just left the pig's head rotting.. in his car trunk.. in the summer.
By 1984, I'd started a new group called "t he booed usicians". We premiered at the 5th anniversary of the phone network, "t he Telectropeheremoanin'quinquennial" where our set involved phone sex. By today's standards we were a 'noise group', but I've never thought of it that way. The other groups on the bill were Sam's Motor Morons & Harp's P.A.B.L.U.M. - wch was a parody group referring to Infant Lunch - a great B-More band who'd played at the SubG Con.
The Motor Morons were great! One guy played cans on a grinding wheel, another played electronics by pouring beer in it. A staple intrument was the one-string bass. A related group of Sam's was Oral Fixation. They played prop instruments, w/ tapes providing the actual sounds - except for the vocals, wch were live.
In 1985, I toured & performed at a place in CT called "Cafe Anthrax". There I was, a naked 31 yr old guy showing weird movies to a mostly much younger crowd & the cops came in. They didn't harass me about my nudity at all. Amazing. I'm told that Cafe Anthrax is a legendary punk club by now.
For me, punk was more or less dead by then. I didn't see much new coming out of it & heroin was creeping in to ruin things. I remember being at a Dead Kennedys show where some of us drew the DK logo on our hands to get in for free. We were told by someone associated w/ the band or w/ organizing the gig that that "wasn't cool". I thought: "This is an anarchist band?! Fuck these people!"
Another time, I was w/ my ex-girlfriend, Valerie Favazza, at a show where a film crew was touring. Valerie used to spend hrs putting her make-up on. People called her the "grandmother of punk", or some such, even though she was young, b/c she was so visibly out there. I was wearing a completely uncool white linen suit w/ pictures of lepers on it that I'd specially made & my hair was in a circle going sideways around my head. I was very 'uncool' b/c punk was already stylized & codified by then. Fuck that. Then the documentary guys asked us if they cd shoot footage of us. Valerie agreed & they went back to her place to shoot her elaborate make-up process. I declined. Punk was too dead to be associated w/ anymore. Too conformist. Now I kindof wish I'd done it. It wd be a nice record of the times. I'd still like to see the movie someday.
Then, yrs later, "BANNED IN DC" came out. People were excited! A bk about the punk scene! There was triumph in the air! As if by having a bk to document DC's scene, punk in general was validated as somehow REAL - rather than just the ephemera of a bunch of suicidal losers. I didn't care, I'd long since moved on, I'd never REALLY been a punk anyway - I was too extreme even for the punk scene. Still, though, looking thru this bk, I feel how important it was all over again.
To an outsider looking at this bk, the punks might look deranged, fascistic, riotous, dangerous - but to an insider, we were people who were trying to live freely & to the fullest. Most of us were barely surviving, the music was one of the only fun ways to make some extra bucks, to possibly escape from the deadend jobs. I'm grateful that "BANNED IN DC" exists. How much of that intense era has really survived? The music, sure, but that seems somewhat secondary to me in contrast to the hell-raising so many of us did. "BANNED" at least shows the people. Seeing them in the bk makes them seem somehow 'normal' in context - but in the rest of the world life cd be pretty dangerous for us given that the hatred for deviance was being expressed violently.
Thank you, Leslie.
April 27, 2021
Fab, loved it. Marvellous stories, wonderful pics of all the scene kids at the time. HarDCore forever!
August 31, 2007
the "companion" book to dance of days. if you only like picture books than look at this one and skip reading the aformentioned dod. cool pics of all the old dc legends 'back in the day' (when they had hair and no guts)
May 10, 2007
You wish you had been there. I know I do. But I was in catholic school lockdown. Oh well.
July 14, 2009
this is mostly a photo book and partly an oral history of the dc punk scene in the early '80s, and it's basically just okay. there are some great photos of some great bands, like minor threat, rites of spring, and bad brains, but for the most part, and this is supported by the chosen quotes they've pulled, the book is VERY scene specific, going even beyond just focusing on the dc scene to really seeming more like a scrapbook for a group of friends. it's a relatively worthwhile chronicle for fans, but for anyone looking for something similar, you might as well just go get a book of glen e. freidman's photographs and read it side by side with stephen blush's american hardcore.
March 7, 2016
A labor of love, this completely DIY compendium collects snapshots and anecdotes from one the nation's most unique and influential music scenes and recalls a bygone era of wholly handmade culture. The (now) new 7th edition includes an afterword by Cynthia Connolly that the uninitiated should probably read first. There is still no UPC code and she continues to publish and distribute the book herself!
September 18, 2011
I wish I could say the nostalgia provoked by Clague was insufferable. I can't however, because I was oblivious to this scene. Right place, right time, attention in all the wrong places. Thanks to Clague, I get a real sense of what my peers with sharper taste were experiencing and the fundamental place it has in what I later came to love.
March 15, 2013
This collection of pictures and stories is more or less a must-have for fans of early Dischord-era harDCore. It takes place in DC in the early 80's, and it's one of those books that make you feel like you were born in the wrong era. I would have enjoyed more insights from the editor herself instead of purely quotes from the bands & their fans, but I guess that's not what she was going for.
January 16, 2020
It's a bit like reading somebody else's yearbook -- it's kind of hard to say if it's good or bad, but I was clearly not the target audience for this book. I appreciate that something like this exists in the world, though.
June 25, 2007
when you're late to the game you can always benefit from someone else's memories. thank god some people are nice enough to share them.
October 23, 2007
Interesting read stolen from my husband.
February 24, 2009
Great DC punk rock collection book. with pictures and scene topics.
January 20, 2016
Read in a record store on a snow day to really up my punk cred.
May 25, 2017
Brilliant photo collection of DC punk. One of my all time favorites.
July 19, 2021
I decided to use this as a supplementary text to Dance of Days. After each chapter of DoD I'd read the pages marked with the corresponding time period in Banned in DC (I finished the latter first because it covers a smaller time frame). It works well for that purpose; DoD mentions a particular show, and then you get to see actual pictures of and anecdotes about that show in Banned in DC. Randos who warrant a line or two in the former become real people in the latter.
Though if I had to choose between the two, I'd absolutely pick Connolly's book. While DoD is a bit ponderous and self-important, Banned in DC is fun and engaging. I especially enjoy the random, contextless anecdotes, which largely center around people screwing up or getting in random fights (rather than detailed analysis of who had the most righteous politics). It makes one of my favorite times/places in music history that much more real and vivid in my mind.
Though if I had to choose between the two, I'd absolutely pick Connolly's book. While DoD is a bit ponderous and self-important, Banned in DC is fun and engaging. I especially enjoy the random, contextless anecdotes, which largely center around people screwing up or getting in random fights (rather than detailed analysis of who had the most righteous politics). It makes one of my favorite times/places in music history that much more real and vivid in my mind.
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April 3, 2012Why Everything You Think You Know About Punk Is Completely Wrong:
http://generation-add.blogspot.com/20...
http://generation-add.blogspot.com/20...
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