In January 1988, having played just 10 shows, Fugazi entered Inner Ear Studios in Arlington, Virginia to record their first demo. All four band members had previously recorded at Inner Ear when the studio was located in the basement of owner and engineer Don Zientara's home - with Teen Idles, Minor Threat, One Last Wish, Rites of Spring, Embrace and more - and the sessions were fast and productive, yielding 11 songs.
At the time of the recording, Guy Picciotto was not yet playing guitar alongside Ian MacKaye, and with the band - completed by bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty - evolving fast, and their music still developing, it was decided that rather than releasing the demo on Dischord Records (co-owned by MacKaye and his former Minor Threat bandmate Jeff Nelson), ten of the songs would be dubbed onto cassettes and given away free at future shows, with fans encouraged to share the recordings.
Eight of the ten songs on the cassette had been performed at Fugazi's very first show, played as a three-piece before Guy Picciotto joined the group, at the Wilson Center in Washington DC on September 3, 1987. Among these was a striking anti-consumerism statement called Mechandise.
"We owe you nothing," the staunchly DIY Ian MacKaye sings on the song's chorus. "You have no control."
"Merchandise keeps us in line," MacKaye continues on the song's second verse. "Common sense says it's by design. What could a businessman ever want more, than to have us sucking in his store."
On the demo recording, there's a repeated refrain of "A dollar and a dollar spent" before the song's outro explodes with the iconic line "You are not what you own."
Once you’re an object of investment, people will do everything they can to maximise their returns
Ian MacKaye
This was Fugazi's earliest declaration of independence, one that remained in place for the entire duration of their career. The band were not for sale, and could not be bought. Furthermore, they had no interest in shifting 'product', beyond their music, and live shows, all of which were presented at well below 'market' rates. The band's refusal to sell merchandise was interpreted by some as a statement rejecting superficial identifiers of tribal allegiances, but for Ian MacKaye, their position was simple.
"I can sum it up in one sentence - we are a band and we play music," he stated succinctly in 2013 in an interview with One Small Seed. “That was our idea, the rest of it is just this carnival surrounding the music business."
"Once you’re an object of investment, people will do everything they can to maximise their returns," MacKaye told me in 2011. "And you can resist it, but it doesn’t make a difference… If someone puts something into you, you want to please your benefactor especially if you’re beholden to them, which you would be."
Capitalism, of course, abhors a vacuum, and if one of the most popular and inspirational bands from America's underground punk scene had zero interest in producing T-shirts, posters, hoodies or any other branded paraphernalia, then bootleggers were only to happy to take up the reins. Type 'Fugazi T-shirt' into any search engine and you'll see scores of designs for sale on Amazon, Etsy and elsewhere. None are official merch, or in any way endorsed by the band, who have been on hiatus since completing a three-night stand at London's Kentish Town Forum in November 2002.
There is, however, one interesting outlier within the bootleg Fugazi T-shirt universe, a T-shirt bearing the slogan 'This Is Not A Fugazi T-Shirt'.
In the mid-90s, Ian MacKaye traced one of these 'fugazi' Fugazi shirts to a company in Boston, he revealed in an interview conducted for The Art Of The Band T-Shirt, and spoke with the main guy, telling him to desist.
"Of course, he wanted to do a deal," MacKaye said. "And, of course, the answer was still no. Still, we had a nice chat. He was curious why we didn’t want to sell shirts, and after I explained our position, he seemed to respect it. About one month later, a friend at a record store alerted me to the ‘This is not a Fugazi t-shirt’ shirt. I traced it back to the same Boston dude. What a smart motherfucker he was!"
"I called him up," MacKaye continued, "and said, Okay, you’re funny and you’re creative, so let’s see how creative you are with accounting. I asked him to choose an organization doing good work in his community and give them what would amount to the band’s royalty for the shirts. I think he chose a women’s shelter up there, and as far as I know he sent them money right up until he quit the business."
In 2013, a writer for defunkd followed up on the story, and learned that the owner of the T-shirt company did indeed honour his pledge to MacKaye, and donated money from every shirt sold to a women's homeless shelter in Boston named Rosie's Place.
Not quite a happy ending, but as close as you'll get to one where Fugazi are concerned.
PS. You can see an unauthorised Fugazi shirt 'in the wild' in the 2012 film Mud, starring Matthew McConaughey.
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