Originally Published: Wednesday, July 5, 2005
Written by: Sarah De Borre
Ian MacKaye – it’s a name recognized widely amongst music scenes: punk, hardcore, indie, rock; it’s a name recognized for quietly revolutionizing music. For those that thought MacKaye had merged into the woodwork after Fugazi went on indefinite hiatus, you were foolishly mistaken. Ian MacKaye isn’t someone that lets up and musically once again Ian is creeping up on us with a different sound, a different band, a debut record; but with the same outspoken manner we’ve grown accustomed to.
Ian Mackaye is one of those overtly passionate people; in his vigor he often struggles to form sentences, hap-haphazardly chopping his words and almost shouting down the phone with enthusiasm. His passion is undeniable – whether talking about music and the arts or war and politics Ian’s enthusiasm floods down the phone line and overwhelms me. Fugazi may be on hold, but with Amy Farina who played drums for the Warmers – a band fronted by Ian’s younger brother Alec – on his side, music creation for MacKaye is anything but.
People are struggling to classify it; a journalist for the Washington post described it by writing “the Evens sound like when post hardcore becomes post, post hardcore”.
“That’s the desperation of a journalist right there” says Ian, “you know what a tough gig they have (laughs) you know they have to come up with a fucking phrase.”
“I’d call it music. I gotta tell you, music is something that we’d call sacred, I’m not talking sacred in a Christian sense, I’m talking about sacred in a human sense. We take music seriously and I understand that in terms of the market place, that when you go into the store you wanna know what kind of bread this is and what kind of bread that is – people want to know that kind of thing, you can develop a brand loyalty by having brands but ultimately these things are food and they’re important. You know? We need food; I feel that music is similar. It is music.
“I feel that the music we play is as valid as any other music in the world that’s ever been made. I think the typical role and tendency people have to classify music, I think among friends is fair enough, but in terms of the larger picture it just becomes absurd and when you hear ‘post, post hardcore’ – you know the air is getting thin, the canary has died.
The Evens may not be what every Fugazi fan was hoping for, none-the-less, it’s amazing on a whole new level. The Evens is stripped back “quiet music”, purposely written to overcome accessibility issues. In the world of the Evens there’s no such thing as an unplayable space – the Evens can go anywhere. After years of trying to win the constant battle with standing true to exclusively playing all ages shows, Ian came to a decision “I really felt we needed to get out of these damn clubs and as you know, we always play all ages shows and it was really a battle to make sure it’s all ages… all these problems, all these things were always connected to this damn alcohol industry and I don’t understand how [the] alcohol industry has come to basically embody music, or hijack music…I’ve never done a show that was not all ages that I know of – ever. And I would never agree to do one. Music is for all people and when I hear bands say, ‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,’ that is just not true. A band always can say, ‘No, we’re not gonna play there,’ and the only way things are gonna change is when bands do that…So what is it that keeps us tied to the clubs? Volume. That’s it. So cut the cord with the volume, play quieter and we can play anywhere.
The music of the Evens may be subtle, but the lyrics are far from, “all the songs have specific meanings; I think most people today, I think a lot of bands don’t think about it, they think about words like instruments and put ‘em out there. In our case we’re not kidding around with our lyrics we put them out there. I mean part of the presentation is quieter and the vocals are up loud, you know? We’re not kidding around we want people to know what were singing about. We feel that the content of the lyrics is really important, so from our point, all the songs they mean everything to us that’s why we sing them.
“I might also submit that there aren’t a lot of vocals worth taking notice of – that’s something I’ve noticed – I think that people, that they’re not taking notice of their own lyrics. They think that they’re doing vocals so they’re trying to think of words to sing, I think they’ve retreated from taking position in terms of lyrics.
One of the standout tracks on the album, All These Governors, begins with MacKaye quipping the line ‘generally I don’t speak ill of the dead, however, I may make an exception in this case’, “that particular comment was actually directed at a local journalist in the early years 2002–2001. This was a columnist for a local newspaper who really promoted the war, it was such a hock, I just found his writing so offensive, he was fanning the flames of war so intensely, such a promoter of military action he encouraged police to beat protesters. I found his writing disgusting. He was so excited when the United States attacked Iraq that he went off to Iraq to be an embedded journalist. He was reporting from the front and he was killed and then all these articles came out about what a great guy he was, that it was such a shame.
“In my opinion great people don’t encourage countries to hurl exploding pieces of metal into other people, I don’t think that is a great quality. What happened was we were having a discussion in the studio about this particular journalist and the tape started rolling to do vocals and I was just saying ‘generally I don’t speak ill of the dead, however I may make an exception in this case’, because I just think he’s an asshole. I wouldn’t wish ill upon anybody, I wouldn’t want him to be killed, but also I wouldn’t want him in a position to be killed. So why was he so in for people [to be] in that position.
“The media has foisted on the world and this country that people here [in America] are in support of the war, I don’t think people here are in support for the war, I think what you have is a deeply divided country. Not divided in red and blue states but divided in the true sense of the word, that people have become isolated and become divided and split up into little cells and that they haven’t figured out how to put there voices together to make enough of a statement to compel the government to stop this crime. I don’t think a single person in this country who is pro-war; they may say things like ‘we’re pro war’ but let someone drop a bomb on there house and we’ll see how pro they are then. So I think that the idea of pro-war is kind of absurd, I think they are operating on misinformation and that they’re scared, I think when people are scared they’re unconscionable because they’re desperate and I think what happened was a series of manipulations.
“People have become terrified and in there terror they have allowed this government to go bonkers. I think why the Evens sing so directly about this sort of thing is that we want to be clear that as human beings, human beings that woke up in America, that we do not support this war or any other war. Other people who agree with us, we want them to know they’re not alone nor should they know we’re not hesitant to say it out loud.
Though you may not have heard much about the Evens they have been quietly marking their territory for well over 18 months, “We played for a year before our record came out so we were in an essence introducing our-self in the most flagrant way, people didn’t have a menu, people just had what we delivered, because they had never heard the songs, we might say something from the stage to give some kind of background. Nine out of ten shows we have said from stage that we are opposed to the war, that we are 100% opposed to the war, we see it as a crime. We see that as a responsibility as concerned citizens that let people know that they’re not alone.
The Evens are slowly but surely spreading their word, “most shows we do we get 100 – 150 people…we haven’t played a lot of shows that are over 5–600 people and when we do that, it’ll be a challenge coz we’re going to have to figure out how the sound will work.” There is no venue to small or too obscure for an Evens show, everything from guitar shops, to art galleries, museums, “we played in a Indian restaurant in Sacramento, we played in a kind of social hall in San Francisco, we played in a high school in Berkeley and we had students do a talent show with us… we’ve really found some interesting spaces.”
Interesting spaces and interesting people who have helped open new doors and experiences for the duo; the Evens recent trip to Europe had them meet up with Holland’s experimental noise merchants the Ex. “they’ve been together for 25 years and… they’re quite popular in parts of Europe and they invited us to play at their 25 year birthday show. They had a two-day festival and they then did a week long tour through France and Belgium and they invited us to come along. The tour bus had 35 musicians on it. There was a prog-jazz band from Italy, a noise-experimental band from France, a French poet, Japanese buto dancer, an Ethiopian traditional band, a 70 year old Ethiopian sax player – it was a very interesting eclectic group of people and then there was the Evens, which was totally crazy.
“Those shows were largely being presented at regular rock venues, a 1000 seated kind of rock club, it was really interesting playing in those kinds of settings, suddenly we were against this tide of typical rock behavior, it was a challenge, it forced us to commit to our form in terms of playing, we really had to play hard to beat back the chatter, not play loud but we had to really give them [something]…you know to be remarkable you better do something to remark upon you know?”
