Coming off another great show at Tipitina’s in New Orleans, Fugazi made the approximately 400 mile drive to play in Houston, Texas on the following night. A recurrent feat, since the band toured Houston as early as 1988, having played the city 7 times in 6 different venues prior to this 2002 concert.

A pitch for this particular gig in a piece by Jeremy Hart, published in the HoustonPress on the date of the show, reads: “One of the hardest-working, most dedicated, most talented bands in the history of rock music is finally coming to town (thanks to the efforts of Hands Up Houston), and this is your chance to switch off MTV and catch a glimpse of what the real underground looks like. Take it.”

Fugazi played 19 songs total, most of these are taken off of The Argument (5), followed by End Hits (3), Steady Diet of Nothing (3), the 7 Songs debut EP (3), and just one song each off of the Furniture EP, Red Medicine, In on the Kill Taker, Repeater, or the Margin Walker EP.

The recording documents the first out of just two performances in 2002 of both Nice New Outfit and Bulldog Front (the other ones date from the October 31, 2002 concert in Leeds, England), as well as the first out of six plays of Stacks in the course of the 2002 tour, the second out of five performances of Place Position, and the first out of seven performances of Promises (the version presented here stands out as well, because sound man Nick Pellicciotto is playing around with some reverb on the percussion which adds a very dubby vibe to the set closer).

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Other things worth mentioning include praise by Ian for Hands Up Houston for booking the show, Joe and Brendan playing the Lusty Scripps intro during the third interlude, and some fun comments by Ian to curb another round of crowdsurfing, “I know that some people here are just riddled with nostalgia, nostalgia over things that maybe they don’t even have memories of, but would the people here do us a big favor and not crowd surf please, it’s a request, the band respectfully requests, respectfully, respectfully requests that people don’t lift other people up on their hands and pass them around because it’s just very tedious and ends up causing so much distraction we can’t get our work done up here so… however, there’s a booth in the back of the room over here, where you give a guy two dollars and he’ll carry you above his head for a few minutes, so it’s just another service that Fugazi is providing for all the people.”

I will not dwell on this recording since Guy’s mic is shot so you can only marginally pick up on his vocals throughout the set with the exception of Do You Like Me (second to last song). Since Guy and Ian takes turns singing, the recording of every other song consequently suffers significantly from this. Also, note that the first bit of Night Shop right after the encore is missing.

I was at this show! The International Ballroom was this fun weird venue that looked like it was once a grocery store or something like that. Saw a few shows here from 93-97 era but it was never booked regularly and when this Fugazi show popped up in '02 it was like, wow that place still has shows? This was the last time I ever went to the venue, no idea if they still book shows there or not. I remember thinking Explosions in the Sky was really great but there were defiantly people around me who were not digging them at all. Too bad. Was a good Fugazi set, the one and only time I got to see them.