While not a single recording of their first 1989 concert in Frederick, Maryland surfaced so far, Fugazi’s second performance that year fortunately did get recorded, but is not yet made available here. The 1989 tour itinerary would have the band play 84 times in total, equalling the number of gigs in the course of the previous year.

This January 26, 1989 concert played out at the famed 9:30 Club in D.C., and is one of the last Fugazi performances with just the single guitar arrangement. Guy’s added guitar would soon become officially established.

For some more information related to this particular venue and its relevance for the local hardcore scene at the time, as well as in relation to Fugazi’s stellar performance at the place some 6 months earlier, in June 1988, see my earlier notes.

The recording I have at my disposal appears to offer a short pre-set, just three songs, which might have been performed as a soundcheck. Well that, or these songs might as well make up the tail end of another gig since it is not clear from the recording.

After these three songs, the sound cuts out, and resumes with the studio recording of a song by another band I don’t know but which definitely has a Dischord feel to it and which gradually mixes with a live rendering of Burning Too, which I think is part of the actual main set of the January 26, 1989 gig, which contains another 13 live songs, including the debut 7 Songs EP in its entirety (see set list below).

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The audio of the recording is limited in range and rather rough throughout, the higher frequencies somewhat shrill, the sound wavering occasionally. However, it is still quite good and does permit cranking up the volume.

The specific audio qualities of the recording actually portray a sense of confinement, dropping the listener in a dense space, huddled together with the band and a couple of hundred other participants, between the sin and the sweat.

As such, I can well imagine it pretty accurately ties in with the actual experience at the time, considering the physical layout of the 9:30 Club and that Fugazi played for a room full of harDCore scene affiliates and friends.

Never mind Ian’s guitar cuts out numerous times (“when you play 9:30 everything breaks”), since the rest of the band thrashes about unperturbed, the audience occasionally pitching in and helping out with the choruses.

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Particularly memorable are a fierce version of Burning (“skinheads go in they never go out”), Suggestion (w/ Amy Pickering from Fire Party on guest vocals, referencing the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling which has been the subject of recent controversy as well in relation to the Kavanaugh conformation process as a Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice ; “something is moving to the right”) and Joe laying out thick bass lines going into Waiting Room.

Pre-set // soundcheck // part of another recording (?)

Furniture - Break-In - Joe #1

Set list:

Burning Too (incomplete) - Bulldog Front - Burning - And The Same (dedicated to Mark Andersen from Positive Force D.C.) - Bad Mouth - Margin Walker - Lockdown - “Ode to Bush” musical intermezzo - Suggestion - The Word (dedicated to sound man extraordinaire Joey P or Joey Picuri) - Waiting Room - Promises - Give Me The Cure - Glueman (introduced as the “Rodeo song”)