We’re far enough from the advent of punk rock that we have analyzed its relevance through books and documentaries, which have pointed out its influence on modern society. Yet, when your scene is built by kids and perceived degenerates, who gets to document the movement you are trying to create? When mainstream media is not interested in the art you create, but the chaos associated with it, you document it yourself.
One of the most vital forms of documentation were zines. A zine is a noncommercial and often homemade publication usually devoted to specialized and often unconventional subject matter. In this case, it was the punk rock bands in a geographical location. Howard Wuelfing started documenting the Washington DC punk rock scene in his zines; first locally with Descenes and later nationally with Discords. Both of these publications were vital to punk rock in a time where there was no social media, let alone the internet to distribute it. Their importance endures as documents of a burgeoning scene and a reference for the history of the genre.
Howard Wuelfing, along with his wife Amy Yates Wuelfing, has reprinted Descenes and Discords and is releasing it in a limited pressing through DiWulf Publishing. Capping the run at eight hundred copies, this reprint maintains the zine’s original size and includes bonus features like commentaries on each issue written by Wuelfing himself, a fold-out poster documenting the DC punk rock family tree, along with an interview with Ian MacKaye. If you’re a collector of all things punk, Descenes and Discords: An Anthology is a chance to own a piece of DIY history. Howard gave us some time to talk about this new collection and the Washington DC scene.
(Edited for Clairty)
I enjoyed this collection. It was really cool to kind of get some context. I remember hearing some of these stories as a kid. It was always kind of word of mouth. It was really neat when I got to Discords to see some of that stuff. What got you into writing? Who were you reading in high school that got you into writing?
I was primarily reading Creem Magazine, especially the dear departed Lester Bangs, who was my hero when I was a kid and we had a high school newspaper. I think it was good how often it came out; it could have been monthly. It was fairly frequent, like high school. I was writing for that. When I got to college, there was a daily paper there, and I was writing for that, and at a certain point, I became the arts editor. I wrote a lot and aspired to be a writer. As a matter of fact, I skipped law school to try and be a rock writer.
Is that what Descenes was? Were you trying to do that essentially?
No, I was already a rock writer. I mean, by that point I’d had a couple of things published in The Village Voice, a couple of things published in Creem Magazine, mainly goofy things that I would write up for them. I was writing for the regional entertainment monthly in DC, the Unicorn Times, and writing for them on a regular basis. I was writing for a thing in Philadelphia called Concert Magazine, which really was only regional, but one of the other writers was a guy named John Kalodner who then became a really big deal; an A&R guy who did lots of very mainstream things. He signed John Lennon to Geffen and signed Aerosmith, whose career was down the dumper at that point, and folks like that.
How did you get into the punk rock scene in DC? What band got you into it, or were you playing music?
I am from a place called Jersey City, which is between Newark and Manhattan. When I say between, I mean, there’s Newark, a river, Jersey City, a river, Manhattan. It’s like right there. That’s just something that I grew up with. Even when I went to college it was just to Rutgers, which is in New Brunswick, the center of New Jersey. I was just taking the New Jersey Transit from Trenton into Manhattan. You just went down to the bus station to the train station for about forty-five minutes.
People lived in New York City and taught at Rutgers. In fact, at a certain point, I had a teaching assistant in film, and he lived… I don’t know if he actually lived on 14th Street, but he lived in that area. We would argue during class about rock and roll. He would say, “Rock and Roll is dead.” And I’m like, “You’re an idiot.” What about all these great people like Slade, the New York Dolls, and the MC5?
“No, no, it’s all dead. But my friend has a great band. You should check them out.” It turned out that it was Richard Hell and the Voidoids, or maybe it was Television when Richard Hell was still in that band. Patti Smith came and played New Brunswick because her guitar player, Lenny Kaye, is from North Brunswick. So they played a little experimental theater place before they had a drummer. That to me was an eye-opener. Seeing the New York Dolls live was an eye-opener because people hated them and said they couldn’t play and stunk, but God, they were a great live band.
I mean, seeing Patti Smith was an eye-opener because it was just a sense of, like, anything being possible. It was so palpable. It’s just like, you didn’t know what she was going to do. It’s like anything could happen at any moment. It was just super, super exciting. Then I moved to DC, which had nothing like that. I’d go back home to visit my parents and say, “Let’s go to New York. I want to see the CBGB’s place.” Everyone talks about it. The neighborhood was different then.
I’ve read a few books on CBGBs. What’s the one they just reprinted a few months back?
Yes. That was a fantastic book. I’m from California, and I moved to Rochester for a few months and ventured into New York City, only got over there after it was gone. It was really interesting to see what it was like from how you hear the Ramones and Blondie describe it.
No, it was something. I mean, the first time I went there, I went with a friend from college who was a big fan of this; it was like the first reality show, An American Family. He was friends with one of the family, Lance Loud. We showed up there and there was Lance Loud, sort of just prone on a car outside of CBGB in like booty shorts and a tied-up shirt, just looking amazingly fabulous. We’d walk in and look at who was on the bill. I didn’t recognize any of these people. These various bands went on, and suddenly, like these four guys came out, and I’m like, wow, they all look like Iggy Pop. That’s kind of weird. They just played this amazingly fast, loud, great music, and it was the Ramones.
I go back to DC. I moved at the wrong time. A friend of mine, Gordon Fletcher, was one of the very few Black rock critics that there were. I met him when he was working at a record store, and we became friends. I’m trying to be a writer. He was a writer, and, I knew who he was. We’d hang out, and he called up one day and said, “Hey, there’s a punk rock show in DC. You want to go?”
That was a place called The Keg. We saw a band called Overkill, and maybe The Slickee Boys were on that bill. They were kind of this really weird, quirky garage rock band, playing super obscure, weird covers of things like Brute Force and weird shit like that. Just having that feeling that we want to be involved in this. Let’s support this stuff. I wound up playing that place because the Slickee Boys were supposed to get a residency. It’s going to be punk night, like a Tuesday or Wednesday, some horrible night of the week. They broke up, and I was in a band. We got offered that residency in their place and took it. I couldn’t tell you how long we did it for; every week, three or four sets a night.
Most of the people in those audiences were all forming bands or would form bands or were early punk supporters. You started getting that feeling of, like, “I’ve seen these people all the time.” That this is kind of a scene. Around the same time, there was a kind of a folk singer/songwriter club in DC called the Childe Harold. People like Bruce Springsteen and Emmylou Harris played there when they were coming up. I was working for the Unicorn Times as a paste-up artist and got to know the booker there. I said, “You should get some of these New York bands in, like the Ramones.” They booked the Ramones for a week.
They played a week in this tiny, tiny place that made CBGBs look huge. They were definitely loud. Another situation where I knew all the people at those shows. Almost all of them wound up in bands and things like that, but it was inspirational. At the same time this is happening, no one’s writing about it, not in DC and nowhere else. No one else cared about DC music. I mean, it was never a scene that anyone cared about in those days. Everyone had to leave DC to make it. Even when I was writing this paper, they didn’t want to write about the local bands. You know, I could write about English or national punk-oriented groups, but they didn’t really want to write about the local bands.
In New York, we’re hanging around, we’re going to shows, going to record stores. We’re picking up the few fanzines that existed, and New York had one called New York Rocker in those days, which was founded by a guy named Alan Betrock, who’s sadly passed away. I picked this thing up, and I’m realizing that almost all the articles in it are about New York bands that I’d never heard of before. I start realizing that most of the people writing the articles are in other New York bands. So I’m like, wow. So these guys are writing about each other, and I thought, well, that’s a great idea. They just put out their own magazine of that. It’s about New York rock bands. It’s written by New York rock musicians. I thought, well, we should do that. We should have that. And that’s where the idea came from.
The co-conspirators are all people who had no publishing experience, but we knew how to put things together. My first wife was working as a typesetter for a thing called The Chronicle of Higher Education. She knew how to input articles. You know, I was doing paste up at the Unicorn Times. Another guy who was one of the major forces in Descenes and Discords, Mark Jenkins, also worked at the Unicorn Times. We physically knew how to do this stuff. Also, because we were kind of doing it, we managed to use other people’s resources to make this stuff. We had a light box, an X-Acto knife, and layout paper. We just did it and found a place that printed periodicals for cheap. We would do small runs, like a thousand. We just started doing it.
I was looking through the book today, and I think it’s like issue number two of Descenes is kind of scrawled and sort of like a preface that I wrote. Basically, I just went through each one and then wrote my evaluation of it, which usually was an evaluation of how stupid I was being at the time. You’ll note that the title on this one is written in whiteout because we forgot to print a logo. We just had to do it on the fly or other things where it’s clear things are just handwritten because we were that far along in the pay stuff, and we didn’t have a chance to print out more stuff.
How did you recruit writers for each of the issues? I know you’re getting a lot of the people in bands in DC; were you getting friends to help you, too?
I did a lot of the writing. Mark Jenkins did a lot. My friend Jim Testa, who’s been running Jersey Beat for decades, now. He was the New York chief, meaning he mainly would cover DC bands when they played in New York. Some of these people, I don’t even know how they came across us. We put it out there, and people started looking us up. It’s one of the things that looking over all these issues is fascinating to me. The connections that were being made in the course of these things where there was no internet, there were no cell phones.
Everything was like looking in phone books, calling directory assistants, or looking in the back of fanzines and at the back of records. People used to put their information out there so you could find them. I mean, they still do, but now it’s like their URL, their Instagram page, or something. So, it was more physical stuff, and people made a point of seeking that out. Some of these things were shocking to me.
I remember when I was living in South Arlington and one day I got a phone call, and this guy got on the phone and said, “Hi, I’m in a band called the Nerves. We’rle trying to tour, and where can we play, like, in Washington, D.C., or Arlington?” And I’ll send you a record in the mail. I’m like, okay. I’ll get the records. One day I get a call, it’s like, “Hi, we’re calling from the L.A. area. We have a band, we’re called Black Flag, and we’re looking for some gigs, and, you know, what can you tell us?” And I’m thinking, like, how did they find me?
The phone number wasn’t published in the magazine, but people were doing research. People were looking to make connections. At a certain point over a number of years, they built up something that at one point they used to call Fanzine Nation: this whole network of fanzines all over the place. You had local clubs that really specialized in booking indie bands that were created because people were looking to connect. It wound up being a very vital, very active, and very effective network of all these people working together. They looked for each other, they found each other, they collected that information, they shared it, and it was great. You know, it was great up through Nirvana becoming a hit, and then it kind of fell apart.
Was it because all the bands were getting bigger and all those stories were going to bigger magazines, just kind of grasping onto all of that?
I sense that it was more because suddenly it seemed like this culture could make money. The big investors came in and bought up a lot of indie labels, either bought them outright or fifty percent stakes in them because they were hoping to find the next Nirvana. And when they didn’t deliver that within a year or two, they just folded them, and it all collapsed. Those people and labels were advertising in the fanzines. It was all interconnected. It was all intra-supportive. If you took any one big block of it out, the whole thing started to collapse.
That makes sense. Was there a set schedule, or were the issues released when you could, when you were able to get them out?
Descenes was published every couple of months, not at all at regular intervals. There were gaps of three to six months. Discords was published monthly, but had a smaller page count, twelve per issue, whereas Descenes was much larger. The first Descenes was in January 1979, and the last Discords was in January 1981. Like this two-year, two-year period. There were fourteen altogether: six Descenes and eight Discords.
Discords covered more scenes nationally. You had reports from all the other scenes coming together. Do you know if they were sending the same information to other zines in different areas, or was that kind of exclusive to you?
I don’t know that I ever saw another magazine that had so many scene reports back in those days. I think that at a certain point, Maximum Rocknroll would have scene reports. I think we’re the ones that really sort of focused on that idea or had that as a large part of it. Almost all the fan zines that existed at that point in time were covering the national scene. There’d be some favorite spots for local bands, but everyone was trying at a certain point to be national. It was a pretty small scene. People you’d never heard of would wind up knowing your name. I remember seeing Steve Albini writing some snarky column saying weird things about me, but that’s what he did. He was pretty big on taking a piss on everyone, or Tesco Vee lampooning me in a cartoon strip. I’m just like, how does this guy even know me? This is pretty weird.
At the time it just pissed me off. Looking back, it’s fascinating again that people really were following each other all over the place. It wasn’t easy. There was no internet, no cell phones. It’s astounding to realize that people would track all this information, put it all together, and then refer to it.
What do you feel was the best letter to the editor you received during that whole run?
Hmm. You know, that’s something I really studied hard over time. There were cool ones. I mean, there was one from Henry Rollins when he first got out to LA, and it was this letter home. He kind of said what it was like, “I’m happy to be sending this letter to you guys. It’s kind of like writing a letter to everyone back home. I hope you’re going to print this.”
I remember there was a letter from Scream saying, “We’re a new band from Suburban Virginia. We hope you’ll check us out and write about it someday.” They were all interesting because it shows that people were paying attention and that the stuff was having an impact. Sometimes, it was incredibly negative because we were very passionate and we had an agenda. We were trying to help create and nurture a creative community of musicians and fans who kind of respected each other, and supported each other. People who were not on board, I was pretty critical of and very vocal. They would hit back as well. They should have, you know, I was basically writing that people shouldn’t advertise in other local papers that didn’t support this music. I mean, it didn’t say that no one should support them.
I just said, if you’re into punk and new wave, you shouldn’t support this magazine or that magazine because they don’t cover you. You know, this is how you get their attention. And they, you know, they came out after me, and it’s fair enough. Then other people came out after them, and it was an interesting dialogue.
What do you feel your best work was out of all of these issues?
I think it was the issue of Discords with the Circle Jerks on the cover because we just started having all these insanely amazing and now sort of iconic people who were contributing to the magazine and sharing information that was new and fresh. It’s kind of astounding. People writing about their new band Hüsker Dü or Suicide Commandos and seeing the Boston Comm was taken over by Gerard Cosloy, who later would be one of the founders of Matador Records. At that point, none of that had happened. None of those associations were there; it’s just interesting people and good writers started writing for us.
Has this reprint been in the works for a while?
It just kind of came about in the last few years. Mainly the genesis of this was when my wife, Amy, who’s one of the founders of Diwulf, put together and published the Hard Times anthology. Hard Times was a New Jersey-based fanzine that she was a part of, and that one had an extra kick to it. There was actually an issue that they never put out and that anthology is the first time they ever published it. At that point I said, “We should do mine someday.” Then years and years went by doing other publishing projects. It went through stages. I mean, she did most of the heavy lifting, scanning all the old issues, which are not falling apart, but they’re pretty fragile and discolored. Some things were more messed up than others. I know we had to source the cover with The Minneapolis band, The Suburbs, who were actually the first band to release a record on Twin Tone Records. It had somehow gotten mangled, and so we just had to source, you know, another copy of that image, stick it in there, and sort of recreate it. It took a while to get that part done, and I was just waiting.
Finally, she’s like, “Okay, this is all scanned. You need to write an intro.” I looked at that and thought I’d like to write an intro for each issue. The thought process was what the goals were, what the strong points were, what the failings were, and kind of own up to all that stuff. Really sort of explains, “This is what we were thinking, and these things were right on. These things were incredibly wrong.” I would do an issue a day until I got them until they were all done nice. Then, at that point, Amy turns around and says, “Give me some blurbs for the back of this.” She goes, “Call Henry Rollins and Ian MacKaye.” Ten minutes later a blurb comes from Henry. Well, that was nice. Ian responds, “I don’t want to do a blurb; instead, let’s get on the phone and have a conversation. Let’s edit that and run that instead of a blurb.” That’s what we did.
I really appreciated that. I’m a big Minor Threat fan. They were the band that got me into wanting to play punk music. I really liked the conversation where it’s Ian talking about being a little punk rock kid and not knowing who the Velvet Underground is.
Throughout most of their high school years because I used to work at a store up in Rockville, Maryland called Yesterday and Today. The kids would shop there. They’d come in with their haircuts and their band names written in duct tape on the back of trench coats. They’d bring their demo tapes and ask, “Can we play your demo tape?” It was fun.
Did you still have a copy of each of the issues, or did you have to seek any of them out?
Had them all. Multiples on a couple, but not many. We actually did print a thousand of them, but we blew through them all. The point wasn’t to make something and then sit on it. We basically gave them away, but we put a cover price on them. I worked in record stores and I could see that free things sat on the floor by the front door. People would wipe their feet on them and they’d get wet. People didn’t really look at them. If you take these and sell them, that goes on the counter. It was just a marketing trick, but it did pay for itself. I mean, our version of punk rock ethos is that this should pay for itself. If it doesn’t, we’re not good enough to deserve to exist. We purloined most of the materials for making them, and the advertising paid for the printing. That’s what it did; there’s no profit, it was a wash, but we got rid of a thousand of each issue.
Do you think either of the zines helped shape the DC scene at all?
You can only really ask the other people who read it and see what they felt, but I got a sense that people were excited seeing that when they saw themselves being validated and written about; that was a charge and that was encouragement. It was also information you could read about all these other bands, especially if you’re a teenager. DC is a kind of a weird, sprawling place; it covers effectively three states. It’s the Virginia suburbs, it’s the Maryland suburbs, and it’s the District of Columbia. The mass transit is okay, but it’s not that great. It’s kind of rough for people to actually get around and see everything.
It’s just like you. You hear a Minor Threat record and think, “I can do that.” For a lot of people it’s like, “Oh, well, here’s a band and they played this place. Oh, that place is down the street. I could play this place. I should form a band. They’re putting out records. I can do that.” It’s that encouragement. It’s letting people see each other and realizing, “These are all just people. They’re just like me. They’re doing these things. I have that potential as well.” I think it did help that, thinking about this sort of socio-political agenda. What I think is pretty clear in this magazine is that we really did want there to be a functional community of people who supported each other.
I saw a bit of an interview with one of the guys from Scream on New York Hardcore Chronicles about Drew Stone saying that in New York there was a lot of inter-generational punk hostility. The guy from Scream was saying it wasn’t like that in DC. The older punks, when the younger punks came along, were interested. The younger punks didn’t think, “These are old, creepy people or has-beens.”
So punks form their own record labels to put out their music. They find home studios, and they don’t wait until they get enough money to be in a big studio. They book gigs in weird places if they can’t get into the regular places. The younger punks were watching the older ones and learning lessons from them and acknowledging that they were learning from them. They were being mentored by them, and at the same time, the older punks, as they were seeing and hearing this new music, were thinking, “This is really exciting.” You could see a review in Descenes about the Slickee Boys, or about Bad Brains when they were playing a basement somewhere. We were proud of that stuff.
At that point, when I saw Bad Brains open for The Damned, I probably wrote that up for Descenes or Discords. When I saw Minor Threat opening for The Damned, when they played in DC, that wound up in the Washington Post. We were proud of them. They were like, “This is the scene, and look at what these guys are doing.” We should all be proud, and when you think about punk rock in various places, you think about the breakout band or a couple of breakout bands. DC punk is a community. I think it resonated with a lot of people, and it kind of went down that way. I’m not saying it’s because we said it. Everyone else said yes.
I think we voiced something that other people felt but hadn’t really crystallized yet. Which is kind of what pop music does. That’s why typically the music you hear when you’re a teenager always sticks with you and hits the hardest, yeah, because it helps you voice thoughts you can’t, you’re not really making clear, yeah, but you can’t crystallize. That’s why it always sticks with you, not to say you don’t like other stuff, but it always hits the hardest, and I think it’s possible that this served that sort of a purpose.
I’m a trivia person, so I liked picking up the little details here and there. It’s just things that you’ve heard about for years that sound like bullshit, but then you find something like this to confirm. I had a good time with these.
I agree. I’m glad to get this out there because every once in a while, people will tell me about seeing them for sale at outrageous prices and in bad shape. The idea of putting this back out there again and nicely produced, it’s limited to eight hundred right now because they’re huge. We printed these things at the original size of these things. So when you’re seeing them in here, it’s heavy too. It’s more than two pounds. The postage sucks, but there you go. A lot of information just goes missing over time, and people forget about it and just get lost because it didn’t make it into the mainstream. It didn’t get really recorded. This stuff is culture, partially because of the unique way the DC punk scene developed. People have taken it seriously and made a point of preserving it.
Pick up Descenes and Discords: An Anthology through DiWulf Publishing, here. It’s a limited edition, and once they sell out, they’re gone.