This is NOT a Fugazi Concert...

...though it was a reunion of sorts. Ian Mackaye and Joe Lally rubbed shoulders off stage along with the likes of one Henry Rollins before Monday night's Fort Reno concert.

Met up with Butch and Gary pre-show at Paradiso, pounded down a few pints and a pie as a primer, then took a familiar route, climbing out of geetown via 34th to Wisconsin Avenue and up to the highest point in deecee, Tenleytown. Caught up with Donna and Jason almost immediately, locked up the bikes, took a few pix of the local punk luminaries milling about the park, then staked out a spot on the grass to the left of the stage. Not long after we settled in, Gwadzilla strolled up, Karate Monkey trundling along quietly at his side like a disciplined dog, and hung out with us a bit before slipping off to mingle and snap some pix of his own.

Joe Lally took the stage first. It was to be his final DC show, at least for a while, as he has plans to roll up his roots and move to Italy, apparently. I confess: I haven't heard any of Joe's music, and the concert was no place to really develop a taste. A heavy bassline dominated most of the songs (no surprise there), and it seemed like good shit, but who the hell knows without hearing it more than once? (Put your hand down, it was rhetorical.) I'll leave the review to Pitchfork and their ilk, whose rating system seems to match my own about as often as the local meteorologists' "forecasts" are in line with Lady Nature's machinations.

Next up were The Evens, whose music I am familiar with (alas, their latest disc, Get Evens, is jammed deep in the belly of my truck's CD player and has, to date, resisted all attempts to gently tease it out. Next up on the scene: needle-nose pliers and a couple of ham-fists). Good stuff—lyrics: political (as with Lally's bass-ridden tunes, no surprise there); instrumentation: less-is-more (hey, it's a duo!); vocals: largely toned down with occasional punkish outburts (redolent of..um...Ian's previous band).

A flawless performance before an appreciative crowd of all ages. In the middle, Mackaye made a cryptic reference to some nebulous event from a previous show (something about being sued for something he said last year that wasn't clear then) and tossed out a remonstration or two to potential hooligans in the crowd for some unauthorized porta-potty pytrotechnics that happened at this time last year and that resulted in the removal of said receptacles from the venue. Flanked by two makeshift living-room lamps whose stark appearance prompted in me a (no doubt) false association to "Furniture", The Evens ran through an impressive array of songs from both albums and managed to avoid the technological problems that interrupted last year's show.

A few pix (and yes, I asked Henry if he minded me taking the picture; he did not)...










More pix can be found here. I'm still adding to the set.