Watch carefully in the coming weeks and you may see them. People roaming the streets of Chinatown, Adams Morgan, Mt. Pleasant. They’ll stop to check their cell phone, punch the keys, wait, check again, then move walk down the street looking with strange interest at empty buildings, houses and random Starbucks. Yellow Arrow’s Capitol of Punk tour, which we previewed in May, kicked off this week, turning D.C. streets into an impromptu museum for a look back at the city’s storied punk rock history, from back in the days when “harDCore” was spelled with a capital “D.C.”
The concept is simple: go to any of the ten tour sites around town laid out in Yellow Arrow’s Capitol of Punk map, send a text message to indicate which tour you’re about to take, and then your phone will act as your guide. Text messages provide you with commentary about the places you’re directed to see, stories of what happened there, as well as quotes from the people who were there at the time.
The result is an odd blend of alternative museum exhibit and a sometimes surreal illustration of the maxim that the more the more things change, the more… well, the more unrecognizable they are. Nowhere is it more apparent than at the starting point of the d.c. space portion of the tour. d.c. space was a small club at the corner of 7th and E Streets that was, for a time, the epicenter of the city’s punk rock scene. Now? It’s a Starbucks. Throughout this tour and that of the area around the original 9:30 Club at 930 F Street, the differences between the streets of the early 80’s that the tour describes, and the area now, with the Verizon Center’s jumbotron clearly visible for blocks in either direction, are hard to grasp. Ian MacKaye, founder of D.C.’s Dischord Records and member of seminal groups such as Minor Threat and Fugazi, contributed a great deal of the commentary, quotes and stories used by the tour organizers. Of the formerly mean streets of downtown, he says, “Passing through that area I sometimes think that I could be in Denver or San Antonio or Raliegh or Sacramento. Such is the landscape.”
