Fugazi turned down millions from record labels and festivals, repeatedly
In 1993 the head of Atlantic Records went backstage at a sold-out Fugazi show and offered them anything they wanted, including their own label. They said no. Two decades later they were still refusing huge sums to reunite. For this Washington band, independence was never a pose.
Fugazi formed in Washington, D.C., in 1986, after Ian MacKaye's hardcore band Minor Threat broke up. MacKaye said he wanted to put music ahead of being in a band. He began playing with Joe Lally, then a roadie who happened to play bass, and his original idea was something like MC5 plus reggae. Brendan Canty took over on drums in January 1987, and his old Rites of Spring bandmate Guy Picciotto kept dropping by practice, quietly hoping to join. He started on backing vocals, inspired by the way hip-hop used a second voice, and later added guitar. MacKaye took the band's name from a slang word for false, found in a book of Vietnam veterans' stories.
Their business ethics set them apart as much as their sound. They released records on MacKaye's own Dischord label and toured relentlessly: from March 1990 to June 1991 they played 250 shows, many of them sold out at rooms holding over a thousand. The first full album, Repeater, missed the charts on release in 1990 yet passed 300,000 copies within about a year, and the follow-up drew more than 160,000 advance orders. When producer Ted Niceley had become a chef and could not work on it, the band simply produced it themselves.
The alternative rock boom made them bigger. In on the Kill Taker, first recorded with Steve Albini in Chicago and then redone, became their first album to enter the Billboard charts in 1993, and they began filling arenas. That was when Atlantic's Ahmet Ertegun made his pitch, reportedly offering more than 10 million dollars. Later albums grew more experimental, from Red Medicine to End Hits in 1998 and The Argument in 2001, which critics hailed as intellectual and thrilling.
After three sold-out nights in London in November 2002, the band began an indefinite hiatus to spend time with their families. MacKaye said in 2011 that money would never be what brought them back. A set of 1988 demos appeared in 2014, and members insist they have never broken up, still getting together privately when all four are in town.
Source: Fugazi
