It’s been like 35 years since Fugazi released its first set of EPs, collected in the Thirteen Songs LP in 1989. Having been a fan of Ian MacKaye’s since I was a kid, I thought this would be a fun opportunity to look back at the music he’s been involved in.

Teen Idles

A pretty standard hardcore punk band. Teen Idles released one EP while they were together, “Minor Disturbances,” and also had a few of their songs featured on the “Flex Your Head” compilation put out by Dischord Records in 1982. MacKaye was the bassist and a lyricist for the band, but it was helmed by Nathan Strejcek on the mic. MacKaye and drummer Jeff Nelson would go on to found Minor Threat.

Musically, neither the “Minor Disturbances” EP or the posthumously-released “Anniversary” EP (featuring slower, more “punk” versions of Teen Idles songs from when the band was still calling itself The Slinkees) are the most spectacular works out there. They sound like a lot of other hardcore bands from this era, still finding their footing and discovering the limits of the genre as they actively repudiate punk’s earlier proclivities. “I Drink Milk,” one of the songs that appear on the “Flex Your Head” comp, might be the first-ever straight-edge song, even taking a hardline against Coke (though as some observant readers will notice, going against the tenets of veganism… nobody’s perfect I guess).

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Skewbald/Grand Union

I’m not going to lie, the band name reminds me of Fate/Stay Night and there’s just nothing we can do about this. The problem is that the analysis can’t really extend past this because we only have two tracks in total from this band, which MacKaye and drummer Jeff Nelson founded after Minor Threat broke up for the first time. Honestly, my first impressions of these two tracks, unofficially named “Sorry / Change for the Same” and “You’re Not Fooling Me” sound like a cross between Minor Threat and a grunge band from ten years in the future. Rites of Spring guitarist Edward Janney played on the tracks, marking the first collaboration between MacKaye and artists from Rites of Spring.

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Egg Hunt

The first true “post-“Minor Threat band in this history was also the final collaboration between MacKaye and Nelson. They created a chill kind of psychedelic post-punk sound on their only recorded output, the two-song “Me and You” EP. MacKaye featured on the album as both the bassist and for the first time as a guitarist, and the results are definitely sonically-interesting, if a lot more meandering and less focused than their other works. Still, it has energy, and you can already hear hints of Embrace and Fugazi come through, especially on “We All Fall Down.”

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Pailhead

This is entirely an outlier in MacKaye’s musical output, as it’s essentially one of the many millions of bands Ministry made composed of itself and punk musicians (see: Jello Biafra and the “LARD” project). Still, MacKaye sings and plays guitar on these Ministry-adjacent songs, collected into a single album in 1998, “Trait.” The vibe is ofc more industrial-rock-tinged and full of samples, but there’s still something unmistakably MacKaye going on here. As far as I know, this is the only thing MacKaye has ever done that he didn’t put out himself on Dischord.

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While none of these bands are the bands that put MacKaye on the map in punk and hardcore, they’re important stepping stones that show him learning and growing as a young musician. Particularly with Egg Hunt and Pailhead, we hear MacKaye get experimental and more collaborative in his songwriting. They’re connective tissue that helps us understand how we go from Minor Threat to Fugazi to the more folk-inspired works MacKaye makes today.