Last Thursday, sort of on a whim, I went to see Beauty Pill at Fort Reno.
Man I love that place. The grounds are small. The stage is small. The sound sucks; there’s nothing really that can be done about that, but that’s pretty much beside the point.
Fort Reno is for the kids, and they don’t care what the sound is like.
A little background: On the grounds of Fort Reno, the highest point in the city and the site of the only Civil War battle to take place within District boundaries, a free summer concert series has taken place for the last 40 years. For as long as I’ve been a music fan, the shows have tended to feature punk/indie bands and has been closely associated with Dischord. After all, the place is right across the street from Wilson High School, which was pretty much a punk rock prep school in the ’80s (Ian Mackaye is the most prominent among a host of DC punk legends to come out of Wilson.)
The concert series is run by the Northwest Youth Alliance. Please donate; they need help to keep up their wonderful work.
I went to a lot of shows at Fort Reno as a teenager. Fugazi played just about every year, the event of the summer for my friends and me and undoubtedly a technical and logistical nightmare for the organizers. The Dismemberment Plan played some big shows there too, and eventually I was excited to see various music-scene friends of mine playing some of their first shows on that legendary stage.
Among said friends were Bald Rapunzel, which brings us back to last Thursday’s show.
Drew Doucette played guitar in that band, and he’s now in Beauty Pill, an arty post-punk band led by Chad Clark (formerly of Smart Went Crazy).
They’re an intriguing band. Two drummers, bass, two guitars, keys, sometimes a skillet. The percussion alone can be mesmerizing, the two drummers in perfect sync and dueling fury; the angular guitars play call-and response. The vocals are mostly simple octaves and not a strong point for me. This often is a deal-breaker for me, and I’m not especially inclined to listen to their recordings, but the live show offers a lot of…post-Lou Reed appeal. It’s a fun spectacle to take in.
So, as has become a notorious recurrence at Ft. Reno (it is summer in Washington, after all,) it started to rain, literally a minute or two after Beauty Pill started tuning up.
The band never seemed to bat an eye, and neither did the crowd of young people who hustled up to the front of the stage as the music began to rise from the PA.
And I mean young. I was really excited to see so many teenagers at this show. They reminded me of what it was like to be a kid and to get such a charge out of going to see bands play.
They reveled in the rain. And so, it seemed, did the band, defiant against a couple of short-circuited amps and the threat of electric shock. Water splashed off the cymbals, the band got soaked, guitars were surely becoming nearly unplayable. And the band was smiling, and the crowd danced (danced!) and got soaked, and loved every minute of it.
It all felt really good, and seeing all those happy kids made me think that we still do have something special in this city’s music scene.
I’ll even forgive them for not recognizing Ian Mackaye onstage playing roadie, covering the band’s instruments with tarps.
