Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes From the DC Punk Underground (79–85) burst into the world in December of 1988 with a humble print run of 2,000 copies thanks to the laborious efforts of authors/editors Cynthia Connolly, Leslie Clague, and Sharon Cheslow. By 2005, Connolly was sure its sixth printing would be its last due to deteriorating negatives and an assumption that "everybody had their fill" of the punk rock yearbook. But technology caught up and our appetites for history and nostalgia are voracious, so Banned in DC enjoys an encore with its seventh printing (this time rocking a metallic blue cover and Connolly’s 8-page afterword detailing the book’s premise and her curative process), putting it back in print for the first time in a decade.
Connolly is an NEA grant-winning artist whose work has exhibited extensively, her series "Letters on Top of Buildings" recently acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum—but her best-known image may still be the cover of the Minor ThreatOut of Step record.
Pitchfork: As a second-wave DC punk girl, I got the book as a Christmas gift from my friend Pam—my show-booking partner in '88—and what made the biggest impression on me was that there were three women’s names on the front and a lot of images of women in the scene, so it’s interesting to read in your new afterword that this was a deliberate act of inclusion. That spoke to me.
Cynthia Connolly: I’m glad it’s something that somebody noticed, because we realized that women weren’t always on stage—where the camera was pointing was usually the stage. So even though the key creators of the book were women, it’s almost like I wanted to do it to show that women were involved in something. Leslie and I started the book and we had a vision of what it was supposed to be. It wasn’t supposed to have text. It was supposed to be stories, photographs and flyers to tell a story. In 1986 I had been working at Maximum Rock & Roll for the summer and I kept thinking, "I have got to go back to DC and make this book." Ian [MacKaye] and I were going out at the time, but living apart. Leslie called a lot of people and so did I but then she got busy with other projects. What ended up happening was I felt this weight of "Holy shit, I’ve asked all of these people for photos and they all doubt me." Some people were like "you’re not making a book," because at that point there weren’t many punk books in existence. There was one about the English scene in 1976 and one called Hardcore California. We really wanted to express the feeling of what it was like to be involved in this music scene.
I just felt at some point that I had to prove it’s not going to be Xeroxed or a zine, but a book. Some people said they didn’t have the time, and just gave us their negatives. We had to go through all the negatives, print the photos, renting a dark room, printing stuff, editing. It was major. I thought I had to do this because if I don’t do it, it’d be what they expected. I wanted to make sure that when I say I’ll do something, people would see that I actually do it. But there was also this thing, I was a woman in this punk scene and I didn’t want to appear to be super-flake. Those are the two things that kept me going. Then Sharon came in and started kicking ass with the flyers and lists.
The goal was to get it out before Christmas because it was so expensive and I had to. I had to sell each individual copy to recoup my costs, which didn’t happen until the second printing because I had to give away a bunch of books to everybody who gave me photographs for the book.
There’s a picture of Monica Richards jumping off the stage. We made it as big as possible. When we were laying it out, we made the pictures of women bigger. Then in the end when we thought it was done and we still didn’t think the weight of men vs. women was right, we went in and put more in. Lefty is in there, really small, and she was a huge part of the scene so we had to go find a photo of her.
Pitchfork: Did you always feel like the DC scene was special? Having lived in L.A. before and having something to compare it to, did you feel like you were documenting your friends? Did you have a sense that something bigger was happening across the world?
CC: Going to DC in 1981, it felt like there were 12 people in the scene when I got here. Part of what was interesting for me is that on the west coast, even in San Francisco, the climate—not just temperature climate but acceptance-to-new-ideas climate—everything was so mellow, where even though punk was really aggressive, in some respects it was accepted. So it didn’t provide this push-back I felt when I moved to DC. When I moved to DC it was challenging. Politics is the dominant culture. Pre-Internet era it was such a challenge—finding places to do shows, being excited when there was a show. You really wanted to support your friends because they were making such a huge effort. There was this innocence and roughness that created so much challenge. Punk rock was so loud and abrasive, it was the opposite of L.A. It was a secret. It was so much fun to find it and keep on trying to find more and discover and connecting and making this underground community. The Internet in a way ruins the surprise.
It was the passion, too. People get up onstage naked or dressed up or doing something weird, being loud, in front of their friends. It takes a lot of guts. It’s passion. It’s not like they wanted to be rock stars. They wanted to just be there. Nobody thought in 1981 they were going to be a rock star. Nobody gave a flying fuck what you were doing with your friends, so that’s a huge difference. It’s about the people and the community involved. In some respects that’s what I like to do with my art. It’s about this greater community, always.
Pitchfork: That purity informs your book. I guess you were thinking about how it would reach the outside world but it seems like you were doing it for you and your friends.
CC: I actually said at one point 'this is just for having on a shelf, so if you need to remember what this was, there’s a format and it’s not going to dry-rot because it’s not newsprint.' There’s a full intention that this was almost a reference guide to cover the feeling of the time.
Pitchfork: Now it’s sold around the world and in its seventh printing. What’s been the wildest or most interesting reaction to it, for you?
CC: The coolest thing is that people say things like what you said. People randomly write to me who tell me that it inspired them to do what they do in their life now. I had no idea that would happen. That music or the book touched them in a way that they’re all still here and doing really awesome things.
Pitchfork: Have your book sales been a good barometer of overall interest in the DC hardcore scene?
CC: It totally waxes and wanes. The book has been out of print a couple of times. It was easy to reprint when I had the old-school negatives, but this printing took about five years because first, I thought it was never going to be reprinted because the negatives were so old we couldn’t use them anymore. I waited a long time because I had to wait for the digital world to catch up so we could scan the photographs and for ones we didn’t have, the pages out of the book. The idea was to make it look the same. It waxed and waned, parallel to release of the Minor Threat CD #40 with all the seven inches, or a re-master of some band, or when Mark Anderson put his book out, Banned in DC sold more as well. I don’t know what’s going to happen with this book. Salad Days is coming out and also James Schneider has been working on a movie about the DC punk scene for ten years. It’s been a huge amount of work. In the end, this book cost so much money it’s like printing it for the first time. I have to sell every single one individually to make my money back. I’m trusting in the original system from 28 years ago.
Pitchfork: You’ve contributed to DC hardcore’s aesthetic so much. Did the book’s popularity buoy to your confidence as an artist or launch your career in some way?
CC: The whole process of making the book and succeeding in selling it and reprinting it and just knowing that’s possible—that you can find an audience. I did mail order and had not-entered-in-a-computer mailing lists like what Dischord did, basically index cards in a filing cabinet. I still have those somewhere. My artwork continued outside of the punk thing. I drove around a lot taking landscape photos. I did half-frame color photos I ended up making into postcards. Before Facebook but basically what Facebook is—they were postcards talking about what I’m doing inspired by these dumb ‘Great American postcards’ with statistics on the Great Cooley Dam and how much electricity was generated per day. I thought those were really funny so rather than read about all this scientific and important detail, this was going to be about my own life detail, which was a tongue-in-cheek homage to these old postcards. The first batch I made got shipped to Dischord and they arrived and I looked at Amy, who was doing mail-order there, and I was like "I just got 7,000 postcards! What am I going to do with them?" I didn’t think about how I was supposed to sell. It’s a good thing I didn’t because that would probably have stopped me. I used the conduits I’d used from Banned in DC to sell those postcards. I used to say "I don’t want to spend a lot of time doing Banned in DC because I really want to do my art" but I just realized that the methods I use inspired by the DIY punk ethic—this is my art, as well.
Pitchfork: Is it ever mind-blowing to you how much your Out of Step art has resonated with people around the world?
CC: Yeah, totally. To this day I think it would be so much fun to do a photo book of people with the black sheep tattoo. If I had nothing to do, I would take a road trip and visit people and collect their stories about why they chose to get that tattoo. I’d take photos of them and hang out with them because I think there’s a lot of good stories behind them.
I drew it for Minor Threat and Dischord kind of manages it because it’s about Minor Threat, not the sheep. They have some separate company now that makes the t-shirts so Ian’s out of the picture of dealing with that stuff, but they give me a royalty for the shirts sold, so that’s totally cool. There was some vegan bakery in London that used that black sheep for their logo. I’ve seen people making kids’ clothes with a black sheep on it. Some friend sent me a photo of someone who made one for a baby’s nursery. I suppose you could make a living asking for cease and desist letters but life’s too short.