How Ian MacKaye Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Keyboards

His long, weird road from Woodstock to Ted Nugent to hardcore punk

In this edition of “WHAT’S IN YOUR TAPE DECK,” I talked to Ian MacKaye, the godfather of hardcore and the frontman for Minor Threat and Fugazi (among other bands) about Woodstock: Music from the Original Soundtrack and More (1970), amongst other records.

Eric Spitznagel: What kind of music did your parents listen to when you were growing up?

Ian MacKaye: My parents had a Grundig console phonograph, a one-piece thing where you flip down the turntable and the speaker is in the base of the unit. They had a 45 of “Last Date” by Floyd Cramer. I think I was probably four or five; I can remember playing that record over and over, lying on the floor with my head next to the speaker, just being completely obsessed with it.

ES: Is it any good?

IM: Oh, I don’t know. I loved it, but it’s sort of a schmaltzy, instrumental piano, kind of swing jazz thing. My parents were not music people, per se, but my mother loved piano pieces.

ES: Was there anybody else giving you a better musical education?

IM: I had a babysitter who kind of knew about rock ’n’ roll. We visited a friend of my parents who had a pretty big record collection, [including] Smash Hits by Jimi Hendrix. He let me play it, and it was one of those moments where I couldn’t stop listening. I fell in love with Hendrix. I still love his music. I’ve probably studied him more than any other musician.

ES: Really? That’s surprising.

IM: Well, maybe not more than the Beatles. The Beatles are also way up there. Their records became holy objects to me. The covers took on almost mystical properties.

ES: You couldn’t listen to them?

IM: This was before I had access to my own turntable. In the early seventies, there were some college kids who moved into a group house on Beecher Street in Washington, DC, just a few houses down from where I grew up.

ES: A group house?

IM: Like a commune. They were hippies, I guess—they had long hair and wore bell-bottoms, and they painted a sun on their stairwell wall, that sort of thing. They kind of took me in, maybe because I was a local little hippie kid. In any event, they were pretty relaxed, and you could just wander in and out of the house.

One of the women, who was probably seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen—but she might’ve been a hundred, for all I could tell—had a crate of about thirty records. She told me that she used the crate to block the door when she and her boyfriend were together. It gave me a sense of just how heavy that crate must have been [and] made me think that whatever it was she and her boyfriend were doing behind the door must have been pretty damn interesting.