Starting when he was 12, Crawford put out a fanzine about D.C.’s punk scene from his Silver Spring home. Now 40, he is making a documentary called “Salad Days: DC’s Punk Revolution” about the local music scene, which produced stars such as Henry Rollins and David Grohl.
How would you define D.C. punk?
There was something very specific to D.C., not just a sound but an aesthetic. … There’s a musicianship to a lot of the bands back then that didn’t really exist elsewhere. And in terms of the art and typography and things like that on the album packaging, it all had a very similar sensibility to it. It was really something unique to D.C.
D.C.’s punk heyday was early 1980s to early ’90s, and then it seems to have sputtered. Why did the city have such a short window of influential, intense creativity — then nothing?
It was a combination of the people involved. D.C. is really sort of an artistic, intellectual sort of town. It’s not like Boston and New York. It’s a very different sort of populace. It was like Haight-Ashbury or something. You had the right combination of people and circumstances and energy and it all sort of came together. It exploded. And when something burns that hot, it’s bound to sort of implode.
What has happened to the musicians? Do they work in government jobs? Are they still banging out music?
A lot of them are still in bands. If they’re not still playing music, they’re still going out and seeing it.
Some of them are likely old enough to have kids who were their ages when they were punk stars. Are their kids getting interested in their past?
You see it continuing. It’s like my parents played me … Linda Ronstadt and Carly Simon music to try to get me into music. And people my age play their kids the Clash and Fugazi.
– Kytja Weir
