“When [President Ronald] Reagan entered office,” says punk elder statesman Mark Andersen, “it provided a focal point, like a physical embodiment of the things that we opposed.”

Andersen makes that observation to WAMU reporter Patrick Madden in a story that aired Tuesday. The co-founder of D.C. activist group Positive Force says that in some ways, the Reagan era energized punk in D.C. And some say the same could happen under President Trump.

Visit the WAMU homepage to hear Madden’s story, “Could D.C. Punk Thrive Under President Trump?” The sound-rich feature includes interviews with Andersen, Ian MacKaye of Fugazi and Minor Threat, filmmaker Robin Bell and Jason Mogavero of rabble-rousing D.C. band Jack On Fire.

On last Friday’s show, host Rebecca Sheir — with me in the passenger seat — took listeners on a tour of D.C.’s astonishingly diverse music communities: the thriving local jazz and hip-hop scenes, rarely seen corners of area music venues, a record label bringing Ethiopian electronic music to the District, metal in a dozen flavors and the small universe of music fans thrusting cassette tapes back into the musical ecosystem.

We also talked with attorney Chris Naoum of Listen Local First to find out what his group is doing to push music-friendly policies in D.C. and strolled down memory lane with Positive Force co-founder Mark Andersen — who shared a moving memory from a Rites of Spring show he’ll probably never forget — as well as WAMU Bluegrass Country’s Katy Daley.

Did you miss the show over Memorial Day weekend? No problem. It’s streamable via Metro Connection‘s website and iTunes. Click “play” and get deep.

Photo: Give at Fort Reno, 2014

Go and read the whole story here. But in the meantime, here are some highlights from Habibion’s website:

Soulside at d.c. space, 1987

Fugazi (with a talk from Mark Andersen) at the Wilson Center, 1987

One Last Wish at the Chevy Chase Community Center, 1986

Dag Nasty at the Chevy Chase Community Center, 1986

The last two years have brought a huge resurgence of interest in the scene’s bygone days, exemplified by the “Pump Me Up” exhibit at the Corcoran last year, Lucian Perkins’ Hard Art DC 1979 book, the fanzine archive at University of Maryland, two recently launched punk-rock archives at George Washington University and D.C. Public Library, the D.C.-themed episode of Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways HBO series and a whopping five documentaries—one of them still in the works—related to D.C. punk music. (And I admit that Bandwidth has been a gushing faucet of D.C. punk coverage lately, so as the website’s editor, I play a role in this, too.)

But why is all of this reflection happening now?

Today’s Kojo guests—Positive Force co-founder Mark Andersen, Priests singer Katie Alice Greer, the GWU music archive’s Tina Plottel and myself—grappled with that. Andersen rejected that nostalgia alone is driving the deluge. (Because punk isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about the present, he said.) But the activist couldn’t explain why the recent past has been such a fertile period for, well, the past. Cynthia Connolly—the Banned In D.C. co-creator who called into the show—didn’t seem to think this moment bears special significance. She said it seemed like a coincidence, because many of the aforementioned projects took shape years ago and happen to be wrapping up now.

But here’s a theory I neglected to bring up on the air today: In an interview back in July, Punk the Capital filmmaker James Schneider told me that folks should try to preserve the past now because redevelopment is erasing D.C.’s cultural history. “With the city changing so fast, on so many fronts, it’s more important than ever now to ensure that the city’s identity is firmly anchored before a remodeled city takes over,” he said. When these films, archives and other projects began coming together, was it because their creators saw gentrification beginning to erase history? Or is the barrage, like Connolly said, coincidental?

In the hourlong segment, Andersen also made key points about punk rock’s relationship with activism and gentrification’s impact on the very poor (versus the less-urgent effect it’s had on middle-class artists), and we mulled over whether D.C.’s current scene has maintained the sense of social responsibility that’s depicted in the forthcoming documentary Positive Force: More Than A Witness.

Ultimately, today’s show wasn’t all about nostalgia, even though that’s what we set out to discuss. But like many of the ideas revived in these allegedly nostalgic films and archives, we found that talking about the past brought up issues musicians and activists are still wrestling with today.

Listen to the segment over on the Kojo Nnamdi Show website.

Image by Flickr user rockcreek used under a Creative Commons license.

Once Jenny Toomey opened the door to MTV, her days at Positive Force’s headquarters were numbered.

Toomey and Kristin Thomson ran the independent record label Simple Machines out of the punk-rock house in Arlington, Virginia, in the early 1990s. The label shared space with Mark Andersen, the co-founder of activist group Positive Force and several other lefty activists involved in the collective. Inside the house’s walls, meat, alcohol, drugs and corporate rock were strictly prohibited.

Robin Bell has spent five years working on “Positive Force: More Than A Witness.”

But the cable TV network had caught on to Simple Machines, and in 1992 the label owners invited an MTV crew to film at the residence. What happened next is already recounted in Andersen and Mark Jenkins’ book about the history of D.C.’s punk scene, Dance Of Days, but the story is revived in Robin Bell’s engrossing new documentary, Positive Force: More Than A Witness, which gets a preview at Mount Pleasant Library Thursday night and formally premieres Nov. 14-15 at St. Stephen’s Church.

“All of a sudden, I come home to discover MTV’s in my house,” Andersen says in the film. He tells the tale with a faint smile, but at the time, it was a death blow. According to Dance of Days, he and Toomey stopped speaking almost entirely after the incident. “There was something about what we were doing that I think felt too commercial to Mark,” Toomey says in the film. She and Thomson soon moved out and started their own spot, the Simple Machines House.

Similar ideological clashes pock the story of Positive Force, the activist collective that has put on more than 500 benefit concerts for local organizations in its 29 years. Another rift came in 2005, when a faction of Positive Force volunteers arranged a march down Columbia Road NW that resulted in violence and more than 70 arrests. Some people in that group later split from Positive Force and redirected their attention toward the expressly anarchist Brian MacKenzie Infoshop in Shaw. For some, Positive Force seemed too traditional. For others, like Toomey, it seemed too uncompromising. But it still exists to this day—a testament not only to Andersen’s dedication, but also its mission’s ongoing relevance to volunteers and local musicians.

Positive Force’s operating procedure could be another reason it’s stuck around this long: In the film, Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna seems a little surprised by the hoops she had to jump through to host a riot grrrl meeting at the Positive Force house, which shut its doors in 2000.

“We had to go to a Positive Force meeting first,” Hanna says. “I’d never had a pitch meeting before. But I was doing a pitch meeting for why they should let us use their house for this all-women’s radical feminist community organizing meeting.” The house’s residents eventually gave her the green light—a decision that made Positive Force one of the earliest advocates of what would become a global feminist movement.

Kathleen Hanna – DC Punk Scene from Bell Visuals on Vimeo.

Bell, a 37-year-old filmmaker who has taught at the Corcoran, calls himself a Positive Force ally. He developed a relationship with the organization while putting in hours at the Washington Independent Media Center, which shared the Arthur S. Flemming Center in Shaw with the Infoshop, Positive Force and other nonprofit groups starting in 2003. Encouraged by Positive Force members and Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye, Bell began assembling Positive Force: More Than A Witness in 2009. Two years later he ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that grossed more than $16,000, and he kicked in money from a hefty settlement he won after successfully suing the D.C. government for his arrest during a 2002 protest.

To produce the film as affordably as possible, Bell turned his Mount Pleasant bedroom into a studio and conducted most of his interviews there. With Andersen’s help, he recruited an impressive array of musicians who had played Positive Force shows in the past, including Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra, The Foo Fighters’ Dave Grohl, Bratmobile’s Allison Wolfe, Chumbawumba’s Danbert Nobacon, Anti-Flag’s Justin Sane and Trophy Wife’s Katy Otto. Bell traveled to interview indie rocker Ted Leo, Kathleen Hanna, Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace and notably Crass founding member Penny Rimbaud, whom Bell filmed at Dial House, the artist’s famous rural commune in Essex, England. (Rimbaud whipped up an amazing pasta dish, Bell says.)

To channel the grimy intensity of a typical Positive Force show in the 1980s and ’90s, Bell included remarkable concert footage (much of which he helped funnel toward the D.C.-themed episode of Dave Grohl’s HBO series, Sonic Highways). Among that footage, some of which is online: visceral scenes from Bikini Kill and Fugazi protest concerts downtown and a particularly raucous Nation of Ulysses gig at Columbia Heights’ Sacred Heart Church in 1991. In the latter, singer Ian Svenonius is seen tossing himself like a flour sack into an undulating crowd—whose ticket money that night benefited the victims of the Latin American debt crisis.

To Bell, part of the point of making Positive Force: More Than A Witness was to show people from all over the world how music and activism can intersect, and in this case, under the banner of Positive Force. He describes the collective’s ethos as, “Let’s not just talk about the problem; we’re actually going to try to find a creative solution to it.”

But in today’s D.C. scene, we don’t see many of the charged, angsty punk protests that Bell spotlights in his documentary. Andersen now spends most of his time working with local organization We Are Family, a group that provides food, services and companionship to D.C. senior citizens. Meanwhile, Positive Force benefit shows seem fewer and farther between.

Is Positive Force winding down? “I don’t think it’s over,” Bell says. “I think it’s just changed.” Protest movements ebb and flow, he says, and young idealistic people—the folks Positive Force has traditionally appealed to—face an ever-climbing cost of living in D.C. and its suburbs. “Now, with just how expensive it is to live in the city, pretty much everyone who’s young is under the gun,” Bell says.

Andersen says Positive Force’s benefit shows can happen as often as local bands want them to. “The musicians who played for us… we couldn’t work nearly as effectively without them,” he says. Fugazi—who only played free shows, protests and benefits in D.C., many of them connected to Positive Force—was the group’s greatest gift. But Fugazi last performed in 2002. Other local bands have stepped up to play Positive Force gigs, but it’s hard to match the draw Fugazi had in its peak years.

Nevertheless, Andersen says Positive Force is less about self-preservation than its ideas.

“If the vehicle wears out, then you find another one,” he says in the documentary. “The energy, the idea, the attitude, the spirit is what counts. I think the spirit’s still there… whether Positive Force is there or not.”

Mark Andersen is scheduled to appear on WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show Thursday at noon. Robin Bell discusses Positive Force: More Than A Witness Thursday evening at Mount Pleasant Library. The film premieres Nov. 14 and 15 at St. Stephen’s Church.

Due to a reporting error, the original version of this article misidentified Penny Rimbaud as the singer of Crass. He co-founded and contributed vocals to the legendary punk band, but Rimbaud mostly played drums in the group. The article has been corrected.

Sonic Highways is really about the process of recording the latest Foo Fighters album in eight American cities, and this episode (I haven’t seen the others) deals with Grohl’s own musical coming-of-age. But along the way, the show aims to trace at least a few decades of D.C. music history, and it does that well—though clearly within the parameters of Grohl’s own experience.

After a short discussion of the 1968 riots and class/race stratification in the District, Sonic Highways takes on go-go, leaning heavily on feedback from Trouble Funk’s “Big Tony” Fisher. Grohl pulls choice footage of Chuck Brown’s live shows, explores the go-go pocket and grabs a few soundbites from Pharrell Williams and D.C. Mayor Vince Gray. But Grohl discusses go-go mostly through a rock lens. Virginia hip-hop/rock band RDGLDGRN (Grohl collaborators), Black Cat co-owner Dante Ferrando and Dischord Records’ Ian MacKaye—among others—all have their say on go-go, then the show moves right into punk and parks itself there for the rest of the episode. Anyone looking for a thorough study of D.C.’s most distinctive African-American music won’t find it here.

The show’s brightest moments come from key footage of local shows, images by scene photographers like Lucian Perkins and—above all—the swath of big personalities Grohl roped into the episode. MacKaye and punk activist Mark Andersen get a lot of well-spent screen time, but the candid Trouble Funk leader, Bad Brains’ funny and direct bassist Darryl Jenifer and bearded superproducer Rick Rubin made some of the strongest—or at least funniest—contributions. (Though I suspect it was Rubin’s L.A. Buddha routine, not his quotes, that produced the laughs at last night’s screening.)

Toward the end of the episode, The Foo Fighters charge into “The Feast and the Famine,” a song it recorded at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studio and wrote based on elements of D.C. music discussed in the program. (Hear the song below.) The song’s title speaks to that commonly cited dichotomy so central to D.C.’s identity: that this is a city home to both the world’s greatest power and the starkest example of that power’s disastrous failure.

It’s obvious that Grohl doesn’t have deep ties to the underprivileged half of that dichotomy, and certainly doesn’t now—in the Q-and-A that followed last night’s screening, Grohl said he paid for the entire TV series by playing two stadium shows in Mexico City—but he gives it pride of place on an extremely visible platform. The show’s emphasis on activism is unexpected and commendable, considering that the local punk scene’s hard-left, DIY-or-don’t-bother attitude is what granted it staying power—even more than the sound of D.C. punk rock, which has taken so many forms over the decades.

Early in the episode, Mark Andersen summarizes one of the most valuable takeaways from Sonic Highways, though he can’t take full credit for it himself. “Charles Dickens I think once called Washington, D.C. ‘the city of magnificent intentions,'” Andersen says. “The gap between the dream and the reality is excruciatingly wide.”

The show airs tonight at 11 p.m. on HBO. Tonight’s screening and Foo Fighters show at Black Cat is sold out.

Reporter Jerad Walker, a staffer at WAMU’s Bluegrass Country, talks to Bill MacKaye—father of Ian—who’s been a member of the radical church since 1960. He says the church went to great lengths to open its doors to the local community.

“I came at the same time as a very adventurous and forward-looking priest came to be rector or pastor of the church,” MacKaye remembers. “His name was Bill Wendt. His sense of what he needed to do with this congregation was get them ready for major change.”

At the time, Wendt presided over the first racially integrated Episcopal Church in D.C.— then, a radical concept in and of itself.

“Father Wendt came in here with a mission to open up the church to the neighborhood,” says MacKaye. “He not only was going to welcome in black people, but he was going to go up and down the streets and say ‘You’re really welcome. Come in.'”

Walker also talks to the younger MacKaye as well as Positive Force founder Mark Andersen, whose activist group has hosted many, many punk shows at the church over the years.

Metro Connection airs today at 1 p.m. and Saturday at 7 a.m., but you can stream the entire show online now.

ASCAP, one of a few organizations that collects royalties on behalf of musicians and songwriters, is going after D.C. punk-rock church St. Stephen’s.

This morning, an ASCAP licensing manager emailed a licensing agreement and an invoice for $472 to Mark Andersen, who helps organize concerts in the church on behalf of Positive Force, the punk collective he co-founded. The invoice says St. Stephen’s owes two years of licensing fees, dating back to February 2013—when Ian MacKaye’s band The Evens played a benefit show at the venue.

Andersen says St. Stephen’s shouldn’t have to pay. So far, ASCAP has not presented any evidence to the church that ASCAP music was played there. (The email’s sender declined to comment.)

A general licensing manager from the organization contacted the church soon after MacKaye and Amy Farina’s band played the Positive Force event there more than a year ago. The manager said the show needed to be “properly licensed.” The church declined to pay, Andersen says, because The Evens don’t have any connection to ASCAP.

“The Evens’ songs are not registered with any performance-rights organizations,” MacKaye writes in an email. “The band plays no covers, and owns 100 percent of the publishing of the songs we’ve written. ASCAP has zero control, interests, or rights to our music. I don’t know why they want to get into this mess.”

If St. Stephen’s has played any music by artists under ASCAP’s umbrella, it would be subject to fees. Churches who play ASCAP music (or host performers who cover it) are only exempt from the payments if the music in question is played during religious services, says Vincent Candilora, ASCAP’s executive vice president of licensing.

Andersen says it’s possible some recorded ASCAP music was played before or after The Evens show, but he’s not sure. “If they have evidence that we’re infringing,” Andersen says, “we’d be glad for them to present it.”

Here’s the email ASCAP sent Mark Andersen today:

ASCAP’s Telephone Licensing Manager has contacted you concerning your need to obtain permission to lawfully perform the copyrighted music of our members in your establishment.  As we have not received your signed license agreement and fees, your file has been referred to me.  According to our records, we have provided information on ASCAP, our members and repertory, the copyright law and our licensing activities.  By now you undoubtedly have a better understanding of the need to obtain permission to use copyrighted music in our repertory.

An ASCAP license will provide you with the permission to lawfully perform our members’ music at your business by giving you access to all of the millions of works found in the ASCAP repertory.  In order for your business to be licensed, it will be necessary for you to sign and return the attached agreement along with payment as invoiced.  A countersigned copy of the license will be returned for your files.

We hope you will take this opportunity to resolve this matter.  Should you have any questions regarding ASCAP licensing, the attached agreement or the factors used in determining your license fee, please do not hesitate to contact me toll-free at the number listed below.  We at ASCAP look forward to serving your licensing needs.

Candilora says he’s contacted the licensing manager who sent the email and hasn’t heard back yet. But he also points out that ASCAP doesn’t have to be certain that a venue owes it money in order to send a letter like the one St. Stephen’s received.

ASCAP just sends notices (Candilora calls them “offers”) to businesses that could have played its music at some point, Candilora says. If the business has not played any infringing music, ASCAP assumes they’ll let them know and put the issue to bed. “We would expect for somebody to say, ‘This is the composer, these are the songs, and they are not with ASCAP,’ and that would be fine,” he says.

Andersen says he’s already informed ASCAP that he doesn’t believe St. Stephen’s requires a license. “Evidently that never got to us,” Candilora says.

Usually businesses are subject to the fees, Candilora says. “We have 8.5 million songs in our repertory. ASCAP has been a business for 100 years, so it’s everything from Irving Berlin on up. Most of the time, there are works in the repertory that are being performed.”

Photo by Flickr user angela n. used under a Creative Commons license.