Hardcore, and D.C. hardcore in particular, has a rep for being stuck in the past. But it stays fresh by continually creating new pasts to draw from. A few years back, bands like Coke Bust brought the early ’80s thrashy style of hardcore back into vogue. But there are others reviving the mid-’80s melody of Dag Nasty, the late ’80s aggression of Swiz and the late-’90s chug of Damnation A.D. Soon there will be late ’00s tribute bands to Coke Bust, too. The logical endpoint is to be, to paraphrase The Onion, nostalgic for bands that don’t exist yet.

This Was My Night & This Was a Lot of Other Nights is another chapter in the scene’s love affair with itself, though an entertaining and necessary one. Editors Tim Follos and Hussain Mohammed compile show reviews and interviews from Follos’ blog Day After Day DC, covering the past decade — the most recent era of harDCore. It reads like a blog, in good ways and bad: The energy of the house shows reviewed (though “lovingly described” is more accurate; Follos has hardly an unkind word for anyone) is palpable, and he draws from a depth of knowledge and eye for detail only a true fan could.

At the same time, the long personal asides, shout-outs and inside jokes (most involving Sick Fix‘s Pat Vogel) remind you this was written by and for a small group of friends who all hang out and play in bands together.

This Was My Night isn’t so much about a particular city or era, but rather a particular crowd of 20-something, group-house-dwelling, radical politics-having, dog-walking, (ex-)vegan straight edge punx dedicated to putting on shows in makeshift spaces on shoestring budgets.

So the 12-page review of the 2013 Damaged City Fest that opens the book is kind of overkill. And for a book aiming to document an era that produced hundreds of local bands, a lot of the same ones show up again and again — Ilsa and The Max Levine Ensemble, both terrific bands, but reflective of the authors’ personal preferences.

There are a lot of others from that period that don’t appear, either for taking a different punk-derived trajectory, or just being in different social circles. They include Deathfix, Mass Movement of the Moth, The Apes, The Shirks, The Cassettes, Medications, Imperial China and the whole Sockets Records roster. Today, as always, there isn’t one D.C. punk scene, there are many scenes, and they don’t always communicate well with each other.

‘This Was My Night & This Was A Lot of Other Nights,’ back cover

This Was My Night isn’t so much about a particular city or era, but rather a particular crowd of 20-something, group-house-dwelling, radical politics-having, dog-walking, (ex-)vegan straight edge punx dedicated to putting on shows in makeshift spaces on shoestring budgets. And in that sense, it’s really about one band, Coke Bust, whose members and fellow super-promoters Chris Moore and Nick Candela (aka Nick Tape, who’s since moved to Brazil) held this scene together mostly by themselves through sheer force of will.

Thus one of the best pieces in the book is by Nick Tape, in which he describes the benefits of booking shows at the Corpse Fortress, the famously filthy, hot, dilapidated Silver Spring house that put on memorable shows until the neighbors finally got sick of the ruckus and got them all evicted.

“As a promoter, access to a venue with no rules and no set fee is enormously helpful,” Tape writes. “The lack of a fee allows promoters of shows with mediocre turnout to still pay bands somewhat respectable amounts at the end of the night.”

The second half of the book is made up of interviews with familiar punk figures, some of which are more lucid than others (Bad Brains’ H.R. is, predictably, in another world). There’s a bittersweet chat with the now-deceased Dave Brockie of Gwar. There’s a theological discussion with Positive Force co-founder (and fellow scene historian) Mark Andersen. There’s the requisite Ian MacKaye interview — a surprisingly unique one given the man must give dozens of interviews a month — in which he takes a deep dive into the history of Georgetown.

Follos is a skilled interviewer, able to draw out rich personal stories without being too much of the fanboy that he is (and most of us who read the book are). He can also be mischievous, asking Brian Baker, “Why is it necessary for Bad Religion to have three guitarists?” and getting Ian Svenonius to accidentally agree with conservative columnist George Will.

It’s fair to wonder whether a book like this needs to exist, especially for a genre saturated in self-documentation — and especially today, when many of the bands documented still exist, and a lot of the material is already accessible online. But I’d say it does. Given the book’s ultra-insider perspective, the target readership seems to be the 50 or so people who already appear in the book.

But only an insider could tell the story of the Bobby Fisher Memorial Building, another DIY space that the Borf graffiti collective jury rigged and briefly put on art installations and punk shows before it inevitably got shut down: “Towards the end, they cut our power, because we were stealing power from a neighbor who was also stealing power,” writes Chris Moore. “We ran over 15 shows on generators. Cops never shut down the shows… Seeing 20 people installing soundproofing and insulation… that’s awesome.”

The authors of This Was My Night & This Was a Lot of Other Nights host a book-release party Monday, April 25 at Black Cat with Scanners and Mirror Motives.

Returning for its fourth edition April 7 to 10, the all-ages fest will take place at All Souls Unitarian Church, Calvary Methodist Church, Black Cat and the Pinch, all located in Northwest D.C.

Organizers are also adding 10 more bands to the already robust schedule. (See a list below.)

Tickets can be scooped at Ticketfly, D.C. record stores Smash Records and Joint Custody, Celebrated Summer Records in Baltimore and Vinyl Conflict in Richmond. A limited supply of discounted three- and two-day passes are also available.

Damaged City Fest has grown both in size and reputation since it debuted in D.C. in 2013. Bookers Chris Moore and Nick “Tape” Candela have stepped up their game for this year’s round, flying in Japanese hardcore legends Systematic Death for the occasion.

Also on the docket: lots of vegan food.

Latest additions to Damaged City Fest’s 2016 lineup in bold:

Zero Boys (Indiana)
Systematic Death (Japan)
The Avengers (California)
Sheer Mag (Pennsylvania)
Tau Cross (England)
Youth Avoiders (France)
Disguise (Ireland)
La Urss (Spain)
S.H.I.T. (Canada)
Blood Pressure (Pennsylvania)
Coke Bust (D.C.)
The Goons (D.C.)
Eel (Pennsylvania)
Caught in a Crowd (Massachusetts)
Dame (Massachusetts)
Torso (California)
Post Teens (Florida)
Rubbish (Florida)
Stalled Minds (France)
Triage (Canada)
Gaucho (Canada)
Busted Outlook (California)
Genocide Pact (D.C.)
The Pessimists (Brazil)
Sem Hastro (Brazil/U.S.)
Holder’s Scar (North Carolina)
Digital Octopus (France)
Firing Squad (Virginia)
Protester (D.C.)
Depths of Reality (Massachusetts)
Firewalker (Massachusetts)
Drug Control (California)
Odd Man Out (Washington)
Bricklayer (Washington)
Stand Off (D.C.)
Homosuperior (D.C.)
Radiation Risks (New York)
Bust Off (D.C.0
Kombat (D.C.)
Collusion (D.C.)

Organizers announced today that Damaged City 2016 will take place over four days, from April 7 to 10, at venues to be announced. So far, 33 bands are booked to play the fest’s beefiest lineup yet, with notable performances from Japanese hardcore legends Systematic Death and classic California punk band The Avengers.

Like past Damaged City headliners Negative Approach, Infest and The Mob, both Systematic Death and The Avengers date back decades. But festival co-organizer Nick “Tape” Candela says he and partner Chris Moore “made a strong effort to include a lot of fresh blood and newer bands” for next year’s edition. Philly rockers Sheer Mag, French punks Youth Avoiders, straight-edge Californians Torsö and grubby Irish punk band Disguise are among them. (See the rest of Damaged City’s preliminary 2016 lineup, below.)

As Bandwidth writer Ron Knox pointed out in 2014, Candela and Moore deserve much of the credit for reviving the District’s fabled hardcore scene, and they’ve done it without tweaking the formula. In the purist tradition of D.C. hardcore, Damaged City remains all-ages and strictly DIY, aided by a legion of volunteers.

“[Moore and I] are the only two organizers,” Candela writes in a Facebook message, “but there are dozens of folks that help out with everything.”

Volunteers clean up, provide equipment, pick up bands from the airport and — critically — open their homes to out-of-town bands. That’s a task Candela says he’s happy to delegate.

“In the past, I learned not to let too many people sleep at my house,” Candela writes. “In 2014, I got home around 4 or 5 [a.m.] from cleaning up and found that there were punks everywhere in my house.” He’d been left with nowhere to sleep.

“I didn’t have the heart to kick our foreign guests out of my room so I just went back outside and slept in my car,” Candela writes. “Lesson learned: Don’t do that again.”

Check Damaged City’s Facebook event page for ticket information and schedule updates.

Damaged City’s preliminary 2016 lineup: 

Systematic Death (Japan)
The Avengers (California)
Sheer Mag (Pennsylvania)
Youth Avoiders (France)
Torsö (California)
Disguise (Ireland)
La Urss (Spain)
Obstruct (U.K.)
Blood Pressure (Pennsylvania)
The Goons (D.C.)
Eel (Pennsylvania)
Caught in a Crowd (Massachusetts)
Dame (Massachusetts)
Post Teens (Florida)
Rubbish (Florida)
Stalled Minds (France)
Busted Outlook (California)
The Pessimists (Brazil)
Sem Hastro (Brazil/U.S.)
Holders Scar (North Carolina)
Firing Squad (Virginia)
Protester (D.C.)
Depths of Reality (Massachusetts)
Firewalker (Massachusetts)
Drug Control (California)
Odd Man Out (Washington)
Collusion (D.C.)
Stand Off (D.C.)
Homosuperior (D.C.)
Radiation Risks (New York)
Bust Off (D.C.)
Kombat (D.C.)
Spite (D.C.)

Brazilian artist and musician Xavero had spent the last six months in D.C.’s Brookland neighborhood taking part in an informal punk-rock exchange program. While the mononymous artist lived here, he spent his time learning English, befriending some of the scene’s elder statesman and for the first time in his life, fronting a D.C. punk band.

That band was Sem Hastro, a temporary group that would nevertheless make a mark on the city’s vibrant, growing hardcore scene. Technically, Sem Hastro disbanded when Xavero went back to Brazil. But it left behind a demo recording that rises from a thick, primordial punk-rock sludge.

In a local hardcore scene that tends to follow in its forebears’ footsteps, Sem Hastro stands out. Over the demo’s five songs, punk bleeds into blastbeat hardcore. The tempo slows. Guitar solos abound. Its spirit resides in a time and place other than 2014 D.C.—maybe the West Coast, sometime in the 1980s, alongside The Circle Jerks and Black Flag.

The songs are also in Portuguese.

“It’s funny,” says Xavero, sitting under a streetlight outside of The Dougout on one of his last nights in D.C. “A lot of people started liking the band because I was singing in Portuguese.”

Sem Hastro’s story is really the story of Xavero, a 24-year-old punk rocker who began swapping emails with local hardcore band Coke Bust from his home in São Paulo more than two years ago. A bassist in his own straight-edge band, Disease, he had contacted Coke Bust vocalist Nick Candela to try to persuade the group to play his city. Later, when Xavero and a friend visited Berlin for an art exhibition—Xavero was invited to paint—they stayed in Europe for the summer and eventually caught a Coke Bust show in Prague. The musician and Candela became fast friends. When Coke Bust finally made it to Brazil in January, they crashed with Xavero.

“In Sao Paulo, we were just hanging out, having a good time after the tour ended,” says Candela, who also goes by Nick Tape. Afterward, Coke Bust invited Xavero and his friends to visit D.C. during the festival Candela and bandmate Chris Moore booked: Damaged City. “It was an insane opportunity,” Xavero says. “I’d never been to America. I really wanted to go.”

In April he came. He had a six-month visa, but just a few English words to work with. When he flew into New York and turned up at Union Station a few days before Damaged City, he called Candela but struggled to say where he was or what he needed. Candela managed to get the message and pick him up. When festival time came, Xavero helped out onsite, selling hot dogs to punk kids.

Even with the language barrier, Xavero made friends. He settled in. As the day of his return flight neared, he realized he wasn’t ready to leave. He asked Candela—who he had taken to calling “Nicktape,” like it was one word—if he could stay on his couch in Brookland.

So Xavero stayed, even while Coke Bust went on tour. By the time the band got back from their West Coast jaunt, Candela had come up with an idea: Let’s start a punk band.

Back in Brazil, Xavero plays in Disease and tinkers with a few smaller projects. But in those bands, he plays guitar or bass. He called his new band Sem Hastro—an intentionally abstract band name that has no English translation—and decided he would sing. In Portuguese.

“It wouldn’t make sense if I were singing in English,” Xavero says. “It’s not my language. It’s hard to write in English. We listen to a lot of Crudos [the legendary Chicago punk band that sang in Spanish]. We knew it would be cool.”

First Sem Hastro wanted to play straight-ahead punk, Xavero says, the songs slower-paced and melodic behind his ghostly, guttural screams. But with the band’s lineup—which included Candela, scene mainstay and Sick Fix member Pat Vogel and Coke Bust’s James Willett—a distinct D.C. hardcore influence crept in.

“It’s the most punk band either one of us has ever been in. But it’s still hardcore.” —Nick Candela

“It’s the most punk band either one of us has ever been in,” Candela says, referring to himself and Xavero. “But it’s still hardcore.”

The next steps felt easy, Xavero says. They wrote a few songs, practiced four or five times and played their first show at the end of July. The band was a quick hit, says the singer—possibly because they sounded so different.

Six months can fly by. The band played its last show—for now—at the Rocketship Sept. 15. The following week, Xavero boarded a plane.

Under the streetlight outside of the Dougout, Xavero says he doesn’t want to leave. He has friends here now. His English sparkles. He wants to keep pushing with Sem Hastro and see where it goes. But he can’t, he reasons. Overstaying a visa is a mess he doesn’t want to make.

But he’ll be back, Xavero pledges—as soon as March of 2015, when Disease plans to tour through here. Candela says next time, they’re going to work on finding a legal way for him to stay permanently. Until that day comes, the band will be waiting.

Photos, top to bottom: Sem Hastro at the Slam Pad by Michael Andrade; Sem Hastro at the Rocketship by Ron Akins.

Moore, prolific punk-show promoter and drummer for D.C. hardcore band Coke Bust, is a key component in the engine that makes Damaged City go. He and bandmate Nick Candela booked the bands and the venue, and now here Moore is, in the packed chapel walkway that doubles as the festival’s marketplace, trying to make sure the whole thing stays on the rails. As fast as the band plays, Cülo has a reputation for slowing things down. So Moore heads back to the stage to make sure the band of mutants—and everything else—is keeping pace.

Damaged City is too important to go off course. The weekend-long all-ages festival, held two weekends ago primarily at St. Stephen’s and Columbia Heights dive The Pinch, is a celebration of hardcore in the city that birthed it and continues to embrace its ethics with more zeal than any other punk scene in the country. Alongside bigger headliners like Infest and Crudos, 10 D.C.-area hardcore bands played the fest, many of them part of a wave of surprisingly young musicians that their older peers say may be the greatest hope for D.C. hardcore in a generation.

But a dozen-odd bands doesn’t necessarily make a scene. What makes a scene are the few people who bring it all together. So there Moore stands, dutifully watching by the stage while Cülo sets up, sound-checks for maybe a tick too long, and rips into its set.

* * *

“Honestly, the best hardcore punk bands are kids between the ages of 13 and 19,” says Moore, a relative elder statesman at 27. “And there’s a ton of them. And they’re all [freaking] awesome. It’s crazy.”

Right now, D.C.’s hardcore scene has one of the most promising assortment of bands it’s seen in a long time, and many of their members are still in high school. The young Vile Faith put out an outstanding seven-song tape before disbanding last month, and some of its members—including drummer Robin Zeijlon—formed Pure Disgust and Public Suicide, the latter of which has its own EP coming out later this year. Nuclear Age released a blistering demo last fall. There’s Misled Youth, whose new album is already streaming online and should be released physically in a few months. Longer in the tooth are Red Death—whose January demo will probably go down as one of the year’s best D.C. hardcore recordings—the more metal Genocide Pact, straight-edge band Protester, and scene mainstays like Sick Fix, Give, and Moore’s own Coke Bust, among others.

Warning: Explicit lyrics.

In a way, the young kids have an advantage, because they’re more likely to live with their parents and they don’t bear the brunt of an increasingly unaffordable D.C. But those kids could also disappear from the area soon, as they go off to college or try their fortunes in another city. Moore—along with Candela—is part of the force that keeps the home fires burning.

Moore books and promotes dozens of local DIY shows a year. He hauls his PA from show to show. He stands outside of venues and hands out flyers. At Damaged City, he was the person running drum-kit components to and from the stage, depending on what the band needed. He also started a practice space behind his Takoma Park home that bands can use for as long as they need. “As far as I know, [it’s] the only affordable place you can just go and pay, like, $10 an hour and use a drum kit there,” says Priests drummer Daniele Yandel. “That’s so important for people who want to start bands.”

Moore tries to offers the kind of guidance he struggled to find when he first got involved in D.C. punk a decade ago.

Born in Montgomery County, Md., Moore was first introduced to punk rock around age 13. His mother was into ‘80s new wave and had punk friends from her days growing up in D.C. “That inadvertently exposed me to that stuff,” he says.

With his mom’s support, he started his first band in middle school, called Munk Petal, a spoonerism of “punk metal,” neither of which really described his band. Moore starts to characterize it in musical terms, then stops. “It’s what an eighth-grader’s first band would sound like,” he says.

Chris Moore

Moore and his Munk Petal bandmates played their first show at his high school, just across the street from his family’s home. It went off as well as it could have, with his friends moshing in front of the stage. But midway through the set, the school’s security guards broke up the pit, saying it was too dangerous, and shut down the show.

Moore had an idea. He called home and moved the gig across the street to his mom’s basement. Over the next few years of high school, Moore says, he and his friends put on 30 or 40 shows in that basement, including performances by regional and national bands. “It started to become a regular spot for suburban Maryland kids to come to shows,” he says.

By 2005, Moore had already carved out space in the D.C. hardcore scene with his high school band, Magrudergrind, which started when Moore was 15 and went on to tour with bigger punk and metal bands across the country.

“I think it’s important to involve younger kids,” says Chris Moore. “It’s what makes D.C. special.”

But back at home, the scene wasn’t great, Moore says. When he first began booking gigs, there weren’t many active DIY venues, and music tastes were different: People were listening to screamo—which, for all of its punk influences, didn’t always adhere to the same value structure as hardcore. The older D.C. punk community had also wound down considerably, and by then “the majority of the older people in the area were [jerks], or I thought they were [jerks],” he says. “They were really alienating to younger kids.”

If that particular crew had been his only exposure to D.C. punk, he might have lost interest and dropped out, Moore says. But around the same time, he met Matt Moffatt and Pat Vogel from Crispus Attucks, a band that anchored the city’s hardcore scene at the time. They welcomed Moore and his teenage friends. Moore says they answered questions, got them gigs, and generally helped out however they could. That stuck with Moore. Ten years later, when kids ask for his advice or guidance, Moore does what he can to help. It’s his way of perpetuating an all-ages tradition that started with the days of harDCore and the early Dischord scene.

“I think it’s important to involve younger kids,” he says, whether it’s getting them shows or involving them in the process of booking shows themselves. “It’s what makes D.C. special.” Plus, he knows if he doesn’t help those kids—if he and folks his age are dismissive or cold—“the scene kind of dies with those older people.”

* * *

Just before Give takes the stage at St. Stephen’s, Ray Brown sits in the chapel’s pews, his elbows on his knees, and thinks about what hardcore in the city means to him.

“Community, definitely community,” he says. Brown is the 16-year-old bass player for The Black Sparks, another teenage group with as much potential as any in the scene. And he says the young bands are a big part of that community. Among them, he says, “in the past year there have been, like, 10 demos recorded.”

Brown appreciates the fact that his band’s relative success is made easier by D.C.’s hardcore tradition. “D.C.’s probably the only place where it’s almost impossible to go to a show at any age and be denied, like you can’t come in,” he says. “And that’s all because of Ian MacKaye, doing everything he did to make sure shows were all-ages.”

The resurgence of young, talented bands coursing through the scene is refreshing, says Tim Mullaney, singer and guitarist for D.C. death-metal band Genocide Pact. For years, he’s used his portable, door-to-door recording kit to tape demos for punk bands, including some of the young ones. Mullaney says there were some lean years earlier this decade, when all-ages spaces were in short supply and bands weren’t as numerous or active. But while it’s had its slumps, hardcore punk has never completely died here—and people like Moore help make sure it continues on for decades. “I don’t ever see those guys quitting booking shows,” Mullaney says. “There hasn’t been a year since I’ve started going to shows that Chris hasn’t been booking four or five big shows a year.”

Meanwhile, Mullaney sees new kids picking up the baton, like Robin Zeijlon, who books shows at Tenleytown restaurant Casa Fiesta and elsewhere.

The scene is in a different, healthier place than it was when he started out, Moore says. “I do think it’s important and it’s cool that this younger crop of D.C. punk bands is getting attention,” Moore says. Some of them are planning tours this summer, too—and that’s how the music and the message spreads.

“If I were a teenager, and I saw this ripping teenage band play my town, I’d think: Oh [man], I could do that. I want to do that.”

This article has been updated to emphasize the fact that Nick Candela also booked Damaged City Fest alongside Chris Moore.

Top photo: Cülo at Damaged City Fest. Image of Chris Moore courtesy of Chris Moore.