After making the rounds at film festivals and showings worldwide, D.C. punk-rock documentary Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington DC is now available for purchase on Vimeo. But that’s just one of the many downloads floating around the Internet, according to director Scott Crawford. He says Salad Days has been stolen widely online before its formal release later this year.

“There have been multiple versions of the film posted all over torrents and YouTube,” emails Crawford, who used to edit Bandwidth. “Overseas even worse. Really bums me out.”

Crawford and director of photography Jim Saah (who both appeared on a Salad Days panel I moderated for NPR in May) began selling downloads of the film on Vimeo for 30 days starting Aug. 4. It comes out on DVD in September, followed by Hulu, On Demand and other services, Crawford says.

But in the months leading up to the film’s release, multiple cuts of Salad Days have popped up illegally online. Crawford says he started noticing them about two months ago. “The versions I saw were ones sent to film festivals as well other versions along the way,” Crawford writes. He says he doesn’t know how pirates got their hands on copies; he says it “could be anything.”

When I checked today, torrent search engines Kickass Torrents and The Pirate Bay yielded more links for Mac DeMarco‘s 2014 album Salad Days than links obviously related to Crawford and Saah’s documentary, but the torrent universe is vast, and not all files may be labeled accurately. The same could be said about YouTube. Update: Crawford says that the film’s distributor, MVD Entertainment Group, had the illegal links taken down.

Online pirating of music has been a hot-button issue since the dawn of file-sharing services like Napster. But music fans might not know as much about the impact of movie pirating. An Indiewire op-ed written by Ruth Vitale of anti-piracy group CreativeFuture and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema CEO Tim League says illegal downloading could be partially responsible for a recent decline in film releases.

“Whether you’re employed by a major studio or a do-it-yourself creator, if you’re involved in the making of TV or film, it’s safe to assume that piracy takes a big cut out of your business,” the op-ed says.

It doesn’t sound like Crawford expected a certain amount of pirating. When he first saw people illegitimately distributing his film, he says he “was pretty shocked, actually.”

Salad Days debuted in New York in 2014, later selling out a string of local showings at AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland. It’s traveled extensively since then, screening in dozens of U.S. cities as well as Canada, Russia and Argentina. The documentary covers the early years of D.C.’s storied punk-rock scene, talking to musicians, venue operators, label owners and fans about the development and cultural impact of punk in the capital region.

Asked how pirating has affected his bottom line, Crawford writes, “[It’s] really hard to say.”

Crawford and Saah ran a successful Kickstarter campaign for Salad Days in 2012, raising nearly $55,000 to produce the documentary. But that hasn’t been enough for the filmmakers to break even, the director says.

Income from Salad Days is “not even close to covering the costs of the film,” Crawford writes.

The documentary Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in the Nation’s Capital is available on Vimeo for a limited time and on DVD starting Sept. 18.

“I’ve come here to feel the pain of the wound,” Strummer says of his escape.

In his first full-length documentary, I Need A Dodge: Joe Strummer On The Run, English filmmaker Nick Hall investigates what seems like a nearly impossible task to find Strummer’s car, a Dodge GT3700, lost in Madrid more than 20 years ago.

Why search for the Dodge? Because Strummer — who died 13 years ago — loved the car. It transported him from Madrid to Granada and the rest of Spain during his creative crisis. But the car is simply, well, a vehicle. The film’s real aim is to document Strummer’s search for a new identity. It captures his devastation as The Clash disbands for good, then follows his recovery as he dedicates himself to producing a record for 091, a young and unknown band from Granada.

The tale of Strummer’s 18-month “Spanish period” is told mostly through the memories of other musicians, who were first enamored by The Clash leader, then became his friends and collaborators. Though the film will probably captivate Clash fans the most, its themes appeal to anyone who has ever had to shift gears in life.

Before I Need a Dodge premieres in D.C. Saturday at St. Stephen’s Church, I spoke with Hall by phone about Strummer’s love of cars, what Spain offered him that England could not and his first creative endeavors after The Clash’s demise.

Bandwidth: How did you first learn about Joe Strummer’s lost Dodge?

Nick Hall: When Joe Strummer died in 2002, I noticed that Spanish guys that had known him were sharing their experiences in an online forum. And there were some great anecdotes, some great tales in there.

The car was the breakthrough, really. When I was investigating, I spoke to a guy who was very close friends with Joe Strummer in the ‘80s and he sent me his cassette of Joe being interviewed in the Glastonbury Music Festival in the U.K. in 1997, some years after his Spanish period. And that is when he says, “If anyone knows where my car is, please get in touch.” Joe puts this call out to the people of Spain to help him find his car. That kind of gave me a trigger, a good narrative thread — a contemporary search for the car. So yeah, that is kind of how it all came together.

What made the Dodge 3700GT such a sought-after car for Strummer?

It’s quite an emblematic car in Spain. An industrialist who actually make trucks and military vehicles for Franco, so for the dictatorship — he always dreamt of making a luxury family car.
He contacted various car manufacturers around the world to invite them to open a factory in Spain. And Dodge and Chrysler agreed to it and they built this Spanish Dodge near Madrid for a number of years.

On the other side, it came from Joe’s romantic streak and his love all things classic American. He loved all that ‘70s America thing — big cars, big TVs and all that stuff. When he released “I’m So Bored With The U.S.A.,” he kind of talks about all these things which deep down he actually loves. He felt his path in music and his love of music to all these great American musicians. And cars [are] part of that. A big American car in Madrid just caught his eye, and he said, “I need one of those,” to one of the bands he knew in Madrid. And they tracked one down for him.

What’s it like to drive a Dodge 3700GT?

Quite clunky. They are not easy to drive. Every time we stopped filming, we had to push start it or get some help to restart it.

There was some filming in the scrapyard at the end. There were four guys working in the scrapyard and each of them had a different method of jumpstarting the Dodge, one of which included throwing petrol straight into the car. You got this, like, knicker-high flame shooting out, you jumped back and the car started.

So they are not the most reliable vehicles, I think. But they look good. That’s the main thing. I think that is what Joe would say. Image before reliability.

What was the music scene in Spain like when Strummer got there?

It was post-dictatorship, and the lid blew off after so many years of control. That was really the trigger for it. Franco dying.

There was an explosion of creativity in the late ‘70s, which was still going pretty strong when Joe Strummer arrived in Madrid. The Movida Madrilena — the Madrid Movement — was the most famous musical movement in Spanish rock-pop history.

It was probably very exciting for someone like Joe Strummer who was getting kind of ground down by the politics of his own band and the mistakes that he made.

Why did he choose to work with this basically unknown band, 091?

The [members of 091] don’t know. They can’t remember whose idea it was. It was sort of an organic thing.

I think the best guess is that he needed a new challenge. One of the people in the film, one of the Radio Futura guys, said [Strummer] wanted to rediscover why he got involved with music in the first place through the energy of a young band who were struggling to subsist.

I honestly think that Joe thought, “I’m going to do something big here. I’m going to get this band on the map.”

What spurred Strummer to try his hand at producing?

He needed a new creative outlet and it offered him that possibility.

I think he imagined himself as the producer of London Calling, Guy Stevens. Stevens had a direct, psychological attack approach to production — swinging ladders around and almost taking the head off of the members of the band, pouring red wine into the piano — and I think that left a mark on all those guys. They thought, “That is it. That is how you produce a record.”

It’s not in the film, but one of the guys said he would have liked to have been Guy Stevens. That was the production role that he was trying to emulate.

Photo: Juan Jesus Garcia

Who knows. The metaphor of loss is quite present. The album [that Strummer produces] doesn’t go well. He leaves Spain. And the car goes missing. Yes. Whether finding it years later was so important to him, I have never — I don’t know. I have my doubts. He would have liked to have found it.

I prefer the metaphor of the Dodge: getting out of the way of something.

Joe said, “I need a Dodge. I need to avoid all the problems I’m getting back in England.” He was very clear on that metaphor.

Do you think that Strummer tended towards obsession?

Its amazing. Twelve years later he is still talking about this car on Spanish radio. He hadn’t given up hope that the car may turn up.

He recorded an album in L.A. in the late ‘80s just after the Spanish [period], and he got himself a Thunderbird. A Thunderbird is better than a Spanish Dodge. But he still wanted to track down this Dodge.

There were no half measures in anything he did. We hear about him and his time with The Clash, he was quite ruthless in a lot of the decisions that he made. Definitely determined, possibly obsessive, he is a strong character. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised that he is still looking for the car, probably still wondering now what happened to it.

The film shows July 25 at 7 p.m. at St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church. It follows a preview of in-progress film Punk the Capital. Proceeds benefit We Are Family.

Correction: An earlier version of this post referred to Mick Jones as The Clash’s bass guitarist. He played guitar. The post has also been updated to clarify that the film encompasses the mid-1980s, not just 1983.

A new documentary film called Salad Days: A Decade of Punk in Washington, DC looks back at that scene. NPR Music will host a screening in, appropriately enough, the nation’s capital, and you’re invited. Salad Days captures an exciting time in this city by pulling together retrospective interviews with rare film footage from the days when harDCore punk was exploding. The film was made by Scott Crawford, a youngster back in those days who had a fanzine that covered those magical times.

Scott Crawford will be on hand after the screening to answer questions along with other panelists including Salad Days director of photography Jim Saah (who documented the scene as a photographer), musician Brian Baker (of Minor Threat, Bad Religion and Dag Nasty) and moderator Ally Schweitzer of WAMU.

The screening will take place on Tuesday, May 5 at 7:00 p.m. If you’d like to join us, go to this page to reserve your free ticket.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

A new film documents the vibrant pop music scene that existed before the Khmer Rogue. Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten: Cambodia’s Lost Rock And Roll, which took director John Pirozzi 10 years to make, opens this week in New York.

One of the artists included in the film, Sinn Sisamouth, still is considered the greatest Cambodian singer of all time, an artist who embraced and adapted Western styles for Cambodian audiences.

“I think he was actually both Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra,” Pirozzi tells NPR’s Robert Siegel.

During the 20 years when pop music exploded in Cambodia, the musicians incorporated influences from around the world. They would imitate what we would call surf rock. There’s also a very surprising Afro-Cuban music trend that started to blend in, and even covers of Western artists like Santana. The sounds from other countries were constantly changing Cambodian music.

One of the most fascinating things Pirozzi discovered while making the film was the very short lag time between music coming out of the West and the Cambodian musicians’ ability to pick up on it.

“I think,” Pirozzi says, “Western music for Cambodians was something that goes back to pre-rock ‘n’ roll. I mean, there were dance halls in Phnom Penh, and big band music and crooners were very popular in the ’50s. People like Perry Como, Pat Boone, Frank Sinatra were getting into Cambodia through the elite, through the wealthy Cambodians who were being educated in France and coming back with records.”

Initially, urban elites only had access to the ’60s discotheque scenes shown in the film. But as American GIs began broadcasting close to Cambodia, Western music opened up to more and more people. By the time the ’70s came around, right before the Khmer Rouge came into power, it was more accessible for Cambodians.

The rise of the Khmer Rouge spelled the end of the booming pop scene. Foreign sounds were banned and only traditional music was allowed. The capital city of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, was emptied out.

“I think most of the famous singers — like Sinn Sisamouth, Ros Serey Sothea — were so high profile, it was impossible for them to hide their identities,” Pirozzi says. “But the backing musicians — the drummers, the guitar players, the bass players — they weren’t as well known, so they could pretty much see what was happening and were able to hide their identities, some of them.

“You had to really pick up on the situation quickly, and understand you had to hide your identity or else you could potentially be a target.”

Sieng Vanthy is one of the few famous musicians who managed to survive.

“I told them I was a banana seller,” she says in the film. “If I told them I was a singer, I would have been killed.”

“When we interviewed her,” Pirozzi says, “no one had really asked her about this time in her life for a long time, and you have to remember these people had their identities stripped from them. They had to start whole new lives, even after the Khmer Rouge, coming back to a city that was completely destroyed, a country that was completely destroyed.

“So conducting the interviews and asking people to access this time was a very intense process.”

When Pirozzi started the film, he was told by many people that he wouldn’t find anything in terms of photographs and archival footage — but a lot of the music was still out there.

“People held onto it, people hid it, people saved it,” he says. “There’s so many people who came to me when they found out about the film who had little pieces to the puzzle — who had songs, who had photos, who had maybe a little bit of footage. And so the film sort of came together in a very communal way, with people who really cared about the music and cared about the country.”

The documentary plays April 29 at the AFI Silver Theatre And Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland, with a concert afterward.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Filmfest DC’s 2015 offerings include two music categories: “Reel Jazz” and the hybrid concert/film series “Rhythm On And Off The Screen.” Subjects range from calypso stars (The Glamour Boyz Again) to steel drums (PAN! Our Music Odyssey) to fascinating figures in jazz (Be Known: The Mystery of Kahil El’Zabar).

But with such an eclectic lineup, the fest might leave casual filmgoers with no natural starting point. So our critic Andrew Lapin looked at one film from both music categories. He found one documentary worth the reasonable $13 admission, and another that doesn’t rise to the level of its $45 admission price on opening night. — Ally Schweitzer

Check out FilmFest DC’s complete 2015 schedule at filmfestdc.org.

See: Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Case Of The Three-Sided Dream

It’s quite a sight — and sound — when, with three saxophones already strapped to his shoulder, blind jazz master Rahsaan Roland Kirk reaches over them and pulls out a flute. Or when he’s in close up and so many reeds are hovering in the frame that one drifts toward his nose… and then enters it, and he plays through his nostril while chatting away with the audience.

Jazz purists have argued that Kirk’s style isn’t a display of outsized talent but rather outsized showmanship. The biggest pleasure of Adam Kahan’s documentary on the New York-based musician, Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Case Of The Three-Sided Dream (watch the trailer above), is seeing his artistry explained and defended by family, friends and bandmates, interspersed with archival footage of his performances so that we can judge for ourselves.

Rahsaan Roland Kirk

Even the existence of those performances, as we learn, was a hard-earned victory, as Kirk had to spearhead a protest group — the Jazz and People’s Movement — to persuade TV producers in the 1970s to air more jazz acts. Making noise on the set of The Dick Cavett Show, according to the movie, helped sway Ed Sullivan to book Kirk on his own show.

But to call Kirk, who died in 1977, a showman isn’t a knock against him. The film depicts the man as a large personality both on and off the stage, a political firebrand who insisted on referring to jazz as “black classical music” and to planet Earth as “Plantation Earth.” Kahan intercuts his footage with animated interludes exploring Kirk’s dreamy philosophies. A sluggish opening third aside, Rahsaan Roland Kirk is an exuberant, entertaining look at one of jazz’s most unique voices. And it’s one of several Filmfest DC documentaries on jazz, a lineup that also includes films about Kahil El Zabar, Jaco Pastorius and Clark Terry. — Andrew Lapin

The film shows April 23 at 8:30 p.m. and April 24 at 6:30 p.m. at E Street Cinema.

Skip: Tango Glories

Tango Glories

The opening night selection for this year’s Filmfest is a lifeless and mediocre attempt to weave together decades of Argentine history via the regional dance. But at least attendees who plunk down $45 for the evening will also be treated to a tango party. Hopefully it’s better than the film it’s celebrating.

In Tango Glories, Buenos Aires psychiatrist Ezequiel (Gaston Pauls) cares for Fermín (Hector Alterio), an elderly patient with one of those contrived, primed-for-catharsis mental disorders favored by the movies: He only speaks in lyrics to tango songs. We can guess that this ailment has been triggered by something from Fermín’s past, perhaps related to Argentina’s ugly political history. We can further guess that Ezequiel will decide to learn the tango in an attempt to better understand both his patient and his gorgeous dancer granddaughter Eva (Antonella Costa). Occasional flashbacks to the younger Fermín offer retro costumes and production design, but the present hangs on Ezequiel, who often seems more lifeless than his patient. The film also inexplicably condenses the part where he, in fact, learns how to tango.

Tango Glories was written and co-directed by Oliver Kolker, a professional tango dancer, and the tango scenes are the highlights, shot in a captivating fashion that captures the dance’s inherent eroticism. But the rest of the film suffers from lethargic pacing that doesn’t seem to befit the subject matter at all (a stereotypically overbearing Jewish mother isn’t helping, either). Rhythm-and-dance fans should save their money and seek out some of the festival’s other selections, including Colombia’s Ciudad Delirio (about salsa), the U.S.’s Tap World (tap) and Trinidad and Tobago’s The Glamour Boyz Again (Calypso). — Andrew Lapin

The film opens Filmfest DC April 16 at 7 p.m. at AMC Mazza Gallerie. Includes party with tango dancers.

WAMU is a media sponsor of Filmfest DC.

The strange, disputed tale of Led Zeppelin’s show at the Wheaton Youth Center is the subject of Led Zeppelin Played Here, the latest documentary by Heavy Metal Parking Lot co-director Jeff Krulik. A revised version of the film, which first premiered almost two years ago, shows Wednesday at the Avalon and Jan. 20 at Black Cat.

For five years, Krulik attempted to solve the mystery of Zeppelin’s alleged Wheaton show, tracking down record company promoters, interviewing supposed attendees and even asking Jimmy Page about it at a red carpet event at the Kennedy Center.

Though about a half-dozen Wheaton Youth Center regulars claimed that the show happened, there’s no real evidence to support their claims. No tickets for the concert have been found, since the center sold tickets at the door and used hand stamps. Fliers probably weren’t printed, either — promoter and DJ Barry Richards used his radio show to hype the concert.

In advance of the two local screenings, Bandwidth talked to Krulik about the birth of the concert industry, the fallibility of memory and why he makes films about bands he doesn’t like.

This interview was conducted over phone and email and has been edited for clarity and length.

Bandwidth: You mention in the documentary that you didn’t attend shows at the Wheaton Youth Center yourself. What fascinated you enough about the center to make a documentary about it?

Jeff Krulik

Jeff Krulik: Well, the reason why I didn’t go to any of the concerts is because I would’ve been 8 or 9 years old. I’m interested in these stories, but I wasn’t around. My curiosity, my obsession — a lot of that drives the documentary. I’ve always had an interest in the local cultural history or this area. I grew up here — I’m from Bowie and I went to the University of Maryland.

Did you know many of the people in the documentary personally?

I knew some of them personally. My original intent was to honor the Laurel Pop Festival, which was the unheralded, somewhat forgotten festival one month before Woodstock. Clearly if you went to it, you remembered it, but anyone who didn’t go to it didn’t realize it was going on. I’d wanted to do a documentary about that, but tracing the arc of Led Zeppelin allowed for a different kind of story because they had such a meteoric rise that year. And if you realize that maybe they played their first local gig at this modest youth center, in a gymnasium, it was pretty incredible. Not out of the realm of possibility, because a lot of those bands had humble starts — this was a place that other bands were playing.

It’s like I said in the movie — it started out to be a nostalgia trip, and now it’s become a mystery. And I didn’t do it because I’m a Led Zeppelin fan. I’m very interested in the cultural and music industry in this area and concertgoing and the concert scene and people who carved out the concert business from nothing. I mean, it was all unprecedented. These days the business is very button-down and ironclad. A very solid, billion dollar business that’s organized and is like any other multimillion-dollar business controlled by corporations. And it didn’t used to be like that.

“These days the [concert] business is very button-down and ironclad. A very solid, billion dollar business that’s organized and is like any other multimillion-dollar business controlled by corporations. And it didn’t used to be like that.”

When did these shows stop happening? When was the industry fully cemented, or institutionalized?

That kind of evolved in the early ‘70s as people became promoters. In this case, you had the Cellar Door, which was a club in Georgetown that basically realized that the owners were bringing in acts but the club could only hold 100 people. And there was such demand for the acts, they started putting on acts in Lisner Auditorium and selling 1,500 tickets in one night. All of the sudden the light bulb goes off.

Do you think that people remember the show differently?

This thing has kind of turned into a Rashomon. People remember things differently and that’s the challenge of it — to kind of connect the dots and see if they can be cross-checked. No one has come up with any smoking gun, like a picture or a diary entry. I don’t have hard proof, but I have supporting evidence, and I believe that it took place. You have people’s stories, and you have to kind of cross-check. For the most part, they do.

The popular belief was that it didn’t happen. It wound up going onto the Led Zeppelin website. The website now lists it as an unconfirmed rumor. The next night in Pittsburgh is not even listed; it was for a while, and that’s another phantom show. If there was a residency or if there’s ads in the paper, you’ve got proof. They were in Detroit, which ended Sunday night, and Thursday they played for three nights at the Boston Tea Party, which was advertised, and it took place. There’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, where, I mean, they were somewhere.

We obviously live in an age where perhaps every single gig can be documented, whether it’s a Facebook event, post on a venue website or an Instagram picture. Is there anything lost by this, or should we be glad that we have documentation to keep our memories from falling victim to confabulation?

I suppose the verdict is still out on it. I’m biased because I came up during a period where there wasn’t such excessive documentation and you clearly were at that event or concert or party or day job and you basically had that experience as it unfolded, without sharing with the world. There seemed something most pure and genuine and more real about it. Of course, at 53 years old now, I can’t remember squat, and I’m envious of friends who wrote down every club show they saw, or in general kept a diary or journal. One of my most prized possessions is a creative writing class journal I kept for one semester in college. Boy, does that bring me back, and I really cherish that.

Why are you screening Led Zeppelin Played Here now?

We’ve changed it around a little bit, tightened it up. It’s because there are still venues that are looking for things to screen, and there are a lot of people who haven’t seen it and may have heard about it. I don’t have it online or for sale because of the rights issues. These kind of curated screenings are the only way to see it. I’ve had screenings with 500 people and screenings with five people. I’m willing to screen it anywhere that will have me. If it’s local, I’ll be there. It’s always fun to have a conversation afterwards and people will add their own commentary and stories and sometimes people will show up and say that they were there.

Do you think that these youth center shows were unique to D.C., Maryland and Virginia, or do you think that this was a nationwide thing?

I think it happened all over the country. Nobody starts off headlining — everyone starts in a garage somewhere.

As with Judas Priest in Heavy Metal Parking Lot, you’re not a Led Zeppelin superfan. Why did you decide to make documentaries about groups that you weren’t necessarily interested in yourself?

It’s not about the bands. The bands are the vehicle to explore something. In this case, I have always been interested in the machinery of rock concerts. And quite honestly, I’m interested in historical preservation. It’s my fascination with the places than the artists or the musicians — the buildings, the gathering spots. Heavy Metal Parking Lot was about the people, it wasn’t about Judas Priest. Both [co-director John Heyn] and I recognized that it was about the fans. The fact that it was Judas Priest playing that night — it was just dumb luck. We didn’t seek out Judas Priest that night, we just wanted to go to a heavy metal concert. … It was about the fans and about that scene that wasn’t profiled in the spirit that we did because no one really had cameras. We were using these clunky professional cameras from this public access studio, walking around this parking lot.

A theme in both Heavy Metal Parking Lot and Led Zeppelin Played Here is rock fandom and building an identity around being a fan of rock or a particular rock band. Is that something that you had in mind when you set out to make either or both films?

I wanted it to be more about the emergence of rock concert culture than anyone one particular artist. Led Zeppelin happens to be my hook to tell this story. It’s also a film about the vagaries of memory. And that’s something that emerged afterwards, I didn’t set out with that agenda originally. Often a film doesn’t truly emerge until after you’ve begun and collected hours of footage, at least that’s how I tend to work.

With Heavy Metal Parking Lot, what little agenda we had was to just focus on the fans and see what we might get. This was a time when heavy metal might not have been in the mainstream as today, but was still a dominant presence on MTV via Headbangers Ball, that sort of thing. You knew it was a popular arena attraction, even if there was little to no airplay. The bottom line is we didn’t necessarily set out with any one particular vision or goal in mind, we just plunged in and started gathering footage and then [watched] what eventually would emerge. Of course, with Heavy Metal Parking Lot, we had that answer in two hours. Led Zeppelin Played Here took nearly five years.

What is it that makes you a believer that this show happened?

I want to believe. I mean, I sought out as much evidence as I could find. I still wanted to find more proof, and I wanted to end the film. I started it in 2008, and I had to set a deadline — which was January 20, 2013 [ed note: the day of President Obama’s second inauguration] — to have something together for the preview screening. There are some minor tweaks here and there. But I just think that I was able to present as much supporting evidence. There was a public hearing. And someone said that I made this film without a shred of supporting evidence. I don’t have hard proof — but if you have some supporting evidence, that can help make the case.

The film shows Jan. 14 at Avalon and Jan. 20 at Black Cat.

Now they’re touring the world with massive crowds hearing these heartfelt tunes and trying to stay true to their humble selves. This short film, Road Dawgs, directed by Jay Buim, who also did the “Seasons (Waiting On You)” video, is a glimpse at a band who now knows things have changed but is trying to keep it real.

You can watch Future Islands’ 2011 Tiny Desk Concert here.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The conversation series D.C. Music Salon hosts a preview of Punk the Capital tonight at its regular venue, the Watha T. Daniel Library in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood. Co-director James Schneider says to expect a showing of early, pre-1980 material, not all of which will appear in the final product.

“While Punk the Capital covers the rise of HarDCore in D.C. up through circa 1984, we will be showing sections of the lesser-known era,” Schneider writes in an email. He writes that “quite a few less-familiar faces” will turn up in some of the footage, as well as lots of unseen archival tape.

“Half of the material we will show probably won’t make the final cut, but I think it will be of deep interest to D.C. folks,” Schneider writes.

Consider that an open invitation to the nerdiest D.C. punk fans.

The D.C. Music Salon hosts a preview of Punk the Capital tonight at 7 p.m. at Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Neighborhood Library, 1630 7th St. NW. Admission is free.

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

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.