The DIY Decade: Why the 1990s needed the Mechanic's Guide

This is part 2 in a series on the label Simple Machines. The last post was a focused look at the Mechanic’s Guide distributed by the label, and the next will take a look at what happened when the label’s founders tried to help DIY music communities take on the Internet.

I’ve also started collecting all of the music I mention on this blog in a collection on Freq! If you want to come hang out on Freq to talk about music or catalogue stuff you like, just request an invite. I’ll approve you pretty fast.

The popular idea of American music in the 1980s boils down to the Top Gun soundtrack. Glossy synths, decadent pop and rock with crystalline production and belted vocals, gated snares everywhere.

But the American music from the ‘80s that ended setting popular music’s trajectory for decades to come had nothing to do with aerobics-class friendly pop anthems and searing guitar solos. The true legacy of that decade comes from regional, iconoclastic innovations in hip hop, house and techno, and punk. That’s omitting a lot, but these are genres and aesthetics that are still incredibly popular today the world over, and still inspire young people to take part. At the time, that wasn’t stuff you’d hear in movie soundtracks or on the radio, or see on MTV—a network whose clear whiteness mandate in the early days meant they were barely playing Prince’s music videos.

By the 1990s, hip hop, dance music, and punk were artistically mature—with established cultures and an endlessly inventive cadre of iconoclasts working in them. Their artists would spend much of the decade contending with their home genres’ rising popularity and in competition with ersatz, commercializable subgenres dominated largely by white people.

So the decade saw the creative vanguard in these genres loudly championing their underground status. Some of my personal favorite music of all time is ‘90s music with underground right there in the name: Detroit techno torchbearers Underground Resistance, Houston rap evangelists UGK (short for Underground Kings), Triple Six Mafia’s Underground Vol. 1: 1991 – 1994.

These days, when you can listen to basically anything instantly with virtually no context, you could make the mistake of believing “underground” was just an aesthetic: that proud underground artists writing lyrics about authenticity and co-optation and selling out were simply suffering some anxiety about their own popularity—at least that’s been one of the popular lines about Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain in the decades since his death.

The reality is that underground artists took pride in the underground because they were embracing reality: the music industry, the mainstream radio stations, the hottest venues didn’t understand what they were doing and didn’t see the point. Artists who loudly embraced their underground status were telling the world they didn’t need that other bullshit because they were successful on their own terms. They made important music, found adoring fans, sold plenty of records, toured the country and the world. And even when artists found massive success, they always wanted to keep it underground.

As Tsunami and Simple Machines co-founder Kristin Thomson told me in an interview, there were many overlapping benefits for doing things this way. On the simplest artistic level, it was a lot of fun, “Because we weren't on a big label or something where somebody was forcing us to like, you have to have this band open for you or you're going to tour opening for this super huge band, because we were sort of in this layer where we were somewhat autonomous about that, we would just tour with bands we loved anyway.”

Those shows were often with bands that, to some ears, were pretty dissimilar to Tsunami, and brought with them different types of audiences. Touring the DIY circuit was also a good way to cross-pollinate with other pockets and expand the label’s reach—and provided a great opportunity to sell Simple Machines records at the merch table. 

This is a defining feature of underground genres. Everyone involved knows that artists and labels are doing something different city-by-city, region-by-region, but the scene as a whole creates a context where fans come to expect as much and artists understand how to cooperate and collaborate with other artists who do things differently than them. It can be good for the business of selling records and touring, but more importantly, it nurtures artistry and creativity writ large.

In my last post, I started talking about the Thomson’s and Jenny Toomey’s Mechanic’s Guide, a short, simple, and easy to obtain guide to putting out records made and distributed by their DC-based Simple Machines label. It was an incredible resource that spread knowledge and created some good standards around starting an independent record label, and was crucial in helping the American DIY landscape do its thing in the 1990s. 

I’m diving into this “What does underground mean?” question because I want to lend the right context to the guide—talking about the social and political environment that Simple Machines came up in. And it’s not just useful for understanding the guide as a kind of proto-Internet network tool for underground rock music. It’s too crucial for understanding why Thomson and Toomey approached the rise of the Internet with creative optimism and a deep conviction that independent music would need strong advocacy in the digital age.

One of the big players in the DC punk scene at the time was Dischord Records, started by Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson, two members of the foundational band Minor Threat, which not only helped set off the incredible popular yet perpetually underground genre hardcore punk, but also the straight edge movement that has lead to generations of punks swearing off drugs and alcohol. 

After Minor Threat, MacKaye would form Fugazi, which, like… I don’t know how you explain Fugazi. They’re just one of the best bands ever. I say that as someone who’s not even really into punk and hardcore. Their albums are all excellent, their live shows were crazy, and their literal unwavering commitment to playing all ages shows helped stoke the dual wildfires of hardcore and intergenerational DIY music culture.

As Jenny Toomey put it in an interview with me, “What Dischord was doing by creating this parallel economy would run up against the economies of scale and the winner take all market stuff, right? Fugazi could put out thousands and thousands of records, but they couldn’t get on commercial radio because of payola, right? And they couldn’t play venues that are larger than a certain size, because one you got into those venues, the moral trade-offs were beyond what they could tolerate—they would only play all ages shows.”

Thomson and Toomey were part of the next generation of DC punks after the Dischord crew and their ilk. And their entrypoint into the DC scene was through an activist organization known as Positive Force, based out of a house in the DC suburb of Arlington, Virginia.

Punk is political music, and Positive Force was as much an activist organization made of punks as it was a punk collective whose members had strong convictions it was serious about living by. What it was best known for were regular benefit concerts it would throw for to raise awareness of local causes, levy mutual aid, and support existing organizing efforts. And a Positive Force compilation that Thomson and Toomey worked on included their first attempts at paper guides for putting out records and throwing shows.

There are two documentaries about Positive Force, one verité dispatch shot on video from 1991 called Wake Up! A Profile of Positive Force and one from 2014 called More Than a Witness: 30 Years of Punk Politics in Action that’s a more polished, talking-heads-and-b-roll type affair. What’s especially cool about Wake Up! is that it really has the feeling of anarcho-left fly-on-the-wall documentary, and it reminds me a lot of Godard’s Here and Elsewhere with its documentation of political action and parade of people speaking their political ideas right into the camera.

What really strikes me about it is that punk in the 1980s hit these kids like something of a religious movement, based on a shared faith in dissent.

These were young people who saw the various decadences of American conservative governance and hypercapitalism, and decided they wanted to live a different life than what the mainstream offered. Vocalists of hardcore bands talking about whatever the cause of that month’s benefit were play the role of preachers for sweating crowds of ecstatic young people, lyrics often describe critiques of an amoral society or proclamations of how punks want to live differently, and the good of the community was a central concern. Watching old videos of these performances, it evokes a sermon being delivered to an enraptured congregation.

Their embrace of vegetarianism and penchant for playing music at protests brings to mind the hippie counterculture movement of the late 1960s, but members make it clear in on-camera interviews that they were really aligned with the New Left of that era, who was interested in finding ways to shift America’s institutions and civic life left from within them.

As Toomey pointed out to me in an interview, there were a couple of things about the DC microcosm that made its punk scene the unique cultural moment it was. 

One is that DC is a diverse place with a sizable black population and home to Howard University. The only band bigger than Minor Threat or Fugazi that came from DC were Bad Brains, an all-black hardcore band that set the world on fire with its incredible mix of scorching punk and reggae. 

And much like how Detroit was a company town for automobile plants and Detroit techno made art with machines, DC is a company town for politics. So those young punks were often the children of people working in government or law, or at NGOs.

Not that melting pot and a near-innate political awareness freed DC punks entirely from, for lack of a better term, normative bullshit. Toomey and Thomson mention misogyny in the punk scene in their interview with Tone Glow, and Katherine Hannah’s Bikini Kill jump started the feminist Riot Grrl genre to protest patriarchal violence not just in society, but right there in the punk underground.

The honest reality of undergrounds is that while they’re trying to provide an alternative to mainstream culture, that mainstream is still what the people in those underground are steeped in. Countering that history takes effort, not simple rejection. Punk wasn’t perfect, but groups like Positive Force were trying hard. 

One segment of More Than a Witness is dedicated to the weekly meetings that the house would hold, which were anarchism-inspired attempts at consensus building about the efforts the group would make in the short term such as organizing a political rally and the longer-term direction of the project. But the point wasn’t for everyone in the group to all be unified in a single pursuit, but instead create a supportive context for all who were participating.

As Toomey told me, in Positive Force, “More experienced activists would empower anybody who came who wanted to do something. If they were too young to sign a permit for a protest, an older person would go and sign the permit. If they didn't know how to get a stage for, you know, an outdoor show they wanted to do, they'd figure out who they could borrow a stage [from].”

That was an ethos that Positive Force wanted reflected in the compilation they put out, and what led the group to publish guides along with it on topics like putting out your own records, booking a tour, and organizing a protest. Toomey told me, “It was trying to institutionalize that information sharing and kindness and helpfulness—but in the record.” The antecedent to the Mechanic’s Guide was a booklet published with that comp called “Guide to Putting Out Records,” penned by someone named Steve whose last name I couldn't catch in Toomey’s interview with me.

The way Positive Force did its thing, and the members themselves, and the specific goals for how it was going to intervene in the world—they were all fairly hyper-local. Responding to and representing the context surrounding the CD punk scene. But that spirit of “sharing and kindness and helpfulness” was not unique to DC.

Toomey told me about how she has notebooks full of notes about calls she took and made while running Simple Machines. “Like Thurston Moore would call up and say he wants to get in touch with the guys from Void. Do I know how to get in touch with the guys from Void because he wants to cover this or whatever. Like so there was just a lot of that. I was actually shocked when I went through all my letters like oh here's Lou Barlow asking a question about a show in DC or like they're just and that that was just it also didn't feel like these were superstars. You felt like these were peers.”

What Toomey describes isn’t something unique to Simple Machines either. The extended punk underground worked because of all of this communication and cooperation. It’s the background for DIY and why the “yourself” in “do it yourself” is a misnomer.

And that system created the conditions for what the Mechanics Guide identifies as a very different way of doing business, alternative to the dominant mode of American capitalism.

“There is nothing that you can’t do with a little time, creativity, enthusiasm and hard work. An independent business that is run with ingenuity, love and a sense of community can even be more important than the products and services it sells because an innovative business will, if successful, stretch established definitions and set a new standard. These businesses can serve the practical function of employing other like-minded people at cool jobs which offer flexibility (part-time commitment), sense of community and, sometimes, a paycheck. In a larger sense, independent businesses can offer alternative notions of success, fame and rewards – all traits that are sorely needed in a society as consumer-focused and capitalistic as ours.”

And for Simple Machines, at least, that meant pressing just enough of any release to sell out and fund the next thing. They’d generally produce 7” singles in runs of 1000 and price them as low as possible to get them into listeners’ hands and keep their enterprise sustainable.

Or as Kristin Thomsen put it in Wake Up! A Profile of Positive Force, “One of the driving ethics of it is that people are paying too much in the record stores, so we’re trying to keep our prices really low. Just to cover our costs.”

As Simple Machines picked up steam and the Mechanic’s Guide became more and more prominent, Thomson and Toomey found themselves emerging as prominent figures in DIY who were helping their peers and the next generation get their start.

That was clearest when the Simple Machine heads were interviewed in Sassy Magazine, a popular feminist publication aimed at teen girls. Toomey estimates they received 1000 letters from girls who read the interview, so they printed an updated version of the guide and offered to mail a copy for free to anyone who sent them two stamps.

And when Kristin Thomson and Jenny Toomey got tired of running a record label, they started to wonder what other ways they could get good information about Doing It Yourselves to the people. In our next installment of this Simple Machines history: the Internet.