Looking at Brendan Canty these days, it’s easier to imagine him as a favorite uncle than the drummer for one of the most important bands in the last 20 years.
Since Fugazi went on hiatus in ’02, Canty may have added a few gray hairs, but he hasn’t exactly been gathering dust. In ‘04, the production company he founded with his business partner Christoph Green, Trixie DVD, released the very first in a series of recorded music performances called Burn to Shine. The concept is beautifully simple and profound: A handful of bands from a particular city get a sound check and one take to play one song inside a house or a building that’s destined for destruction. The result is a powerful portrait of a city’s music scene at that moment in time.
That first performance was, naturally, in Canty’s hometown of Washington D.C. Ian MacKaye, his bandmate in Fugazi, performed with his new band the Evens. Ted Leo, Bob Mould and Q and Not U also played. The house where they played was donated to the city’s fire department and burned for training purposes – hence the name of the series.
Since, Canty and Green have recorded and distributed a Burn to Shine from Chicago (some of the bigger names to perform were Wilco, Shellac and Tortoise) and Portland (Sleater-Kinney, the Shins, the Decemberists). Performances in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle have also been recorded, but have yet to be released.
The weekend of July 28th and 29th, Canty and Green visited Atlanta and recorded the sixth installment of the series in the living room of a doomed single-family home; a yellow, wood-framed house at 54 Moreland Ave. in the Reynoldstown neighborhood, directly across the street from the sprawling Edgewood Retail District.
Twelve bands performed Sunday, July 29, beginning with Shannon Wright at 10 a.m; the Liverhearts, the Selmanaires, Deerhunter, the Black Lips, Delia Gartrell, the Mighty Hannibal, the Carbonas, the All Night Drug Prowling Wolves, the Coathangers, Snowden and Mastodon.
Atlanta native and curator Lee Tesche spent nearly three years working on assembling the lineup and securing a structure. I spoke to Canty and Tesche before the performance of the final band, Mastodon.

Dry Ink: Eleven bands have performed and Mastodon is up next, and you know they’ll be great. What do you think about the bands so far?

Brendan Canty: I think the bands are amazing, and I’ve been totally into every band so far. It’s certainly got a nice distinctive vibe, and Lee, I think what really helps it is that everyone are friends more or less. And Lee put together an incredible lineup. That’s more important to me than anything else in a curator. I’m not here to represent Atlanta at large; there’s just too much history, it would be impossible to do. But today’s been great, it’s always a blur from the moment you get there in the morning…. Right about now I’m about to fall out. But yeah, everyone has done a great job. It’s always a testament to the bands that they can show up, bring it and actually play. I think it’s a great litmus test to these bands to actually show up and be great live. Records are one thing…. That’s one thing I like about the project is that it allows us to put a bunch of people on a tightrope for a few minutes.

DI: It must’ve been incredibly tough putting together this lineup, how’d you manage?

Lee Tesche: Well, that was what was really rewarding about the last two and half years, I got turned on to a lot of bands and on to Atlanta music spanning over the last 10 or 15 years. I talked to so many people. Chad Radford, who is a great Atlanta music historian and knows a lot of people… and Tom (Cheshire) telling old stories, and people telling me ‘you know what, my favorite band used to be so and so,’ so it was awesome. But it was weird selecting the bands. I lost sleep over Gentleman Jesse (And His Men) not being on it, I think they’re a great band but there was only so much room. A lot of people were saying ‘you need this band, you need this band…’ And in reality, I listened and it was more of a selection by committee. So yeah, we wanted to get a little bit of everybody, we wanted to represent Stickfigure, Die Slaughterhaus… Shannon Wright, the older wave, and the really old wave, like Mighty Hannibal.
I just wanted it to be, when it’s all said it done, I wanted it to be a really accurate snapshot of Atlanta music.

DI: And Brendan, that’s really what it’s all about, right?

BC: Yes, yes, this idea was borne out of a change in my life with Fugazi not playing, and in D.C., for forever, we’ve had bands just disappear, change and reform. And people always play music, but with different people, it seems like the same thing here. Granted I was in Fugazi for a long time, and when we stopped playing it very much hit me that I was in a state of flux and I looked around and a lot of the people, Ian and everyone in Fugazi… everyone, Q and Not U were on the verge of breaking up; everyone was dissolving and reforming in a big way, and I felt it was a big transition. And I thought it would be interesting to take a snapshot of everyone in this weird permutation.

LT: Yeah, regardless of what anyone might say, it is a pretty close-knit community. All these people know each other, all these people have played shows together, have been on splits together, drink at El Myr or Estoria. It’s all the same folks, played in bands together or, you know, hung out with each other’s girlfriends.

DI: The timing is perfect, too. The Black Lips and Deerhunter have had really good years, and Mastodon, of course, and there was that MTV spot.

LT: Yeah, it is, so I hope this gets out before the bubble bursts.

BC: I hope so, too, shit. It’s really hard though, it takes an inordinate amount of time and Touch and Go doesn’t want us to release more than one every six month because of the press cycles and all of that, and we’re distributed by them. It’s hard for us to get one done.

DI: How did it end up having the bands play in a house, or building or whatever set to be burned or…

BC: Yeah, Burn to Shine is underscored by the fact that we have this house that’s going to be demolished. To begin with, it was all a byproduct that my friend, Pat Paddack, who offered me a house that he was going to demolish, and he felt guilty about it because he knew the woman who lived in there, his 95-year-old neighbor who he found dead standing up on her walker in her room. And he had been taking care of her and he said, ‘you know, I really want to honor this house, this space where this woman lived for 50 years,’ and he offered it to the fire department and he offered it to us to have a party there. And I said, well it would be really cool… because Christoph and I were working on a lot of more commercial work, the Kerry campaign and film stuff, and we were looking for a music idea to work on together. So as we talked about it, and we decided the method should be very quick and so we decided to have the bands come in and play just a couple times.

DI: How’d you find this house?

LT: This house was always on my backburner, because one of the things that would always happen… man, honestly, if I could do it all over again, I would do it backwards, I spent years trying to get it lined up where all the bands would be in town, which I eventually did… but the hardest thing was finding the location. It just so happened that this is perfect, but it was always a backup. I have stories about shit happening at this house – I used to play music with the drummer from Sun Ra, he was a 60-something year old crackhead and he lived back here. Jared from the Black Lips has a crazy story (see “A Ride to the Airport With Jared Swilley”) about this house and I’m sure other people who’ve played today do too. It’s in my neighborhood. I tried to do the old Lenny’s, I thought that would be perfect, I really wanted that to happen… granted that has a special place in people’s hearts, but that could’ve been another rock club video. But it’s weird dealing with developers, they’re dicks. This group who owns this property, the Reynoldstown Revival Group, they’ve been awesome.

DI: Yeah, being across the street from Target, Office Depot… it’s really a perfect location, and these houses are going to be knocked down for some developer to build essentially more of the same things that are across the street.

BC: The house in Portland, which was a 5,000 square-foot, two-year-old house, was being torn down to build a 12,000 square-foot house. Really… I mean, the market is going nuts and undermining, dissolving, really, one of our basic tenets, which is to have your own place. You’ve got commit financial suicide. And I know so many fucking people who have got in such fucking hot water. I bought 10 years ago and my house is worth a lot more, but I know it nearly fucking killed me. I’ve lived in that same house for 10 years and I’ve got four kids in there now.

LT: Yeah, and here, you have all this development and gentrification; it’s sort of fascinating, the white flight and the white return flight. It happened in so many places, but here in Atlanta, the South… it all ties in to this, the Burn to Shine concept. This whole community has changed so much in the last 15 years. The whole story about this house… Boner, (pronounced Bone… the r is silent, he says) the neighbor, who has been real helpful this week, he said this track of homes were all condemned in the late 80’s, and then his band director in high school bought the properties, fixed them up a little bit and turned them into low income boarding houses. He told me they went and dug up two trees from a Mrs. Winners in East Atlanta to plant in the back.

DI: It’s a nice touch.

LT: Yeah, it’s a cool space back there. Everybody has been hanging out, drinking beer, playing Frisbee with the dogs. John Coleman, the guy from the Reynoldstown Revival Commission, started mowing the lawn because he wants to get in the movie.

DI: Do you know when this is getting knocked down?

LT: It’s to be determined. When I started talking to John, I thought it was going to be pretty soon, but it’s got to go through zoning, the neighborhood association then the city. It could be a couple of months, it could be eight months. But hopefully sooner than later, the DVD can’t come out until then.

DI: So how did you guys meet and start working together towards this?

BC: They took me out and got me drunk.

LT: It’s actually a pretty interesting story. Let me start from the beginning… Basically I had seen the first Burn to Shine and had always kept up with Dischord, and saw the series, was intrigued and I sent Christoph an e-mail – not really even expecting a response – asking them to come to Atlanta. A day or two later, I got a response saying, ‘We’d love to do Atlanta, let’s keep in touch on this.’

DI: Do you guys get a lot of people wanting you to come to, say, Peoria, and places like that?

BC: Yeah, we do now, you know, even from Brazil.

DI: Sorry Lee, go ahead.

LT: Thanks. From then, well, the project for me snowballed from there. I got in touch with Rob Del Bueno, I was recording at Zero Return at the time, and originally wanted him to curate it. But he was getting really busy with the biodiesel thing; he was driving around to go to conferences with Jimmy Carter and the Tanzanian government, and, anyway, we had had several false-starts. At one point, around January of ’05, Bob Weston called asking for the list of bands, and he was basically going to come down and record the music for it. But I wasn’t ready. That made me look like kind of a dumbass. So I called Christoph because Atlanta was going to be the third one; they shot Portland three weeks later, I called Christoph and he said they were going to put off Atlanta for a while. So in the meantime, I was trying to get a few hip hop-related people; my friend’s girlfriend knew Andre Benjamin’s hairdresser, and there were some other connections, but a lot of those guys operate on an entire different level. In the rock community, Brendan’s name alone means a lot. People really respect the hell out of him. But in the hip hop community, the bottom line with them is what am I going to get paid. Anyway, I called Christoph to get some contractual stuff in case we did get some hip hop people, and he asked me what I was doing that night because Brendan was playing drums with Bob Mould at the Variety playhouse…

BC: I had been on tour with Bob playing drums. A long, long tour and we had just got back from Europe.

LT: So we took in the show, went backstage to say bye to Brendan, and he had a six pack of Bass and asked us to hang out. And that was cool. Then I started to notice a bunch of dudes with neatly trimmed beards, close-cropped hair, muscle shirts, and all of certain everything clicks…Oh, Bob! So then Bob yells ‘We’re going to the Eagle!’ My friend Clint said, ‘What’s that?’ And Bob said ‘Oh, it’s a really cool shitty punk rock club with a bunch of hot ass men.’ So yeah, so Brendan didn’t want to go to the Eagle…

BC: No.

LT: So we went back to El Myr and Troy from Mastodon was there. We had been drinking a bunch of whiskey, and I was wrecked. So I grabbed Troy, totally drunk and tried to explain the Burn to Shine series to him; he was holding my hand as I tried to explain the project in this drunken mumbo jumbo, and finally I said, ‘Brendan Canty from Fugazi produces it, and just meet him, he’s here with me…’ So they started talking and from then on Mastodon was on board. At that point, I said ‘If I can put this together, I really want to wow the shit out of them.’ There are a lot of cool people and great bands in this town and I knew they would be stoked to put it together.

BC: Lee has worked insanely hard on this thing and I really appreciate what he’s done. You know, he found the one date that works for everybody and drove it through. He made it happen. I can’t say enough about it. It came to a point where his dedication was such to it that we said, ‘Well we gotta go to Atlanta. We have to go to Atlanta. That motherfucker pushed it through.’ So you know, he assembled a great crew so, I think it’s going to be great.

William Inman is editor of Dry Ink Magazine. Write to him at william@dryinkmag.com