A Steady Diet of Riffing

Ian MacKaye of Fugazi – and now Coriky – talks Hendrix and harnessing what you have

- By Jim Beaugez

PUNK PIONEER IAN MacKaye’s proudest guitar moments say a lot about his philosophy and aesthetic for the instrument. Deep in the runtime of Instrument, the 1999 documentary about his legendary post-hardcore band Fugazi, MacKaye stands in front of his Marshall JCM 800 half-stack, conjuring caterwauling feedback from his alpine white Gibson SG during the breakdown of “Promises,” the closing song on 1989’s landmark 13 Songs [Dischord].

“There’s this moment where I do this chirping feedback thing,” MacKaye recalls. “It was really like I intended it and I knew what I was doing, and it got captured. And I’m like, ‘That’s what I’m talking about.’”

MacKaye doesn’t think far beyond wood and wire when it comes to guitars. In his 30-plus years of playing guitar in Fugazi, the Evens and now Coriky, his new band with wife Amy Farina and Fugazi bassist Joe Lally, he’s never used effect pedals. He only recently acquired an amplifier that has a channel switch. But out of that simplicity comes a maelstrom of sounds heard in the lockstep post-punk syncopation of Fugazi’s Repeater and the caustic tones of In On the Kill Taker [both on Dischord]. MacKaye manipulates volume and the proximity of his pickups to his amplifier, playing offthe acoustics and resonant feedback of the room, and lets his hands do the rest. “[I like] what happens electronically when you get [in] that space, and then using the toggle switch and bending a neck and making music out of it.”