POP MUSIC : Punk’s Monks They’re Not : Fugazi may be strict and demanding, but the guys are tired of being portrayed as a freak show

Ian MacKaye bounced a black rubber ball on the asphalt parking lot outside the Hollywood Palladium, where in a few hours his band Fugazi would headline a sold-out abortion-rights benefit concert. They’d stay in town to pack the place again the following night.

In the bright afternoon sun, MacKaye explained that he found the ball the night Fugazi played its first show at a small community hall in Washington, D.C., in 1987, and he’s carried it around ever since.

Is it for good luck?

The singer-guitarist seemed puzzled by the question.

“No. Just a ball. Just a ball.”

The Washington-based Fugazi, the biggest-drawing and probably the most critically hailed punk-rock band around, tends to view the world that way, cutting to the essence with Zen-like clarity. The result is an operation like no other in rock.

The group disputes that distinction, claiming that bands all over America record, distribute and perform with the same passion and independence. But no one adheres to a code of principles as rigorously as Fugazi.

- For concerts, it stipulates a maximum $5 ticket price and that no age restrictions apply. If its albums cost too much in your local record store, you can get them by mail order for a guaranteed price of $8 for CDs.

- It prohibits lavish catering spreads backstage, and works as much as possible with promoters who have “alternative” credibility.

- It runs its own record company, Dischord, supports independent distributors and stores, spurns overtures from major labels and doesn’t talk much to the mainstream press. But it’s equally prepared to deplore the excesses of the punk community.

For the members of Fugazi, this is all supremely simple and reasonable, and they’re a little tired of being portrayed as a “freak show”--sort of punk monks with a dogmatic, ascetic code. Sometimes the media gives the impression that they create rules to live by rather than songs to listen to.

“It is a little weird,” acknowledged MacKaye, 29, sitting with his back against a wall in the parking lot. “People don’t even recognize the fact that we’re a straight-up band. I think the music is really valid. I don’t think it’s secondary at all. In fact, I think the music is what it’s totally about.

“It just so happens that to get the music out the way we want to, we just want to be comfortable about how we do it. All the things that we do . . . these so-called principles, all of these things are basically because we want to be comfortable about how we play our music.”

Guy (rhymes with key ) Picciotto, Fugazi’s other singer-guitarist, leaned against a parked car and listened to his partner’s analysis, then added a pitch for independent thought.

“Also it’s good to be ornery,” said the leather-jacketed Picciotto as bassist Joe Lally, 28, stood quietly nearby. The fourth Fugazi, Brendan Canty, 25, was inside the Palladium preparing his drums for the sound check.

“Not everything has to run along the same path that everyone else goes down,” continued the spidery, intense Picciotto, 26. “There doesn’t have to be hierarchies of management and huge amounts of promotion, just by exploring a little bit you find you can do things just exactly how you want to.

“I think the way the band carries itself is important. The way that we do the things we do is important. But sometimes it tends to obscure the fact that we’re a band.”

Fugazi’s five records--from the seven-song “Fugazi” in 1988 through last year’s self-produced “Steady Diet of Nothing”--are miles away from the hard-slamming punk stereotype. With psychodramatic vocals, an arty edge and taut structures drawn from funk and reggae, the band has been compared more to English post-punk groups Gang of Four and Public Image than to its hard-core brethren.

But as its operative philosophy--”the records are the menu, the show is the meal”--suggests, Fugazi’s live performances are its raison d’etre --intense, vivid encounters that seek to transform what is often an empty ritual into an engaged dialogue between the group and its fans.

Being in a band was a preoccupation for MacKaye (rhymes with try ) as a teen-ager, but he was discouraged and intimidated by the forbidding technique and the air of royalty surrounding such ‘70s rock gods as Led Zeppelin.

“Then I saw the Cramps in 1979 and it totally changed everything,” he said. “It was all so simple and so obvious, and I just said--I mean, it’s a cliche, but I said I can do it. So I just did. ‘OK, let’s make a band.’ ”

MacKaye’s early-’80s band Minor Threat became a cult legend, leading punk’s evolution into the fierce, fast-paced genre of hard- core. His anti-drug, anti-alcohol song “Straight Edge” inspired a clean-living punk subculture that took that name, and continues on without much apparent interest on MacKaye’s part.

After Minor Threat, MacKaye started playing informally in his basement with bassist Lally, a roadie for one of the bands on Dischord Records. Canty, a member of Happy Go Licky with Picciotto, started sitting in on drums, and when Happy Go Licky broke up, Picciotto came aboard. They called the new band Fugazi, a military slang term from the Vietnam War for a crisis situation.

While they built their following through steady touring, they continued to run Dischord, the company that MacKaye established in the early ‘80s. Operating out of the house that he and Lally share, Dischord releases Fugazi’s material as well as records by host of Washington bands. For MacKaye, it’s a way to document his community--and to bolster the alternative infrastructure that initially helped him out.

“Instead of waiting around for someone to say, ‘We’d like to put out your records,’ we decided to put out our own records,” he said of his first group, the Teen Idles. “And because there was already a community even then in Washington, they were able to give us advice and support. It was great. So if anything, (what we do) is to return that favor. I spend a lot of time helping people get their stuff sorted out, how to put out their records and stuff.”

This dedication to the underground goes beyond their pragmatic interest in maintaining a system of independent bands, concert promoters, record companies, distributors and record stores.

“I think it reflects opinions, attitudes and styles which are not reflected in general by the mass media,” said Picciotto of the alternative culture. “There’s always been a much more heavy sense of community ethic involved in independents, not just the flow of cash.

“It creates relationships, it creates situations which don’t have a whole lot to do with money. . . . For us, Washington would be that community. It’s a town where there’s a lot of bands, a lot of people, a lot of ideas we can support and are tied into in a big way. That came into my life strictly through music.”

For MacKaye, punk-rock was a radicalizing force.

“I think through life there’s a lot of forks in the road,” he said, “and you have a lot of points in your life where you have an opportunity to go different ways. For me the punk-rock thing was a massive fork in the road, and when I took that different way of going I saw the rest of the world in a really different way.

“When I was 15 it all made sense. Boys went out with girls, whatever, all these really straightforward things. I took this weird detour in my life and suddenly I realized that boys could go out with boys and girls could go out with girls and there’s all different ideas and thinking.

“The more I became exposed to alternative ways of thinking and living, it became much more obvious to me how outrageous all the injustice in the world was.”

Rick Van Santen of Goldenvoice, L.A.’s main alternative concert promoter, grappled with Fugazi over the ticket price for their second Palladium show, finally giving in to the band’s demand that he reduce the cost from $6 to $5. That made it merely a break-even night, but Van Santen doesn’t complain.

“They’re honest and consistent,” he said of the group. “They make you charge less, but they don’t demand champagne. They’re easy to deal with. They just tell me what they want, they tell me the truth.”

Not all concert promoters have such an easy time. Fugazi books its own tours, and their approach is “ruthless,” according to Picciotto.

“We go right down the line,” he said. “We find out who we’re working with, try to find out as much about the history of the place as we can, etc. etc. There’s limits to everything . . . but we definitely try to do our homework. We don’t like being surprised by situations that are totally uncool.”

Adds MacKaye: “There’s been times when we’ve made subtle compromises in consideration of the kids who come out to the shows. There’s some (promoters) we’ve worked with that we don’t wholeheartedly endorse or support, but if we can get them to work on our set of rules or whatever, then we feel like it’s worth compromising if it means getting the music to the kids. . . .

“As we get bigger that’s one thing that’s more and more difficult, trying to find (alternative promoters) who are big enough to deal with the kinds of crowds (we draw). . . . It’s tough.”

When major record companies--now in the habit of snatching up young bands that previously would have developed naturally in the underground for a few years--come calling, Fugazi tells the truth: They’re wasting their time.

Said Picciotto, “No matter how good the A&R; bloke they have working for them, there’s no way at the top that their attitudes are gonna reflect our attitudes or their motivations are gonna reflect our motivations.

“Ultimately, the way major labels are run is dictated by money, and what we’re doing is not dictated by money. You have to use money as a tool to get through it, but it’s definitely not where the band comes from.”

MacKaye says that Fugazi’s albums sell in the neighborhood of 150,000 copies each. That’s impressive for a band operating at that level, but isn’t the idea of reaching more people tempting? “But if to reach more people you’re no longer saying what you were saying before, it doesn’t really matter,” Picciotto argued. “If what you’re saying is being warped by the very mechanism you’re using to get to people, then what’s the point?

“I think there’s a lot of bands that aspire to a mass scale. . . . But I think what we do is really fragile and in a lot of ways is not really suited to it. I just don’t think our band is that important for everyone on earth to get into. I think it’s much more important for people to come to it through the natural process that the band is about.”

It was time for sound check, and as MacKaye, Picciotto and Lally walked toward the stage door, Picciotto started anticipating the upcoming show.

“Whatever our ideals or philosophies are, when we’re actually playing as a band and we’re hitting it hard, this is beyond language or ideals or anything like that. It’s just a physical, great feeling. . . . That’s why I do it ultimately. You get addicted to it.”

MacKaye gave the black ball a final bounce, then stowed it in his knapsack. “We never have sat down to have a seminar on why we do it,” he said. “It just is what you do. This is what we do.”