Can you talk about what the D.C. music landscape was like when Black Eyes started? What was your band trying to add to that conversation?

J: D.C. felt like a pretty exciting place when we were starting. We had done a couple of bands previously that were various iterations of the five of us so it more felt like a continuation of that than anything else. But at that point we had lots of bands we were friends with that we were excited about/playing with/etc. There also was a pretty healthy house show/DIY/odd space scene to immediately dive into, along with a couple of venues—The Black Cat and Galaxy Hut, which was kinda like playing a house show at a bar—who were extremely supportive from the beginning as well.

M: Concur with Jacob here. It felt vibrant. There was a lot going on. Q and Not U was well-established by the time Black Eyes got going. Fugazi was still playing. El Guapo. Early Humans. MMR. Later, Et At It. Those are just some of the folks that I remember seeing a bunch, playing with a bunch. And that was just our immediate crew. I think Dead Meadow was still in town? Ted Leo started his solo/Pharmacists work. I think I remember seeing him open for Q in a basement; they covered Lungfish’s “To Whom You Were Born” together. Oh! Lungfish too.

We wrote about some of the more impactful shows we saw in the zine we put out in 2023; the Intima was on there, the Ex at 9:30 opening for Fugazi in 1999, I think? A Milford Graves performance that I declined to attend, a fact that I deeply personally regret. I don’t quite remember being intentional about adding anything specific to all of this as we started playing? But I could well be missing something. I do remember not wanting to sound like other stuff. And I remember really being wowed by the interlocking polyrhythms that Fugazi was making in its later years.

Dan: Amazing time to be in D.C. The Dischord people that were very influential to me, were still active—Fugazi, Lungfish, All Scars—as well as all of these other creative, thoughtful, friendly people in and around punk. It’s hard to say what we were specifically trying to add to the conversation, other than the music we created together. I think we were trying not to be boring.

Daniel: It felt both vibrant and in-between. The influence of Dischord loomed large, but it had been a label for 20 years and a lot of the core artists had already made their most seminal work. You could feel a sea change with new millennium rock ‘n roll in NYC and a sense of emptiness, like, “Well, what do we do now?” Many of the groups who were most exciting to me felt like they were trying something fresh rather than extending a lineage. Personally, I was just so electrified at the idea that punk could open up to so many possibilities, I wanted to dive in headfirst.

H: There was a lot of cool stuff happening in and around D.C. when we were getting going. Q and Not U, Pupils, Quix*o*tic were putting out records—just to name a few—and it felt like there was a fair amount of continuity from earlier generations of D.C. punks and younger folks like us. There had been kind of a wave of younger weirdo no-wave-y stuff a couple years before—Meta*matics, Meltdown and associated bands, The Crainium—and along with older bands I enjoyed like Trans Am and Lungfish, it contributed to the feeling that there was a lot of room for doing stuff that wasn’t just hardcore or punk rock. D.C. having a lot of all-ages shows made it easy to get involved when I was a teenager so by the time we were playing shows I felt pretty comfortable in the broader music landscape around town.

How about by the end of your first run as a band? What changed or developed—both within the larger East Coast underground scene and your band?

M: I think our personal interests started to diverge by the end of the first run. I don’t so much remember significant changes in the wider infrastructure? When I first started traveling in bands, everything was booked on the phone; one shared lists of DIY or DIY-friendly promoters. Sent out tapes. Waited for an answer. But I think most of that shit had moved online by the time we were active. We might even have had a Myspace page? I don’t recall. My feeling is that a lot may have changed right after we stopped playing that first time, but I could be wrong?

J: We definitely ended pre-Myspace—or at least pre in booking terms—but most of the booking was done via email by the point we were a band.

Daniel: Internally, our band had evolved from something looser into a very driven and focused musical unit. It was exciting but it really felt like just the beginning of a larger musical journey. We were struggling to reconcile ideas with each other, but to our credit, the only thing that changed was creative differences. As far as any sort of “success,” I never felt tensions inside the group to pursue a more commercial approach and there were no arguments about whether we should shoot a music video or court press. We just went as hard as we could and then imploded. As soon as we broke up, social media started to enter everyone’s lives and slowly the world would change, but Black Eyes just missed that.

H: I agree with what everyone else says here. I feel like gas prices were starting to increase pretty steadily over our first life as a band. That didn’t affect us super intensely but I think it contributed later to challenges around the economics of DIY touring.

Web of Influences - Black Eyes

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Web of Influences - Black Eyes