Flag of Democracy: Why Philly’s long-running punk band just won't quit
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
"We thought what we were doing was right and what other people were doing was wrong," says McMonagle.
Several of the band's long out-of-print records will be back on the shelves in time for Record Store Day on Saturday.
It was one in the morning in a cold, mostly empty warehouse on Lancaster Avenue the first time I really paid attention to Flag of Democracy.
This was December, 2001. The Philly punk band had already been playing for almost 20 years at that point, and it wasn’t the first time I’d seen them. Nor was this show particularly notable for them.
What blew my mind that night and what turned me into believer was the energy these three guys were putting into their performance. It didn’t matter that the only people still left at the show were a few drunk, spiky punks and the entirety of the band Thorazine who, despite having just played, spent the entirety of the FOD set moshing and going absolutely wild.
FOD played hard, they played fast, and most of all they clearly had a lot of fun doing so. It was extremely infectious.
It was what they did best. It’s what they still do.
“Other bands played fast but I think we were the first kind of U.S.-hardcore fast, that Gang Green fast, that Hüsker Dü fast,” says Jim McMonagle, guitarist, singer and one of the founding members of FOD. The lineup hasn’t changed since Dave Rochon (bass) and Bob Walker (drums) joined back in 1983 and 1986, respectively.
FOD had a plan early on, says McMonagle: “Gang Green are good but we’re going to be faster than Gang Green. All of a sudden you had this new word in your vocabulary, this skill where you can say ‘Wow, you can do this.’” Mind you, when the band played its first show — opening for Minor Threat, Agnostic Front and SS Decontrol alongside other locals Crib Death at Buff Hall in Camden in November of 1982 — McMonagle was, at 17 years old, the oldest member of FOD.
Thirty-three years later, the band’s back catalog, much of it long out of print, is seeing the light of day again thanks to Bruce Howze Jr. and his SRA Records label. Howze has been a devout fan since he was 15 and living in Delaware County. “I felt that it was a real crime that this stuff wasn’t available [so] I took matters into my own hands and turned my fake label into a real label, securing distribution and maxing out my credit cards.”
FOD never stopped and never changed paths, avoiding both the awkward heavy metal-crossover record that plagued so many punk bands in the ’80s and the nostalgia-driven ‘reunion circuit’ of has-beens that exists today. FOD didn’t break up because, “[Playing music] was a fun thing to do. We thought what we were doing was right and what other people were doing was wrong,” says McMonagle. “We could do whatever we want.”
Although they toured internationally in the ’80s and ’90s, family and other responsibilities have kept the band happily tethered to Philadelphia in recent years. According to McMonagle, “It’s a lot harder to do it now because you’re an adult with an adult life and children and responsibilities and you can’t always just say ‘fuck it all, I’m going to go play a gig somewhere.’” Still, the band has continued to release new music and play out. It’s earned them some lifelong fans.
Nancy Petriello Barile — who along with others at the Philadelphia chapter of the Better Youth Organization, booked that Buff Hall show all those years ago — still loves them. “They do an excellent job of representing Philly in their sound because they’re loud, fast, raucous fun.” That sound, which mixes the anger and force of hardcore punk with the unadulterated glee of pop music, has come to represent them both in style and attitude.
“[FOD is] one of the lone bands of that era and milieu who stayed intact, developed and continuously evolved and experimented while maintaining their original energy level,” says Philly punk veteran Chuck Meehan. You can still see him at every FOD show, up front and singing along with the same exuberance he's shown for the band for the past three decades.
Joel Tannenbaum, of the bands Plow United, Ex Friends and, most recently, The Rentiers, is an obsessive fan. He also calls himself “the world’s only FOD conspiracy theorist.”
While the title might be slightly little tongue-in-cheek, he explains that, “A handful of bands that got really famous for playing melodic hardcore in the 1990s did so by systematically ripping off early FOD records and, to cover their tracks, making sure the band never got a fucking break.”
They might have never gotten that break but they also never stopped making music on their own terms. “I think being in a position of not giving a fuck gives you power,” says McMonagle. “There’s no expiration date on us, there’s not a door slamming shut at any time soon.”
SRA Records and fans around the city and around the world will make sure of that. Along with the re-releases of the band’s back catalogue that have been ongoing for the past couple years, Howze is putting out new FOD music in the form of a series of split 7” records and an LP, the band’s ninth.
Flag of Democracy is approaching middle age at the same breakneck speed they've maintained since 1982. McMonagle recalls a conversation he had with Meehan 30 years ago: “I remember saying to Chuck Meehan in the ’80s: you can’t be playing fast music for the rest of your life, like, when you’re 50, can you? And Chuck was, like, ‘Oh I’ll still be playing’ and I said, ‘Oh I don’t know.’ But here we are,” he says.
“I think at this point in Philadelphia we’re like air or water. We’re there and we’ve always kind of been there. It’s, like, ‘The sky is blue and FOD is playing.’”
Flag of Democracy is playing Sun., May 3, 7 p.m., with +HIRS+ and Soul Glo, LAVA Space, 4134 Lancaster Ave.
