Turnstile’s Washington Monument Show Was A Sight To Behold

By this point, I've seen the Brendan Yates speaker-stack leap so many times, from so many angles. In the middle of Turnstile's giant free Saturday-afternoon show on the National Mall in Washington, DC, Yates climbed up on a speaker stack that put him maybe seven or eight feet above the stage. As the band launched into "Sunshower," one of the more directly old-school hardcore ragers from last year's Never Enough, Yates launched himself off, curling himself into cannonball position and keeping that form until the split-second before he landed. It looked cool as hell in the moment, and it looked even cooler when captured as a still photograph. When he's in the air, frozen forever before that sea of people, Yates looks like he's about to soar through the sky like Neo at the end of The Matrix. To anyone who has seen a Turnstile show, Yates' big jump was not a surprise. He does stuff like that all the time. All five Turnstile members are athletes. I've seen drummer Daniel Fang bust out the resistance bands while winding down after a set. Yates doesn't say much between songs, but Turnstile sets are marathons of physical expression. He never stops running, jumping, whirling. None of them do. It's powerful spectacle, and it sweeps you up. You see what they do, and you want to be a part of it. Eight years ago, at a church hall less that three miles away from the Washington Monument, I saw Yates pull off the most impressive stagedive I have ever seen in my life, a front-flip during the first song of their set at the Time & Space record-release show. The rotation, the hang-time — it was astonishing. Yates couldn't do anything like that on Saturday. The days of no-barricade Turnstile shows are over. They're just too big for that now. But that big jump was even more dramatic, in its own way.Rich TarbellSomething like 60,000 people came out to see Turnstile play at the Washington monument on Saturday. That's the number that Hassan Wadi, global director of the Canadian relief organization Human Concern International, announced when he introduced Turnstile. It definitely sounds plausible. That's a stadium-sized crowd. Turnstile's set took place in a penned-in area of the National Mall, and it reportedly reached capacity before the show started, but thousands of other people seemingly watched from the hill leading up to the Monument. I've seen some people describe Turnstile set as the biggest non-festival hardcore show in history, and that sounds right to me, though I have no idea how you measure anything like that. The scale of the thing was baffling. I can't believe it actually happened.Rich TarbellHow did it happen, anyway? I feel like I need to know. This show was my first time back in Washington, DC since Donald Trump installed a seemingly-permanent National Guard occupation. Police were all over the show, some on horseback. Helicopters buzzed overhead. I cannot imagine the bureaucratic hoops that Turnstile had to jump through to make this show happen, and I can't imagine how many people would've loved to prevent it from taking place. When Turnstile announced the show a few weeks ago, I truly doubted that it would really happen. But no, there was Brendan Yates, waving a Palestinian flag onstage, within sight of the White House. This all goes down at a weird convergence moment when Turnstile are a legitimate pop-culture presence and the current fascist administration is in a defensive crouch, waiting to get mopped up in the midterms. Maybe they just couldn't stop it.Rich TarbellThe show was a fundraiser, not a protest, and I'm not naïve enough to think that it represents any kind of tipping point. (The money that it raised was real — up to $261,000 at press time — and I would encourage you to donate any extra money you have to donate to those relief efforts.) Instead, it feels more like Turnstile snuck one past the refs — like the people who would've dedicated themselves to disallowing this event were otherwise occupied. Lots of stuff was happening in DC that day. At the same time, the Chainsmokers were headlining something called the GLOW Block Party outside the Capitol, and you could hear the beats when you were leaving the Turnstile show. Maybe it was just one more mass-gathering event in a city where mass-gathering events happen all the time. Maybe curious onlookers just came though, donated a couple of bucks if they felt like it, and then went about their days. But the sheer scale of what Turnstile accomplished almost didn't feel real.Rich TarbellWhen Turnstile tour, they go to great lengths to make the crowd feel like they're in it. As a hardcore band headlining gigantic stages, they're in a basically unprecedented situation, and they've put serious work into imagining how that presentation should work. The legendary skate photographer Atiba Jefferson is heavily involved in their video production. They play in front of a huge screen, and most of the time, that screen shows real-time footage of the people in the crowd, not the band. No matter where you look, you see humanity. In DC, they didn't have that. Instead, it was just Turnstile on the same rainbow-striped stage that they used when they played a free show in a Baltimore park when Never Enough came out last year. That show, seemingly staged guerrilla-style, drew an estimated 10,000 people, with no barrier and stagedives all day long. The DC show couldn't be that. The security state had to be involved. But presented without frills or openers or screens, the show still felt like an expression of community.That community runs deep. Just southeast of the Washington Monument, there's an amphitheater called the Sylvan Theater; it mostly hosts the US Military Band and an annual performance of the 1812 Overture. Fugazi played that venue for the first time in 1993, when most of the members of Turnstile were little kids and guitarist Meg Mills was a few years away from being born. Fugazi's set was in honor of the 30th anniversary of Martin Luther King's March On Washington — King once spoke at the Sylvan Theater, too — and something like 5,000 people came out to see Fugazi. I wasn't one of them, but images of that show captured my imagination when I was a kid. Luckily, Fugazi played a lot of free shows in DC, and I got to see them a few times. Their annual sets at Fort Reno Park felt like overwhelming events as they were happening, even if they never even approached the scale of the Turnstile gig on Saturday.As Zachary Lipez points out, Pat Graham, the guy who took the above photo of the Brendan Yates speaker-stack jump, also shot Fugazi's 1993 set at the Sylvan. Ian MacKaye was at the Turnstile show, too. I didn't see him in the crowd, but he looks happy in the pictures I've seen. (I did see Justice Tripp, from Trapped Under Ice and Angel Du$t, in the crowd, and I can tell you that he was extremely stoked.) Here's some trivia: MacKaye was one of the kids stagediving in Studio 8H when Fear became the scariest punk band ever to play Saturday Night Live. Turnstile, who just played SNL, are not scary at all. Neither is MacKaye. Scariness isn't the point anymore, if it ever really was.I don't know if I felt like I was taking part in an historic event on Saturday. It was more of a fun way to spend a beautiful day in a place that we, the American people, supposedly own. The vast crowd didn't seem to fit any real category. I saw parents with little kids on their shoulders, teenage skateboarders, fists-up metalheads, greying retired moshers, guys in banana costumes. (On the way out, I pointed to my End It shirt and tried to joke to one of the banana guys that we're natural enemies. He didn't think it was funny. Maybe my delivery was off.) At least one Chainsmoker was there, too. Afterwards, I got Vietnamese food with a couple of guys who played in Richmond punk bands back in the '90s, and they both brought their middle school-aged kids, who seemed like they had fun. One of them said that he'd always wanted to take his daughter to a hardcore show. (I wanted to bring my kids, too, but they didn't feel like making the trip from Charlottesville to DC, and I don't blame them. Driving into DC sucks.)Rich TarbellI don't want to sentimentalize or gush over the show itself, but it was extremely fun. Turnstile played a version of the Never Enough set that I've seen them play a few times now, and they played it well. They threw themselves around with abandon, bringing joy and energy and bounce and swagger to those gigantic riffs and those catchy, dreamy choruses. Brendan Yates' mic cut out a few times. He got the whole crowd to back up a few times to keep anyone from getting too smushed up front. I love that band and those songs, and I moshed a tiny bit at the end, but I never got lost in the show the way I have with that band in the past. This was not a mosh-to-survive situation. It was a pleasant afternoon with some great music.Rich TarbellBut maybe that's just how it happens. Maybe Fugazi's 1993 Washington Monument show felt like a pleasant afternoon with some great music. Maybe the day's victory was symbolic, more than anything. Ever since the Turnstile show ended, my entire feed has been full of videos and photos from the set, and they all look incredible. Get used to seeing that picture of Brendan Yates frozen in the air, seemingly hovering just above the pointy tip of the Washington Monument. That jump wasn't necessarily a statement or a readymade iconic moment. Yates simply did the kind of thing that he does at every Turnstile show. But whatever it comes to symbolize, the image is going to stick with us for a long time.