Turnstile Takes the Washington Monument Stage

By this point, the Brendan Yates speaker-stack has leaped so many times from every possible angle. In the midst of Turnstile’s massive free Saturday afternoon performance on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Yates ascended a speaker stack that placed him perhaps seven or eight feet above the stage. As the band launched into “Sunshower,” one of their more directly old-school hardcore раgers from last year’s Never Enough, Yates launched himself off, curling into a cannonball position while maintaining perfect form until the split second before his landing. The move looked incredible in the moment, and even more impressive when captured as a still photograph. When Yates was airborne, frozen forever above a sea of people, he appeared poised to soar through the sky like Neo at the end of The Matrix.

For anyone familiar with Turnstile’s live performances, Yates’ dramatic jump came as little as a surprise. All five members of the band are athletes. I’ve witnessed drummer Daniel Fang utilizing resistance bands during set downtime. Yates, meanwhile, tends to remain quiet between songs, but the Turnstile set functions as a marathon of physical expression. He never ceases running, jumping, and spinning. None of the band members break this intensity. It is a powerful spectacle that draws listeners in. Watching what they accomplish inspires you to be part of the experience.

Eight years ago, at a church hall less than three miles from the Washington Monument, I witnessed Yates attempt the most impressive stagedive I have ever observed in my life—a front-flip during the opening song of their set at the Time & Space record-release show. The rotation, the hang-time, and the overall execution were astonishing. Yates could not replicate this level of performance on the previous Saturday. The days of barricade-free Turnstile shows are firmly in the past; these events simply became too large to accommodate without them. Yet, Yates’ dramatic leap was still more cinematic in its own way.

The event drew approximately 60,000 attendees, as announced by Hassan Wadi, global director of Canadian relief organization Human Concern International. The number sounds plausible for a stadium-sized crowd. Turnstile’s set took place in a fenced quadrant of the National Mall, reportedly reaching capacity before the show began, while thousands of others watched from the hill leading up to the monument. Some described the set as the largest non-festival hardcore show in history, and that assessment seems accurate, though measuring such events is inherently challenging. The scale of the event was baffling to witness.

How did it happen, anyway? I feel like I need to understand. This was my first return to Washington, D.C. since the installation of a seemingly-permanent National Guard occupation, with police everywhere and helicopters buzzing overhead. I cannot imagine the bureaucratic hurdles Turnstile faced to secure this show, nor do I understand how many people might have wanted to prevent it. When Turnstile announced the show a few weeks before, I truly doubted it would actually occur. But there on stage stood Brendan Yates, waving a Palestinian flag, within sight of the White House. This event took place at a strange convergence point where Turnstile were a legitimate pop-culture presence and the current administration was in a defensive posture, waiting to be handled in the midterms. Perhaps they simply could not stop it.

When Turnstile tour, they go to great lengths to make the crowd feel like participants. As a hardcore band headlining gigantic stages, they’ve taken on a largely unprecedented responsibility and invested serious effort into imagining an ideal presentation. The legendary skate photographer Atiba Jefferson plays a heavy role in their video production. They perform in front of a massive screen, which most of the time displays real-time footage of the crowd rather than the band. No matter where you look, you see humanity. In DC, this wasn’t available. Instead, it was simply Turnstile on what looks like the same rainbow-striped stage they used for a guerrilla-style free show in a Baltimore park last year when Never Enough came out. That show drew an estimated 10,000 people, featuring stagedives all day long. The DC show simply couldn’t replicate that. Security had to be involved, yet without unnecessary frills, openers, or screens, the show still felt like a genuine community expression.

The community is deeply rooted. Just southeast of the Washington Monument is an amphitheater called the Sylvan Theater, which primarily 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 current Turnstile members were still small children and guitarist Meg Mills was a couple of years away from being born. Fugazi’s set honored the 30th anniversary of the March on Washington—King once spoke at the Sylvan Theater as well—and attracted roughly 5,000 people. I wasn’t there in person, but images of that show captured my imagination as a child. Fugazi later played many free shows in DC, and I attended a few myself. Their annual performances at Fort Reno Park felt overwhelming in the moment, even if they never approached the scale of the Turnstile gig on Saturday.

Zachary Lipez notes that Pat Graham, who captured the Brendan Yates speaker-stack jump, also photographed Fugazi’s 1993 Sylvan performance. Ian MacKaye was present at the Turnstile show as well. I didn’t spot him in the crowd, but his happiness is evident in the photos I’ve seen. (I did spot Justice Tripp from Trapped Under Ice and Angel Du$, and he was clearly hyped.) Fun fact: MacKaye was one of the kids stagediving at Studio 8H when Fear became the scariest punk band ever to play SNL. Turnstile, who just performed at SNL, are not scary at all. Neither is MacKaye. The image of scariness is no longer the point, if it ever was.

I’m not certain if I felt like I was participating in something historic on Saturday; it was more of a fun way to spend a beautiful day in a place that many Americans claim to own. The vast crowd didn’t fit any single category. I saw parents with young children on their shoulders, teenage skateboarders, fists-up metalheads, greying retired moshers, and 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 were natural enemies. He didn’t find the humor amusing. Perhaps my delivery was off.) At least one Chainsmoker was present as well. Afterward, I had Vietnamese food with a couple of guys who played in Richmond punk bands back in the ’90s, and they brought their middle school-aged kids, who seemed to have fun. One of them mentioned he’d always wanted to take his daughter to a hardcore show. (I wanted to bring my kids too, but the drive from Charlottesville to DC seemed daunting.)

I don’t want to sentimentalize or overact about the show itself, but it was extremely fun. Turnstile performed a version of the Never Enough set I’ve seen them play multiple times now, and they executed it well. They threw themselves around with abandon, bringing joy and energy and bounce and swagger to those massive riffs and catchy, dreamy choruses. Brendan Yates’ mic cut out a few times. He got the whole crowd to back up occasionally to keep nobody too smushed up front. I love that band and their songs, and I moshed a little at the end, but I never lost myself in the show the way I used to with them. This was not a mosh-to-survive situation. It was a pleasant afternoon with great music.

But maybe that’s just how it happens. Perhaps Fugazi’s 1993 Washington Monument show felt like a pleasant afternoon with great music. Maybe the day’s victory was symbolic, more than anything. Since the Turnstile show ended, my entire social feed has been filled with 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 ready-made iconic moment. Yates simply did the kind of thing he does at every Turnstile show. But whatever it comes to symbolize, the image is going to stick with us for a long time.

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