Self Empunishment chat with Steve Hansgen (Minor Threat, Second Wind, Government Issue, etc)

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I went down a “DC Wormhole” recently when I discovered how much I liked the new Hammered Hulls album that just came out with Alec Mackaye singing. That led to said wormhole and eventually that included Minor Threat, a lot of Minor Threat. It doesn’t matter how long ago or how old I am now or whatever, that is some good music that still sounds good, and the version of the band I was really fascinated with was the OUT OF STEP era, the five piece version with Steve Hansgen on bass while Brian Baker went to guitar and joined Lyle Preslar on a two guitar attack. I thought that they sounded their best with this version of the band for whatever reason. I never saw any version of the band. A sad story there is that the band did play in Chatsworth California in 1983, where I lived about…oh maybe less than ten miles away in neighboring Simi Valley. And I didn’t go. That remains a regret to this very day.
I thought Steve’s bass playing on OUT OF STEP was one of the best performances from a bass player of that era, in that world and I still think so. Another reason why I got up the nerve to contact him was I started to see a bunch of people posting about Minor Threat, who somehow had no idea Steve was in the band. I must be getting old, I thought. This is bullshit!
So I reached out to Steve and set this up. I knew about a few of the other bands he was in, Second Wind for starters. He joined Government Issue later, and shared a long standing friendship with the band and especially the late John Stabb. I knew he had recorded and produced and engineered some music too. So what the fuck, let’s get in touch with Steve and see what he has to say.
Not surprisingly, he turned out to be a very nice and affable sort of person and didn’t mind talking about ancient history. We cover a lot of ground here and it was a lot of fun. There wasn’t even any stupid shit that was said that had to be removed…okay actually, there was just one thing I said….but that is it! It’s a straight shot otherwise, for like an hour and a half. I think certain people will really enjoy what he has to say and I would like to thank Steve for giving me a lot of his time.
Cheers!