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Brian Baker was too young to drive when he started playing the early ’80s punk circuit as the teenage bassist for Minor Threat.
By 1986, he was in the driver’s seat – both as the founding guitarist and creative force behind melodic D.C. hardcore quartet Dag Nasty, and as the guy who owned the van. With the latter in mind, Baker credits his dad – and misappropriated tuition funds – for getting him on the road.
“He gave me the check and, wouldn’t you know, instead of registering for college I bought a van,” Baker says now with a laugh. “I didn’t let him know I’d stolen his money until I had made something of myself… By the time I told him, he was cool about it.”
After Minor Threat broke up in 1983, Baker practiced with Glenn Danzig’s then-developing Samhain project, but it wasn’t a match. He also briefly performed with punk-provocateurs the Meatmen while attending college but abandoned both pursuits to start Dag Nasty.
While often rooted in the furious pace of first-wave hardcore, 1986 debut album Can I Say also endures as a scope-expanding proto-emo classic – reflecting Baker’s love of heart-pounding hooks and Captain Sensible’s jangle-jolted guitar sound on the Damned’s 1982 album, Strawberries.
“I’m not going say I had a notepad of things to do, but I was consciously [thinking], ‘We need a couple ragers that sound like Minor Threat,’” he says, “Also, the music that was not specifically trying to be fast was a reflection of what I liked to listen to.”
Dag Nasty initially featured Baker, bassist Roger Marbury, drummer Colin Sears and gruff-but-energetic frontman Shawn Brown. After cutting a demo on Halloween ’85, Baker brought Dave Smalley of Boston hardcore outfit DYS into the fold as a screamer who could match unbridled fury with melodic flair. They “slightly tarted up” eight early songs for the Can I Say sessions at Don Zientara’s Inner Ear basement studio in Arlington, Virginia.
Baker’s solo on the power-shuffled Thin Line is anything but wispy; the Justification demo’s slender vibrato passage evolved into rock-scorched dynamism for the LP. Sometimes he hot-shotted things even more in concert: “As I got more comfortable playing guitar, and more familiar with the songs, I would probably cheese it up a little bit – but I wouldn’t change the core of it.”
His setup comprised a ’70s Les Paul goldtop, a 100-watt JMP 2203 Mk2 and a Marshall 1935B 4×12. The most crucial part of Can I Say’s tone ended up being an MXR chorus laying around Inner Ear. While omnipresent on the album, Baker felt the pedal design was “clumsy,” so he opted to bring a roadworthy, rackmount Boss CE-3000 Super Chorus on tour instead.
Interestingly, Smalley wasn’t road-ready either. Just as Dag were about to promote Can I Say, their frontman pulled out of the project. “We were going to open for the Descendents on a huge summer tour… and Dave decides he’s going to go do graduate school, something that wasn’t being in Dag Nasty.” Vocalist Peter Cortner handled those dates.
Shortly after the tour, Baker moved into Descendents bassist Doug Carrion’s L.A. basement and started playing in Doggy Style, a party band making music with a “regrettable Chili Peppers flavor to it.”
That bottomed out for Baker quick – he and Carrion bounced to D.C. and restarted Dag Nasty with Cortner and Sears. They slowed the tempo for 1987’s Wig Out at Denko’s, “a weird-sounding record that sounds like people who went to California and smoked some pot.”
Dag’s demo-era lineup reunited in 2012 but have been relatively dormant since 2018. Baker’s primarily focused on his 30-year run with Bad Religion, and he also plays with Fake Names and Beach Rats. Despite Can I Say ending with Never Go Back, he says the door remains open for Dag Nasty’s return.
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