Jason Yawn has a keen sense of American history and his place in it.

As the vocalist of Washington, D.C.’s Trial By Fire, he is part of a new breed of young, politically minded left-wing punks who are taking their message to the people with music. Yawns politics aren’t the product of watching television news or skimming one-sided scene zines for dirt on “the man.” Instead, he’s gone to the source for answers to his questions about this country and it’s government. He’s been reading the Federalist Papers, a series of document from the late1780s that outline some of the founding fathers’ opinions on matters as varied as the power of taxation to state militias.

“What I’m getting from it is that, in some ways, things aren’t like the founding fathers intended them to be, but in a weird way they actually are,” says Yawn.
The framers of the constitution, he says, probably never envisioned a world where automobile manufacturers had more power than voters in determining the nation’s future.

“The founding fathers intended that the people who owned the country would run it, and, unfortunately, that’s what’s happening now with corporations,” says Yawn. “Ben Franklin said that if banks ever got control of the political system, it would be the end of democracy. I think that’s what’s happening now.”

The realization that the power is slipping out of the hands of the people is the match that lit Trial By Fire’s fuse. Yawn says he doesn’t want to follow the punk rock model of singing about girls and partying. He’s more concerned about what’s going on in the streets, who has the power, and how the people can get it back. His attitude and his band’s message, though not it’s musical approach, hark back to much of the protest music of the ‘60s.

“The hippy movement has a lot in common with punk music,” says Yawn. “There’s always been this gap between hippies and punks, but I think this issue is spanning that gap.”

Hippies and punks, according to Yawn, have a lot more in common than not. Both movements, he says, despite their disparate methods of achieving their goals, have always been about railing against unbridled power.

“During the (IMF) protests in D.C., anarchists like the Black Bloc were more confrontational, smashing windows and pulling dumpsters into the streets,” says Yawn. “Meanwhile, the hippies were sitting in front of the cops, trying to engage them in conversation.”
Yawn says neither approach is wrong, and he respects and incorporates both into his own views and music.

“I think our music is kind of both,” he says. “Let’s dialogue, but also be confrontational.”

Yawns only gripe with hippies, particularly those of the ‘60s, is that he says they lost their focus, and turned into what a lot of punks and even modern hippies view as “the enemy.” He is confident the same thing won’t happen to the modern punk movement. In the song, “Threat to the Slave Trade,” Yawn revises Timothy Leary’s hippy mantra “tune in, turn on, drop out,” singing instead, “tune in, drop out, resist.”

“That’s my way of acknowledging that hippies had some good ideas, but also saying, ‘let’s not give up.’”