In his book The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, Steven Beeber chronicles the Jewish lineage that led to New York punk rock. It goes from Lenny Bruce, “the patron saint of punk,” to Lou Reed, to Jonathan Richman, to Suicide, to Richard Hell to Joey and Tommy Ramone. “As it originated in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early 1970s,” Beeber writes, “punk rock was the apotheosis of a Jewish cultural tradition that found its ultimate expression in the generation born after the Holocaust.”
It’s a fascinating read, and one that had a parallel in Washington, D.C. Seth Hurwitz, the founder of the 9:30 Club in Washington, is a local legend. He grew up in Potomac, Maryland, the same suburb I did. His father Harold was a chemist who worked for the government and his mother Selma an artist. As a boy Hurwitz’s parents took him to see Peter, Paul, and Mary at Carter Barron Amphitheatre. “My first real concert,” he said in an interview, “was at the Shady Grove Music Fair in 1972: Delaney & Bonnie, Roy Buchanan, Billy Preston. The opening act was Loggins and Messina.” The Shady Grove Music Fair was where I saw the Partridge Family and Count Basie.
Hurwitz attended Winston Churchill High School, where he started working as a teen DJ at radio station WHFS. “Well, my goal was to be a disc jockey, and I was a disc jockey at WHFS when I was in high school,” Hurwitz said. “I hung around the station and just figured out [how to do it]. They were in this whole Robert Palmer/Little Feat groove. I was, too, but I moved on and they got stuck in that. Basically I moved on to Roxy Music and Lou Reed and Be Bop Deluxe and Rory Gallagher—the new progressive stuff.”
Hurwitz went from HFS to WGTB, a Georgetown radio station. “They played some seriously radical stuff,” he recalled. “Just crazy. So I was welcome there. In fact, I was considered to be maybe too conservative, but they let me give it a shot.” He interviewed a man named Sam L’Hommedieu, a promoter and a partner at a club called the Cellar Door. Hurwitz went to work for him.
Then in 1979 Hurwitz discovered the Ramones:
I saw that the Ramones were playing at this place called Louie’s Rock City about the same time that this movie was coming out called Rock ’n’ Roll High School. And I thought: Let’s do like a premiere and maybe we can get them to come by and meet people and get a bunch of bands to play. (Obviously they’re already booked and they’re not going to play.) So he let me try for this thing because there was no risk really, and it sold out. The band came by and everything happened the way it was supposed to. [After that] I went with [L’Hommedieu] on booking trips to New York and watched what he said and did, and decided to try it myself.
I’ve written before about the connection between the Jews and the Irish in America, and I was reminded of it again when researching Hurwitz’s history. Despite the fact that Hurwitz and I probably never crossed paths—we lived close to each other but I was going to Catholic schools—we shared a similar family dynamic. My father was a journalist for National Geographic who encouraged us to read widely, take adventures and experiment with new ideas. Here’s Hurwitz on his own father: “I will say, my dad—as much as he was a tie and jacket, straight-laced guy—had a challenging, alternative side to him that he imparted upon us. He would take us to see Fellini movies and to get sushi before you ever heard of such a thing, and bought me books of logic problems. He forced me to figure out my homework on my own, never giving me the answer but would teach me how to figure it out.”
He also had a progressive brother: “My older brother was also one of the first hippies in the world back then and listened to Miles Davis and Traffic and he turned me onto that. So from a young age, I thought that what you’re supposed to do is challenge yourself, and find things that you haven’t found, and see weird movies, and stuff like that. So that’s always been ingrained in me. That’s why the terms ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ feel obvious to me. Of course you want to try to learn and do things differently and make things better. So the whole concept of conservative escapes me.”
Hurwitz opened the 9:30 Club in 1980. I began going to the club when I was in college at Catholic University in D.C. in 1984. I worked at a record store, Kemp Mill Records, in the 1980s and we’d get free tickets. Yet it wasn’t the club that introduced me to punk, but my Irish-Catholic family. In 1980, the year the 9:30 Club opened, my father travelled to Ireland to do a story for National Geographic. Like Hurwitz I had older brothers and was interested in music. My father delivered news from Ireland that there was this new young band called U2. I got a copy of Boy, their first record. This was still when U2 was influenced by punk. From there I went to the Ramones, the Clash, Buzzcocks, Gang of Four, Husker Du, Dead Kennedys.
The best band I ever saw at the 9:30 was That Petrol Emotion, a punk-influenced Irish band with an American lead singer, Steve Mack. In The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s, Steven Beeber writes about the rage that many Jews felt after the Holocaust. Many younger ones were angry that Jews had let it happen. There was a parallel in what many Irish felt about the the British. The Irish members of the band wouldn’t Anglicize their names on album covers. The band’s name came from what lead guitarist and songwriter John O’Neill called “that churning feeling you get from going up in Northern Ireland and seeing what we saw.”
Singer Mack had discovered punk in Seattle, but his life really changed when he spent a summering D.C. in 1982:
Then in 1982 I went and spent a summer in DC, working for a government agency. The drinking age was 19, so I could drink legally! And since it was east coast, so many more bands played there! Killing Joke. The Dickies. Gang of Four. X. Bad Brains. Government Issue. The Necros. Man, those DC punks were HARD. In Seattle, we stage dived like crazy, but people always caught you, and helped you if you fell down. In DC, guys were literally trying to beat the shit out of you. I guess they were pissed off because they weren’t drinking.
