When I was a child growing up on the rim of the Beltway, D.C. was as exotic as Paris to me.
Okay, maybe not Paris. Let’s say London.
In any event, it was the place to both lose and find yourself. No one knew you there – you could be anybody. In the early ’60s freak flags weren’t common in D.C., but it was still a good time to rebel, explore, go a little crazy.
And in all of D.C., no neighborhood offered a more magnetic opportunity for the budding eccentric than Georgetown. It had a funky offbeat atmosphere in which the very well-to-do and the ne’er-do-wells shared the same bumpy brick sidewalks. It seemed magical to me as a teenager. I thought it would always be.
In the forty years since, as the current of my life has taken me further from that time and place, the memory of it remained unchanged. Now, having returned to my hot steamy hometown, I find it altered in many ways, some great, some not so much.
This is only natural, of course. Cities rise and fall, humans come and go. But the changes in Georgetown – at least along the main commercial arteries – seem more insidious – sort of like the malling of New York City, where the once affordable districts of warehouses and artists’ lofts, seedy bars and pawn shops, the gritty soul of the city, seem to have been dispossessed, replaced by trendy eateries, high-end shops, expensive hotels. The poets, musicians and artists appear to have relocated to Brooklyn. Wouldn’t Walt Whitman be pleased?
A similar shift seems underway in Georgetown. The M Street I remember from my wild youth was filled with bars where live bands played late into the night. The Shadows, which later moved down the street, is where I heard the Mugwumps, a short-lived band whose members included Cass Elliott, before she became a Mamma, and Zal Yanovsky– before he became a Lovin’ Spoonful.
There was the Crazy Horse, the Shamrock, and, a couple of blocks below M, the old Bayou, where primal rock bands like The Telstars tore it up.
The classiest of all the old Georgetown clubs, The Cellar Door, where I once had the great good fortune to hear Miles Davis when Keith Jarrett was in his group, is boarded up. Judging by the sign in its window it ended its days as a Philadelphia Cheesecake Factory.
And no list of D.C. rock venues would be complete without The Emergency, at the far end of M Street, the little all ages club that could and did change the world, at least for me.
D.C. is a city dense with history. You can’t throw a brick without hitting some spot where somebody famous once did something. And Georgetown has its share of that revered legacy.
But the Georgetown I remember, that scruffy eccentric neighborhood with deep roots, has been subjected to a corporate takeover, upscaled into near Disney-esque quaintness. The live music venues have been replaced by cupcake franchises. Lines form outside Georgetown Cupcakes and Sprinkles.
I love a good cupcake, but it’s no substitute for rock ‘n roll.
Ah well. I hear the kids these days do their reinventing and rebelling over in Adams Morgan. Times change. The moveable feast relocates. The repast goes on.