this is a long article, but its a good read ... seth is quoted towards the end ...
washingtonpost.com
Teen Angle
By Anne Kenderdine
Special to The Washington Post
Friday, March 11, 2005; Page WE29
On a recent Thursday just after 9 p.m. at the Black Cat, opening band the Unseen thanked the audience for coming to hear them instead of staying home watching TV. The crowd noted this sarcasm with amused snorts, but recognition was due. In the previous hour's time slot, Fox airs a soap about wealthy California high schoolers, "The O.C.," a program so compelling that, as the Unseen reported, members of the headlining band Strike Anywhere were watching it themselves backstage. The actual teenagers at this all-ages rock club on 14th Street NW had to really want to be there -- especially on a school night.
Just about anyone between ages 14 and 17 can outline the challenges of going out for entertainment. There's the cash-flow issue. The transportation logistics. But the limiting factor for teenagers is one of permission: Will your parents allow you to go out? Will the clubs allow you to come in?
There are simpler opportunities for teenage socializing. Mainstream pursuits, ones backed by million-dollar advertising campaigns, such as shopping, or going to the movies or out to dinner, are the ones everyone knows about. The theater, author or poetry readings, basketball games or ice skating: These, too, are open to anyone, and some are ideally priced for those with no income. Yet these suggestions -- bowling, say -- can elicit eye rolls and groans from a 15-year-old. The swirling feeling of connecting with a live band or being in the middle of a packed dance floor is stirring and cathartic in a different way.
"There's something about being so close to the musicians and the amp and the vibrations, and it kinda just makes you want to jump around and be crazy," says Nicole Kelly, 14, an eighth-grader at Takoma Park Middle School and one of a handful of young teenagers at the Strike Anywhere show.
It's an exhilarating and intimidating experience to be out at night, dropped off by a minivan at a converted industrial building where the door staff evaluates who may enter a place that's intentionally dimly lit. Music revs up the senses, creating an appealing atmosphere for teenagers with energy to burn.
That can make anyone responsible for high schoolers, such as parents or club staff, very nervous. But the thing is, most teenagers don't go to nightclubs to try on being a different age or to test an establishment where liquor is served.
Ask them, and they'll give you a pure motive. Regardless of the genre -- go-go, Latin, rap or punk rock -- music is the reason teenagers show up at all-ages clubs. They come for the live interaction with the band, to dance with friends, to meet new people, to release tension from a week of school and work, to reveal different sides of their personalities, to simply get out of the confines of their too-familiar living rooms or neighborhoods. Stephanie Kimou, 17, and her friends, fellow seniors at Northwest High School in Germantown, often come to the "Club Illusions" teen night at El Boqueron II in Rockville. "We're all pretty reserved; we keep to ourselves in school," she says. "And once we get here, it's like we're the center of everything. We're more inclined to socialize."
Dante Ferrando, owner of the Black Cat, sums up the tradeoffs for many club proprietors who admit all ages. "The reality is that concert venues sell alcohol to stay open," he says. "But I don't like the idea that the fact that there's alcohol in a place would exclude people from being able to see live music. I think it's important that younger people be exposed to live bands."
His policies have a price. Admitting anyone younger than 21 requires door staff to check IDs and administer special hand stamps. It takes extra time when bartenders again check the IDs of the whole party for each drink order. "It does cost a lot more to staff appropriately for all that. You have to do a lot more work," Ferrando says. "The customers who are over 21 are confused sometimes by the complexity of our hand-stamping policy and maybe a slower drink order because we have to monitor the booze, but I think it's well worth it."
Given the risks, most clubs that open their doors to high schoolers do so from the heart. Many of their staff members grew up here and want to extend the same or better cultural opportunities that they experienced as teenagers.
"When we opened, we wanted to be involved with the community," says Lawrence Maynard, general manager of Club Levels on Montana Avenue in Northeast Washington. The new management for the old Boom Boom Room took over in November 2003, and the weekly teen night, now several months old, grew from the club's contributions to the Arboretum Neighborhood Association events. During Saturday teen nights, the bars for Club Levels' older patrons are literally hidden behind locked doors. Teenagers see only the snack window, selling sodas and hot dogs for $1 and chips for 50 cents. DJ Krazy, who promotes the event and makes the mixes "with no cussing" that play between bands' sets, stands out front, suggesting pickup times to parents.
After climbing from the club's door to the hall where the go-go bands play, it's easy to understand how the venue got its name. The half and full staircases, separated by switchback landings and terraced rooms, could inspire the set designers on the next "Harry Potter" flick. A turn from the top of the tallest staircases provides an enticing view of the long rectangular dance floor below, pulsing with kids moving to "Bazooka Bottom," by Critical Condition Band, or CCB. "They on the stage!" a girl just entering yells to her friends, zipping up her boots and rushing down the steps to join the throng.
One look for girls is long shorts or denim culottes paired with bright argyle or polka-dot knee-high socks. A boy with a gymnast's build wears a fitted navy T-shirt that says "Proud to be Awesome" over a white polo. The teenagers dance in groups, not touching, the girls demonstrating more energy while the boys mostly shift their weight and lift their arms overhead. Shannon Frost, 18, a senior at Friendship-Edison Collegiate Academy in Northeast Washington, comes because "it's crazy, it's crunk, it's loud and they represent your 'hood," when the band shouts the names of various locales -- Barry Farms, Potomac Gardens, 37th and Minnesota -- to measure crowd response.
No matter where their neighborhood is, no teenagers think it's hard to get here; a bus route runs right by. Shannon likes the fact that she's sure to meet teenagers outside her school and neighborhood. "The whole point of going to clubs is to dance with other people," she says. Dancing liberates her from the weekday routine, her "business, working side." "I feel more free and alive," she says.
There's no dance floor at Jammin' Java in Vienna, but kids can let loose all the same. Tucked into a strip mall off Maple Avenue under the slogan "Music, Coffee & Community," it is sometimes mistaken for a mere coffeehouse. One Sunday night, a small boy, legs dangling from his stool, spoons up a chocolate sundae at the bar, while jazz guitarist Michael Fath and his band rock the stage. The audience is seated, some holding paper coffee cups, dressed for the drizzle outside in jeans and waterproof shells. Fath's teenage daughters and a handful of their friends are here, too. A bouquet of lilies, snapdragons and a Gerbera daisy decorates the counter, which serves beer and wine along with warm drinks, pork and tomatillo chili, and spinach artichoke dip. A woman reads in an armchair in the glow of the neon "Open" sign in the glass storefront.
"We're not a dirty rock club; it sets us apart," says Daniel Brindley, who owns Jammin' Java with his brothers, transplants from New Jersey. "We're not so thrilled about the name, but it does say coffee shop, and the all-ages thing does fit with the theme. All ages, nonsmoking: It's not a bar. . . . It sounds like a safe name, and it sends out a safe message. We do get more of the listening-room, acoustic act."
The club keeps busy during the day, too, as a multipurpose space that opens at 7 a.m. weekdays. Children's performers play six daytime shows weekly; commuters or moms' groups stop by for coffee or a sandwich during the day; music lessons upstairs run until 10 p.m.; and after school brings students with laptops piling onto the couch and five chairs.
Daniel's dad, Bill, stands at the corner of the countertop where the cafe ends and the concert seating area begins, using his ex-Wall Street skills to transform curious walk-in visitors into ticket buyers. With a gray beard, zip-neck sweat shirt and khaki cargos, he's a relaxed and welcoming presence, sounding just like any dad who's very proud of his sons, the musicians who run the place. He's more a restaurant greeter than door staff; the room's capacity is 200, and cafe workers only check IDs when someone asks for a drink.
A Fairfax family, Aida and Carlos Carmona and their son, Roberto, 15, stop in after dinner elsewhere, and when Bill likens the guitarist's sound to Stevie Ray Vaughan's, they get tickets for the show. Roberto's been playing guitar for three years. Looking around, he wonders if his band could do a show here one day. He last saw a show at Jaxx in Springfield, which frequently books heavy-metal bands, and his dad wasn't a fan of that scene. "This one is more classy," Carlos says. "I don't know; it has a good atmosphere. The setting is really nice. Besides, we see other kids around here."
All-ages clubs let teenagers show up anytime, and some other clubs only allow them at certain events. For example, only ages 14 to 20 are admitted to El Boqueron II's "Club Illusions" night, a party that pops up when there's no threat of school the next day, such as the Sunday before Presidents' Day. The lines to get in -- one for each gender -- curve around the office park buildings at Gude Drive and Southlawn Lane in Rockville. Inside, past the burly security detail and some plastic palm trees, bodies are undulating to DJ Roz on the dance floor of a large ballroom. To the right of the stage, slithering against traffic down a narrow hallway leads to a humid room half the size of the main dance area, where another DJ plays Latin beats.
The promoter, Guillermo Herrada, 20, began organizing and DJ-ing teen parties at community centers when he was a sophomore at Watkins Mill High School in Gaithersburg. Over the years, his parties moved around to find bigger venues, settling at El Boqueron II about two years ago. "I figured that when I was in high school, there wasn't anything like this for us," he says, explaining that the event is for high schoolers and that the upper age limit is 20 to accommodate some older English as a Second Language students. "I always said if everything's for 18 and over, why can't we have anything for us?"
The DJ puts on "Some Cut," an ode to vigorous sex by Trillville, and the full crowd inhales and compresses on the dance floor. Consistently, not just to this song, in about every fourth group of dancers, there is one girl pressing her posterior into a boy's crotch. Sometimes she bends over, as if to touch her toes.
Most other girls ignore this behavior and let their own moves fly with flair. One poised group, all 17-year-old seniors, chalks it up to immaturity. "We're older, too. We're more inclined to respect ourselves," says Stephanie Kimou. Molli Chang and her friend Jessica Lastre, both 17 and seniors at Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring, also eschew what they consider "not dancing."
It's Molli's first time here, and the scene isn't what she envisioned. She sees too much sameness prescribed, and it's not the way she wants to be. "Here, there's a type of clothing style you wear: tight pants, low-cut shirts with your cleavage showing or your belly button hanging out." She was hoping there'd be techno music, like the flier said, the kind of music that she dances to at home. She was also imagining that she could feel the same freedom from judgment that she feels dancing by herself. "I just want to get into the music and feel the beat, and you can do anything you want because it just goes with the flow. Here, you have a certain style of dancing you have to do."
Jessica surveys the crowd, pleased. Her little brother, her charge, who was temporarily lost back in the boys' line, has been located. The promoter's assistant asked her to distribute fliers to all kids at Sherwood to diversify the audience -- still primarily African American and Latino -- and she thinks her work has paid off tonight. She can see more of a mix of cultural backgrounds. And that's the point of being at parties like this, she thinks, to be exposed to fresh music and new styles. "When you go out, you open yourself up to a whole new environment, so many new people, and you can just go out and explore the world."
The loiterers in front of Electrik Maid are doing a little too much exploring for Flora Lucini's tastes right now.
"Sweethearts, off the bricks!" she calls.
The Takoma Park 17-year-old holds forth from a stool outside the club, directing patrons to a part of the sidewalk that won't block the path of passersby crossing the street from the Takoma Metro station.
Flora's been around since the very beginning of this nonprofit community space, capacity 50. "She was here before we were even on the map, before we had heat," says co-founder Joe Brown, one of a handful of adults volunteering tonight.
"I finally decided that to make anything happen, I had to do it myself," Flora says of a role she began at age 14. So she helps book bands and plans shows in honor of friends' birthdays. And she still directs traffic and keeps a strong handle on security at the door.
"I don't know how a person knows so many people," Brown muses. "She knows everybody."
Tonight, there are six bands, including ones from Culpeper, Va., and New Jersey.
"The difference is that when I book bands, these are people that I know," Flora says, to distinguish the Maid from "corporate" venues. "It's a unity that the other venues don't get."
The bands generally don't get paid. There's no bar here, no alcoholic beverages or smoking allowed. The all-volunteer organization is forever concerned about making rent money. Admission to shows is considered a donation. "People who don't find they fit in the other venues fit in here," says volunteer Daniellea Barry, 20.
The space has been used for potlucks, acoustic concerts, children's music sessions and political gatherings. Around inauguration time, the Maid gained some attention for hosting Ralph Nader and having some regulars burst in to throw eggs at him toward the end of his question-and-answer period. Inside, there's a break between sets, time for kids to disperse from where they've been pressing against the stage. They clap for the band and wander back toward the glass storefront outlined in a string of white lights. On one of the faded armchairs, a boy with a mohawk and green plaid leggings checks his phone. Nearby, two boys debate the appropriate term for a certain musical genre -- emo-metal or emo-core? -- and tease each other about girls.
"This is an important time in their lives," Brown says. "They're pushing their limits, and they're looking to see how I respond to them. There's respect there, too. It's really cool to see how that comes back to us."
Small venues like the Maid let kids really get close to the performers. Galaxy Hut in Arlington, which also has a capacity of 50, allows all ages only for its live shows. When ages are mixed in a professional club, owner Alice Despard says, she sees benefits for the teen audience members absorbing club etiquette and for the young musicians on stage learning to stand up in front of an unfamiliar audience. Seeing performers just a bit older, elevated on the stage, could inspire viewers to take guitar lessons or apply for a gig, she says, remembering her own sixth-grade crush on the lead of the high school play. Such idol worship yields "an emotional level to admiration that can really motivate people to begin things in their lives," she says. " 'I really admire the fact that that person has so much talent, I wish I could do something like that.' "
Tony Puesan, director of the jazz center HR-57, compares the interplay between generations at his compact all-ages venue in the District to the flowing exchange between jazz musicians, as one player in a quartet bequeaths the solo to another. "The giving and taking of support on that stage is important for people to understand," he says. "And we think it is important for students to see that."
Beyond musical knowledge that can be applied to one's own performance, a host of practical insights can be gleaned from entering the club scene. Teens learn that inhaling secondhand cigarette smoke can give you a stomach ache, that the music is loud and earplugs aren't a bad idea, that adhesive-backed metal rivets used to decorate a sweatshirt will come off in the wash. Bartenders like it when you tip them for each Coke, and some places won't even give you free water. Having a warm jacket is great for waiting in line outside, but a hassle once you enter venues without a coat check. And after a while, an institution you once thought overwhelming can become navigable.
Many venues are happy to answer calls and e-mails from parents. They're used to explaining neighborhood safety issues, their atmosphere and their own security policies. It's not unusual for one or more parents to join teenagers at a show; those who do are uniformly described as "cool." The Black Cat requires anyone younger than 18 to be accompanied by someone older. And some clubs offer a way to balance teenagers' dual needs for independence and supervision: a separate, quieter, free-to-enter space, often serving food and drink, where parents can cool their heels during the show. Club Levels unlocks the bar area, the Warehouse Next Door has a cafe one door over, the Black Cat offers table seating at a small vegetarian cafe, and the 9:30 club's Backbar is accessible from a separate street entrance.
Ultimately, nightclubs can be a lot like high school, even for adults. The teachers' old excuse for condescending and aggravating rules -- a few bad apples can ruin the whole barrel -- is trotted out in clubs as well. Door staff members can enforce any regulations they choose: Sometimes females get in first, or you can't bring in outside food or drink, or once you leave you can't come back in. Some clubs, with their metal wanding and thorough pat-downs, can resemble a high school entryway -- or an airport security station.
"I'm not sure how nightclubs got this tradition of excluding young people, but I think it's ridiculous," says Seth Hurwitz, owner of the 9:30 club, the 800-pound gorilla of local all-ages venues. He sees the club not as a bar, but as a music venue, like the new Music Center at Strathmore. "I don't understand how we're any different from any establishment that serves alcohol. I'm sure Applebee's does."
It's a Tuesday night at the 9:30 club, and Atreyu, a band from Orange County, Calif., is about to take the stage. Has anyone seen Aidan Curry's shoe? One black suede Vans sneaker, size 11, has been lost in the mosh pit during Unearth's set. Aidan shrugs. It beats the time he was knocked unconscious at Nissan Pavilion. Aidan is 17. He and his friends live in Leesburg and really came for another band, Unearth. They don't like Atreyu anyway. They're hoping to skip the traffic and have to sacrifice the shoe. It's time to go home.
ALL-AGES CLUBS
These venues are always all ages:
BLACK CAT -- 1811 14th St. NW; 202-667-7960.
www.blackcatdc.com. Metro: U Street-Cardozo (Green Line). Sunday-Thursday 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., Fridays and Saturdays 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. Anyone 17 and younger must be accompanied by someone older than 18. Concerts nightly, cafe, Red Room lounge with pool table.
ELECTRIK MAID -- 268 Carroll St. NW; 301-270-8057. electricmaid.org. Metro: Takoma (Red Line). Concerts Fridays and Saturdays, open mike two Thursdays per month. No alcohol or smoking permitted. Currently seeking volunteers. For more information, meetings are held Wednesdays at 8.
HR-57 -- 1610 14th St. NW; 202-667-3700.
www.hr57.org. Metro: U Street-Cardozo (Green Line). Jam sessions Wednesdays and Thursdays 8 to midnight, jazz concerts Fridays and Saturdays 9 p.m. to 1 a.m.
JAMMIN' JAVA -- 227 Maple Ave. E., Vienna; 703-255-1566.
www.jamminjava.com. Monday-Thursday 7 a.m. to 11 p.m., Fridays 7 a.m. to midnight, Saturdays 8 a.m. to midnight, Sundays 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Concerts nightly, cafe, music lessons, children's daytime concerts 10:30 weekdays and additional 4:15 show Monday; DJ on Mondays; nonsmoking.
9:30 CLUB -- 815 V St. NW; 202-393-0930.
www.930.com. Metro: U Street-Cardozo (Green Line). Concerts nightly, Backbar.
WAREHOUSE NEXT DOOR -- 1017 Seventh St. NW; 202-783-3933.
www.warehousenextdoor.com. Metro: Mount Vernon Square (Green and Yellow lines). Monday-Friday 3 to midnight, Saturdays 10 a.m. to midnight. Concerts most nights, adjacent cafe, theater and gallery.
ALL-AGES EVENTS
Selected events are for all ages or high school students; the venue restricts ages at other times.
EL BOQUERON II -- 1330 E. Gude Dr., Rockville; 240-274-5928.
www.illusionclubs.com. "Club Illusion" rap and Latin dance party for ages 14 to 20 March 24 and 31. Cover charge is $10 for girls, $15 for boys.
CLUB LEVELS -- 1960 Montana Ave. NE; 202-269-0100. "Teen Night" with go-go bands for ages 18 and younger Saturdays 4 to 10 p.m. Cover charge is $5.
EAST COAST -- 13989 Jefferson Davis Hwy., Woodbridge; 703-490-5504.
www.eastcoastbilliards.com. All-ages metal showcases; billiards and darts until 8 school nights and 9 on weekends. Anyone 17 and younger should be accompanied by someone older than 18. Cover charge varies.
GALAXY HUT -- 2711 Wilson Blvd, Arlington; 703-525-8646.
www.galaxyhut.com. Metro: Clarendon (Orange Line). Concerts Saturday-Monday; younger than 21 admitted for live shows only. No cover charge.
JAXX -- 6355 Rolling Rd., Springfield; 703-569-5940.
www.jaxxroxx.com. Rock concerts; most shows are all ages. Cover charge varies.
NATION -- 1015 Half St. SE; 202-554-1500. concertsfirst.com. The club periodically hosts all-ages events. Cover varies.
Anne Kenderdine is the events editor for washington post.com's Entertainment Guide.
