It was the place to go for Dixieland jazz.

♪♪♪ Bayou, to me, was a quintessential rock and roll joint, you know, it was the flat black Boom, boom, boom.

♪ Band was blowing Dixie double 4 time.

♪ Over its 45 year history, The Bayou nightclub on the Georgetown Waterfront was a scene of a lot of famous firsts.

♪ Well it feels like the first time.

It feels like the very first time.

♪ And some legendary last calls.

The Bayou turned out to be the perfect place to have that experience.

♪ Don't you ever stop.

Cause I'm on a high rollin dream and I don't want to drop.

♪ You have a whole history of the changes in American popular music, ♪ singing ♪ And they're opening up the joint for one more night.

Wow!

What goes on in this place?

This program has been made possible by the generous support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the International Documentary Association, the Potomac River Jazz Club, and by Bayou contributors.

We started off in this city, oh, it's 20 years ago, I think, almost, almost to the week or the month.

So you couldn't have all been there though, because it was only about 20 people in the building.

I think it was called, uh, The Bayou.

Pirates Den.

I think that was the first club that was there.

And, all the waiters dressed up as pirates, and they drug people out of their, away from their tables and threw 'em in the brig.

And the whole place was a raucous, raucous mess.

The murder happened down there and they closed the club down.

Well, my father went down and locked, padlocked the building, immediately.

Mr. Nesline had followed Mr. Harding to that club, had followed him up the steps to the second balcony and shot him.

There was a real gangland killing there, real violence, and it colored people's perception of the place.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome to the Bayou.

The club was began as the Bayou.

Its genesis was in 1953.

There were three owners at that time, a gentleman named Mike Munley, my uncle Tony Tramonte, and of course my father Vince.

Well, the way I understand Mike was at the Knights of Columbus one night having a drink at the bar, and he said, I'm gonna open up the place and we're going to feature jazz six nights a week.

And Vince says, sure, I'd like to get a piece of that.

Mike says, sure.

He said, but I don't have any money.

He says, that's all right.

I'll loan it to you.

And then while they were standing there talking, his brother Tony came in and, uh, he said, I'd like to have a piece of that too, but I don't have any money.

Mike says, hell, I'll lend you the money too.

Basically, that's how it happened.

The three of 'em put up, uh, I think they put up $5,000 each.

I know they got it for a song because the place was bordered up and, you know, the chairs and the tables and the chains and the dust and the dirt had been there since the, uh, speakeasy days.

You know, in other words, when they opened that place, they took the boards off the door and they were ready for business - cobwebs and all.

My father and mother had been on a vacation, and, you know, the Bayou was all over New Orleans.

My dad said, what an appropriate name.

Oh, well, Mike Munley came down to the Charles.

He said, I want you to take the band in there, but I want my nephew, Bobby Conway, to be the leader of the band.

I says, great.

Bill it like this: Bobby Conway and the Dixie six featuring Wild Bill Waylon.

That way I don't have to worry about the band's problems.

And I said, and I get my money on the side.

I got my name up in lights.

I've got all the pleasures.

The Bayou was a hit right out of the box.

I asked my dad, he said, how long did, was it before you turned to profit?

I was expecting him to say two years.

He said, we made a profit the first month.

♪♪♪ Vince Tramonte was a lawyer.

And, uh, you know, you, you can't run him down when you see him, but he had a good business sense on him.

And then Tony would just kind of go along with almost anything.

He was more fun to be with than Vince.

Vince was very serious.

Mike Munley, who was kind of a carne type guy, you know, uh, I had worked for him.

He had, he used to rent trailers.

Tramontes were dead on Italian.

Mike Munley was dead on Irish.

And I think that's why they didn't, didn't get along.

That lasted for a year.

And then they had a falling out with each other, and they eased Mike out of the place, and Tramontes took over.

I understand he got the squeeze job.

And with that, Mike's nephew, Bobby Conway, the piano player, he left too.

So I got top billing and took over the band and ran the whole thing from then on.

And Waylon was the main force of the Bayou, I think, in the early fifties.

And then when we heard that Bill Whalen was down there, we stopped in there and we liked what we heard.

And we just kept going back for years.

They were there for a good time.

You know, this was a club that had music and it was loud music.

And, uh, maybe you get a little action, you know.

So you take a cab to this place over in Georgetown, you know, it's kind of sinister, it's under, under that freeway, you know, when it's dark.

♪♪♪ Somewhere along the line during the night, we'd walk out the front of the building and up the hill and back down into the building, come down playing: When the Saints Come Marching In.

We used to love it.

The drummer hated it.

We'd march out the front door, we'd go up two blocks to M Street, to the Silver Dollar.

That's another nightclub.

We'd walk in through the back door, and we'd done this so many times that the two owners knew us and liked us.

They had a beer and a shot lined up when we walked in.

So here they come sailing down the bar and we grab those, throw 'em down, and then go back down and rescue the drummer.

And, uh, we get a little wild at times.

You never knew what Bill Whalen was gonna do next.

Don't forget, we're having a Halloween party here two weeks from tonight.

Don't you think this has the right atmosphere?

Ha for a Halloween?

Very much.

It has, um, stone walls painted red.

He's got a balcony around it and very dim lights and way up there you can see the scenery.

It's almost like looking out over the bow of his ship.

I saw many famous people come in that place and play Whalen attracted them.

We start off with, Wild Bill Davidson and he was such a hit that they started getting other featured people in, and they'd come in and play for Sundays.

And then they progressed and started getting 'em in two and three nights a week.

Bud Freeman, Coleman Hawkins came in.

Jimmy McPartland, Buddy Rich, and Woody Herman and the Herd.

Cutty Cutshaw, the trombone player, Peanuts Hucko, Pee Wee Russell, Joe Venuti.

And I went down and saw Count Bassie and Joe Lewis, the Boxer was there.

And we sat down and had a talk with Joe Lewis watching Count Bassy.

And there was an interesting thing about the Bayou in the early fifties, we could go to a Red Skin game, Sunday afternoon.

Big deal.

I mean, the Redskins were the social event.

And when the game was over, he had two choices.

You'd go down to Bayou and hear music or go to Kavakos.

All was a good crowd from one extreme to the other, you know, from a bum, down to Congressmans and Senators.

In the old days, uh, I know the Kennedy's were through here.

On occasion, we did get movie stars come in here.

Gary Cooper was one.

There was about the time he had his face lifted.

There was a dress code.

You had to have a coat and tie to get into this place.

So who comes walking in the door?

Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Roger Meris and Dale Long.

But Mickey Mantle was famous for wearing that cardigan sweater.

My mom says to Mantle, said, gee, sir, you know, we'd love to have you come in, but uh, you know, we'd be happy to loan you a tie to get in.

Well, well, this is Mickey Mantle.

My God, this is the, the biggest baseball player, most important baseball player of his time, who's been invited down, and my mother's telling him he's gotta put a neck tie on.

Well, the next picture was, my father walks by the door and sees these big shoulders walking out the door.

He goes, what happened?

She goes, ah, I wouldn't put a tie on.

I sent him down the road.

Could you just check Mickey mail outta the Bayou?

For goodness sakes.

[baseball bat hit] Bill Decker course with the help of Buddy Dean Bob Decker, his dirty little brother.

Part of the joy of going to a club that size is if you sit close enough to the band, you can hear the musicians talking to each other.

And to hear Waylen and Bill Decker and Bob Decker and Buddy shouting obscenities at each other while they're playing or talking, or, hey, dig that chick there in the third row or whatever.

That adds to the ambiance of the place for me.

[chatter] I can't really dance and play, so I can't join.

Played nice for change.

Bill was one amazing character.

I didn't realize how how much he was burning the candle at both ends when he had that job.

I mean, he worked at the, the Army Map Service.

He was raising a family.

And he'd come in every night.

And I mean, we worked hard.

I mean, that was a hard gig.

It was Saturday night, uh, the place was jammed.

We did the Saints Go Marching In, which was our finale.

And I reached up for a high note, and that's the last thing I knew.

I collapsed, went down on my nose.

When, uh, we went back to visit him in the hospital, and only Bill Whalen would do anything like this.

He says to Fred, would you like a beer?

And Fred says, oh, sure.

And he opened up the bed pan and he had beer ice down it.

That's true.

When I got out, I quit smoking.

I quit playing.

And then after Bill left, we went to see Joe Rinaldi.

♪♪♪ He plays the clarinet like you want to hear it be played.

It's real good soul music, the way he plays a good Dixon land soul music.

A lot of the local musicians would want to work there.

'cause it was a good steady job.

Week in and week out.

We were, we were running, uh, six nights and one matinee.

♪♪♪ I used to go over just to hear the guys, you know, after I had my own band and I'd, I'd drop in.

For example, Hal Posey was playing trumpet at that time, but they were there as a kind of backup to Julie Gibson, the, the Stripper.

Well, I can't say that there wasn't some frustration, but I, like everyone else in the music business, know that things change.

There's a usually a seven, eight year trend on things.

Of course, I was appalled not, not because of the, uh, the loose morals of the thing, but that the Trais had, had, had, uh, betrayed the cause of music.

And they, you know, they're having a stripper.

She was balletic in her movements.

She had a body of a Venus.

In actuality, if you go to any beach, the women at the beach wear less clothes than what she wore on the stage.

But she had a pair of these that were magnificent to look at.

Julie was an exotic dancer who had an act, and, uh, she was good at it.

And I don't know anybody that didn't appreciate her work.

I'm talking men and women.

I don't know anybody who thought it was anything more than an artistic display of what the human body should look like and how it should be treated.

Didn't she do a thing called the Dance of the Seven Veils?

I wanted to buy her every veil she ever had.

Hey, what you damn longs in McLay?

This dude?

Gimme what C sounds like.

The first time I was at the Bayou was at, was as a, as a kid when it was still a Dixieland joint.

But rock and roll had hit, I don't think the Beatles, maybe the Beatles had hit, but if so was just around 65 or 64.

And, uh, I realized that I was watching a generational turn of the page, that there was these middle aged guys, you know, and they were playing this music that was basically over, or at least over for kids my age.

The enormous change in taste that already occurred.

The cultural shift had occurred.

And what happens is that you have the entrepreneurs in this case, the Tramontes doing what they have to do.

He saw the Rock.

They were very close to folding the place up.

Georgetown was becoming a rock and roll mecca of the city - big time.

And it happened almost overnight.

♪♪♪ I could say I didn't like rock and roll music, and I couldn't, I couldn't tell s**t some Shinola well that, whether that was gonna be a winner or not.

And then he made a trip down to Ocean City for a group called The Tell Stars.

My wife, myself and Vinny went to Ocean City.

And when we went into this club, and I mean, it was really jumping, you know.

♪♪♪ I think on a break, uh, the owner of the club called us in, and Joe, Joe Rinaldi was there with Tony and Vinny Tramonte.

And, uh, they told us that they owned the Bayou.

And they explained to us what it was was it had been a Dixie Land Club.

They needed to change direction with something that they felt was really gonna make an impression.

Luckily it was us.

And I believe we were the first band in there.

And they booked us in there for two weeks, after the end of that summer.

They came into the Bayou and the lines were overnight.

Thanks to having played in Ocean City.

We had a pretty good following from Baltimore and Washington DC areas.

So we had pretty good crowds there.

And, uh, we would go out the kitchen door on a Friday night or a Thursday night or a Saturday night at 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock at night, and just look out the door and there'd still be a, a line around the block and just go and shaking our heads.

You know.

We couldn't go anywhere that people didn't know who in the heck we were.

They played here for almost three years straight, which was, you know, just unheard of.

When they heard has the Tell Stars,.. [whistles] Their stage presence was like the Beatles.

They were high energy and they sang like birds.

And at that time, there was no enhanced anything.

It was, these guys were that good.

♪ Singing ♪ But everybody was talking about the Tell Stars.

And we came over to see those guys and they were, they, they were like aliens.

We had a whole different look.

We weren't a Beatle looking band, okay?

We didn't have the hair down.

Our hair was big pompadour, actually, Country style, like a Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty type style is what it, what it really was.

Matter of fact, the first two week job there, the first night we were there after we loaded in, we walked up, uh, Wisconsin Avenue to a place called Dino's Steak Pub.

And, uh, they wouldn't let us in.

Ronnie with his beard and stuff was a pretty formidable looking fella.

I mean, he, he scared a lot of folks.

He really did.

I remember going a couple times, sneaking down to the Bayou and going onto the Go-go platform up above the stand.

And I remember one time I took this cream pie and I dropped it right on Ronnie Wilson's hair and it sprang back up in the air and off.

And there was no damage at all, nothing.

[chatter] When we hit the stage, we knew the every tune were gonna do that whole set.

Uh, there wasn't a lot of talk between the band members during that.

When one tune ended, two beats later, the next one started.

They were, um, a very prolific cover band.

We did everything.

We tried to cover a ton of bases.

We did an awful lot of British music, of course, but we also did R&B.

We did, we did Rockabilly.

The Tel Stars were not an easy group to get a record deal for because they were not writers.

They didn't have any material at all.

♪♪♪ Keep on running.

I watched the Spencer Davis recording of it, which was the original, and it only went to like 72 in the country.

This is not a hit.

So I figured, okay, let's take a shot.

Let's cut this thing.

♪ Singing ♪ Terry did a very good job with it, and I liked it.

So we got our record out there.

We had a shot.

♪ Singing ♪ I had just started this singles group, uh, called the Junior Officers Professional Association, which was a, a party group for young officers and young professional people, women and men in the area.

And I read an article where the Bayou was changing from jazz to rock and roll.

And I thought that would be a tremendous opportunity for a party.

I think it was probably the first week or second week that they changed over that I had a party there and it was tremendously successful.

And then, uh, we continued to have parties and, and then it became a regular, every Sunday night affair in 66.

It had a clubby feeling, of course, in the sixties, people were looking, they weren't looking for the flashing lights and the glitz and glamor.

It was just, it was comfortable.

It had dark corners and crannies where people could kind of go and chat up a girl if you want, and get a phone number.

Well, I actually went down there to find the girls.

Didn't ever think I'd find this one.

And the real story is, we're up the top, the top of the Bayou, which is a really interesting place.

We got a lot of foot up there.

And I was just standing there minding my own business, and this fellow Rocky Ryan, who was Mr.

Cool Daddy, and he was teasing Betty, and he was trying to kiss, she had these hip huggers on, and she was trying to kiss her belly button.

And she kept back it up and back it up and soon know, she backed right into me.

And mm-hmm.

The rest of the story is history.

31 years.

What they did do later on was up behind the stage was create a platform up there for the, for the Go-Go dancers up behind us, above us.

On the upper level there was this area where we put these Go-go girls.

It was just a tremendous party atmosphere, I could, I would say, I don't really think the girls got paid or anything.

It was something they wanted to do.

But that was the heyday of rock and roll.

I mean, you had the Tell Stars down here.

You had the, the Mad Hatters up the street, the Hangman, the British Walkers, the old Cherry People up at the Silver dollar.

A lot of good rock and roll going on in town.

It's kind of a rite of passage.

You almost had to pass through the Bayou at one time or another.

When we were at the Bayou.

I would negotiate a new contract, a yearly contract.

I think there comes a time when the club gets a little wise, good or bad, and they figure, I think we might be able to do this on our own.

We may not have to pay so much money for a band.

I think there comes a time when they want to take that shot.

And I think that's what I was feeling.

We were there three years and basically it was just time.

I think we'd run our course.

'cause the question is, is the club drawing the people, or is the band drawing the people?

♪♪♪ [chanting] Feeling in the city changed with, with the riots and with, uh, the problems in Vietnam and stuff.

You know, there were a number of constituencies that always supported the Bayou.

One was that younger crowd, particularly.

It was a place to go and hang out.

The other one was, of course, all the military bases that surrounded Washington.

You know, the guys would come in and they wanted to go where the girls were and the girls were at the Bayou and various other Georgetown clubs.

So you'd always see the sort of odd mix of, you know, guys with very, very short hair.

And then, you know, in the sixties, people with very, very long hair.

And Georgetown students typically didn't come here.

This wasn't one of the places where the, the well healed wanted to congregate in those days.

It was mostly a, a rites of passage kind of institution for suburban kids from Maryland and Virginia.

I had a certain amount of experience coming here as a paying customer because I turned 18 in 1968.

And Washington DC was a place where you could come and drink when you were 18.

I grew up in College Park, Maryland.

So there was a certain magnetic attraction there.

You have to remember in those days, and this, I'm not qualifying this as good or bad, but there was a lot more drinking, a lot more drug abuse.

People were partying, and there was an edge that you don't find out there.

I don't see out there anymore.

We're talking about 69.

A lot of, part of 69 was kind of wild around this area.

You had, uh, that large moratorium march, they called it in November 15th, I think it was.

It was a lot of political activity going on.

Anybody that knows about Georgetown knows it's a diverse place.

It would wouldn't be odd at all to see eight businessmen in a thousand dollar suits sitting in a table beside a, a biker gang.

We used to have some biker gangs in the area in those days.

There were the Avengers and there were the Pagans.

And these people could come into a club and cause a lot of trouble.

Well, my family didn't have a clue how to deal with something like that.

So this place was turning into the OK Corral on some evenings and really, it was an issue.

It was, it was a frightening issue.

I remember when the, uh, motorcycle gang, the, uh, Pagans wanted in, you know, with the chains and everything and the helmets, and they were disrupting everything.

And I had to have, I had a meeting with those guys, and I'm not a, I'm not ashamed to tell you, I was wearing a 38 when I met with those guys.

There were biker gang fights up here on the main dance floor.

And, uh, we had once where the cops came and left.

It was too much.

They came and they went out and they waited outside until more help arrived.

And, uh, those were wild years.

Now, sometimes the reasonable approach didn't quite work in asking people to restrain from choking their next door neighbor.

Um, so I would say, well, just, just hang out for a second.

I got somebody else who wants to talk to you.

So I'd get a guy who was somewhat bigger than me if that didn't work.

We brought the, we, we brought out the big guns, and that was their supervisor, the infamous Wilber Slaughter.

Wilber Slaughter was one of the first managers in the nightclub when they made the change over to rock and roll.

Wilber came to my father and he says, Mr. Tremonte I know you're looking at just some big black guy who's got a, a a record, but I'm telling you, this is my story, and if you hire me, he says, I can solve the problem here.

And he says, and you will never regret it.

First thing you see when you walk in the door to the left is this guy with an afro, this big standing at the door.

And he's, because I mean, he was like a muscle guy before muscles were in, He was about six four and 240, 250, just like a linebacker.

He looked like a linebacker to me.

He looked like he probably managed the horses for the seven riders of the apocalypse.

And he kept order.

Wilber Slaughter did.

He wouldn't call them bouncers.

He would call the people on the floor, floor-men.

The reputation of the club when I got down there was that they couldn't, the floorman couldn't control the place.

He had a leadership quality.

And, and that served him well in here.

He recognized early on that, you know, this business of beating people up and, and dealing with things, you know, that was absolutely the last recourse.

He had a, a hint of devil in him.

And, uh, and you could tell in his eye.

We were, uh, rehearsing after hours, which is what we did.

I mean you, you could see us 2:30 to 4 working up new tunes and stuff.

Boy, he said, it's time to go.

He yells it from somewhere in the back.

We didn't know, you know, they still had lights on the stage.

I think somebody said, uh, okay, we're gonna run through it one more time.

And what happened?

Shots rang out.

Bang, bang, bang.

[laughing] I remember Reno lying on top of his Les Paul like this, like, like hugging it in fear of being... Flat on the ground.

I'm going like, God, I better get on the ground too.

So we all laid flat on the ground and the shots stopped.

And, and we came in the next night and there were bullet holes, right Stage.

Oh my God, It was time to go.

We packed up.

So Wilbur didn't, he didn't, you know, take no for an answer.

If I tell a person and I'm controlling the floor that there's no rehearsal tonight, I'm not gonna go up there and bodily take them out, I'm gonna give him a little incentive.

Wilber slaughter.

The nicest guy you'd ever want to mess with.

♪♪♪ It was Dave Edmond's.

Dance, Dance, Dance, Sugar Magnolia by the Grateful Dead, Sugary Jerry Garcia and Annabelle by White Duck on WHFS stereo 102.3 in Bethesda.

WHFS had just gone FM and it was the best sounding radio in town, and they were playing all the music that sounded good on the radio at the same time.

It was ahead of time.

So I was looking to do something on a scale of, uh, Blood, Sweat and Tears.

I wanted to do something different.

And I came to Georgetown in search of some weird musicians.

I fell in love with, uh, the Bayou, the, the week that I came here to see Carl Anderson and the Jesus Christ Superstar Second Eagle band.

That was in the very early seventies.

And Carl was sort of discovered out of the Bayou, if you will, when that album first came out, the group did a 40 minute, you know, composite of JC Superstar, the Rock Opera.

♪ Singing ♪ They got booked up at the street here on a, on a Easter Sunday.

And this was, you know, this was unbelievable.

It was sacrilegious almost at that point in time.

Robert Stigwood bought the rights to Jesus Christ Superstar and sent out a cease and desist order.

And the cease and desist order said, nobody can perform this.

Of course.

Bill Wendt, calls a press conference and just blew the thing out.

And footage from Channel 4, which was owned and operated by NBC, made it to the Today Show and played on the Today Show the next day.

And they were in New York, some guys heading down to the theater for the fifth day, looking for somebody to play Judas.

And there on that morning stood I doing all s**t the from Superstar.

So they called up and had me come to New York, and I walked right in and got the gig.

♪ Singing ♪ [applause] I got a New Rock group for you, Tony.

This is their latest album, which I'm gonna show the camera right here.

But before we see them perform, I watched it to meet one of the members of this act Close up.

Oh sure I saw Kiss there.

We had gotten there, we'd gotten there a little late.

There weren't that all that many people in there.

And then all of a sudden the Kiss sign lit up and these guys come out there.

And to see these guys in that small stage, just, that's unbelievable.

I'd seen a photo of them and I'd never seen anything like that in my life.

I'd never heard of them.

In fact, no one I knew had ever Heard of them.

This is 1974.

Right as they were about to make a, a break nationally, but there was already a certain reputation about them.

What I remember most of all is the concert being the loudest concert I had ever experienced in my life, because they were used to playing slightly larger places.

And the Bayou was in fact smaller.

But they didn't tune anything down.

They didn't turn the sound down.

They didn't make any accommodations.

And I remember that my ears buzzed for about a week afterwards.

I remember we kinda left with they can't play, but what a show this is.

Yeah, it was a fricking circus.

I mean, it was just, it was just unbelievable.

This guy spinning up blood and these flash pots and everything else, and the makeup.

And it's just like, wow.

And I wrote the review based on the notion that the music was so loud.

I, I was having a hard time writing 'cause I couldn't hear myself think.

And actually Jean Simmons remembered that about 20 years later.

Real quickly, Jean, do you have any memories of playing at the Bayou in Washington DC?

Any great memories?

As a matter of fact, I do.

Her name was Lola.

[Laughing] I started to step in 74, 75.

My father always, again, felt strongly about learning everything from the ground up.

I was 22 or three and my brother was 25.

You know, I'd get ready to go to work at night and it didn't really feel like I was going to work.

We were entertaining people that were the same age as us.

At that point, my uncle and my father never came down.

I think my father came down maybe two times in the four years I was here.

The Tramontes made us feel like family.

That was the main reason that when they asked you to go that extra mile, listen, it's New Year's Eve, can you do whatever it is?

It's somebody's birthday.

Can you, you always did it because, and you did it with a smile because they treated us so well.

We had a health inspection that we failed, which was my first health inspection.

And the health lady came back, she's giving us a chance so we don't have to close the doors and a lot of pressure on me.

And we walked through the kitchen, I looked down and there's a rat right in front of us.

And I had a, a linen white towel.

And I did something like, you know, look over there, you know, or you know, something crazy like that.

I was very desperate.

And I put the towel over the rat and the busboy behind me scooped it up.

And we went on.

And she never had seen it.

I always ate in the dressing room.

They, they had a, a little girl down there, Laura, who was in the kitchen, sweetheart would, she made herbal teas and she just, anything you want.

Very, she was an earth person.

And Brent, uh, had a habit of running up his bar tab on my name.

And we were friends and, and I wouldn't be real hard on him.

And he'd be in Baltimore by the time I'd seen the tab sometimes.

So I was mad at Brent and I, I remember I took this rat and I made a sandwich.

I made a rat sandwich and I took it with hoagie bun and we garnished it and it had pickles and french fries.

When you got a sandwich from her, it was just like to die for.

And I said, anybody hungry?

'cause Brent was always hungry and I'd made this rat sandwich just for him to pay him back.

And he said, yeah, I am.

I said, well, I've got this, um, Cuban platter here.

And I put it down in front of him with the linen over it.

And I remember he took the linen off and I had four or five employees behind me.

And there was a little parade of people that went by and he started eating the french fries.

I wasn't paying any attention anyway.

I was, I was in conversation with somebody that's, I know that.

And the sandwich came up and they sat it in front of me.

It was garnished beautifully with lettuce and fresh tomato.

You know, Laura did a great job.

It was apparent he was gonna invite into the rat and he picked up the burger and it had a tail hanging out of it.

Well, it had a tail hanging out of it.

These guys were up there in the dressing room.

Alan's up there, he's waiting uh guffaw, right?

Everybody was like, you better stop him.

And I didn't.

And uh, he put it down and I think one of the best one-liners I'd ever heard in my life.

And I just said, can you send this down?

'cause Lauren knows I don't like mayonnaise on my rat.

And, uh, I just, I looked at him and I thought, well, I better start again.

You know, I went back down the stairs.

The rat sandwich is what really stands out in my mind because when you think of fine cuisine, it don't get any better than that at the Bayou.

Our bread and butter was the local entertainment.

This is the way the club was built.

It's the way it was founded.

And that was our thrust.

And for a lot of the local bands here, playing the Bayou was a very important room because if you were playing here at the Bayou, you had sort of made it, you had sort of had an entree into the local music scene.

Some of that went back to my father's philosophy.

He had watched what happened when somebody, like say the Tell Stars broke up.

All of a sudden there was a dip in the business.

It wasn't the Bayou anymore, it was the Tell Stars.

They were coming just for the Tell Stars.

And he just didn't want to be dependent on the, you know, the yin and the yang of bands coming and going.

The first time we came into the club as the Nighthawks was opening for James Cotton, which was a little unusual, but, uh, we brought in a good number of folks to see us.

There was obviously a Nighthawks fan base presence here.

I remember being scared, but the adrenaline's good when you're on stage.

And we came out and did what we did and we must've done okay, because it evolved into what became a house gig for us for, I don't know, seven, eight years.

We'd been trying to get into the Bay for quite some time.

Steve Long was our manager at that time.

We were playing up in Massachusetts somewhere in Shrewsbury, I think.

And he called us midweek and said, we got a shot at Sunday night at the Bayou.

Do you got, can you do it?

Do you think you can get here?

Yeah, let's go.

So we were all exhausted, but the night was unbelievable.

There was like a thousand people through the door that night.

And that launched us really into, uh, playing the Bayou on a pretty regular basis, being abused by Mike Tramonte.

When I was 12 years old... My family came in, in the car, you know, it was a big trip into DC and they parked the car down there on K Street and we got out and we were just kinda looking at how the water came up and then all this nice stuff.

And then I looked across the street and I saw the Bayou.

I saw, you know, the, the steps that went up into the front and there was a window to the left of it, and it was, had big old metal bars on it.

And I grabbed them and I pulled myself up and I looked in there and I went, wow, what goes on in this place?

So look, folks here, they are right, have been in the Hall Of Fame in the Whammy Award Hall of Fame.

These guys are in the Bayou Hall of Fame tonight, ladies and gentlemen, make welcome from your Nation's Capitol The Night Hawks.

♪♪♪ But it was a kind of an ongoing thing.

Face Dancer, Sinbad, Nighthawks, Cherry Smash, that was the four bands that would play weekly.

The bands always came in with the attitude, you know, we wanna set the house record at the Bayou and put that on a resume.

It was absolutely a competition.

And they were both much more top 40 oriented.

We were sort of the, the bad boys, the renegades, you know, the other guys.

We would come in and then Mike would go, Nighthawks did 700 last, last Saturday night.

You know, can you beat that?

We didn't feel competition, did we?

Well, I just remember that whenever Cherry Smash was doing so well and all the broads and all that stuff, that it, it was kind of like, yeah, well we, I know we can, we can do that too.

Where it really got interesting was on Thursday nights, which was Ladies Nights, and we would alternate with Cherry Smash and we would continually break records and break records.

We like kicking their butts, but it wouldn't last long.

I mean, we, I think we were always the first to break a number, 900, 1000, 1100.

But virtually two weeks later they would do it.

Cherry Smash did 823.

Face Dancer did 900.

They're turning the door.

The place only held, what, 400 or something.

Turning the house typically, and this stems back from the union rules and regulations.

40 minutes on, 20 minutes off.

But we would go two sets and we would ask the band to stay off for a longer period.

And pretty soon people would just decide to go up to M Street and then we'd get a new wave of people from M Street that would come down here and the bands would start again.

And it was like a new night.

I remember looking out from the stage and all you could see was just heads.

You couldn't see anything but heads.

That's how many people they had in that place.

That's absolutely unbelievable.

Had to break the fire code.

Oh totally.

♪♪♪ I never allowed National X on Fridays and Saturdays.

They were strictly weeknights.

Because weeknights I was just trying to build the reputation of the club.

I was pretty proud of the Foreigner gig.

You know, there were so many to pick and choose and God knows I picked a lot of losers.

I mean, we're talking about all the hits.

Well, there, there were also the Jules and the Polar Bears.

And you know, I had some of the, I got some of those gems in my back pocket too.

But I heard the album early.

In those days the record companies, you know, sent out stacks of these things and, and just heard the album and jumped on it.

I know that seems obvious now, but I was a keyboard player and, and that opening lick in Cold As Ice, just said that is strong.

♪♪♪ When the band formed in 76, they rehearsed, they, uh, got their deal with Atlantic.

They went into the studio, did the album, and then there they were at the Bayou.

So we wanted to start out, you know, in a small way and at least try and do some club dates.

You know, we had ne literally never performed as a band together before on the stage, so.

Warner had just released their album and they were just getting ready to tour.

The first show they ever did was at The American University.

And then that night we did the Bayou.

Those were the first two shows and for at least a year, it was the only club date that they had done.

They went from that into arenas.

I just remember the, uh, the day of that show, you know, and everybody was like nervous.

We, the first time we'd had, um, we had to sort of set off on the road together, you know.

They had a road manager who literally had pieces of paper almost that looked like footprints that went from the dressing room, which was in the back of the house then to the stage.

So these guys would be able to find their way to the back of the stage.

So there was, uh, uh, a nervousness, uh, for me.

It was, uh, remembering the words, uh, the arrangements Here they were headlining in a club and they only had an album's worth of a material.

So they had 40 minutes.

So they did a cover of, uh, of uh, an old R&B song called Somebody's Been Sleeping In My Bed to try and get the set long enough to actually be a headline slot.

They had no encore.

I mean, they had that set list.

Whatever was on that album is all they had.

Uh, the 380 people that were here were, you know, wild.

I mean they, they made more noise than, you know, a thousand people might have made.

They had to come back and encore with Johnny Be Good.

And I think it might've been the one and only time they ever played Johnny Be Good as a unit.

It was a huge, uh, high, like all the buildup with the nerves all through the day.

And by the time we were on stage that night, I think it was just like really heady and, you know, well let's have some fun now we're in a club.

♪♪♪ As far as the Runaways go, they were kind of a, a shot in the dark for us to choose them.

And there was a huge article in the Washington Post, which featured an enormous photograph of the All Girl Glitter Band from Los Angeles, California.

And I remember the owners waking me up on the phone and saying, you better get your butt down to this Bayou, 'cause we're gonna have a sellout crowd.

And I'm thinking, but it's the Runaways.

This is before Ticketron or any of that type of thing.

Phone comes off the hook and now we've got 'em lined up down the street.

We're gonna try and do two shows.

And they wanted, uh, Courvoisier and Grand Marnier and Chavis Regal and we didn't have those things.

We had gotten most of the liquor they wanted before I realized there wasn't the person in that band over 17 years old.

Uh, at that point in time, I was actually playing in a group and we were the opening act for The Runaways.

I don't even think we were originally gonna have an opener.

We just, all of a sudden the show became more than what we expected.

So we've got 500 people in here screaming, hoot and hollering having a big time.

My act goes up, does its little thing.

Runaways aren't here.

Stage is set.

Band's not here, girls aren't here.

So time's clicking off, clicking off, I'm getting a little crazy.

And we got 500 more people out front for the 10 o'clock show.

So it's 8:30, it's nine o'clock, it's 9:15, it's 9:25.

I remember receiving a call from Baltimore and it was from the manager.

He sounded like he was about 16.

And he said, uh, well we're thinking about coming now, something like that.

And I said, what do you mean?

He said, well, we've talked it over first.

We weren't gonna come.

Now we decided we're gonna come.

So wait for us.

Now in order to buy some time.

I have the unenviable job of going back up with the group I'm working with, trying to entertain the masses for a few more minutes.

Lemme tell you, they don't wanna see an opening act in the first place.

They sure as hell don't wanna see him come back.

And that's the last thing anybody wants to see.

I mean, we were almost stoned off of that stage.

We subsequently, they did show up.

We ran another 200 people in here standing.

The capacity, the legitimate capacity of the club is 500.

I think we probably cranked 700 into the place.

Only got one show off.

It was a fiasco.

They, they were wild and crazy, but they were kids.

I mean, I probably would've acted badly too if I was 16 and had a million dollars worth of equipment to work with.

I was with a band called The Nowhere Man, which was a horn band.

It was really a good band.

I had met Mike Tramonte.

I had fixed a bunch of stuff for him.

You know, my nickname was Fix at the time.

So I, you know, I fixed everything.

After I put the psychedelic light show in... And we ran that for maybe a year.

And then I decided to put in stage lights.

I had the old Rush lighting system.

I was out on the road for three years with them.

And this, I took the lighting board, which is... That board down there is from Rush and I made for 'em.

And then the landing lights and all the back lights are old Rush lights.

So we put that in.

And then at that time was the best lighting system in DC in a club.

♪♪♪ Directly over the center of the dance floor there was a cluster.

They looked like big, bad, bitten birdies.

There was four of 'em.

And there was a bunch of horns.

When Tim Pace was here, he started about two weeks before I did.

He and I quickly dubbed it The Death Star.

'cause that was right about the time when Star Wars came out.

And it was loud and it wasn't very pretty.

That was the original system.

And then we took that system out and we put in a JBL system, a theater type system, large, you know, straight horns.

Bands would come in here and comment about, you know, oh, this place is gonna be awful sounding.

But when they would actually run things through the system, it was just sweet.

And that was the way we had it.

I mean, between Tim's lights and, and my sound system, we had just an unbelievably great sounding room.

He had lots, a tremendous amount of video, uh, not videotape rather but old, you know, uh, movie tape up there that he would run from rear projection behind the screen.

[Star Wars Theme] And all of a sudden we see this thing, Star Wars explode up on the screen.

It's the trailer.

The movie wasn't out.

Nobody had seen a trailer yet.

Not even sure where he got this thing.

Bootlegged outta Canada or something like that.

And we're going, what is that?

Nobody had ever seen anything like this.

Well, Pace had it, and the next thing you know, Pace goes out and builds an R2D2 robot.

Maybe five years after that I made a robot rock band, all NASA surplus, mostly from Goddard, which we use for opening acts sometimes.

The bodies of the robots are backup satellite bodies of different types.

And the antennas are off satellites, the motors are off, like the motors that turn the solar panels and that type of stuff.

The R2D2 brought out Peter Frampton's guitar at the Madison Square Garden concert.

And that's where George Lucas saw it.

And that's where we got in trouble with... Tim is legendary in so many ways in Washington with that, uh, step van that he made looked like the Star Trek Enterprise, uh, um, shuttle craft.

And it drove it around town to all the concerts.

♪♪♪ Captain's log, star date unknown.

♪♪♪ In 69 through 71.

I was running the Emergency Club, which was down the street.

Emergency, had all the psychedelic bands and, uh, the touring bands and the local groups.

So it was a whole different scene.

The Bayou was pretty much a top 40 club, but I always thought it was a wonderful place and kind of fantasized the idea that someday I would, uh, be involved in the club.

So I needed a spot to do things regularly.

And, uh, the Bayou just happened to be open at that moment.

And I partnered with the owners of the club and we promoted shows together.

So it was New Era Concerts and the Bayou presented.

When I was there.

we were doing a steady diet of national acts and, uh, it worked out great.

Peter Tosh, again, a show that we were fortunate on in the sense that just two weeks prior, he was on Saturday Night Live, and not only was he on Saturday Night Live, but they were the first act that I believe the Rolling Stones signed to their new record label.

So Jagger did a walk-on, on Saturday Night Live, which, you know, if he had any credibility, well then all of a sudden it went right through the roof.

We already had it booked and all of a sudden it's a sellout.

♪♪♪ So there really Weren't many other great showcase venues in town at the time.

Those kind of shows used to sometimes go to the teen centers.

Uh, although they were on their way out at the time.

The Cellar Door Club was obviously much too small and not geared for that kind of an act.

And the Celler Door had, uh, I think legally a 125, a 150 seats.

And at one point they were doing 250 people, which was pretty cramped.

But the fire marshal put an end to that.

And it was about the same time that I started doing shows at the Bayou.

So, uh, it gave us an advantage and we were able to pay out a lot more money than, uh, Cellar Door.

Mike Schreibman called me one day at my house out in McLean and said, there's, we, I've got this show and there's this guitar player, Mark Nobler and this band's gonna really be big and they're gonna be at the Bayou.

And I had a night off.

So I came down, Oh, it says it's the Bequest tonight.

Is it?

Oh, I think, uh, one of the, the biggest shows was probably Dire Straits who, uh, were just starting to happen.

And when I booked them, they were pretty much unknown.

But by the time they got to the club, we probably could have sold out another couple nights.

But we did two nights and the agent tried to get me to book more nights at the beginning, and I, I thought I was being extremely risky, taking two.

And then they had this hit Salton of Swing and then everybody was coming to see 'em.

So we knew that was gonna be big.

You know, in those days a band played an hour, an hour and 15 minutes and they, they played, uh, they played way longer than that.

We had to stop them from playing that night.

They, they had to be stopped.

Uh, it was five of two and we were very serious about the liquor laws.

I knew we were heading for a riot.

So I said, ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem.

I said, we have to pick up the drinks and if the band is willing to continue, we're willing to allow you to stay.

But not until we get up all the drinks.

And I remember looking out in the crowd and seeing like a biker pick up the drinks of the guy next to him, you know, and they were helping, which is a first never before seen in Bayou history.

People were giving up their drinks voluntarily, but that's how good the band was too.

♪ Singing ♪ [cheering] In 1979, I get a call from Dave Williams, another of the partners of Cellar Door now, and they're up the street.

They're the big bad guys up the street.

And we we're starting to have a little bit of fun 'cause we were doing the national acts.

We had a large room.

Cellar Door concerts didn't really have that need to develop artists, they just needed to have a venue that they were providing to keep that system working.

We used to be able to put 200 people in the Cellar Door and then all of a sudden the fire marshals decided it should be 124 or something.

We couldn't make it work anymore.

We also saw that the business was changing, you know, the smaller rooms around the country we're getting out.

But Dave called me up and said, geez, Mike...

He said, would you come up?

And he said, I'd like to meet with you for a few minutes and chat.

I was out looking for the acts and Cellar Door was answering the phone.

When we entered into negotiations with the Bayou, it was a different type of place than what we were trying to run.

My family was gonna have some discussion as to whether we really were gonna sell it or not.

And you know, I felt like, well, gee, my brother and I, and maybe my other brother, we can all get involved and keep it and take it to the next step, perhaps.

The next day I get up and I ask my mother, I said, well, well gee, what time is the meeting tonight?

She says, there is no meeting.

I said, what do you mean?

What do you mean, there's no meeting?

Of course there's a meeting.

She says, your father has decided he feels like 27 years in the business and nobody in our family has gotten hurt.

That is beating the odds.

An Tony had done this for a long time.

I think they were tired of doing it and uh, it was time to, to make a change.

Yeah, I didn't know it was happening.

But, uh, they had been negotiating for months and all of a sudden one day I found out I was out and, uh, they owned the club.

The Club was sold for $500,000 $100,000 cash and two notes, one to my father and one to my uncle for $200,000 each.

Jack Boyle and Cellar Door Productions, real professionals, real men of their words.

I was pretty shocked and very upset with it.

And I built up quite a, uh, business.

The Bayou was important, not only because I was doing shows there, but because it gave me access to doing larger shows and concerts and bringing people back when they got larger.

And Joe Jackson and Dire Straits are perfect examples of that.

And, uh, agents that I'd talked to one day that were my best friends the next day, uh, I couldn't get 'em on the phone.

♪♪♪ The nice thing was these folks took it on to a different level in terms of national entertainment.

And the Tramontes ran it right and then Cell Door took it over and Dave Williams came in and did a lot of improvements.

Put the balconies in for the people so they could see the stage better and new bar and then that type of stuff.

And then they had the Cellar Door money behind them so they could bring in the smaller acts and run 'em through the club and then hopefully they would be playing bigger places next time they came back.

So they used the club as a stepping stone basically.

I would like to tell you that, uh, we'll called U2 and we're not just another English band passing through.

First of all, uh, we intend to spend some time next year in this country 'cause it's probably 'cause it's so large, but for other reasons as well.

And, uh, just thank you for this.

This is very nice.

It was my 100th show with Slicky Boys and that was the fourth time that we played on the Bayou and that was on December 7th, a day that we'll live in infamy.

Uh, and we played with this band.

Some band was from Ireland was coming here and they were opening for us and it was called U2.

This is our single, uh, and its currently working its way up the English charts at the moment, whatever that means.

I thought they were really good.

And then we got to hang out with 'em backstage, you know, and I'll tell you, I couldn't understand a word these guys were saying.

♪♪♪ I don't remember it being sold out.

I think they were not very well known at the time.

Our manager at the time was this woman Susan Marquis.

I remember she saw U2 and she's like, wow, these guys are gonna be something.

There's something really special here.

And I was like, eh, that's just another band from Ireland, I think.

I don't know.

I didn't, I didn't really catch it.

Well, it was interesting because the look was completely different.

Their sound was, I, I don't know why, but I thought he sounded a little bit like Rod Stewart.

I thought they were good, but I really didn't think they were star material in my gut.

I have to admit this.

And then about five months later, this was after Boy, I think they were first record Boy, they came back to the Bayou and I think they asked for us.

And at that time, we got to open for them, so... That was, uh, an interesting thing about the Bayou too.

A lot of local talent got exposure opening for large name acts For a local band whose career lasted about as long as the lifespan of a mayfly to show up at the Bayou on the bill with a band like Squeeze or Jim Carroll was an immense deal.

It, it, you came and you went into the dressing room.

You had to pay for your beer.

You had to pay for your drinks.

You probably took the a hundred dollars that you made playing at the Bayou and spent it at the Bayou that night.

But there still was a temporary grandeur about it.

It's like one of these things that you like a feather in your cap.

And at that time, Slickee were still kind of a struggling local band.

And it was neat to be able to play there.

'cause you know, they had like the big shows there, you know, all the acts, you know, that would come through DC would play there.

Or this was before the 9:30 Club had become the premier club.

Bayou kind of had that reputation at that time.

At this time, the 9:30 was not open.

So there was this weird year, 79 to 80 where the new wave punk kind of bands looking for who were on tour looking for a place to play that The Bayou was kind of the only venue for that.

However inappropriate it was For Tru Fax in the Insaniacs, we played places like the WPA and DC Space and the Bayou was sort of an establishment club.

And so when we played there, we didn't really know what to expect.

We didn't know if our crowd was going to be there, the punk new wave scene.

And one night we played with the Insect Surfers and it was packed.

It was standing room only.

People lined up around the block.

♪♪♪ And then I think in June 79, word got out, the Damned we're gonna play the Bayou.

And the Bad Brains were opening.

Now, this is a show that I would have to be at.

We would all have to be there.

But the Bayou at the time was 18 and up.

We had a neighborhood friend in Glover Park, and he was a bit of a hustler.

And he had managed to steal a stack of IDs off his commander's desk.

Using my mother's Polaroid, we took pictures of, you know, of ourselves.

We cut our heads out, put 'em on the id, and then we went to the gig.

♪♪♪ I mean, that show was a life changer.

♪♪♪ Cellar Door was Jack Boyle.

Jack was maybe one of the promoters was closest to Joan.

He, he, he adopted her early.

But the thing about having the Bayou and Cellar Door was they had a connection to the radio stations.

They had a very tough station, DC 101, you needed to be, uh, like Journey to get on that station.

And they weren't into like young punk chicks, you know?

So we, we worked it hard and kissed a lot of butt.

But I remember Jack and Dave Williams, they, they would keep control of the situation 'cause they had the, uh, the leverage.

Dave was the one who understood the Bayou better than anybody.

Dave Williams, uh, was the Bayou.

He was Cellar Door in the Washington DC market.

He taught me everything I know about business and a good deal about just being a responsible, compassionate human being.

When I first knew him, I was about six four, about 240.

And probably the baddest man that walked in Georgetown without any hesitation or qualification.

He came off as a tough guy and he wouldn't take any s**t from anybody.

And he was telling me as he, when he was a bouncer, he bit a guy's earlobe off or something like that and spit it out.

And he'd had a big ring of keys.

He'd come in and smack me in the nuts with him.

I'm like, ah, you know, I'd see him coming and I'd go like this.

Dave might've been one of the few lucky people in the world with no sense of pain.

'cause nothing could stop him.

I've seen Dave with his shoulder out, still take people and throw 'em out the door.

Uh, I've seen him stand up to anybody and everybody.

And in a nice way.

People don't realize that Dave never drank and Dave never spoke badly to anybody, even somebody who was putting out of a club for doing something wrong.

The sentimentality attached to the place, I think was Dave Williams.

I think it was his and I, I really don't think that Cellar Door per se cared so much for the Bayou or cared what happened to it.

I think like it did what it did, did.

Because Dave cared about it then.

Yeah, I mean, things changed so much after the Cellar Door took over and the Tramontes left, the vibe of the place changed dramatically.

You know, they changed the setup internally.

They changed the, the atmosphere.

Early on, they brought in a very tough, mostly marine kind of, uh, staff coming in the front door started being like crossing an international border.

I mean, they were looking in your old lady's purse.

They were looking in the pockets of your coat.

You would stand somewhere and some big eye come up and say, you can't stand here.

What do you mean you can't stand here?

You know, you can't be there with a beer.

Don't do this, don't do that.

And they drove...

I mean, they, they drove our crowd out of here.

♪♪♪ We played a benefit with Clarence Clemens.

Sold the house out.

Drenched wet, soaking sweaty barroom brawl night.

It was fantastic.

♪♪♪ At the end of the night, me and Clarence are waiting for the limo to come and get us.

It was pouring, pouring rain.

They threw us out on the street.

Now, you know, they threw us on the sidewalk.

Here's me and Clarence standing on the sidewalk drenched.

They wouldn't let us like even wait for the limousine.

Wow.

So that was Cellar Door, I guess, I don't know...

I'm not saying nothing, but...

I think that's kind of the bouncer way in general.

Like, that's just for, you know, you give 'em a T-shirt and they're just assholes.

They can't help it.

We called them floorman, 90% host and 10% bouncer.

Even after we had played there a bunch of times.

I would go see bands there and, you know, it's the typical thing.

You can't stand here.

You know, you, you know, that's the usual thing.

You can't stand anywhere.

I go to a club.

I like to, I don't like to sit down and watch.

I like to walk around and talk to people and party and get a drink and keep walking around and and stuff.

So it, it was very difficult to do that at the Bayou, you know, 'cause he always had some Marine telling you, you couldn't stand there.

And I had seen friends of mine...

I had friends of mine thrown out of, you know, Slickee shows a bunch.

For me it was one of those venues when I would see it on the itinerary.

I say, why here?

Isn't there another place in town to play?

And they would say, no, there is not another place in town to play.

You know, there may be some larger venue, you know, where you would have to sell a whole lot of tickets.

But as far as small to medium sized club venue, there weren't, um, weren't many choices.

Well, it sort of sucked.

It was like a big metal box.

It didn't sound very good.

But I do understand that it's the place where people go.

And in a lot of ways where people go is much more important than who plays there or what they think about the place.

'cause you don't, you really just go there to get laid or, or pick up a girl or a guy or meet whoever really is the whole point of going out.

No matter what you go see from the opera to the grungiest rock and roll.

And also you want to have the bar close enough so you can check out the waitresses if you inevitably go home with one of them.

So, you know, you want that kind of a layout, you know.

I guess right now what comes to mind is seeing, seeing my my mom up on the, on the balcony, looking down over me with a scotch and soda in her hand and, and telling me, uh, that, uh, you know, after the show that it was a good show.

♪ We're having a party, everybody's swinging dancing to music on the radio.

♪ So listen, Mr. DJ keep those... because I'm having such a good time... dancing with my baby.

♪ ♪♪♪ I was down here one night for Robin Thompson, who was a guy from Richmond who was in a band with Springsteen back in the late sixties.

And everybody sort of thought that maybe Springsteen would show up.

And because I think Bruce was in town at the time, By the middle of the first setup, you know, it was pretty obvious to me that, you know, people were, were anticipating, you know, the last, the last set.

And, and um, they pretty much knew Bruce would end over there.

When Springsteen came on within a half an hour, you couldn't even move.

I mean, there was people everywhere.

I don't even know how people found oy.

And so he, he came in and, you know, there was some electricity there.

♪♪♪ I played here a bunch of New Year's Eves opening for the Night Hawks.

The one particular one I remember the most.

We played the first show and quietly police officers came into the back and said, Hey, you know, uh, we gotta get everybody outta the club.

We're like, what are you talking about?

There was evidently an escaped convict who when he escaped, said he was going to see the Night Hawks at the Bayou for New Year's Eve.

So they came in quietly cleared the club and could not find the escape convict.

However, when they did capture him later that morning, had been hiding on the roof.

Watched the whole thing.

[laughs] The cover of one of the Night Hawks records is them standing on the roof with the sign there.

You know, you'd drive by the Whitehurst Freeway, you see, you'd chair up there, you'd never figure out what the chair was.

Well, that was our sex chair.

[laughs] I would check a fire exit and there would be three employees having sex.

Not two, but three, you know.

Or there were times where I couldn't find a bouncer all night, a specific bouncer.

And you'd look in the door underneath the stage while the band is playing at God knows how many decibels and he's having an intimate relationship.

There's been all kinds of things going on in that other room.

Uh, I've seen the door blocked off three or four, five times.

I've seen a couple, two or three people come out at a time.

Um, I've seen close in various disarray of, usually a lot of what comes out of there.

Bras on sort of sideways, you know, maybe a little boob hanging out or something.

We were free.

We were wide open and free.

And this goes out to Charlie Rose, as well as Margo and Alex.

Anybody got our new album Brain Drain?

My favorite one ever was the Ramones.

I, uh, we brought Darius up to, uh, it was his birthday, I believe.

Yeah.

And we brought him up to, to DC for the weekend we were off.

We had played and went to Dean's house or whatever.

And we got trashed all day long.

And Darius passed out at Dean's house.

But, and it was like eight o'clock and I was still going.

And a couple other guys were cruising his guys.

And we knew we were going to the show, going to see the Ramones.

It was unbelievable.

Still to this day, I, I'll never forget the show.

I stole the set list off the stage after the show because I was just moved.

♪♪♪ We were coming from somewhere in the northeast to play the Bayou and that horrible plane crash on the 14th Street Bridge happened.

And we had to play there that night and took us like six and a half hours to get from Baltimore to the Bayou.

And the whole time, you know, in the bus, we had to watch this horrible drama unfold on TV.

And that was weird 'cause we got there.

It was snowing.

Very few people made it to the show.

It was terrible.

It was a blizzard.

And, uh, it was strange, you know, to have to do a show with something like that tragedy going on right up the road.

♪♪♪ When I came out with my solo record, we came through and played the Bayou and actually did a telecast from there.

♪ singing ♪ The English rock group that can fill a hundred thousand seat stadium at the drop of a hat last night, returned to the small club where they got their start in America.

Peter Quinn Hackis was there.

In Washington, Foreigner threw a party for 400 of their closest friends to honor their return to the Bayou, where they played their first US date eight years ago.

That was one of the scariest shows going in.

It was a big show, a live, uh, recording there.

Foreigner was still huge.

It was, you know, the first place they played in the States.

Came back to play it.

And we were really concerned that we were gonna have thousands and thousands of people show up outside the doors.

Well, we had been, uh, kind of a holdout with MTV in the early days.

You know, we, we were one of the bands, I think along with Pink Floyd, maybe, uh, Bruce Springsteen, I think at the beginning too, hadn't made any particular videos, you know, for MTV.

And there was still a debate whether it will "video kill the radio star" type thing, you know.

Ten years ago was, there was a lot more anxiety, uh, a lot more butterflies.

Uh, quite a bit of unsureness.

Well, you could tell that they had memories when they walked into the place.

I mean, it's, it's where they began in the United States.

So of course, you know, it's just like when you go back to an old house, you never remember it being as small as it was.

Uh, the Bayou stage was 20 by 20, which in some clubs is a large stage.

But, uh, not when you've been on those 60 by 40 and all the arenas and so forth.

♪ Singing ♪ MTV was definitely in its infancy, and especially as far as live broadcasts and stuff goes.

So there was a lot of, there was a lot at stake, you know, but, um, the vibe was so good.

Everybody was really into it.

Uh, other than, uh, a new paint job and all that time, uh, the floors were still sticky with beer, you know, and, uh, the dressing rooms were already trashed.

Mm-Hmm.

It, it, it, it really, uh, you know, the, the, uh, cosmetics may have been slightly different, but the feel was exactly the same.

♪ Feels like the first time.

It feels like the very first time.

♪ ♪ I've been waiting for a girl like you to come into my life.

♪ I think one of the favorite memories I have is, is Lois.

Lois was, was a real firecracker.

We had a signal for Lois and that was short.

We'd all kind of watch out for each other, you know, if we're out getting high or something was going on, or slipping somebody a free drink or, or doing something like that, you know, we'd look at the Floorman, the Floorman look around, we'd look around and if she was coming up, they'd, you know, give you the short sign and we'd know that Lois was around 'cause she's always lurking in the back.

It was kinda like us against Lois, you know, but that's what a manager's job is, you know.

She was good at it and we had to be just a little bit better.

You know, it took all of us.

When I first went in there, they would try me and I didn't know how far I could go until the one owner said, Hey, don't wanna push you around.

That's all he had to say, look out.

They didn't like Lois.

The bands didn't like Lois.

And Lois in those days, used to, um, have, you know, floorman guards posted on the side of the stage and you used to sit up on the middle of the stage yourself just to make sure there were no stage divers or anything like that.

And the one owner, um, Jack Boyle used to call me Little Hitler, if that does anything.

I didn't take crap off anybody.

She perched herself in the middle of the stage while they were performing and they just like bitched about her and gave her the finger all night.

It was pretty funny.

And she was rougher than anybody I ever saw.

And bouncer, I mean, she would take six foot five guys out, drag 'em outside and throw him through the door.

Because you're dealing with musicians and musicians don't do anything without being yelled at.

Okay?

The Stray Cats were playing.

Robert Plant and some of his buddies were in there, and it was the end of the night.

Alcohol's supposed to be up by two.

Robert Plant came up to the bar and two strippers, uh, that happened to be there, came up, and they wanted to borrow a marker because they wanted him to sign their breasts.

So as we were standing there, Robert Plant asked if we could do, you know, some shots.

So we all did a shot of tequila.

And, uh, someone happened to inform Lois that, who was managing at the time, that there was drinking going on.

And she came upstairs and just got in Robert Plant's face.

Tried to, um, slap the drink out of his hand when he wouldn't put it down.

And I said, let me tell you something...

I don't care who you are, you're not gonna make me lose the liquor license in here.

So I proceeded down the bar and at the end of the bar, there was a guy that was one of his roadies, I think, and I said, excuse me and need to let me have that drink.

And he said, one word that sets me off, if you mean it, he said, F you.

And his bodyguards immediately converged on her.

And then our bouncers got in on it, Grabbed him by the arm, and I'm trying to pull him off the board.

He's holding onto the bar, and I've got floormen coming up, and a big melee starts.

We got people all over the floor.

I reached down and I grabbed the back of the neck of the person who was on top of them.

When I pulled him up, it was Robert Plant.

Robert Plant looks me in the face.

And he goes, I lost a turquoise bracelet.

That's what I was looking for.

I'm not hurting anybody.

Put me down.

Everyone got thrown out.

And that was about the end of that, that night, you know, So it has not been forgotten.

Mike Joyce from the Washington Post came in three or four weeks later and said, Lois, what?

What happened with Robert Plant?

It's like, God, you know, I was only doing my job.

♪♪♪ We gonna get this thing together sooner or Later.

My thing is, uh, has always been alternative.

So whatever the Bayou did, I was gonna do something different.

I think when the 9:30 came that they didn't quite catch on to the whole new wave of, of acts that were coming.

And the 9:30 Club sort of stole its thunder.

And for a while there, it was really good for Washington that there was a little bit of a sense of competition between the two.

But I don't think the Bayou ever quite made the commitment that the 9:30 did.

Because of the, the scene during the eighties, the, the whole punk new wave thing was very vibrant.

And whereas 9:30 Club kind of led the way of that whole scene and that fan base, the Bayou never really latched onto that, uh, scene that kind of got left behind.

The alternative culture in the beginning, alternative bands, uh, was also a culture, not just in music.

It was, let's do something to shake things up.

Let's do something different.

And they didn't want to be playing the night after Fog Hat or something.

But basically what happened here was, uh, the people that ran the Bayou, Cellar Door, were betting on the big mainstream rock acts.

Um, and figuring these alternative things were never gonna really be that big.

It was easier for them to go after bands like Kicks and, and, uh, various other hard rock groups because that was closer to what their reputation was.

I mean, they, they were definitely much, much better known as a rock club as opposed to being a new wave or a punk club.

♪♪♪ I think we could not have gotten a record contract if we were not playing places like The Bayou and selling them out as consistent as... We, we, we brought in, um, people from, from Ryco Disk when we were entertaining record contracts and trying to get one, we'd bring them to the Bayou as like, this is the club to bring them, to show them, uh, the fans, the music and all that kind of stuff.

Now what happened with the Bayou, uh, in its last few years is that they were really a great spawning ground for these kind of bands like Mo or, uh, God Street Wine or, uh, Pat McGee Band, you know.

For lack of a better term, I mean the, the easy label is hippie bands.

It's the whole fish crowd and all that.

♪♪♪ And that's really what the Bayou, uh, evolved into at the end there and, and really did play an important part, a vital part in developing these bands.

The first show I went to see was, uh, New Potato Caboose.

'cause I was a little deadhead for a while.

And, uh, uh, my friends took me to New Potato Caboose.

So I remember walking in the room and going, wow, so this is a club.

It was actually it was the first bar I was ever in.

The, uh, the balcony, you know, ringed, the, the whole upper tier.

But you know, the people that were over the stage, they were looking right down on you, you know, dropping stuff, you know, cigarette ashes or whatever, you know.

People spilling drinks off the side, you know.

The place is madhouse, you know, and it was always like a good hot, sweaty gig.

And it has that thunderdome vibe.

Yes.

So like, surrounded by people beneath you, above you, or everywhere around, which just makes it a lot of fun to play.

Yeah, I remember thinking it was this cavernous place, like, oh my God, you know, this is the big time man, this is so cool.

You know?

And then once, uh, once we started playing bigger venues and coming back, I, it was like, wow, this, it's not that big.

It's not as big as I always thought it was.

But it's the perfect room for like a, a national club act because you have that second level, you know, so you can pack a bunch of people in there, and it always sounded good in there.

♪♪♪ I remember the first time we played here, I, I had been listening to songs, uh, Songs From The Attic, Billy Joel record, and I saw, you know, on the credits that some of the tunes have been recorded at the Bayou.

So I was pretty fired up to play here.

♪♪♪ Cool thing about the Bayou was that, you know, you'd have like totally like hardcore, you know, insane people there, and then you'd have yuppies there and that, I mean, that's why I liked it.

I mean, it's, if that isn't a sign of the melting pot of our country, you know, it was, you just kind of had a, you always had a mixed crowd.

♪ singing ♪ When she came out on stage, she was using a walker because she had had hip surgery to remove the cancer in her hip.

And she also had cancer in her arm and in her back.

Everybody was extremely emotional.

I think everybody pretty much figured out that it was likely that Eva was gonna die.

Eva had just started to become popular.

Her entire fan base had basically made it a point to come to this show.

We have, as a token of our esteem, this honorary award, "your voice has touched many hearts!"

from the Recording Industry Association of America.

[cheering] It was a very diverse group of Washingtonians there together tonight that you don't always see brought together.

There were a couple songs we thought Eva might be able to do.

They were Wonderful World and Red Top 'cause she wanted to sing something with Chuck.

♪ I see trees that are green red roses too.

I'll watch them bloom for me and you And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

♪ There's a part at the very end of the song, it's the very end of the song where she goes, I think to myself, and normally in Tempo, She says, "what a wonderful world."

But she kind of, she kind of held it out.

She kind of melted it a little bit, kind of, she kind of tipped her head to the side to listen, you know, to see if there was any reaction in the crowd.

And she just came down how she felt: what a wonderful world.

It was beautiful how she did that.

And I, Eva had a, had a pretty good sense on how to phrase things and put emotion in that.

But I think that was a combination of her playing something that she may have thought would be the last thing she'd ever play in her life, plus everybody wanting her to do good and getting caught up in the moment.

And it was, it was very special.

And she was overcome emotionally.

Uh, it was lots of tears.

Um, but it, it was a beautiful thing.

I I, I think that out of all the things I've ever experienced in my life, I've never seen anything as... real as emotionally real as that.

That really struck me is that everybody truly was there because she had lived her life, right?

And everybody cared about her and everybody was really sad.

And she got a chance to see that.

I think that everybody there was really glad she was able to get up and sing the way she did right up till the end.

And I'm glad so many were there, uh, to bear witness to that.

And the Bayou turned out to be the perfect place to have that experience.

I think to myself Oh, What a wonderful world.

[applause] Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.

Eva Cassidy!

♪♪♪ The Bayou as a club was a very good deal for us.

The Bayou and leading to other things that were good for the Cellar Door companies was a great deal for us.

We were picking up a lot of steam.

Um, we were started selling out a lot.

And, uh, we just thought it was a great remodeling job, we'll be able to do it.

And I remember I went to the bank, I went to First Union, applied for this loan.

I got my loan and I was so excited.

I got this $500,000 loan.

I went and saw Jack and Dave and, uh, they told me that they had, uh, got an offer the day before to, to sell it.

And, um, I said, well, you know, guys, please don't sell it.

Please don't sell it.

And I, I begged and begged and begged.

If you stayed with it, there was no future in it for you.

Georgetown needed a boost, or maybe this would be it.

And it's the last area that's developable.

Unless you owned the building, all you were doing is making your landlord a better living.

Georgetown was changing the, you know, there were people that were buying a lot of those crappy apartments and townhouses and turning 'em into, you know, yuppie farms.

And they were really hammering on the cops to clean up, you know, "clean up things."

You know, at the same time 14th Street was going through its big cleanup.

All the strip clubs and everything were going away.

It was a whole temperament change on, on attitude towards alcohol and rock bands.

When I finally found out that it was sold, it was like that, you know, life was just taken out from underneath me.

You know, here's something, I've been at the, you know, almost my whole life I had been a part of and it's gone.

And then with Dave dying at the same time, it just kind of felt like everything was just going wrong.

It's run its course for work.

It helped us.

Let me put it like this: Dave Matthews, right?

Superstar.

Our connection came through to Bayou.

Okay.

We've made more money with Dave Matthews than we, than we ever even paid for the Bayou.

So I think that would explain it rather well there, It's had its moments, you know, this past year I think it's gone downhill a lot.

We haven't had the, nearly the caliber shows we should have had and we were closed a lot.

So that's been kind of a disappointment.

This is my last night working here.

I want get a picture of you.

You guys are nuts!

1999 around the corner.

Thank for coming out.

Our final at the Bayou.

After 45 years., [cheering] We're about 30 seconds away...

It's getting closer... [crowd cheering] 6 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 Happy New Year!

♪♪♪ The Bayou is gonna close?

I guess it's probably they deserve that for having us here.

This isn't the first place we've closed.

We played in Pompeii just before the volcano went off.

It's too bad.

Any place like this that closes.

I mean, what goes up in its place?

That's my question.

Whatever comes in its place isn't gonna have this kind of atmosphere, this kind of tradition.

So it's just...

The world's always busy reinventing itself, but... ♪ Closing time, you don't have to go home, but you can stay here.

♪ This program has been made possible by the generous support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Humanities Council of Washington DC, the Arts and Humanities Council of Montgomery County, the International Documentary Association, the Potomac River Jazz Club, and by Bayou Kickstarter Contributors.