The People and Places of Northwest Washington
February 22, 2012 ■ Page 15
Back to The Bayou: Film explores Georgetown club
By KATIE PEARCE Current Staff Writer
For the creators of a documentary on The Bayou nightclub in Georgetown, a dawdling approach has turned out to be the right fit. The filmmakers first latched on to The Bayou in 1998, documenting the music hall as it prepared to shut down for good that New Year’s Eve. At the time, their general aspiration to make a film outweighed their connection to the K Street club. But after 14 years of soaking in The Bayou’s posthumous wealth of anecdotes and artifacts, the team members now speak of the venue with intimate affection. They describe it as a complex, offbeat and raucous place that survived its decades on the Georgetown waterfront — on the site beneath the Whitehurst Freeway that’s now a Loews movie theater — by constantly shifting identities. “Once we looked under the hood and saw this engine with odd parts and gunk and weird assembly … it became a story worth coming to,” said writer Vinnie Perrone, a former Washington Post staffer who has interviewed subjects for the documentary. The team, working under the auspices of producer Dave Lilling’s Metro Teleproductions in Silver Spring, also includes C-SPAN producer and announcer Bill Scanlan and writer and humorist Dave
Above, courtesy of Dave Nuttycombe; other photos courtesy of Metro Teleproductions
Nuttycombe. They recently brought on board a young New York University film school grad, Adam Bonsib, as editor. Now, they’re in the post-production phase, hoping to raise some still-needed funds though a campaign on Kickstarter, an online platform that supports creative projects. The plan is to release the full-length documentary, “The Bayou: DC’s Killer Joint” to area public television stations later this year. The Bayou started out as a Dixieland jazz club in 1953, owned by brothers Tony and Vince Tramonte. Its building, a former barrel factory, had hosted speakeas-
The Bayou, above, hosted music acts for over four decades on the Georgetown waterfront. A team of filmmakers including Adam Bonsib, front left, hope to release a documentary about the club this year.
ies and “late-night histrionics” in the first half of the century, according to Scanlan. It was also the site of a single-gunshot mob slaying in 1951, whose sole victim, George Harding, was rumored to haunt the venue for years afterward. By the early 1960s, “when musical tastes started to change, out of necessity the club started groping
for alternatives,” said Nuttycombe. A short phase as a burlesque house bridged the gap until the rock ’n’ roll era descended on D.C., and a house band called The Telstars took over The Bayou. Playing cover versions of hits, the band sold out the club most nights of the week for three years. In the late ’60s and through the
’70s, the owners became more ambitious with booking. Though the club’s “bread and butter” was local bands, it “began to make its name known as a venue for national acts,” said Scanlan, drawing performers like Kiss, Dire Straits, Todd Rundgren and Foreigner. “A number of bands made their Washington debut at The Bayou,” said Nuttycombe. The Bayou’s popularity continued into the ’80s, after Cellar Door Productions took over ownership. U2 played its first American show See Bayou/Page 25
Washington International School delves into Arab Spring By KATIE PEARCE Current Staff Writer
Photos courtesy of Washington International School
Juniors Camila Salvador, left, and Lilia Fetini are leaders of the Arab-American Student Union, which organized a lecture series featuring Rolf Mützebich, right.
When the Arab Spring uprisings were breaking out in Egypt a year ago, some history classes at the Washington International School tuned in to watch Hosni Mubarak give his speech live on Al-Jazeera. Upper school teacher Philip Benson said the speech itself wasn’t particularly notable, but in watching it, the students witnessed history. “While the speech was a disappointment, the dictator was gone the following day,” he said. Many students at the Cleveland Park school have been following the protests with interest since they began. “Last year during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, Al-Jazeera was on constantly in the library here at school,” junior Camila Salvador wrote in an email. “In history we would discuss the revolutions and other current events.”
But the school’s Arab-American Student Union recently kicked things up a notch by pulling in experts. To mark the one-year anniversary of the first demonstration in Tunisia, the group helped orchestrate a lecture series featuring a professor, a diplomat, a news editor and a foreign-policy spokesperson from Germany. The student group, which has about 20 members, was already “so excited about the
Arab Spring” and was dedicating most of its year’s activities to the topic, junior Lilia Fetini wrote in an email. Fetini and Salvador act as co-vice presidents of the group. The lecture series, Fetini said, was a way to “better educate ourselves” about different viewpoints on the revolutions. The group deliberately sought speakers who could represent the perspectives of United States, Europe, the Middle East and the media, she said. On Feb. 16, Rolf Mützenich, the foreign policy spokesperson in the German Parliament for the Social Democratic Party, shared thoughts and fielded questions. Mützenich told the students he believes the Arab uprisings will create “a chance to see more societies that will be governed better in the future.” But if European history offers a lesson, he said, it will be a “long, long journey until we see societies that are more free than they are today.” See WIS/Page 25