Georgetown Time Machine: Punk Rock

This week for Georgetown Time Machine, GM is taking you to the punk years of the early 1980s. The image is of a concert poster from the DC Punk Archive. It was for a concert at Scandals in Georgetown featuring the Teen Idles, as well as other bands listed simply as “others”. The concert was May 19, 1980.

Scandals was a club at the northwest corner of Wisconsin and Prospect st. The poster helpfully described club’s location as “near Roy Rogers” and “next to Tramps”. The Roy Rogers was were the Wawa is now:

Tramps was a disco club in the same building as Scandals. It was opened in 1975 by Mike O’Harro, and lasted until 1982:

When Tramps opened in 1975, it was really more taking over the space that had been Billy Martin’s Carriage House. This was a second location opened in 1953 by the famed pub.

(GM would love to give you some more info about Scandals itself, but it is impossible to find any useful information because trying to search “Scandals” and “Georgetown” gets a million unhelpful hits!)

The Teen Idles was a notable but short-lived DC band. It was formed in 1979 by Ian MacKaye, Jeff Nelson, Geordie Grindle, and Nathan Strejcek. The band played a hard punk which rejected the influence of the emerging New Wave style. The poster points a fine point on it by writing “New Wavers Not Invited” and an arrow pointing to a dancer says “52 B’s” (a reference to the B-52s):

The band broke up later in 1980. By the end of the year, MacKaye and Nelson would form the legendary Minor Threat, putting out albums on their own record label, Dischord Records, which was formed with money made from the Teen Idles.