My Celtic-Jewish Punk Rock History

In his book The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, Steven Beeber chronicles the Jewish lineage that led to New York punk rock. It goes from Lenny Bruce, “the patron saint of punk,” to Lou Reed, to Jonathan Richman, to Suicide, to Richard Hell to Joey and Tommy Ramone. “As it originated in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early 1970s,” Beeber writes, “punk rock was the apotheosis of a Jewish cultural tradition that found its ultimate expression in the generation born after the Holocaust.”

It’s a fascinating read, and one that had a parallel in Washington, D.C. Seth Hurwitz, the founder of the 9:30 Club in Washington, is a local legend. He grew up in Potomac, Maryland, the same suburb I did. His father Harold was a chemist who worked for the government and his mother Selma an artist. As a boy Hurwitz’s parents took him to see Peter, Paul, and Mary at Carter Barron Amphitheatre. “My first real concert,” he said in an interview, “was at the Shady Grove Music Fair in 1972: Delaney & Bonnie, Roy Buchanan, Billy Preston. The opening act was Loggins and Messina.” The Shady Grove Music Fair was where I saw the Partridge Family and Count Basie.

Hurwitz attended Winston Churchill High School, where he started working as a teen DJ at radio station WHFS. “Well, my goal was to be a disc jockey, and I was a disc jockey at WHFS when I was in high school,” Hurwitz said. “I hung around the station and just figured out [how to do it]. They were in this whole Robert Palmer/Little Feat groove. I was, too, but I moved on and they got stuck in that. Basically I moved on to Roxy Music and Lou Reed and Be Bop Deluxe and Rory Gallagher—the new progressive stuff.”

Hurwitz went from HFS to WGTB, a Georgetown radio station. “They played some seriously radical stuff,” he recalled. “Just crazy. So I was welcome there. In fact, I was considered to be maybe too conservative, but they let me give it a shot.” He interviewed a man named Sam L’Hommedieu, a promoter and a partner at a club called the Cellar Door. Hurwitz went to work for him.