Breaking Through

In 1987, when my high-school band played our first club date, I was desperate for an escape hatch. That night, I saw there might be a place for me in the world of downtown poets, artists, and punks.

Me on the left; Jesse Quitslund on the right. Photograph by Eben Burr, circa 1986.

It’s hard to describe just how different it was back then.

It was the mid-‘80s—the height of White Flight—and Downtown Washington, D.C. was a hollow shell. After the torrential rainstorms that broke like water balloons over your head, you could literally smell the decay wa…