In September 2021, as 9:30 Club was celebrating its grand reopening after 17 months of pandemic closure, Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters casually announced that the venue’s owners would be “opening an exact replica of the old 9:30 Club” next door.
“We’ll probably be the band that opens it, right?” Grohl said to loud cheers. “Is that what’s going to happen?”
Almost 18 months later, that’s exactly what’s happening. And they’ll be followed by a jaw-dropping lineup of acts, including the Pixies, the Walkmen, Billy Idol and Joan Jett.
The new live music venue, dubbed the Atlantis — after the club that operated at 930 F St. NW in the late 1970s, before 9:30 Club took over the space — opens May 30 and is designed to evoke the cramped, dingy and utterly iconic music venue that operated there from 1980 to 1995, hosting early D.C. performances from countless big-name artists, including R.E.M., Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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But the Atlantis, which is attached to the venue’s current location at Ninth and V streets NW, is better described as an homage to 9:30 Club, rather than an exact replica. For one thing, it has a capacity of 450 — more than twice as many people as the old club’s 199, though that number often seemed more like a suggestion than a hard-and-fast cap. The Atlantis will also have a second-floor balcony facing the stage, a feature that brings to mind the current 9:30. But on a tour of the still-under-construction venue last week, Seth Hurwitz, the owner of 9:30 Club and the Anthem, pointed out similarities: The stage sits in a corner on an angle, not facing the front of the room. The audience will walk down a hallway to get in, though not as long as the entryway on F Street, before passing by the front desk from the old club. And there’s a pole in front of the stage — but more on that below.
As expected, the Foo Fighters, who also played the opening night of the Anthem, are performing at the grand opening May 30, giving their fans an unbelievable chance to see the band in an intimate setting. But it’s the following 43 shows, stretching through the end of September — 44 concerts, all with $44 tickets, to celebrate the 9:30’s 44 years in business — that are truly the showstoppers. Parliament Funkadelic. Maggie Rogers. Sylvan Esso. Franz Ferdinand. Jenny Lewis. Jeff Tweedy. Thievery Corporation. The dizzying schedule is full of artists who could easily sell out 9:30 Club, the Anthem or even larger venues, but they’re performing at a club the fraction of the size.
In the concert business, this is what’s known as an “underplay,” or, as Hurwitz puts it, “deliberately playing a small place just to create a fuss.” He points to concerts by the Rolling Stones at the Warner Theatre in 1978, and at a club called Toad’s in New Haven, Conn., in 1989. That Warner show, Hurwitz says, “was just such a crazy big deal. I wanted to re-create that for the opening, but I didn’t want it to be just one night — I wanted it to be as many as we could get out of it. So I came up with that gimmick” of 44 shows for 44 years.
With the theme in place, Hurwitz; his son Sam Hurwitz, who’ll be the general manager at the Atlantis; and Zhubin Aghamolla, the venue’s talent booker, began assembling a list of artists who they felt would be a good fit for the Atlantis, and Seth Hurwitz sent out an email to booking agents and band managers explaining his idea.
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“The people we called either got it or they didn’t,” Hurwitz continues. Some agents turned them down because the concert wouldn’t pay much, or because of scheduling. But others, Hurwitz says, were all in. One of them was Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service, whom Hurwitz approached backstage at a concert at the Anthem.
“You know, he is a very assertive man, which is probably one of the many reasons he’s been so successful in his line of work,” Gibbard says. “He’s like, ‘I need you to come play [the Atlantis].’ And I’m like, ‘Okay, man, I’ll do it.’” Never mind that, in September, Gibbard is already playing three sold-out shows in the D.C. area — two at the Anthem and one at Merriweather Post Pavilion. Hurwitz convinced Gibbard to add a solo show at the Atlantis on Sept. 2. “The guy knows what he’s doing, and he takes care of his artists. It’s one of the reasons that the 9:30 Club had, and still has, the reputation of being one of the best clubs in America.”
Naturally, there’s going to be a lot of interest in these concerts, and I.M.P. is trying hard to keep tickets from being resold for exorbitant fees on the secondary market. Instead of putting all the tickets for sale online at once, or making fans queue at a box office, there will be an online lottery for all 44 shows, opening Tuesday morning and continuing until 11:59 p.m. Friday. Users will register through the Atlantis website, providing their credit card info, before choosing up to 12 shows they’d like to attend, and whether they want one ticket or two — or if they want to splurge on a package that includes one ticket to all 44 concerts.
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Lottery winners will be notified over several days, beginning Monday, April 10, and will be required to purchase their tickets. (So, if you win a pair of tickets to five concerts, your credit or debit card will be charged $440 plus fees.) The ticket purchaser has to attend the show. One caveat: Because some of these concerts are months away, and plans can change, anyone who purchases tickets but can’t attend will be able to sell the tickets for face value on a fan-to-fan exchange beginning May 1.
During an interview last week at I.M.P.’s offices around the corner from 9:30 Club, Hurwitz, who purchased the original 9:30 in 1986 with partner Rich Heinecke, said he didn’t remember when the idea to re-create the old club was hatched, though inspiration might have come from 9:30’s 35th anniversary World Tour celebration, when a miniature version of the old venue was re-created inside the current club. “That always stuck with me,” Hurwitz said.
Beyond nostalgia, though, there’s also a practical reason: “We realized we need our own” club of this size, Hurwitz says, to complement the rest of I.M.P.’s portfolio: not just 9:30 Club (capacity 1,200) and the Anthem (2,500-6,000), but the two venues it operates, Lincoln Theatre (1,200) and Merriweather Post Pavillion (18,000). Before covid, there were “9:30 Club presents” shows at U Street Music Hall, featuring acts that were not yet big enough to headline 9:30 Club, including Lizzo and Sam Smith, but U Hall closed during the pandemic. “We have everything but a small club,” Hurwitz says. “We need our own because we need ours to stand out. I wanted to have the best small club, like I wanted to have the best midsize venue, and the best amphitheater, and so on and so forth.”
Still, nostalgia is potent. Ask musicians for their favorite 9:30 Club memories and stories come pouring out. Hamilton Leithauser of the Walkmen, whose band plays the Atlantis on May 31, shortly after four shows at 9:30, grew up in D.C. and can easily tick off the names of bands he saw on F Street: Fugazi, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Jonathan Fire*Eater. “It was sort of like the Mecca,” he says. “In my mind, it was the only place that you could go and see rock-and-roll music.”
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His first teenage visit, though, didn’t go so well: “The first time I went without my parents was with my friend Hugh, and we went to see Superchunk, which he was a fan of. I remember we went in, and we were like, I don’t know, 14 or something. … The opening band played, and then we realized that it was our curfew and we had to leave. We never even saw Superchunk.”
Since Grohl’s announcement, Hurwitz says the same three questions have come up again and again from music fans curious about re-creating their nights at the old club.
The first one is obvious: Will Atlantis replicate the famous smell of the old club — a potent odor redolent of a blend of spilled beer, cigarettes, disinfectant, Band-Aids, vomit, sweat and God knows what else, which clung to clothes for days after a concert?
“Nope,” Hurwitz says, smiling.
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“The next one,” he continues, “is, ‘Will there be rats?’” referring to the creatures that scurried along pipes in full view of audience members and bands hanging out backstage.
So, will there? “I hope not.”
“Number three,” Hurwitz says, “‘Will there be a pole in front of the stage?’” One of 9:30 Club’s defining features — perhaps most annoying features, if you got stuck behind it at a show you particularly wanted to see — was a large metal support pole that blocked views of the stage from certain angles.
“There will be a pole,” Hurwitz says, “which everyone fought me on, but since it’s one of the big questions everyone asks, I’m like, ‘Well, there you go. That’s why we’re putting the pole there.’”
Once the 44-concert series is over, Hurwitz says, the focus of the Atlantis will shift to featuring up-and-coming bands — the club’s motto is “Where music begins” — though Hurwitz still expects the occasional underplay, too. But he doesn’t expect it to be booked every night: After all, the opening lineup features between eight and 14 shows per month. “We’re curating this place, so we don’t have to fill a calendar,” he says. “We’re only going to book the bands that we think either matter now, or will matter.”
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“These are the next Sleater-Kinneys. This is the next Pixies,” Hurwitz says. “And you don’t know who that’s going to be.” But, he says, it’s worth taking a chance: When you see an artist playing large venues, “how many times have you said, ‘I wish I’d seen them at the 9:30’?”
The Atlantis opening lineup:
May 30: Foo Fighters
May 31: The Walkmen
June 2: Hot Chip
June 3: Rainbow Kitten Surprise
June 4: Modern English
June 5: Franz Ferdinand
June 6: Pixies
June 9: Tank and the Bangas
June 10: Yo La Tengo
June 16: Marc Roberge of O.A.R.
June 17: Hannibal Buress + Eshu Tune
June 19: Sylvan Esso
June 20: Darius Rucker
June 24: Rodrigo y Gabriela
June 25: X
June 28: Jeff Tweedy
July 2: Barenaked Ladies
July 6: Tegan and Sara
July 7: The Head and The Heart
July 15: The Magnetic Fields
July 20: Clutch
July 21: Jenny Lewis
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July 23: The Struts
July 27: Third Eye Blind
July 28: Portugal. The Man
July 29: Living Colour
July 30: Iron & Wine
Aug. 5: Gogol Bordello
Aug. 6: Bush
Aug. 8: Shakey Graves
Aug. 10: Drive-By Truckers
Aug. 14: Parliament Funkadelic featuring George Clinton
Aug. 17: Thievery Corporation
Aug. 27: Joan Jett
Aug. 28: Gary Clark Jr.
Sept. 2: Ben Gibbard
Sept. 6: Luna
Sept. 9: Bartees Strange
Sept. 13: Spoon
Sept. 15: Tove Lo
Sept. 17: Billy Idol
Sept. 21: Bastille
Sept. 22: Matt and Kim
Sept. 29: Maggie Rogers
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