Credit: Joseph Schaefer Legendary Washington, D.C. venue 9:30 Club, which Rolling Stone named the number-one "big room" concert hall in the U.S., is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. To commemorate the occasion, the venue is staging a five-day, interactive "world's fair" exhibit, which kicks off tonight, January 5.
"There's the opportunity to be on the stage of the 9:30 Club and experience what it's like to be in front of a big crowd," Donna Westmoreland tells ABC Radio of the exhibit. Westmoreland is the chief operating officer of I.M.P., the concert-promoting parent company of 9:30 Club.
"People get to go in the dressing room, which most people haven't had the opportunity to do, and experience what it's like to be a rock band in a dressing room, in your green room before your show," she adds.
Westmoreland first started working at the 9:30 Club as a bar manager before eventually working her way up to COO. From her 20-plus years of professional experience with the 9:30 Club, she picks Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine show as her favorite memory of the venue.
"It was a technically bigger show than we'd ever done," she remembers. "A handful of us spent probably 48 hours getting the club ready, bringing in the extra gear that they needed, working with their production manger to make sure that we had everything that they needed to put on the show. That was beyond anything that we'd done to date there."
In addition to the exhibit, which also includes a contact-free mosh pit simulator and a "hall of records" featuring album covers from every band that played the venue, the 9:30 Club is also putting out a oral and pictorial history book detailing its 35 years of existence. The book includes artists such as Fall Out Boy's Patrick Stump, D.C. hardcore icon Ian MacKaye and Dave Grohl giving first-hand accounts of their experiences at the 9:30 Club.
Grohl grew up in Virginia and often frequented the 9:30 Club in his youth, and he was a mainstay in the local punk scene before he became the drummer for Nirvana and the frontman for Foo Fighters.
"There's not a musician in this town that doesn't feel like he's one of us. He came from this," Westmoreland says of Grohl. "All of those people that were a part of the old 9:30 Club especially, they were all in bands together and they all were part of the scene, and he was part of that scene, too."
"He was our guy that made good," she adds.
The music scene that the 9:30 Club helped foster expanded when Grohl joined Nirvana, creating a connection between Washington, D.C. and Seattle.
"We would get sort of dispatches from Seattle about how amazing this album was gonna be," Westmoreland tells ABC Radio. "What Nevermind became, 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' before even the album came out, but just what it was, we as a community were so excited for it because of our connection to Dave."
The 9:30 Club "world's fair" exhibit will be on display until Saturday, January 9. The book, officially called 9:30 -- A Time and a Place, The First 35 Years, is available now.
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