SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Flannel shirts, tortured rock stars and teen spirit - the story of Seattle music is pop culture mythology. But the weirdest chapter of that story, the Teen Dance Ordinance, is often overlooked. While grunge was taking over the world, city leaders imposed a law that criminalized young people going to concerts and dance clubs. Predictably, the youth fought back. From Member station KUOW in Seattle, "Let The Kids Dance! " is a seven-part podcast that reveals the untold battle between punks, parents and politicians for the soul of the city.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: If they want to keep kids off drugs and kids off, like, wandering on the streets, give us something to do. You know, I'm 16 years old, and I can't do anything. It's like, you want us to stay at home and smoke weed? Or do you want us to go out and. like, dance around and have fun?
DETROW: It's hosted by veteran journalist Jonathan Zwickel. In this excerpt, he describes the chaos that erupted when the police enforced the Teen Dance Ordinance, or TDO, for the first time. The 1985 incident led to a street riot in a snowstorm, indignation from a popular TV commentator and a musical prank that became an anthem.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LOU GUZZO: Who needs teenage punk rock nightclubs anyway? In fact, who needs punk rockers? If ever the rest of us needed to put our foot down and say enough is enough, the time is now.
JONATHAN ZWICKEL, BYLINE: Lou Guzzo was a TV commentator for KIRO 7 News in Seattle in the early '80s. Guzzo was a professional curmudgeon in the vein of Andy Rooney.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GUZZO: The world of drugs and booze made attractive by punk rock has them mesmerized.
ZWICKEL: He'd appear on air a few times a week to unload whatever was on his mind. Today, Lou was particularly worked up. What caught his attention were the unprecedented events that occurred in his beloved city the night before.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: An adult and five juveniles are in custody tonight following a melee last night outside a Seattle punk Rock nightclub.
ZWICKEL: The club was called Gorilla Gardens. The band performing that night was an up-and-coming act called Circle Jerks. Seattle police shut down the show, and the ensuing chaos would be known as the Gorilla Gardens Riot. It was the first-ever enforcement of the TDO.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Several police cars and a fire department car were damaged after the youths began throwing things at police. But, as always, there are two sides to a story, and some of the teenagers who were there last night say the police roughed them up.
ZWICKEL: The accusations of police brutality apparently escaped Lou Guzzo. Maybe he was unaware that cops had been beating the crap out of Seattle punks for years.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
GUZZO: We have no obligation to provide teenagers nightclubs and opportunities for mayhem. In fact, I think our obligation is just the opposite, to prevent them from ruining their lives.
ZWICKEL: The Gorilla Gardens Riot was the opening skirmish in a war between Seattle's music community and establishment forces, a war that waged for 17 years and, in the process, dramatically altered the world-changing music that would soon explode out of the city.
ZWICKEL: The battle lines were drawn. Punks were ready for a fight.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #1: (Singing) Let the kids dance, let the kids dance, let the kids dance.
DAVID PORTNOW: This bar was here, but it was much more seedy, and the...
ZWICKEL: Oh, seedier than it is now?
PORTNOW: Way more seedy. Yeah.
ZWICKEL: Wow, 'cause this place is pretty...
I'm standing outside the former Gorilla Gardens with David Portnow. In 1985, David was a 14-year-old doorman at the club, working after school almost every day. Today, he's our wiry excitable tour guide through the International District. He's wearing a PIG Records T-shirt, merch from one of the several record labels he's run since he was a teenager. The place he's pointing out is boarded up, painted a dull gray. Today, it's utterly silent, but back in 1984 and '85, when it hosted live music almost every night of the week, it would have been packed with music fans inside and out.
PORTNOW: Well, your metalheads had long hair, leather. There were mohawks and stuff but not these modern, fake mohawks.
ZWICKEL: The club was located in a building that once housed a two-screen Chinese movie theater. The guy who ran it, Tony Chu, turned its two separate theater spaces into two separate stages that ran at the same time. The Omni Room hosted punk and new wave, and the Rock Theater was dedicated to metal. Chu's pairing of disparate musical tribes under one roof was dicey. Brawls between punks and metalheads were common. But Chu made the genius decision to charge a single price to access both rooms. The rival clans couldn't deny the cheap cover. The result was alchemical.
PORTNOW: Back then, if you were into punk, you didn't get along with metalheads, and if you were into metal, you hated punks. That all started changing about '85 to '90, and this was one of the first places in the world where that took place. They commingled, and by the commingling, some of the bands kind of played a crossover.
ZWICKEL: That crossover and commingling between punk and metal - the music it spawned became Seattle's signature sound. According to Seattle lore, Gorilla Gardens gave the world grunge.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "10000 THINGS")
GREEN RIVER: Crawling through, dark, with streaks.
ZWICKEL: Green River might be the first band to master the sound. The conditions necessary to spawn that kind of revolutionary music are rare. But in these moments of revelation, young people are always present. Rock 'n' roll, punk, hip-hop, rave - all these groundbreaking modern musical styles were born from youth culture.
(SOUNDBITE OF GREEN RIVER SONG, "10000 THINGS)
ZWICKEL: At their very first practice in 1984, the guys in Green River were barely into their 20s. They played Gorilla Gardens a bunch of times, then they went on to start Pearl Jam and Mudhoney.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ZWICKEL: The venue was bare-bones, just music blasting from a makeshift stage in an empty warehouse. David Portnow worked the door. Six bucks to get in - his brother was in the opening band, The Dehumanizers. The Circle Jerks had just gone on stage. The crowd was dancing madly, when suddenly, without warning...
PORTNOW: The police come in with a fireman, and they didn't say anything.
ZWICKEL: David and I are now outside a self-storage place on the back side of Queen Anne Hill. In 1985, it was the second iteration of Gorilla Gardens. On that snowy November night, the cops had found the place, possibly tipped off by a noise complaint.
PORTNOW: They just pushed me out of the way, and they go straight back, and they were in there, I would say, about 40 seconds, and then all the lights and everything go off.
ZWICKEL: David says the cops didn't announce themselves, didn't say anything as they burst in.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: About 10:30 last night, 20 squad cars and dozens of Seattle police officers moved in on the Gorilla Gardens rock club. They went inside, accompanied by the fire marshal, with instructions to shut down the place and effectively stop the music. They did. But outside...
ZWICKEL: Almost 30 police officers, 20 squad cars, to pull the plug on a punk show. They plunged the room into sudden darkness and total confusion.
PORTNOW: Nobody can see. Nobody knows what the hell is going on, and then a couple of more cops stopped just came running in. They had their batons out and just started hitting people. Nobody had any warning whatsoever.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ZWICKEL: Punks were used to harassment from the cops, but this was a new level of violence. Hundreds of kids lined one side of the street, cops on the other. The kids started pelting them with snowballs. Despite the frozen streets, Seattle TV news station KIRO 7 sent a crew to the scene.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: Several police cars and a fire department car were damaged after the youths began throwing things at police.
ZWICKEL: The things they threw included Molotov cocktails.
PORTNOW: You know, it was two wrongs that happened that night, but they hit us in the head. Well, guess what? You're gonna take a brick to the head.
ZWICKEL: Lou Guzzo's rant aired the night after the riot. He didn't know it at the time, but he was now embroiled in a punk rock art project because Guzzo's spiel didn't sit well with David Portnow and his friends in The Dehumanizers. And the band's bassist happened to be an intern at KIRO TV, and he happened to know where KIRO kept the Guzzo recordings.
PORTNOW: He actually walked out of KIRO with the actual tapes.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KILL LOU GUZZO")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Well, that's caught the attention of our commentator Lou Guzzo, and Lou tonight says he thinks a crackdown is in order.
GUZZO: I have to ask a question, Gary (ph). Who needs teenage punk rock nightclubs anyway? In fact...
ZWICKEL: The Dehumanizers took Guzzo's voice and built a song with it. They gave it a catchy title, too - "Kill Lou Guzzo."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KILL LOU GUZZO")
GUZZO: The time is now. And the issue is nightclubs for teenagers, as well as the punk rockers that they attract.
ZWICKEL: Hostile, but also tongue in cheek - the singer take shots at Guzzo, his wife and his daughter. David pressed 500 copies of "Kill Lou Guzzo" on 45 and released them on his record label.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KILL LOU GUZZO")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #2: If that's Lou Guzzo, we hate his guts (ph).
ZWICKEL: Here you have artists repurposing the sound of oppression as a kind of liberation. It's a thumb in the eye of authority, using the man's own words against it, art as guerrilla media warfare.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "KILL LOU GUZZO")
UNIDENTIFIED SINGER #2: (Singing) Kill Lou Guzzo. Kill him now. Kill him here. Just kill.
ZWICKEL: You can see the pendulum process working here. An all-ages music scene bubbles up in Seattle. Cops and politicians beat it down with the TDO. The music community was put under such tremendous pressure that it was bound to collapse, or it was going to explode.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EVEN FLOW")
PEARL JAM: (Singing) Even flow...
ZWICKEL: Grunge was about to take over the world. But what most music fans didn't know about Seattle and probably wouldn't believe is that the city's young people were left outside looking in.
DETROW: "Let The Kids Dance!" is hosted by Jonathan Zwickel and produced by KUOW in Seattle. You can find all the episodes at kuow.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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