“What’s With Washington?” is WAMU’s new listener-powered journalism project. We invite folks to send us their burning questions about life in the D.C. region — no subject is off-limits — then we ask the public to vote on which questions we investigate.

In one of our latest rounds, a question from Centreville resident Alisa Pappas touched a nerve, drawing thousands of votes.

“Why do Washington audiences seem so subdued?” Pappas asked. “Are we really cooler customers than in other cities?”

As editor of WAMU’s Bandwidth — and a longtime audience member at D.C. concerts — I had no qualms tackling this one.

So what did I discover? Are D.C. music audiences really the tamest in the land? Check out my story on WAMU’s website. I’ll also discuss my findings on today’s edition of The Kojo Nnamdi Show, joined by go-go artist Michelle Blackwell and Black Cat club owner Dante Ferrando. Stream or tune in at noon.

Top image: Ace Cosgrove performs at the 2015 Landmark Music Festival in D.C.

The D.C. garage-rock trio deals directly with that often suffocating pressure on “Gun To My Head” (listen below), the opening track on its new EP Gun, Medicine, Prayer.

“I remember being in my early 20s,” says singer and guitarist Kenny Pirog, “and I know I can’t be the only one who felt like I was under tremendous pressure. Pressure to get a career going, to find a new home. Kind of like the system was holding a gun to my head.”

Now 28, Pirog says he wrote the song “because I wanted to smack that gun out of the system’s hand and not succumb to the pressure, and find my own way to play with the system.”

While the track is more about taking control of one’s life than D.C. life in particular, the nation’s capital still sounds etched into the song. Pirog, an Adams Morgan resident, says he took some of his cues from punk bands he saw at an iconic local rock club.

“I was hanging around Black Cat all the time, seeing a lot bands — a lot of which were punk-rock bands — and just getting that ingrained into my musical vocabulary,” Pirog says. “Musically, ‘Gun To My Head’ is a very D.C. song.”

Drawing from the energy of D.C.’s punk-rock scene as well as his own background in blues and jazz — Pirog’s older brother Anthony is an established experimental jazz composer in town — the guitarist says that “this attitude and energy that they played all these songs with contributes as much, if not more, to the song’s identity than just the chords, the melody and the lyrics.”

That attitude is the reason “Gun To My Head” is the leading track on the EP. “It just hits you right away,” Pirog says. “There’s no intro or anything, it’s just immediately full-throttle.”

The combination of lyrics and punk lineage may make the song instantly relatable for anyone who has spent much time in the District, which is exactly what Pirog wants.

“When I write a song,” Pirog says, “I want it to be relatable for an audience, so that people can personally identify with each one.”

Teen Liver:

Speedy Ortiz:

Ex Hex:

The concert-going ritual—apparently still huge with Fishbone, Skrillex and tattooed young men everywhere—found itself back in the spotlight last week, when California pop-punk band Joyce Manor stopped an attendee from stage diving during the band’s show in Jacksonville, Florida. A video from the show captures Joyce Manor frontman Barry Johnson yanking the guy out of the crowd and chastising him for leaping onto a woman only part his size.

Predictably, critics began to creep out of the woodwork, calling Johnson less than masculine and unpunk for taking a stand against the practice. Johnson responded in part by tweeting the serious injuries he’d seen on tour—implying they were caused by stage diving and other punk-show tomfoolery. All of the injured parties were women, he wrote. (Update: After another confrontation with a show attendee in Houston, Johnson addressed the issue again on Facebook.)

To a segment of D.C. music fans, this debate isn’t new. There was a time when local punk rockers became bitterly divided over the related issue of slam dancing—and it’s a divide that dogs D.C.’s punk scene to this day.

Black Cat’s Dante Ferrando remembers when D.C. punks battled over moshing and what to do about it. “There was a split in the scene over how to deal with this,” says the club owner, who played in punk bands Iron Cross and Ignition in the 1980s and Gray Matter in the 1980s and ’90s. Back then, D.C. shows could turn violent, he says, and a faction of the community got sick and tired of it. That malaise eventually led many bands—but most famously, Fugazi—to repeatedly speak out against moshing and other aggressive behavior at shows.

Now when bands ask fans to curb their violent dancing, they’re chided for emulating that preachy band of grandpas, Fugazi. Screaming Females reportedly got this treatment when they asked a rowdy crowd to chill out during a 2011 show at SUNY Purchase. Fugazi’s public rejection of slam dancing still feeds some people’s distaste for the band, not to mention D.C.’s overall reputation as a city that hates fun.

“A lot of people saw the Fugazi Instrument movie where Ian MacKaye throws a fan out of a show for moshing,” says Metal Chris, who runs DCheavymetal.com. He says that image helped D.C. become known for having “boring and docile concert audiences.” He sees no problem with fans going nuts at shows—as long as it’s the right setting. “If a band is high energy, high intensity, and you don’t want to deal with that kind of behavior, then you should probably stand near the back.”

To some extent, Ferrando understands where slam-dancing advocates are coming from. “When people see their rock gods act like mom and dad, it can be a real bummer to them, I guess,” he says. But he adds that it’s better for bands to set the rules early rather than give a pass to violence and risk attracting more of it. “If you don’t take steps to control it, it will become whatever it becomes—and you will lose your ability to have any control over your crowd,” he says. “You could end up with an audience you don’t want to play to.”

“If you don’t take steps to control [violence at shows], it will become whatever it becomes—and you will lose your ability to have any control over your crowd. … You could end up with an audience you don’t want to play to.” —Dante Ferrando

The club owner speaks from experience. “With Iron Cross, we developed some fans that would cause lots of trouble,” he says. “We lost control of our audience at some point and they started to define the band.” When Ferrando left Iron Cross in 1983, he says it was partly because he’d grown sick of fans who felt they knew more about what the band stood for than he did.

But what band wants to take the risk of yelling at fans and alienating its audience? It’s not exactly good PR (though sometimes it produces funny T-shirts). “From a performer’s standpoint, no one wants to police the crowd at their own shows,” says Priests singer Katie Alice Greer. “But maybe even more so, no one wants to actively facilitate an environment for this kind of idiocy.”

Ferrando says most rock bands probably worry more about growing their fanbases. “It’s a tough one, because the average band just wants to get bigger and doesn’t think about it that much,” he says. “I think it’s very easy to get sucked into trying to get more people out to your shows, and that’s the primary goal—without trying to be selective about who is coming out to your shows.”

Meanwhile, tensions simmer between bands who encourage slam dancing and the risk-averse clubs that host them. Metal Chris says he saw that tension play out during a Municipal Waste show at D.C.’s Rock & Roll Hotel in 2010. Club security was “throwing out stage divers,” he says, and the Richmond thrash-metal band fought back. The group stopped playing and protested the security measures, “creating an odd vibe for the show that basically felt like the band and its fans versus the venue and its staff.” According to the blogger, Municipal Waste’s Tony Foresta invited the whole crowd onstage, saying “They can’t throw us all out!” (Neither Municipal Waste’s label nor Rock & Roll Hotel booker Steve Lambert returned a request for comment.)

Coke Bust drummer Chris Moore recognizes the importance of letting showgoers express themselves, but he says they should still follow some basic rules. “You shouldn’t dive feet first, you shouldn’t dive into a small crowd, and you should try and avoid people who are a lot smaller than you,” he says.

Greer offers a similar guideline. “People who want to consensually punch and jump on each other should really be doing this in a pit behind the people who are dancing to and watching the show,” she says. “I hope this gets written into the next edition of the show-attendance etiquette handbook.”

But what happens when a new generation comes along and doesn’t realize there’s an etiquette handbook—or simply chooses to flout it? What if the venue doesn’t have security? What choice does a band like Joyce Manor have? Fugazi’s MacKaye (who declined to comment for this story) has compared the scenario to a dinner party gone down the tubes.

“It would be if like I was having you over for dinner and someone started stabbing you with a butter knife,” MacKaye told NPR’s Ask Me Another. “I would encourage that person to stop. It just seems obvious.”

Photo by Flickr user Montecruz Foto used under a Creative Commons license.

For Gray, who has cerebral palsy and uses a walker, it was yet another show he missed because a venue was inaccessible.

“The steps were so wide and so rickety and the ceiling was so low and steep, that my friend couldn’t even help me down the stairs,” he says.

Stairs, narrow doorways, cramped corridors: They’re barriers to mobility-impaired people in any building, but they pose a particularly large problem in the underground music scene—even in D.C., a government hub that’s otherwise pretty accessible.

Bands all over the country get their start playing unconventional spaces like houses and dive bars—and for a few reasons, those spaces aren’t always subject to the regulations established by the Americans With Disabilities Act, the pivotal civil rights legislation that celebrated its 24th anniversary last month.

Consequently, even while D.C.’s DIY scene experiences a small-scale renaissance, a segment of the music community is effectively barred from participating—often by factors as common as a flight of stairs.

But with such glaring obstacles preventing mobility-impaired people from going to shows, activity around the issue seems minimal in D.C.’s music scene. Why don’t more people talk about accessibility? And how can venues and show-bookers do better by disabled music fans?

Understanding Accessibility

The good news is that many of D.C.’s big commercial venues comply with ADA, which affords basic rights to people with physical or mental impairments and establishes accessibility requirements for new buildings. It also makes sure that buildings that predate the legislation meet certain accessibility standards when possible.

The bad news is that many other D.C. venues don’t comply with ADA’s standards—and they don’t always have to.

If you use a mobility aid like a wheelchair or walker, you’ll do fine at numerous D.C. spots including the Howard Theatre, The Hamilton, Sixth & I Historic Synagogue, U Street Music Hall and Gypsy Sally’s. They make it easy with elevators that open their levels to all patrons. Black Cat gets high marks not only for its wide front doors and accessible backstage concert space, but also for the freight elevator to its main concert room upstairs.

Some DIY spots do accessibility well, too: Columbia Heights church St. Stephen’s is equipped with ramps, and Comet Ping Pong and Takoma Park’s Electric Maid are easy to enter.

Some major music venues in town are only partially accessible. Disabled patrons can easily navigate the 9:30 Club—unless they want to visit the balcony, which requires a hike up a set of stairs. Everyone can access Rock & Roll Hotel‘s first floor, too, but not the second-floor dance hall or rooftop bar.

The concert rooms at DC9 and Velvet Lounge can only be accessed via a flight of stairs, making shows at those venues inaccessible to customers who use mobility aids. (Though DC9 booker Steve Lambert says club staff is happy to help showgoers up the stairs.) Critically, plenty of house venues are inaccessible, too—they’re often old rowhouses with staircases to the front door and stairs to the basement. Unfortunately, places like these are not required to go accessible, assuming they meet certain criteria established by ADA legislation.

Marian Vessels, director of the Mid-Atlantic ADA Center, says that since so many D.C. buildings were built before the ADA’s construction requirements took effect in 1992, they were built without accessibility in mind. But she says if an accommodation is cheap and easy, businesses must make it. That means if the only thing preventing your venue from compliance is, say, an easily widened doorway, you must modify it. But for many businesses, constructing a ramp or adding an elevator would be either physically or financially impracticable.

If it’s structurally and financially feasible for a house venue to be made accessible, the property owner has to do it—because when that house hosts shows, it’s considered a public gathering place.

Private residences normally don’t have to comply with the ADA. But the rules change for houses that host public events. If it’s structurally and financially feasible for a house venue to be made accessible, the property owner has to do it—because when that house hosts shows, it’s considered a public gathering place.

“If you put flyers out that say something like, ‘Free movie night! Come as you are! We’ll have a good time!’ now you’ve become a place of public accommodation,” says Jim Pecht, an accessibility specialist at the United States Access Board.

Erik Butler, who runs D.C. house venue The Rough House, says that his space has a makeshift ramp. If other houses did the same, they could open doors they might not have realized were closed.

Going accessible offers a longer-term gain, too. Residences serve as seedbeds for the local music scene, particularly in D.C., where house shows have been happening for decades (and not just in the punk community). If a disabled music fan can’t get into a basement show, it means one less person is supporting local music—and that’s no good for a DIY scene like D.C.’s, which normally prides itself on its inclusiveness.

“Just Treat Everyone Like A Person”

You couldn’t accuse D.C.’s punk scene of broad insensitivity; it’s a community that tends to be clued into social-justice issues, and promoters, venues and musicians regularly support progressive or otherwise worthy causes.

Take D.C. punk activist group Positive Force, which has hosted numerous benefit concerts over its nearly 30 years of existence, and the national happening Punk Rock Karaoke, whose local iterations have benefited an assortment of D.C.-area organizations like Girls Rock! D.C., D.C. Books to Prisons and Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive.

Yet for all its idealism, D.C.’s DIY music scene doesn’t seem as attuned to accessibility as a social-justice issue. Evidence exists in the number of shows hosted at inaccessible venues, particularly houses.

Then again, it’s difficult to gauge the size of the accessibility issue in the D.C. music scene, because it’s tough to count the number of disabled people who aren’t coming to shows. But ask people who work at venues, and they’ll tell you they hear from people about accessibility on a fairly regular basis.

Black Cat booker Candice Jones says the 14th Street NW club gets phone calls about accessibility up to several times a month, and Rock & Roll Hotel Marketing Manager Molly Majorack says the venue fields calls about it once every two months. (Majorack also says security staff at the H Street NE club take a course and receive a certificate through the city to train on hospitality for people with disabilities.)

Natalie Illum (shown above), a disability activist, performer and poet, says that she moved to D.C. in 1999 specifically because of its accessibility to people like herself, who identify as having a physical disability. “It’s by default one of the most [ADA] compliant cities in the United States,” she says. “It’s why I live here.”

But Illum became frustrated by local spaces and stages that didn’t accommodate performers with disabilities. “Stages are not necessarily built with people who have mobility issues in mind,” she says. Her idea for a barrier-free performance series inspired a campaign that aimed to raise funds for a venue, ASL services, an accessibility ramp and other costs. She hasn’t met her goal yet, but the campaign is ongoing.

“Eight or nine times out of 10, there’s some drunk guy at the end of the show who tries to clear a path for me, showing the world, ‘We got a disabled guy coming through! Move out of the way!’ and then there’s this spotlight put on me. Is that person trying to help me or are they trying to make himself feel better?” —Sean Gray

Sight-impaired scenester and photographer Ahmad Zaghal goes to a lot of shows—by his count, four or five per week—and he says that for the most part, venue staff is great about helping him out. But he adds that accessibility doesn’t usually occur to able-bodied people until they are confronted with it. “It’s mostly an awareness issue,” he says. “It doesn’t really register until you’ve encountered it in some way.”

Because Zaghal turns up at so many local concerts, he says, many of his fellow showgoers are already aware of his disability, so he doesn’t endure a lot of blatant ignorance or harassment. But Sean Gray—who co-hosts a WMUC radio show with Zaghal—says he’s been confronted with a certain kind of unpleasant helpfulness.

“Eight or nine times out of 10, there’s some drunk guy at the end of the show who tries to clear a path for me, showing the world, ‘We got a disabled guy coming through! Move out of the way!’ and then there’s this spotlight put on me,” Gray says. “Is that person trying to help me or are they trying to make himself feel better?”

Gray compares that scenario to one that has dogged women at shows for years. “It’s the same thing if you said, ‘There’s a woman at this hardcore show, so we better make sure nobody [messes] with her.’ Putting that spotlight on you highlights that you’re The Other and you’re the oppressed group.”

Memphis-based guitarist Will McElroy, who has cerebral palsy, has toured with indie bands Magic Kids and Toxie (shown below). He reports few problems with the venues he’s played over the years. But still, he says, “More awareness could never hurt.”

McElroy says interactions between disabled and able-bodied showgoers should follow a simple but powerful rule: “Just treat everyone like a person.”

What Can Be Done?

Venues don’t have the option of a silver-bullet solution to their accessibility problems because disabilities exist on a spectrum. In other words, a ramp isn’t especially helpful for someone who is hearing-impaired, and ASL translation is useless for a someone who needs to circumvent a flight of stairs.

“There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer,” Gray says. “It would be ignorant of us to say ‘This is what the venue or the staff or the public needs to do to make things better.'”

But all venues can take steps to do better by disabled showgoers. Independent promoter Sasha Lord, who books Comet Ping Pong, says getting the word out about local venues’ accessibility—or inaccessibility—is key. “Be proactive,” she says. “Every venue should assess their accessibility. Knowing your limitations should be the first thing.”

Venues could also include accessibility information on their websites, social-media accounts and flyers. Numerous local venues’ websites tell people to call with questions about ADA compliance. But why should anyone have to make a phone call?

“If I have that information in front of me, it will make the whole interaction, going to that venue, a whole lot easier,” says Gray. “Be public about what is accessible or not.”

Marian Vessels says that to eliminate barriers, venues of all kinds need to think creatively. She suggests that show spaces install inexpensive portable ramps where they can, and those that cannot could consider installing speakers or monitors to broadcast the performance into an accessible space in the venue or offsite. “It’s not ideal,” she says, noting the social aspect of live music. But it’s better.

“If the artist says, ‘I won’t play a venue that’s inaccessible or isn’t a safe space,’ then it puts the venue’s back against the wall. … No band is too small to put their foot down.” —Sean Gray

Independent promoters can opt to host shows in more accessible venues, too. Instead of booking bands at houses with no viable entry for disabled people, look elsewhere.

Gray suggests that performers take up the torch, too, in order to raise the issue with venues. “If the artist says, ‘I won’t play a venue that’s inaccessible or isn’t a safe space,’ then it puts the venue’s back against the wall,” he says. “If enough artists do that, a venue will lose money and start to pay attention. No band is too small to put their foot down.”

Vessels agrees. If a space is inaccessible, “tell the venue why you’re not going in,” she says. That way, venue owners may see how becoming more ADA-compliant could benefit not just people’s lives and the scene, but—in the case of commercial venues—their bottom line. If spaces are still not barrier-free when they could be, maybe they’re just unaware of the problem.

“We don’t expect them to know the answers,” Vessels says. “But they have to know enough to ask.”

The Mid-Atlantic ADA Center’s website provides an easy-to-use guide to tax credits and deductions that are available for businesses to make their space more accessible. Also, the annual Leadership Exchange in Arts and Disability Conference provides valuable information about accessibility in the arts.

Photos, from top: Images by Flickr user Marlon Dias, Stewart Chambers and Alex Barth used under a Creative Commons license; images of Toxie and Natalie Illum courtesy of the artists.

Correction: The original version of this blog post said buildings that predate ADA legislation are “grandfathered out” of its regulations. No older buildings are grandfathered out—all must comply to the extent they can be made accessible—but they were less likely to be built with accessibility in mind. The post has been corrected.

We caught Dustin when he was in town this past fall, playing a mainstage show at the Black Cat. Check out this sampling of his set, in advance of his return to DC in April.