“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.

Sonic Highways is really about the process of recording the latest Foo Fighters album in eight American cities, and this episode (I haven’t seen the others) deals with Grohl’s own musical coming-of-age. But along the way, the show aims to trace at least a few decades of D.C. music history, and it does that well—though clearly within the parameters of Grohl’s own experience.

After a short discussion of the 1968 riots and class/race stratification in the District, Sonic Highways takes on go-go, leaning heavily on feedback from Trouble Funk’s “Big Tony” Fisher. Grohl pulls choice footage of Chuck Brown’s live shows, explores the go-go pocket and grabs a few soundbites from Pharrell Williams and D.C. Mayor Vince Gray. But Grohl discusses go-go mostly through a rock lens. Virginia hip-hop/rock band RDGLDGRN (Grohl collaborators), Black Cat co-owner Dante Ferrando and Dischord Records’ Ian MacKaye—among others—all have their say on go-go, then the show moves right into punk and parks itself there for the rest of the episode. Anyone looking for a thorough study of D.C.’s most distinctive African-American music won’t find it here.

The show’s brightest moments come from key footage of local shows, images by scene photographers like Lucian Perkins and—above all—the swath of big personalities Grohl roped into the episode. MacKaye and punk activist Mark Andersen get a lot of well-spent screen time, but the candid Trouble Funk leader, Bad Brains’ funny and direct bassist Darryl Jenifer and bearded superproducer Rick Rubin made some of the strongest—or at least funniest—contributions. (Though I suspect it was Rubin’s L.A. Buddha routine, not his quotes, that produced the laughs at last night’s screening.)

Toward the end of the episode, The Foo Fighters charge into “The Feast and the Famine,” a song it recorded at Arlington’s Inner Ear Studio and wrote based on elements of D.C. music discussed in the program. (Hear the song below.) The song’s title speaks to that commonly cited dichotomy so central to D.C.’s identity: that this is a city home to both the world’s greatest power and the starkest example of that power’s disastrous failure.

It’s obvious that Grohl doesn’t have deep ties to the underprivileged half of that dichotomy, and certainly doesn’t now—in the Q-and-A that followed last night’s screening, Grohl said he paid for the entire TV series by playing two stadium shows in Mexico City—but he gives it pride of place on an extremely visible platform. The show’s emphasis on activism is unexpected and commendable, considering that the local punk scene’s hard-left, DIY-or-don’t-bother attitude is what granted it staying power—even more than the sound of D.C. punk rock, which has taken so many forms over the decades.

Early in the episode, Mark Andersen summarizes one of the most valuable takeaways from Sonic Highways, though he can’t take full credit for it himself. “Charles Dickens I think once called Washington, D.C. ‘the city of magnificent intentions,'” Andersen says. “The gap between the dream and the reality is excruciatingly wide.”

The show airs tonight at 11 p.m. on HBO. Tonight’s screening and Foo Fighters show at Black Cat is sold out.

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.