“I came not to work, but dressed to party,” Stubs says. “I had a little skirt on.”

Usually, when Stubs checked in at the downtown D.C. rock club, she was there to do her job: run a camera. She’d seen more than 1,000 acts during her 10 years at the venue. Most of the time, though, Stubs didn’t record them — from her seat above the audience, she normally just shot for the in-house video system.

But this was New Year’s Eve of 1995, and Tiny Desk Unit was getting ready to play the final show on F Street before 9:30 Club moved to a bigger building uptown. It cried out for documentation. Stubs wasn’t on the clock, but her pal couldn’t let her miss this one.

“A friend said to me, ‘Get your butt in that chair. You’re gonna regret it the rest of your life if you don’t shoot the last band that plays there,'” says Stubs. “I said, ‘I have a little skirt on! I don’t think I should get up there.'” But her friend insisted. “Get your butt in that chair,” she said.

“So that’s exactly what I did,” Stubs says. “I got my butt in the chair and held my legs tight together that night.”

That video went into Stubs’ small collection of tape she’d shot at 9:30 Club, much of which sat in her Takoma Park house after the venue relocated and retired its camera-operator position. It took Stubs 20 years to find a new home for the videos. Now they live at the D.C. Public Library.

“Over the years I kept thinking, ‘OK, I’m gonna digitize these things,’ and I never got around to it,” Stubs says. Brendan Canty, the former drummer of D.C. punk legends Fugazi, suggested that she donate them to the library’s growing D.C. Punk Archive.

Now, the library can boast that it has original footage of Nine Inch Nails, Gwar, Psychedelic Furs, Youth of Today, Mudhoney, Jawbox, Seven Seconds and Fugazi — among many others — playing 9:30 Club back in the day. (Her Tiny Desk Unit video isn’t there, but it’s on YouTube, above. See a complete list of her donations, below.)

Rumors have swirled for years that someone, somewhere, must be sitting on a goldmine of old 9:30 Club footage. Stubs probably has the closest thing to it — and there may be more tape she hasn’t found yet, she says. But her collection isn’t exactly vast.

“People were far more protective of their music at that time,” she says. “Most of the time, the best work I ever did was gone. It was not recorded… It wasn’t like people today, recording things with their cell phones.”

Stubs’ contribution to D.C. music history is now digitized and accessible to anyone who visits the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library downtown. Librarian Michele Casto says members of the public just need to contact her division to arrange a viewing. (Some of the videos were also shown at 9:30 Club’s recent World’s Fair exhibition.)

Stubs looks back on her 10 years at 9:30 Club warmly. But she says it wasn’t all bad that the venue stopped filming shows when it relocated to V Street. If it hadn’t, she doubts she would have moved on.

“I’d be a geezer up on the pole,” Stubs says, laughing. “It would be so hard to give up that job.”

A list of the 9:30 Club performance videos Teri Stubs donated to the D.C. Punk Archive, by band name: Adolescents, Clutch (four tapes), Cop Shoot Cop (two tapes), Executive Slacks, Firehose, Fudge Tunnel, Fugazi (three tapes), G.I., Gumball, Gwar, Happy Go Licky, Henry Rollins, Holy Cow (four tapes), Ignition, Jack Hammer, Jawbox (three tapes), John Sex, Killing Joke, Kingface, Lucy Brown (four tapes), Marginal Man, Mudhoney, Nine Inch Nails (two tapes), Pain Teens, Psychedelic Furs (two tapes), Royal Crescent Mob, Seven Seconds, Slickee Boys, Sonic Youth, Strange Boutique (two tapes), Sugartime, That Petrol Emotion, Thud (six tapes), Velocity Girl, Who is God, Youth of Today.

Top photo: A screenshot from Teri Stubs’ video of Tiny Desk Unit’s Dec. 31, 1995 show at the 9:30 Club.

Arlington resident, Electric Cowbell label founder and former Tropicalia booker Jim Thomson was also one of Gwar’s founding members. He fell into Brockie’s clan in 1984 while a student at Virginia Commonwealth University, and went on to help start the group. “You felt like you were some sort of co-warrior with Dave,” Thomson says. “He was an art-school misfit.” Monstrously costumed and constantly over-the-top, Gwar loved to skewer politics and religion and spray copious blood on its fans, and it became Richmond’s most famous band. Brockie continued to live in Richmond, and remained a major presence in the local scene.

Thomson toured with Gwar for the last time in 1989, but remained in touch with Brockie over the years. He gave permission to Bandwidth to publish his memories of Thomson, which he posted on Facebook earlier today.

I first met Dave Brockie at a surprise birthday party for him in ’84. I had just moved to Richmond to go to VCU after high school. I kept hearing about Death Piggy and Dave Brockie. His vibe was already larger than life. When he walked in the door of his apartment on Harrison [Street], everybody piled on top of him. Everybody seemed to love this guy. I didn’t know him, but I piled on, too. Seemed like the right thing to do.

I thought he was too cool for me, but we naturally became friends and fellow pranksters together. When he came out to check out my band, I thought it was the coolest thing. And he was so supportive. He had a way of inspiring you. He was very local. Very punk rock. The kind of punk rock that was real. It was how you lived it. Make your own scene.

We lived and sort of squatted in the Richmond Dairy together. We jammed for hours together. Dave was an entire cosmos of spirit and boundless energy. He always had a sketchbook or notebook nearby. Constantly creating. It made you feel like you should be doing something, too. We played together in probably the most unlistenable band ever called Armpit. We had an absurdist trio called Deranged Deranged that we always talked about doing again. There was MILK. There were the GWAR years. Then it was just years of going along running into Dave here and there, sharing war stories, new projects, even until the last time we spoke on the phone a few months back.

He was one of the biggest peaceniks I ever met. His fascination with war was more or less one of horror and amazement that humans could do that to each other. He was truly a soldier for art and creativity. He helped me to revise my thinking. In many ways he shaped me and others around him. The scene. The community. Richmond. He was just inspiring and fun to be around. You knew when Dave entered the room. He was a fire starter. A provocateur. He seemed immortal. He called me brother. I love him and miss him deeply. I’m thankful for his friendship and his spirit. That’s for keeps.