But that was the burden foisted upon Martha Hull and her husband, Bob Berberich. In late September, their basement record store in Frederick, Maryland, was overcome by floodwaters brought on by a massive storm.

“We’ve been in the building for about two years and we, personally, have not had any flooding issues,” says Hull, who opened Vinyl Acres with Berberich in 2013. “We have heard that there have been some floods in the past — last time about four years ago, but nothing on this scale.”

The storm on Tuesday, Sept. 29, dumped about five inches of rain on downtown Frederick, impacting numerous stores along the city’s popular commercial strip. But Vinyl Acres got hit particularly hard. Most of the record shop’s merchandise was either damaged or destroyed.

“The water on Patrick Street was so deep that our stairwell just filled up, and the force of that six feet of water just pushed the door right in,” says Hull. “The water hit like a tidal wave, knocking over two 300-pound glass display cases in addition to a whole lot of lighter stuff.”

The store owners can’t put a dollar amount on their losses. They say it’s tough to gauge because the value of used vinyl and CDs lands somewhere between their purchase price and whatever sale price they can get. But it was immediately apparent that the flood had dealt a mighty blow.

Then the shop owners’ luck kicked in.

Hull and Berberich have deep roots in the Washington, D.C., music scene. Hull fronted local legends The Slickee Boys for the band’s first two years, later playing with D.Ceats, Steady Jobs and The Dynettes. Berberich played with The Hangmen, Grin and The Rosslyn Mountain Boys, among others, and he still plays music today. The Slickee Boys, in particular, still have a community of committed fans.

After the flood, the Downtown Frederick Partnership started a GoFundMe page to solicit donations for Vinyl Acres. In just a day, the shop had raised nearly $6,000 for its recovery fund, with a big chunk from folks involved in the regional punk and rock scenes.

Music filmmaker Jeff Krulik, Old Indian frontman Cory Springirth, Danny Gatton biopic director Virginia Quesada, Kevin Longendyke from The Ar-Kaics and Dig! Records and Vintage, Punk the Capital co-creator James Schneider, Mobius Records owner Dempsey Hamilton, WHFS documentarian Jay Schlossberg and ex-Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty were among the donors.

Canty says helping Vinyl Acres was a no-brainer. He relishes traveling from D.C. to buy records in the shop’s neighborhood.

“Frederick is a record-buying Mecca,” Canty says.

A little more than two weeks after the campaign launched, Vinyl Acres reopened. It rounded up some local bands and hosted a reopening party Oct. 17.

Hull calls the GoFundMe campaign “something we never would have thought of ourselves, and it has been like a miracle.” So far, the ongoing effort has raised more than $10,000 with donations from 176 people.

Without the outpouring of help, Vinyl Acres might have seen its last sale.

“This, and an astonishing amount of support, manpower, donations of supplies and salvage equipment — plus actual records — are already what has prevented us from closing for good,” Hull says. “We are so grateful and overwhelmed we can’t even pull together a proper expression at this point.”

Vinyl Acres’ GoFundMe campaign is still accepting donations. On Oct. 30, JoJo Restaurant & Tap House plans to host a benefit for both the record store and Whidden Willow, a Frederick boutique damaged in the flood.

Ally Schweitzer contributed to this report. 

The conversation series D.C. Music Salon hosts a preview of Punk the Capital tonight at its regular venue, the Watha T. Daniel Library in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood. Co-director James Schneider says to expect a showing of early, pre-1980 material, not all of which will appear in the final product.

“While Punk the Capital covers the rise of HarDCore in D.C. up through circa 1984, we will be showing sections of the lesser-known era,” Schneider writes in an email. He writes that “quite a few less-familiar faces” will turn up in some of the footage, as well as lots of unseen archival tape.

“Half of the material we will show probably won’t make the final cut, but I think it will be of deep interest to D.C. folks,” Schneider writes.

Consider that an open invitation to the nerdiest D.C. punk fans.

The D.C. Music Salon hosts a preview of Punk the Capital tonight at 7 p.m. at Watha T. Daniel/Shaw Neighborhood Library, 1630 7th St. NW. Admission is free.

Now a new music video from Brit producer Dan Gresham—aka Nu:Tone—turns D.C. into a drum ‘n’ bass dreamland.

Shot by Robin Bell (who directed forthcoming doc Positive Force: More Than A Witness), the video for Nu:Tone’s “‘Til Dawn” stars local belly dancer Ebony Qualls as a camera-toting explorer shooting images of public art. (That’s Kelly Towles’ Espolón Tequila-commissioned mural on H Street NE in the video’s opening.) As her shutter clicks, we’re shown images from an older D.C., notably the neighborhood and nightclub district razed to make way for Nationals Park. That footage comes from filmmaker James Schneider (Punk the Capital), whose 2006 documentary The New Ball Game captured the neighborhood’s demolition.

The song’s vocal refrain is sourced from a classic house tune, New Deep Society’s “Warehouse (Days of Glory),” an ode to the iconic capital of Chicago house music. But paired with D.C. imagery, the sample helps tells a story about what used to be a vibrant D.C. club scene.

Bell says he took on the project because Gresham is an old friend; they met long ago in a youth summer program sponsored by their two churches: Gresham’s in England and Bell’s in Arlington, Virginia. Bell credits Gresham with getting him into electronic music back when drum ‘n’ bass was just beginning to take over U.K. electronic music.

“‘Til Dawn” is the first track on Nu:Tone’s fourth studio record, Future History, out next month on Hospital Records.

The idea had been kicking around for a few years, says Michele Casto, a special collections librarian in DCPL’s Washingtoniana collection. Casto says she’d started looking into it some time ago, but she later changed jobs and the idea fell through the cracks. It wasn’t until after she’d transferred back to Washingtoniana—and Schneider got in touch—that the plan sprouted legs.

Now the D.C. Punk Archive is officially coming together at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, in the hopes that its physical and digital components will help capture what Casto calls a “big piece of D.C. history.”

The punk archive aims to date back to 1976—the year the Slickee Boys released their Hot and Cool EP, a recording now seen as a key predecessor to D.C. punk and hardcore—and track the scene to its bustling present day. A $20,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services will pay for an online multimedia showcase so both locals and out-of-towners can explore the collection. The library hopes to unveil the web portal in the spring or summer of 2015.

When Schneider contacted DCPL, Casto says, he said he’d come across various punk collections in people’s houses while making his in-progress documentary with Paul Bishow, and some of those pieces of the past could be in danger of being lost. It seemed like a smart idea to house vulnerable objects like flyers, records and photographs in a venue that was both secure and accessible to the public. Casto, of course, agreed. “That’s the gospel of preservation: making sure these things don’t disappear,” she says.

But what would a D.C. punk archive look like, and whose stories would it tell? DCPL reached out to people in Schneider’s network to solicit guidance for the project. Their efforts led to one well-attended meeting last year, where numerous figures in the punk scene showed up to offer their feedback.

Cynthia Connolly, the photographer who assembled the seminal punk-rock photography book Banned In D.C. and formerly worked at Dischord, attended the meeting. She says she stressed the importance of bringing in original, handmade material with distinctive and personal touches like pinholes and tape marks. “Any subculture thrives on the passion of the people who are involved,” Connolly says, “and those little details are important.”

Now the library is asking the public to donate their own pieces of D.C.’s punk history to the library. It already has some items, including a flyer collection (now being digitized) donated by musician Eddie Janney. But right now the library has mostly secured “firm verbal commitments” from several people with small collections of things like records, film footage and posters. Some folks with larger collections have expressed their support, but Casto says they’re “waiting to see where it goes before deciding what they want to do.”

As items come in, Casto says the library is harnessing people power to organize it all. It’s already recruited dozens of volunteers that it will train as “community archivists” to help catalog and digitize donated artifacts, and it’s working with the people behind the University of Maryland’s fanzine collection to see how they can pool their resources.

The library hopes to use this process as a template for another music project it wants to pursue: a D.C. go-go archive. That initiative is on hold at the moment; a previous attempt to solicit donations from the go-go community hit a wall, Casto says. They’re hoping to reboot it after learning some lessons from the punk collection.

Schneider says that now seems like an opportune time to build an archive like this. For one, D.C.’s punk scene is surprisingly energetic right now, with new bands and venues cropping up regularly. Plus, he and Bishow are readying Punk the Capital for a release in late 2014 or early 2015, and Scott Crawford’s Salad Days film is also in the works.

But even as the local punk scene grows, D.C. is speedily transforming into a wealthy, built-up city with fewer obvious traces of its musical heritage. The filmmaker says it should be a priority to preserve and reflect on what came before.

“With the city changing so fast, on so many fronts,” Schneider says, “it’s more important than ever now to ensure that the city’s identity is firmly anchored before a remodeled city takes over.”

D.C. Public Library is currently accepting items for the D.C. Punk Archive. Contact Michele Casto or Bobbie Dougherty for more information. The library has also set up a Google Form for members of the public who want to suggest D.C. music for the archive. Follow @dcpunkarchive on Twitter.

Both images: Materials donated by Eddie Janney

Today, co-creators James Schneider and Paul Bishow launched a Kickstarter campaign for the film, which is now in post-production. When it’s completed late this year or early 2015, it will be one of several films about D.C.’s storied punk scene, a list that includes Bad Brains: A Band In DC, Jem Cohen’s Fugazi film Instrument, and the in-progress documentaries Salad Days: The Birth of Hardcore Punk in the Nation’s Capital and Finding Joseph I, which focuses on Bad Brains frontman H.R. 

But while D.C. punk may not be the freshest subject, Schneider says Punk the Capital will look at an era that hasn’t been explored in depth: roughly 1977 through the mid-1980s. “There was a whole music scene, pre-1979, that had an identity and it had pioneers in their own right,” Schneider says. He’s referring to bands like Urban Verbs, White Boy, The Razz, and The Slickee Boys, which came along before D.C.’s underground rock scene began to give way to a faster, brasher hardcore sound. It’s a transition that some would call a split, Schneider says, but it also sprung from intentional cooperation between generations, in which those older, established bands extended a hand to the younger kids who would become D.C.’s hardcore pioneers. “Basically, we’re tracing that whole generation shift,” Schneider says.

Punk the Capital has been in the works for so long because, as Schneider says, he left the D.C. area for graduate school in France in 1999, and since then has spent a lot of his time working on other films, among them The Band That Met the Sound Beneath, a documentary about the Chilean band Pánico; Jean Epstein, Young Oceans of Cinema, about the French filmmaker; and The New Ball Game, which examined the D.C. neighborhood razed to make way for Nationals Park. Before graduate school Schneider made the short Blue Is Beautiful, a look at Ian Svenonius’ old band The Make-Up. (Schneider also directed the music video for “Devitalize,” the latest video from Svenonius’ current band, Chain & the Gang.)

The filmmakers hope that the Kickstarter campaign—which aims to take in $43,000—will help pay for things like producing DVDs and wrapping up editing, as well as preserving its Super 8 source material. A large chunk of that original video comes from Bishow’s video archive, much of which he captured at the fabled punk and rock venue Madams Organ. Other D.C. punks—or ex-punks—contributed their own Super 8 footage from those days.

Turns out, a lot of people were holding on to that old film, which they shot partly because no one else was going to, Schneider says. The bands in the film were “largely ignored by the media,” so they and their fans created their own documentation.

Even in the late 1970s, says Schneider, “the DIY ethic was alive and kicking.”