That’s basically what Heavy Metal Parking Lot is. It’s essentially a movie — if you want to call a plotless 16 minutes and 41 seconds a movie — of drunk teenagers making asses of themselves in a parking lot.

But Heavy Metal Parking Lot has the distinct privilege of being a featured exhibit at the University of Maryland for the next year. Heavy Metal Parking Lot: The 30-Year Journey of a Cult Film Sensation aims to tell the story of how a low-profile 1986 video wound up all over the country — at a time when it wasn’t so easy.

Here’s the short version: Jeff Krulik was working for public-access television in Maryland and had access to recording equipment. His friend John Heyn had the idea to go to the parking lot outside a Judas Priest concert and just see what they could come up with. The two aspiring documentary filmmakers recorded about 65 minutes of footage on the afternoon of May 31, 1986, outside the Capital Centre in Landover.

(James Doubek/WAMU)

Heyn edited it down to the most entertaining encounters — almost all of which involve young people in various degrees of intoxication. And because Heyn had a job at a video dubhouse, they “gave out copies out like water,” Krulik says.

In the early ’90s, some of those copies make their way through friends out to the West Coast, and to places like Mondo Video A-Go-Go, a cult video store in Los Angeles. Dubs got into the hands of people like director Sofia Coppola, who wanted to use it in a TV show, and onto tour buses of bands like Nirvana.

It was protoviral video.

“The story we wanted to tell was kind of twofold,” says Laura Schnitker, the acting curator of the University of Maryland’s Mass Media & Culture collection, who is co-curating the exhibit with Krulik. “First we wanted to tell how the film was created, like what equipment they used and what their initial thinking was. And then we want to talk about how the film went viral at a time when there was no internet and no digital film.”

The exploration of this dissemination is one of the reasons the university agreed to host the exhibit.

Additionally, Schnitker says she was able to “sell” her colleagues on the exhibit because it’s very Maryland-focused. Krulik is a University of Maryland grad (’83) and a lifelong state resident. Schnitker notes the Maryland accents of the people in the movie and its documentation of a “really identifiable subgenre” — working-class white Marylanders, with distinct hair and clothes.

Co-curator Laura Schnitker notes the Maryland accents of the people in the movie and its documentation of a “really identifiable subgenre” — working-class white Marylanders, with distinct hair and clothes.

Krulik donated his archive of source material and video to the university’s Mass Media & Culture collection last year. He pitched the idea of the exhibit in anticipation of the movie’s 30th anniversary, and also as another way to celebrate the donation.

The exhibit is nestled in a small corridor between the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s main building and the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library. The floor is gray with yellow stripes, in tribute to the parking lot.

You can see the whole thing in about the time it takes to watch the movie. VHS tapes of Judas Priest and Dokken (the other band that played that night) are on display. One wall contains screenshots of the movie’s “stars” and their notable quotes, including such words of wisdom as:

“Priest is bad, man. Priest is Number One in heavy metal, man.”

“Joints across America.”

“I’d jump his bones!”

“Who are you here to see tonight?” “Your mother!”

Krulik especially wanted to “pay homage” to the Cap Centre, Schnitker says, noting its importance to people who grew up in Maryland in the ’80s and ’90s. The exhibit features a brief history of the venue, along with asphalt taken shortly before its demolition in 2002.

Visitors can see a handwritten postcard from John Waters, sent to John Heyn in 1987. “Your film was great — what monsters!” Waters writes. In what must be truly a feat of accomplishment for Heyn and Krulik, the director of Pink Flamingos writes that Heavy Metal Parking Lot “gave me the creeps.”

In what must be truly a feat of accomplishment for Heyn and Krulik, director John Waters writes that Heavy Metal Parking Lot “gave me the creeps.”

That postcard is one of Schnitker’s favorite items, along with a ticket stub from the concert. It harks back to the days when people saved Ticketmaster stubs as mementos. Scannable codes on smartphone screens these days just don’t have the same charm.

There’s also a wall filled with pictures of magazines from the ’90s and 2000s that mentioned the movie. Request magazine in August 1999 referred to “a Wild Kingdom-style study of haystack-haired headbangers like ‘Zebraman,’ drug-legalization champion Gram, and other Jack Daniels-swilling Beavises and Butt-heads in their natural environment.”

Even though it’s a Maryland story, something like Heavy Metal Parking Lot probably could have happened at any Judas Priest concert on that tour.

What makes it unique is that events weren’t “documented to death like things are today,” Krulik says. “It was a real novelty to be in that kind of environment, that place with professional video equipment.”

The exhibit will be up through May 2017, after which it will be put back with the rest of Krulik’s collection in the university’s Hornbake Library. Schnitker and others are creating a digital version to put online.

On a summer day with the semester over, not many students passed by the day I saw the exhibit. But Krulik is hopeful students will take a second to be inspired when they do walk through. Perhaps from some words on the wall: “Heavy metal rules!”

(James Doubek/WAMU)

“Heavy Metal Parking Lot: The 30-Year Journey of a Cult Film Sensation” is on view at the Gallery at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library through May 2017.

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 strange, disputed tale of Led Zeppelin’s show at the Wheaton Youth Center is the subject of Led Zeppelin Played Here, the latest documentary by Heavy Metal Parking Lot co-director Jeff Krulik. A revised version of the film, which first premiered almost two years ago, shows Wednesday at the Avalon and Jan. 20 at Black Cat.

For five years, Krulik attempted to solve the mystery of Zeppelin’s alleged Wheaton show, tracking down record company promoters, interviewing supposed attendees and even asking Jimmy Page about it at a red carpet event at the Kennedy Center.

Though about a half-dozen Wheaton Youth Center regulars claimed that the show happened, there’s no real evidence to support their claims. No tickets for the concert have been found, since the center sold tickets at the door and used hand stamps. Fliers probably weren’t printed, either — promoter and DJ Barry Richards used his radio show to hype the concert.

In advance of the two local screenings, Bandwidth talked to Krulik about the birth of the concert industry, the fallibility of memory and why he makes films about bands he doesn’t like.

This interview was conducted over phone and email and has been edited for clarity and length.

Bandwidth: You mention in the documentary that you didn’t attend shows at the Wheaton Youth Center yourself. What fascinated you enough about the center to make a documentary about it?

Jeff Krulik

Jeff Krulik: Well, the reason why I didn’t go to any of the concerts is because I would’ve been 8 or 9 years old. I’m interested in these stories, but I wasn’t around. My curiosity, my obsession — a lot of that drives the documentary. I’ve always had an interest in the local cultural history or this area. I grew up here — I’m from Bowie and I went to the University of Maryland.

Did you know many of the people in the documentary personally?

I knew some of them personally. My original intent was to honor the Laurel Pop Festival, which was the unheralded, somewhat forgotten festival one month before Woodstock. Clearly if you went to it, you remembered it, but anyone who didn’t go to it didn’t realize it was going on. I’d wanted to do a documentary about that, but tracing the arc of Led Zeppelin allowed for a different kind of story because they had such a meteoric rise that year. And if you realize that maybe they played their first local gig at this modest youth center, in a gymnasium, it was pretty incredible. Not out of the realm of possibility, because a lot of those bands had humble starts — this was a place that other bands were playing.

It’s like I said in the movie — it started out to be a nostalgia trip, and now it’s become a mystery. And I didn’t do it because I’m a Led Zeppelin fan. I’m very interested in the cultural and music industry in this area and concertgoing and the concert scene and people who carved out the concert business from nothing. I mean, it was all unprecedented. These days the business is very button-down and ironclad. A very solid, billion dollar business that’s organized and is like any other multimillion-dollar business controlled by corporations. And it didn’t used to be like that.

“These days the [concert] business is very button-down and ironclad. A very solid, billion dollar business that’s organized and is like any other multimillion-dollar business controlled by corporations. And it didn’t used to be like that.”

When did these shows stop happening? When was the industry fully cemented, or institutionalized?

That kind of evolved in the early ‘70s as people became promoters. In this case, you had the Cellar Door, which was a club in Georgetown that basically realized that the owners were bringing in acts but the club could only hold 100 people. And there was such demand for the acts, they started putting on acts in Lisner Auditorium and selling 1,500 tickets in one night. All of the sudden the light bulb goes off.

Do you think that people remember the show differently?

This thing has kind of turned into a Rashomon. People remember things differently and that’s the challenge of it — to kind of connect the dots and see if they can be cross-checked. No one has come up with any smoking gun, like a picture or a diary entry. I don’t have hard proof, but I have supporting evidence, and I believe that it took place. You have people’s stories, and you have to kind of cross-check. For the most part, they do.

The popular belief was that it didn’t happen. It wound up going onto the Led Zeppelin website. The website now lists it as an unconfirmed rumor. The next night in Pittsburgh is not even listed; it was for a while, and that’s another phantom show. If there was a residency or if there’s ads in the paper, you’ve got proof. They were in Detroit, which ended Sunday night, and Thursday they played for three nights at the Boston Tea Party, which was advertised, and it took place. There’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, where, I mean, they were somewhere.

We obviously live in an age where perhaps every single gig can be documented, whether it’s a Facebook event, post on a venue website or an Instagram picture. Is there anything lost by this, or should we be glad that we have documentation to keep our memories from falling victim to confabulation?

I suppose the verdict is still out on it. I’m biased because I came up during a period where there wasn’t such excessive documentation and you clearly were at that event or concert or party or day job and you basically had that experience as it unfolded, without sharing with the world. There seemed something most pure and genuine and more real about it. Of course, at 53 years old now, I can’t remember squat, and I’m envious of friends who wrote down every club show they saw, or in general kept a diary or journal. One of my most prized possessions is a creative writing class journal I kept for one semester in college. Boy, does that bring me back, and I really cherish that.

Why are you screening Led Zeppelin Played Here now?

We’ve changed it around a little bit, tightened it up. It’s because there are still venues that are looking for things to screen, and there are a lot of people who haven’t seen it and may have heard about it. I don’t have it online or for sale because of the rights issues. These kind of curated screenings are the only way to see it. I’ve had screenings with 500 people and screenings with five people. I’m willing to screen it anywhere that will have me. If it’s local, I’ll be there. It’s always fun to have a conversation afterwards and people will add their own commentary and stories and sometimes people will show up and say that they were there.

Do you think that these youth center shows were unique to D.C., Maryland and Virginia, or do you think that this was a nationwide thing?

I think it happened all over the country. Nobody starts off headlining — everyone starts in a garage somewhere.

As with Judas Priest in Heavy Metal Parking Lot, you’re not a Led Zeppelin superfan. Why did you decide to make documentaries about groups that you weren’t necessarily interested in yourself?

It’s not about the bands. The bands are the vehicle to explore something. In this case, I have always been interested in the machinery of rock concerts. And quite honestly, I’m interested in historical preservation. It’s my fascination with the places than the artists or the musicians — the buildings, the gathering spots. Heavy Metal Parking Lot was about the people, it wasn’t about Judas Priest. Both [co-director John Heyn] and I recognized that it was about the fans. The fact that it was Judas Priest playing that night — it was just dumb luck. We didn’t seek out Judas Priest that night, we just wanted to go to a heavy metal concert. … It was about the fans and about that scene that wasn’t profiled in the spirit that we did because no one really had cameras. We were using these clunky professional cameras from this public access studio, walking around this parking lot.

A theme in both Heavy Metal Parking Lot and Led Zeppelin Played Here is rock fandom and building an identity around being a fan of rock or a particular rock band. Is that something that you had in mind when you set out to make either or both films?

I wanted it to be more about the emergence of rock concert culture than anyone one particular artist. Led Zeppelin happens to be my hook to tell this story. It’s also a film about the vagaries of memory. And that’s something that emerged afterwards, I didn’t set out with that agenda originally. Often a film doesn’t truly emerge until after you’ve begun and collected hours of footage, at least that’s how I tend to work.

With Heavy Metal Parking Lot, what little agenda we had was to just focus on the fans and see what we might get. This was a time when heavy metal might not have been in the mainstream as today, but was still a dominant presence on MTV via Headbangers Ball, that sort of thing. You knew it was a popular arena attraction, even if there was little to no airplay. The bottom line is we didn’t necessarily set out with any one particular vision or goal in mind, we just plunged in and started gathering footage and then [watched] what eventually would emerge. Of course, with Heavy Metal Parking Lot, we had that answer in two hours. Led Zeppelin Played Here took nearly five years.

What is it that makes you a believer that this show happened?

I want to believe. I mean, I sought out as much evidence as I could find. I still wanted to find more proof, and I wanted to end the film. I started it in 2008, and I had to set a deadline — which was January 20, 2013 [ed note: the day of President Obama’s second inauguration] — to have something together for the preview screening. There are some minor tweaks here and there. But I just think that I was able to present as much supporting evidence. There was a public hearing. And someone said that I made this film without a shred of supporting evidence. I don’t have hard proof — but if you have some supporting evidence, that can help make the case.

The film shows Jan. 14 at Avalon and Jan. 20 at Black Cat.