It wasn’t always that way for Margus. There was a time that he wouldn’t think twice about wearing a flaming red wig and playing guitar onstage in a Ronald McDonald costume. That outfit — deployed during a medley of TV-commercial music — was one of many he wore when he performed with his band Friends of the Family in the ’70s.

The band Inspiration, in another photo posted on the DC Bands from the 70’s group on Facebook.

The fast-food-clown getup was hardly the most outrageous thing in the band’s wardrobe.

“Spandex and satin were pretty happening at that point. Once we did a Queen medley and a couple of the guys had capes that had hundreds of lights inside,” says Margus, 65.

In an early photo of the band, its seven members are wearing matching white suits, each adorned with colorful floral patterns made by a man who designed costumes for KC and the Sunshine Band. Caught in what appears to be mid-strut, the band is smiling.

“If I put that on today, I’d get arrested,” Margus laughs.

The outfits worn by Friends of the Family are unforgettable. But the band and its community are little remembered. In an era when walloping hardcore punk and hip-shaking funk were the loudest sounds emerging from the nation’s capital, there was a shadow scene of flamboyant and popular cover bands that played at long-forgotten venues in the Washington suburbs.

These were show bands. They were typically all-male, and often racially integrated. The types of variety shows they staged weren’t exclusive to the Washington area, but the scene was particularly vibrant in suburban Maryland, Baltimore and Ocean City. Like many cover bands, show bands included accomplished musicians who dreamed of making a living with original material. But to make ends meet, they played nights full of Top 40 hits at nightclubs and hotel bars. Making it on that circuit required, at a minimum, versatile musicians who could easily satisfy audience requests for Styx and Billy Joel, “Freebird” and “Stairway to Heaven.”

Friends From the Start press image

The bands that stood out had something more to offer, though: Comedy skits. Magic acts. Stunts. Friends From the Start, another of Margus’ bands, brought a gallows on stage for a cover of Alice Cooper’s “Welcome to My Nightmare.” Bandmate Rick Davis was the lucky member who got to hang during the song.

“We went through all kinds of testing with this thing,” Margus remembers. ”We had him hooked up with harnesses and had the noose so when the hatch pulled he actually wouldn’t hang, but we had him hooked up in the back on bungee cords so it would look like he was hanging.”

Tiny Barge and ‘shooter sets’

Some of the history has been collected by Michael Weiland, who was in the bands Confection, Springfield and Redemption. He operates the Facebook group DC Bands from the 70’s, which features colorful promotional photos of groups represented by the Washington Talent Agency and Barry Rick, once prime movers in the scene.

Prominent bands played as many as five sets a night, six days a week. The most successful groups made $6,500 a week, which would be $20,000 today. One of those sets would be a floor show.

Friends From the Start members Rick Davis and Pete Margus perform at Mr Pip’s in Glen Burnie, Maryland, in an undated photo.

“For the most part bands sat on stage and people were on the dance floor,” explains Arthur Leon “Tiny” Barge, a musician and promoter who developed floor shows for bands while he worked for the Washington Talent Agency. “These were a special presentation where the audience would take their seats and the band would be on the dance floor.” Floor shows were an added attraction for patrons out to see live music. A band that played six nights a week might only do floor shows on two of those. On Thursdays, floor shows drew patrons into clubs on a slow night. Saturday nights, they whipped up a party.

The show-band scene owes much of its success to Barge. A composer who could sing and play multiple instruments, he was a founding member of ’60s D.C. soul group the El Corols, the first band signed to the fledgling Washington Talent Agency. The group’s knack for showmanship made it a hot commodity — so much so that while Barge was still a student at the University of Maryland in the early 1970s, the company had him coach other acts in choreography and audience interaction.

“We were prostitutes. We had to play what they heard on the radio. We sold liquor. If they sold more liquor that night, the band would come back.” — Bob Farris, show-band guitarist

Barge helped show bands pace their sets and warned against habits that hampered audience engagement, like drum solos. Mimicking a solo with his voice, he explains how an audience will stop clapping if unaccompanied drumming continues past a reasonable point.

Kent Harris, singer with the show band Springfield, credits Barge with taking a bunch of white guys and teaching them to dance. “We were idiots!” Harris says.

The most successful show bands could perform, in addition to Top 40 hits, a live variety show that kept customers coming back to the nightclubs. And kept them drinking.

“We were prostitutes,” says Bob Farris, who played guitar in a number of show bands. “We had to play what they heard on the radio. We sold liquor. If they sold more liquor that night, the band would come back.”

Friends From the Start even had what it called a “shooter set,” where customers would send the band trays of lemon drop, apple pie and lime shooters. “People wanted to see if they could get the band wasted, and it happened more than a few times,” Margus says.

A newspaper ad from September 1980 featuring Friends From the Start’s multi-day schedule at Chesapeake Crab House & Lounge in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Show bands played venues like the Classics III Supper Club (now the Classics) in Camp Springs, Club Venus in Baltimore, Mr. Pip’s and Bojangles Too in Glen Burnie and Randy’s California Inn, which currently sits abandoned at the intersection of Route 1 and Whiskey Bottom Road in Laurel. (There were occasional gigs in Virginia, too.)

Sometimes a show band had a good idea but not good timing. Harris, who sang in several bands with Margus, recalls a plan he had hatched with his band, MacArthur Park. “We were getting ready to do a disco version of ‘MacArthur Park.’ We had an excellent female singer, a little like Chaka Khan. Then Donna Summer came in and did a version.” That version became Summer’s first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. MacArthur Park never recorded its own version.

Despite that missed opportunity, Harris, who also booked and managed acts for the Washington Talent Agency, had other good ideas.

“I went into the Rockville Ramada, which is now a Comfort Inn off of [Interstate] 270. And there was a piano thing going on, a single act. There were only a few people there, and I thought, there’s no club activity at all around here — there’s no place to go. I got together with the general manager to start a band and I told him we’re gonna blow this place away.”

Because Harris was also a talent agent, he had access to top local musicians. “We started doing entertainment there, and the place went crazy — people lined up all the time. There were people standing in the back and one Saturday night the fire marshall was there, and I had to stop right in the middle of a floor show.”

All of that energy and showmanship also led to some ideas that are politically incorrect by today’s standards.

“We did a takeoff on the Jackson Five,” Harris says. “We were the Jacksons but instead of Michael we were Stonewall Jackson and Andrew Jackson. There were things that today you couldn’t do.”

Changes in the grind

When Barge left the East Coast for Chicago and points West, he brought the show-band aesthetic with him, but while some bands adopted the variety show format, it didn’t take off as much as it did back east.

Show bands thrived through the 1970s and mid-1980s, and while some of them still perform as wedding bands, the show-band business model had faltered by the dawn of the ’90s. What happened?

“I was in was the band Bittersweet almost 15 years doing as many as 50 jobs a year. We opened up for Bill Cosby, Fifth Dimension, Ray Charles, Barbara Mandrell. Then it was just wedding bands, bar mitzvahs and company parties. Some of the players had graduated into that,” Margus says. “Then you’re playing the circuit for years, with no recording contract, and you’re on the road six days a week, married with kids.”

Other factors led to changes in the scene: DJs became more popular, and they charged less than a live seven-piece band. But many show-band players say the law interfered.

“In those days,” Harris says, “People would go out any night of the week. When DUI laws went into effect in the ’80s, people would not go out as much. The budgets just collapsed.“

Farris, who performs to sold-out audiences today as part of local rockabilly legend Johnny Seaton’s band, recalls that in least one case, clubs pulled the plug on show bands too soon. He had a regular gig in a popular oldies band at the Pooks Hill Marriott in Bethesda, when one night in the early ’90s a waitress informed him that the venue was closing. It was to be converted into a corporate replica of the bar from television series Cheers.

“I went back there when it opened on a Friday night,” Farris remembers, “and there were three people at the bar, period. There was a stuffed animatronic Norm and Cliff. Cheers was playing on eight different televisions. Three people at the bar. That was the end.”

Behind the fence, signs of creative life flicker. Inside the building, up a flight of stairs, producers and rappers bump beats in a two-room recording studio. Outside, a PA and a stage are planted in the yard next to a garage equipped with a DJ booth, old couches and bar stools. Elaborate street art tattoos the fence and the garage’s interior walls. Teenagers are out here, smoking cigarettes in camp chairs. They’re waiting for a show to start.

Since June, this has been the headquarters of Bombay Knox, the hip-hop promotion and management group that has carved its own space in D.C.’s small but growing hip-hop scene with an approach that, at least here, is usually associated with punk rock: It books low-cost all-ages shows, often at unconventional spaces like this one.

It’s difficult to understand the importance of Bombay Knox by describing what it is. Technically, it’s a business that offers a range of creative services—from artist management to promotion to videography to recording. But its reputation is staked on its hip-hop concerts, which it hosts at places as unrefined as an Adams Morgan auto shop and as professional as U Street Music Hall. As local hip-hop begins to produce national stars—Wale, Fat Trel—the group is positioning itself to foster even more homegrown talent in a city that has never been seen as a hip-hop capital.

The architect behind Bombay Knox is Jesse Rubin, a soft-spoken D.C.-area native with a robust red beard. Rubin handles almost all of the group’s noncreative business: He books the shows, answers emails and runs the Twitter account. He conceived Bombay Knox in 2011 while studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and managing hip-hop production team Odd Couple.

“There was a lack of these local shows,” says Bombay Knox founder Jesse Rubin. “There wasn’t a real, solid underground scene [in D.C.].”

Rubin spent his time after graduation floating around New York’s underground hip-hop world, shooting music videos and working in artist management for members of Joey Bada$$’s Pro Era rap crew. The scene felt too crowded for his taste—he had to split management duties and he wasn’t getting big-picture control of artist booking and promotion—but he liked its energy. “In New York, there are cool underground shows every day,” he says. “You can see people from the area and from outside the area that put on cool affordable shows.”

When Rubin returned to the D.C. region in 2012, he realized he could start his own thing in a city that has no equivalent to what he saw up north. “There was a lack of these local shows,” he says. “There wasn’t a real, solid underground scene.”

Bombay Knox hosted its first show in spring 2013 at the now-defunct Georgetown gallery MOCA DC. The format—a cheap, all-ages show featuring young, occasionally unpolished rappers—has changed little since.

The group rarely charges more than $5 to $15 for its events, and many are free. So far, it’s maintained a busy schedule—unlike other local independent hip-hop promoters that book shows sporadically or have fizzled out completely. The group has put together more than 30 events in the last year and a half. Last week, it co-hosted a video game tournament and show with a local hip-hop collective called Kool Klux Klan. Admission price: $5.

Booking cheap shows isn’t always a money-maker for Rubin. “I go into the show knowing my best-case scenario is breaking even on expenses,” he says. “But for me, even if I lose some money, in terms of building up the brand it’s not a bad investment.”

Some promoters might choose to recoup their losses by charging artists to perform on their shows. But Bombay Knox claims to offer an alternative to pay-to-play, which many consider predatory. Pay-to-play is fairly common in local hip-hop and across the country, according to some reports—and Rubin says he stays away from it. For young, cash-strapped artists on the rise, that can make all the difference.

The steady supply of shows has helped Bombay Knox raise its profile and grow: That creaky stage in Hyattsville has hosted acts with healthy followings outside of D.C., like Mr. MFN eXquire, Bones and Drake-endorsed freestyler Nickelus F. Some of the artists it manages have made an impression online, too: Gaithersburg rapper Uno Hype has appeared on tracks with massively popular rappers Smoke DZA, Joey Bada$$ and Chance the Rapper, and he’s been praised by tastemaking outlet Complex. Another Bombay act, D.C.-based Akoko, has sharp ‘90s flows and tight harmonies that have earned the duo thousands of YouTube views.

Rubin hasn’t done everything on his own. He holds down Bombay Knox’s business affairs while a coterie of associates help out with things like merchandise and event art. Manny Phaces handles some of Bombay’s sound engineering. Bombay’s creative director, Kevin Chambers—also a producer known as Flash Frequency—cranks out the group’s clean and modern photos and posters, and—yes—GIFs.

Rubin and his associates have gone the DIY route mostly out of necessity. He suspects that some spaces haven’t wanted to work with him because they associate hip-hop with bad news. Bombay’s time at MOCA DC ended quickly: Rubin says some neighborhood restaurant owners, who were already upset with the venue’s nude art parties, complained that the gallery’s hip-hop shows hurt their businesses.

“When people hear rap or hip-hop, they have this assumption that it’ll be something like Fat Trel,” he says, referring to the rising D.C. rapper with a tough reputation. “Then they see something and they’re like ‘Oh, trouble.'”

Other venues haven’t had the same reaction. In early August, D.C. go-go artist turned rapper Yung Gleesh headlined a wild Bombay Knox show at U Street Music Hall with Uno Hype, Sir. E.U. and Flash Frequency. It was Bombay’s biggest event yet. Meanwhile, Rubin says he’s already in talks with even bigger venues.

For small gigs, the Hyattsville building—which Rubin took over from a friend who had hosted parties there—will do for now. The Akoko show in mid-July drew around 50 people. It was a small turnout by the group’s standards, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind, as it vacillated between head-nodding and moshing. When Bones played the spot in June, multiple guests said it attracted close to 300 people.

Bombay Knox sees the Hyattsville studio as its key to profitability. It offers in-house artists a means to crank out more music, and studio fees could help fund future endeavors. It’s been a blessing for Bombay’s current artists, too; Sir E.U. has been finishing up his album Madagascar there while Rubin works on finalizing details for the first Bombay Knox compilation. Eventually, Rubin wants to ease off on hosting events at the space, and transform the studio into its primary operation. The venue isn’t easily accessible by public transportation, and Rubin says that noise complaints have brought police to the venue before.

But while Uno Hype, Chambers and Phaces hang out in the studio that July night—chatting about Cuba Gooding Jr. and watching Cosgrove’s video interview with Complex—it feels like this cheap, raw space could be the incubator that talented but untested artists need to grow.

Top photo: From left to right, Kevin Chambers, Ace Cosgrove and Manny Phaces in the Bombay Knox studio.

A $10 million class action filed in federal court on May 15 accuses the county’s political leadership and law enforcement community of denying citizens of their freedom to dance—among other things.

At issue is a 2011 emergency bill that targeted the county’s dance halls and music venues. It instituted requirements for businesses that allow dancing to seek a permit to do so, and it gave county law enforcement more authority to shut down businesses they consider threats to public safety. It also prohibited people with criminal records from obtaining dance permits.

The measure quickly triggered protests from venue owners and music promoters, as well as a petition from fans who felt go-go bands were being unfairly blamed for homicides. It also came at a particularly sensitive time for the go-go scene: Fans had long complained that aggressive policing and gentrification had pushed go-go from the District into the suburbs.

Now promoters and business owners in Prince George’s are claiming in a suit they filed on their own that they have suffered irreparable financial harm.

One of the petitioners to the lawsuit, Dan Richardson, was the owner of the Plaza 23 Event Center in Temple Hills, where a man was killed in 2011 after a concert by the go-go band TCB.

Richardson claims he moved quickly to obtain one of the dance-hall licenses required by emergency law, but that he lost so much businesses during the application process that it was impossible for him to recover. Plaza 23 Event Center, which also was among a group of county clubs indicted in a sweeping tax crackdown in 2012, is now closed.

“If you look at how [the emergency law] was enforced, it was like it targeted small black businesses that can’t afford to fight back,” Richardson says in a phone call.

Karen Toles, the Prince George’s County Council member who wrote the emergency bill, has already filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. She claims it wasn’t properly served.

Meanwhile, in his re-election campaign, County Executive Rushern Baker is touting recent drops in violent crime. A spokesman in the county executive’s office wouldn’t comment on the emergency bill because of the pending litigation. Baker’s campaign website lists crime reduction as his top achievement thus far—and cites a 14 percent drop in homicides in 2013.

Baker is running unopposed in this month’s Democratic primary, and he has made economic development one of the planks of his re-election platform. He often cites the potential of the county’s underdeveloped Metro stations in his pitches for the FBI to relocate to Prince George’s.

An activist from the District who doubles as a go-go promoter, Ron Moten says he suspects politicians are eager to move out businesses that feature go-go music to make those areas near Metro stops more attractive to developers. But neither of the current or former businesses associated with the suit are located within a mile of a Metro station.

Moten, who has helped organize a campaign against the emergency bill, worries about the fraught relationship between go-go and local law enforcement. The tension boiled over in the District about a decade ago, when violent incidents forced the closure of Club U, a nightclub inside the Frank D. Reeves Municipal Building that hosted go-go concerts. Several years later, Washington City Paper reported that the Metropolitan Police Department kept a running internal report on which bands were playing at D.C. venues so it could deploy officers more effectively.

“Everybody loves change,” Moten says. “They just want to be included in that change. Why can’t we learn from the mistakes we made in D.C.?”

Moten is known for recruiting local musicians for “diss tracks” that target politicians with whom he disagrees. He says he’s in the process of making a song directed at the emergency bill and its author, Prince George’s County Council Member Toles.

Go-Go in Prince George’s County

Martin Austermuhle contributed to this report.

Photo of Be’la Dona by Flickr user DrivingtheNortheast used under a Creative Commons license.