Jordan Clawson – Camera Man
Bumper Jacksons – Them There Eyes
Big Easy E – Don’t Cry For Me
John Lanou – Hannukah
Dub City Renegades – High, High, High (dub)
Joey and the Waitress – Country Road
Gordon Withers – Cast Into The Sky
Bossalingo – Les Feuilles Mortes
Night Kitchen – Thai Iced Tea
Golden Looks – Rooftop
Mbandi – Destiny
Aquarium – Channel 9
Arlin Godwin – Bangkok Matinee
Junhee – Call for War
Rare Essence – Turn It Up (feat. DJ Kool)
Brian Wilbur Grundstrom – An Orchestral Journey
Jonathan Matis – On the illusion of permanence
The Internal Frontier – Gravity
Motion Lines – Howl
Fugazi – The Kill

In the video for Rare Essence’s 1992 hit single, he’s front and center in a white Norfolk State sweatshirt, commanding you to “Work the Walls.” In the video for “Lock It,” released the same year, he’s in denim shorts, leading a ferocious front line. He’s Donnell “D” Floyd, the go-go talker and saxophonist who fronted Essence for nearly 20 years, and now leads Team Familiar.

Floyd helped write Rare Essence’s most enduring songs: “Body Snatchers,” “Uh Oh (Heads Up)” and “Overnight Scenario,” plus “Lock It” and “Work the Walls.” Critics say today’s go-go bands have failed to deliver the same caliber of original tunes that the scene’s luminaries once did. That’s one reason Team Familiar, Floyd’s band since 2001, is taking part in Go-Go New Music Day. The first annual event kicked off today.

But while Go-Go New Music Day strives to smash perceptions that go-go has run out of ideas, its primary mission is to honor the genre’s founder, the late Chuck Brown. Floyd, who performed with Brown in the past, says he’s proud of Team Familiar’s role in maintaining the go-go innovator’s legacy.

To mark Go-Go New Music Day, Floyd’s band Team Familiar dropped a hard-edged track called “Straight to the Bar,” joining a range of other groups releasing new music, including The Chuck Brown Band, Be’la Dona, Backyard Band and Junkyard Band.

Team Familiar has long billed itself as a “grown and sexy” group, but “Straight to the Bar” reminds fans how versatile the ensemble — which features two members of The Chuck Brown Band and six expats from Rare Essence, including Floyd — really is. Uptempo, body-shaking numbers such as this one balance out their sultry R&B covers. Floyd says he’d like to record a whole album of originals, which the group hasn’t done since their early years, when they were still called 911. There’s just one problem.

“It seems to me a good while ago radio abandoned go-go,” Floyd says. “When you spend upwards of $15,000 to 20,000 in the studio and radio doesn’t support it, it’s very difficult to get the money back from it.”

Go-Go New Music Day doesn’t necessarily clear that roadblock — participating bands are releasing their new music digitally, and much of it isn’t available online yet — but the event draws attention to the fresh and vibrant sounds still emerging from the scene.

At a Team Familiar show, it doesn’t feel like go-go is in a rut. Onstage, vocalists Ms. Kim, Marquis “Quisy” Melvin and Frank “Scooby” Sirius hit the high notes, with Sirius and Melvin launching into the occasional falsetto battle between choreographed dance routines. A roar emerges from the back of the stage, as a grinning “Jammin’” Jeff Warren flicks his sticks on the trap drum set, Milton “Go Go Mickey” Freeman slaps the congas and Eric “Bojack” Butler wails on his timbales.

Floyd, meanwhile, seems as lively as he was in those ‘90s music videos, leading vocal chants, shouting out audience members and deftly guiding the band with hand gestures.

Floyd has a flair for the dramatic. In 2015, he organized an anniversary show for Team Familiar vocalist Ms. Kim, a 20-year veteran of the scene. She performed from a regal throne upholstered with red fabric. At Floyd’s own 30th anniversary gig at the Howard in 2013, band members rocked the grooves while situated on scaffolding above the stage, like Hollywood Squares.

“Donnell has always been that visual, let’s-be-extravagant-as-I-can type of theatrical guy,” says keyboardist Byron “BJ” Jackson. “He brought [shows] to life.”

But Floyd — whose busy schedule includes working a job at Verizon — believes in routine, too. He has a time-tested regimen onstage.

“Most places we play at, we play three sets. It’s a graduation type of deal,” he says. “We start off instrumentally with a nice, laid-back set. … Our second set we play a little more aggressive as people are getting their drinks and getting adjusted, and our third set is the most aggressive, as the audience has finished their drinks and they’re ready to party.”

This method helps Team Familiar fill local clubs every night from Wednesday through Sunday, whether they’re playing originals or current R&B hits. Meanwhile, it doesn’t sound like Floyd intends to abandon covers anytime soon. That would be going against tradition, he says.

“People were saying on the Internet that go-go has changed and is only now doing…cover tunes,” says Floyd. “But it seems like to me go-go has always had lots of cover tunes.” He points to Chuck Brown’s “Go-Go Swing” and “Run Joe,” both covers that the legend turned into signatures.

Despite criticism from some go-go fans and outsiders not keen on covers, the music still finds new ears and fervent appreciation, even from out-of-towners.

“I love D.C. people more than I can ever express, but I really enjoy watching people who haven’t grown up with go-go, enjoying go-go. This isn’t the normal, but they still think it’s great,” Floyd says. “Meaning, maybe we aren’t crazy to be still playing it after 35 or 40 years.”

A Go-Go New Music Day concert takes place at Howard Theatre May 14.

That’s because the most likely candidate for D.C.’s song of the summer comes from a homegrown band with “real” instruments and 40 years of history: Rare Essence.

“Turn It Up” is the newest single from the beloved D.C. band, and it’s a crusher. In rock terms, it slays. In millennial terms, it’s 10 fire emojis, at minimum. And naturally, that was the idea, says founding Rare Essence member Andre “Whiteboy” Johnson.

“It’s a club record — uptempo. There’s a beat that we play on this record, and everybody seems to love that beat,” says the 53-year-old.

DJ Kool of “Let Me Clear My Throat” fame guests on “Turn It Up,” which melds old-school, swinging go-go with hard-charging bounce beat. When Kool screams, “If you ridin’ in your car now, turn it up!” you’d be wise to comply. Better yet, pull over.

“Turn It Up” is also the name of Rare Essence’s new album, the band’s first studio full-length in 15 years. It’s out today, one day before the ensemble headlines D.C.’s Funk Parade. Rare Essence commissioned muralist Aniekan Udofia to design the record’s vivid cover, and they just dropped a lively and star-studded “Turn It Up” video, directed by Joseph Pattisall and produced by Roger Gastman. (Watch it above.)

In advance of the new album, Johnson talked to Bandwidth about his initial fear of rocking a mic, the limited rewards of a cover song and Rare Essence’s revived attempt to take over the country.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Bandwidth: Turn It Up is your first studio album in 15 years. Why did you decide to release a new record now?

Andre “Whiteboy” Johnson: What we’ve been doing for the past 15 years is mainly just doing live recordings, because those are quick to turn around. But we decided that we wanted to try to get out on the national playing field. … When we were trying to reach out to radio stations outside of the DMV area, they’re not so quick to play a live record. They really want studio records more.

The last time we talked to you, Rare Essence was about to be the first-ever go-go band to play South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. What was that experience like?

That was great. I knew it was gonna be good, but it was better than I thought. Because everybody that was at the show — 90 percent of those people had never even heard of Rare Essence. But they partied with us like they had been listening to us for 20 years.

You’re the only original member of Rare Essence that’s still in the band. How does it feel playing with newer generations of musicians? 

A lot of the guys have been with us for a few years, but it’s cool. It helps to keep you on your toes because there’s a whole new perspective than what we started with. We were doing things one way and playing a certain type of music when we first started, but now it’s evolved into a bunch of other different things.

You’ve been around for 40 years. It seems like you’ve had no choice but to evolve.

[Laughs] Right. ‘Cause if you keep playing the same songs you were playing 35 years ago, I mean, people are bound to get tired of it. As great as the record may be, it’s gonna be like, “Oh, God… come on! Do something else!”

So that’s what we’ve been able to do, and we’ve been very blessed in that area to be able to come up with something new and creative that the people still like. They still love the classic songs, because we cannot get out of the building without playing “Work the Walls,” “Lock It” or “Overnight Scenario.” But they want to hear the newer things as well.

I was talking to [Backyard Band leader] Big G about his band’s Adele cover, and he said some classic go-go bands aren’t big on covers. Rare Essence had its Ashlee Simpson cover, but your new album is all original. How do you feel about covers, generally?

Original music is what really gets you out there. Backyard doing a great job with that Adele cover — that brought a new energy to the Adele record for me. I love what they done with it. But that will only take them so far, like the Ashlee Simpson cover would only take us so far. To be able to get out there and do some originals — “Overnight Scenario” was original, “Lock It,” “Work the Walls” — they were all original, so they all have done much better.

Let’s go back in time for a minute. I watched the interview you recently did with Take Me Out to the Go-Go, and you talked about how you initially resisted getting behind the mic in Rare Essence.

Oh my goodness, I did not want to. I went into that kicking and screaming. There were many a night that the managers and the band was in the back room giving me a pep talk — “Come on man, you can do it. Let’s go. We got all these people out there waiting on you.” And I’m sitting back there saying, “Nope, I’m not going out there, I’m not doing it.” ‘Cause it was a frightening experience to come from — I was kind of the band director. I was more in between the front line guys and the band. For me to move from that position up to the lead mic and I’m actually running the show, it was absolutely terrifying.

Plus, I knew the fact that [former Rare Essence talker] James Funk at that time was the MVP. Everybody wanted to hear Funk, and nobody wanted to hear me. That’s what scared me the most. People were looking at me like, “What are you doing? Why are you up here? We didn’t even know you could talk.”

How did you acclimate to it?

The crowd sort of changed a bit. All of the old-school [fans] that really liked James Funk, they kind of phased out, and the new crowd that was more into myself and Donnell Floyd started to be the normal audience. So with Donnell and I doing a tag-team type of thing, we were grooming our own audience. Now, we still get a lot of the old-school people to come out to support — especially when we bring James Funk in as a featured artist. Then we get both audiences [old and new].

Rare Essence is headlining Funk Parade this year. What are your expectations for that gig? 

Oh, man. We played a Funk Parade pre-show last year, and it’s a completely different audience. I didn’t realize that alternative audience was into funk music like that. It’s crazy. They know the records! They know the songs. [Laughs] But it’s great, though, because they have a good time when they come out.

Have you ever had a white-collar day job?

I haven’t. No.

So music is your life’s work.

Yeah! I’ve been extremely blessed to be able to do that. The last job I had was McDonald’s when I was 18 and I was trying to buy a car.

That’s amazing. 

Yeah. I’ve been extremely blessed, for real.

There’s been a lot of talk about problems facing go-go, like a diminishing supply of venues. What do you think about the health of the scene now? 

I think the scene is in danger, but the audience always finds a way to help keep this music alive. We’ve gone through this type of thing before — in the ’80s and the ’90s — but we’re still here. We have a lot less venues than we did back then, but we’re still here.

As long as the audience is involved — and they’ve proven that they’re gonna be here, after 30 or 40 years — they’ve just been terrific [about] supporting the music. So we believe that the music will survive. But we want to really be thriving as opposed to just surviving. That’s the idea behind putting out this new record.

Rare Essence plays May 7 at the Funk Parade in D.C. More show listings on rareessence.com.

Anderson .Paak

BJ the Chicago Kid

Nag Champa

Rare Essence

Rock Creek Social Club

The Internet

Future

Stay woke

All photos by Michael Andrade

The Silver Spring photographer has been shooting photos and video of the contemporary go-go scene since 2010, and he captures conversations with D.C.-area musicians with a new web series called Locally Grown. Py’s videos live permanently on YouTube. His newest photo show, on the other hand, is one-night only.

Py plans to share and discuss some of his go-go images Monday, Aug. 17 at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown D.C., just in time for the late Chuck Brown’s birthday. The godfather of go-go would have turned 79 on Aug. 22. One of Py’s images can be found at the Chuck Brown Memorial in D.C.’s Langdon neighborhood.

The photographer says his presentation will be more than just a random collection of band photos on a screen.

“The photo talk is really designed for people who are somewhat familiar with the go-go culture but haven’t really been into the go-go culture,” Py says in a phone call. “I talk about the music of go-go and how it is distinctive and unique to Washington D.C. How it is a big part of the culture for African-Americans who have grown up and lived in D.C.”

But he has his own side of the story to share, too. “I speak to my adventure in go-go and my work with many of the bands, especially my work with Chuck Brown,” Py says. “A very personal adventure.”

Capturing go-go

When Py calls his photography a personal adventure, that’s important. He’s spent time in places, and with people, who are crucial to the go-go scene. He hung out at clubs such as Tradewinds, the now-shuttered Maryland go-go hall. And he worked as one of Chuck Brown’s official photographers in the final year of Brown’s life.

In 2009, Py was just another local shooter who had photographed old-school D.C. rock acts like The Nighthawks and The Slickee Boys. Then in 2010 he saw Brown perform at the annual National Capital Barbecue Battle on Pennsylvania Avenue NW. He took some photos from the crowd and got hooked.

“So I started shooting [go-go groups] Bela’dona [and] Da Mixx Band, and worked my way up to Rare Essence,” Py says. “I kept sending my work to Chuck and [his manager] Tom Goldfogle, and within three months I was onstage with Chuck shooting his shows. I quit my job and pursued this for two years.”

Between the summer of 2010 to 2013, Py went out three or four nights a week and came home at 6 a.m., he says. He enjoyed crossover-friendly go-go gigs, but he tended to prefer the late-night shows that attracted genre devotees.

“It’s much more interesting when the audience is engaging at eye level with the band,” Py says, “and the lead talker is talking about those people’s lives and what is happening that week, and whose birthday it is, and the guy who just got out of jail after 20 years and gets to come onstage and dance with the band. You don’t see that at the Strathmore Hall show.”

Py’s presentation at the library, which he’s shown only twice before, will include images of gigs by The Backyard Band, Team Familiar (formerly Familiar Faces), Suttle Thoughts, Be’la Dona, Da Mixx Band and Rare Essence in addition to Chuck Brown.

But Py isn’t shooting as much as he once was. He still regularly hits Silver Spring’s Society Lounge to see Team Familiar play its Sunday gig there, but he’s slowed down his go-go photography. He’s working a day job again, for one — and he also found himself in an artistic rut.

“For the most part I stopped shooting go-go two years ago,” Py says. “You can’t shoot the same thing over and over again and still have it be creative.”

So Py has channeled his love of documentation into his YouTube show that serves a similar purpose: to record D.C.’s music culture.

Locally Grown

Py has a green thumb. “I have a very beautiful — I call it a ‘yarden,” he says. “It’s no longer a garden, it has taken over the entire yard.”

Sunday afternoons he invites musicians to his backyard jungle. He grills up a meal and switches on his video camera for a chat and a performance. “Grill, garden and grooves,” he calls it.

This summer Py is recording 10 to 12 programs of artists playing in his garden. Each show runs for 15 to 20 minutes and features local musicians from go-go and roots bands performing original material and answering Py’s questions. He handles the entire production, from setting up microphones to interviewing artists to editing tape. He likes it that way.

“I decided I didn’t want to wrestle with cell-phone photographers in clubs for a position to video,” Py says. Plus, he’d been inspired by NPR’s Tiny Desk concerts, a series of live performances filmed at the cluttered desk of All Songs Considered creator Bob Boilen.

Py has taped Locally Grown episodes with musicians including keyboardist Marcus Young from The Chuck Brown Band, Esther Haynes and Hokum Jazz, Frank “Scooby” Marshall (aka Frank Sirius) from Team Familiar and The Chuck Brown Band and guitarist Genevieve Konecnik (aka Genny Jam), formerly of Be’la Dona and now with Pebble to Pearl.

Py usually wears something outlandish on his show — a tie-dyed shirt or a loud thrift-store sports jacket — and his enormous, phallic microphone adds a goofy, public-access feel. Occasionally, Py’s dog Bebop will wander into the frame.

The photographer says he’s “extremely uncomfortable in front of that camera,” but he sticks with it. “As a kid, I wanted to be a game-show host. I grew up on The Gong Show.”

Py admits Locally Grown hasn’t racked up many views online, but he’s happy with the project, and he suspects his guests are, too.

When go-go artists join Py in his “yarden,” he asks them to play original music — not covers, which many go-go acts play live. He also sometimes asks them to collaborate with people they haven’t worked with before.

“A certain joy comes out,” Py says, when musicians are doing that kind of thing. Take Claudia “Kool Keys” Rogers from Be’la Dona and Salt-N-Pepa’s band. She’d only met bandleader and violinist Chelsey Green once, briefly, but their dual performance on Locally Grown felt authentic.

It was the kind of creative chemistry Py wants to capture on his program.

“I put [Rogers] in a situation that she was a bit uncomfortable with, but afterwards she thanked me,” Py says. “It allowed her to be an artist.”

Chip Py shares and discusses his go-go images Aug. 17 at 6:30 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown D.C. Free admission. The library also hosts a Chuck Brown tribute Aug. 22 at 1 p.m. The Chuck Brown Band plays a Chuck Brown Day concert Aug. 22 at the Chuck Brown Memorial in D.C.

This year Hammond — who goes by Kato — turns 50. After that Rare Essence gig, he went on to sing and play guitar in go-go bands Pure Elegance and Little Benny and the Masters and rap in Proper Utensils. In 1996 he founded the website that would become a news source for the go-go community: Take Me Out to the Go-Go. It’s still active today.

Today, Hammond releases his self-published memoir, called, of course, Take Me Out To The Go-Go. It’s different from go-go books like The Beat by Kip Lornell and Charles Stephenson and Go-Go Live by Natalie Hopkinson, which take a historical view of D.C.’s homegrown music. Hammond’s volume is instead a personal tale, exploring his life story and the hold that go-go has had over him for nearly four decades.

The memoir doesn’t discuss go-go like it has been in the media, either. There is little discussion of go-go clubs getting shut down, how white locals perceived Mayor Marion Barry — whose tenure coincided with the explosion of go-go music — or D.C.’s erstwhile reputation as America’s murder capital. Readers also don’t get full character studies of the stars of go-go, or details of how shows at Club LeBaron in Palmer Park compared to those at the Black Hole on Georgia Avenue or the Panorama Room in Anacostia. Discussion of Hammond’s website and magazine gets lost at times, too.

But we do learn a lot about Hammond — how a mugger made off with his leather jacket, whose pocket held one of his favorite go-go tapes; how racism affected him when he got wrongly blamed for theft in the Army. He writes about how he, as a teen, stole his lunches at school to save money for the $5 admission to Friday go-go gigs at Howard Theatre, where he looked down from the balcony, studying all aspects of Rare Essence’s presentation.

While the level of detail in his book — like his lists of seemingly every bandmate in all of his bands — may mostly be of interest to fanatics, he also offers glimpses of how Chuck Brown, Trouble Funk and E.U. differed from each other musically despite their common genre, and he conveys the deep sense of satisfaction he felt the one time he played a big go-go bill at Maryland’s Capital Centre.

In advance of the book’s release, Kato Hammond spoke to me on the phone. We talked about how go-go interfered with his love life, the pain he felt getting kicked out of go-go bands and his days at D.C.’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts, where he met other students who would go on to be prominent go-go musicians.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Bandwidth: When did you start writing the book?

Kato Hammond

Kato Hammond: I had started it right at the time [go-go trumpeter and vocalist] Little Benny passed away [in 2010]. Because Benny used to always talk about writing his book, writing his book, writing his book. But he was always so busy, he never got around to writing it. He talked to Tahira Chloe Mahdi [a local writer and broadcaster also known as “99”] about getting together and her writing it for him. But it never happened.

I got more serious about it in the past six months. My goal was to have it finished by the end of the year. To make time for it. You’re a writer, you got to make time for it and not procrastinate and talk yourself out of it. Another thing was I turn 50 this year. I got kids who are older now. Two of them have kids. I just wanted them to know my story. I promised them. There’s stuff in it they don’t even know. They just knew daddy played music.

In the book you describe how, as a kid, you learned guitar in part from sitting in a small apartment room, closely watching a musician you knew as Littlejohn — from The Jaguars — perform.

That was pre-go-go. Even to this day it affects how I listen to music. Littlejohn would practice as if he was onstage. He’d have his microphone stand set up in his room. Before that I would just practice with my guitar sitting in my lap.

“I remember my cousin used to have his girlfriend hold the tape recorder [up to the speaker] while he was partying [at the go-go]. Then they would argue about that, with her complaining it wasn’t fair.”

It was interesting that you discovered that Rare Essence’s impressive choreographed dance steps back then were taught to them by the D.C.-based Bren-Carr dancers.

I just happened to later on find that out. Meanwhile with Benny, he’d go back to them to work on steps. I don’t remember whether I put it in the book, but when Benny was at that first Capital Centre go-go show — I wasn’t with him then — he was playing “Cat in the Hat” and he had four girls come out in cat outfits and [do] choreographed steps. That was them, the Bren-Carr dancers.

So going back earlier, in 1979, there was no problem with you bringing in a tape recorder to Club LeBaron?

Back then they didn’t stop you from bringing in a tape recorder to a go-go. Back then it was normal. Early tapes then were made by people just putting their big boomboxes up by the speakers and recording. I don’t know the detailed history of PA tapes, but I think that is when they decided to start taping shows from the PA board and stop allowing people to do it. Some people were dancing, some people watched the band and some people were recording. I remember my cousin used to have his girlfriend hold the tape recorder while he was partying. Then they would argue about that, with her complaining it wasn’t fair.

Hearing about you and all the teenagers getting jobs as musicians and other positions as part of Mayor Barry’s D.C. Summer Youth Program jobs had me thinking Baltimore needs something like that.

Exactly. I was talking with someone about Baltimore and they were saying, “Kato, you don’t realize how fortunate you guys had it.” I said, “You have a point.” But I think we were at the age that it was new at the time. We just had to remember to sign up before it was too late.

During your brief time at Duke Ellington School of the Arts, you met go-go musicians like Donnell Floyd and others.

I met and knew all of them then. I didn’t want to make the book just Donnell’s story. I don’t know if I put it in the book, but I remember in 10th grade, the rumor was that Donnell was in Rare Essence, but I didn’t see him with them. It turns out he was first just practicing with them and then he later joined them onstage.

Was it hard — with your family potentially reading this — that you write about and convey your guilt about stealing a car with your buddies and leaving the woman in tears?

I put that in to show what kind of trouble youth can get into when they don’t have an outlet. If I had not met the girlfriend who went to Duke Ellington School, if I hadn’t known the girl at Bowie High who told me about the playwriting contest that brought me up to New York, that was all like a whole different new world. I was trying to show that youth don’t know what’s out there because they have never seen or experienced it.

The car thing was a spur-of-the-moment, dumb thing. I don’t fault the mother of that youth [hitting him and keeping him out of rioting] in Baltimore. With the youth, it’s that peer thing and not realizing the seriousness of it. I think that situation later — when I got robbed — was probably my get-back for what I did earlier.

“Every relationship I was in ended because of go-go. My marriage ended because of TMOTTGoGo.”

You briefly mentioned after returning from the Army becoming a father and getting sole custody of your daughter Krystina, and your aunt June helped take care of her.

That was a whole story in itself, but I didn’t put it in the book. She’s 27 now.

How did you decide what non-go-go stuff to put in the book and what to omit?

I knew I did not want to put her in there. Even later on, you notice I talk about different girlfriends… I mention my marriage, but not her name. I consciously tried not to talk about the details of my family life. I wanted to touch on a constant thing with me, [which] was that every relationship I was in ended because of go-go. My marriage ended because of TMOTTGoGo. I wasn’t actively in a band anymore, but all my time was spent on TMOTT stuff. Her complaint was I was on the computer too much. I can’t win.

Getting kicked out of Pure Elegance and Little Benny and the Masters, and being told to switch to rap and not play guitar with Proper Utensils, must not have been easy.

I was crushed with the Pure Elegance thing. I was blindsided by both [dismissals]. With the Benny thing, I am real, real close with one of Benny’s sisters. I didn’t put it in there. When I put in there about living with Jacques [Johnson, a guitarist], one of Benny’s sisters lived with us, too. We weren’t a couple, we just shared an apartment. I was real close with Benny’s family. But I didn’t want to put that part in there.

“Egos were very big in go-go.”

When you went to see Benny perform onstage again a few weeks later, weren’t you worried Benny would tell you to leave?

Benny was never a bad guy. That wasn’t the kind of thing he would say. I was still close to his family and there wasn’t any animosity to it, although I was hurt by it. I wasn’t surprised the next guitarist [he had] didn’t work out. Sometimes you make the choice — do you want the best person in the world or the most dedicated? I would go with the most dedicated because they can get better. The best person might have too much of an ego. Egos were very big in go-go. The Pure Elegance thing was worse because we went to Bowie High together, and then we worked together in the day at the same job. So I was probably more thrown off by that then the other.

You said the TMOTTGoGo chatboard in the early years, before current social media, had lots of commenters. Do you miss that?

No, I don’t really miss it. Those people you see now on the Facebook go-go groups are the exact same people you would see then on the boards. We have known each other so long. There are people on those boards who have gotten married and had kids. The other thing is that back then, the Internet was fresh and new, and anything that anyone said on it got blamed on me.

Kato Hammond’s memoir, Take Me Out to the Go-Go, is available now on Amazon.

Local legends Rare Essence are scheduled to perform at the festival Tuesday, sharing a bill with other D.C.-area artists including Prinze George, Oddisee, Paperhaus, Black Alley, Kokayi and Asheru. The showcase is technically part of the Washington, DC Economic Partnership’s technology campaign during the festival, but Rare Essence is paying for the trip itself with a combination of private donations and money it raised at a recent fundraiser concert.

Bandleader Andre “Whiteboy” Johnson, the group’s only remaining original member, says Rare Essence has been looking to play SXSW for several years to meet with industry representatives and get its sound in front of new audiences.

“We’re trying to expand Rare Essence and go-go music beyond the beltway,” Johnson says.

Now nearly 40 years old, Rare Essence could seem like a strange fit for SXSW. It’s not a buzz band with a recent Soundcloud hit or a nationally known group hitting the summer festival circuit. It’s a treasured local band that’s been performing in clubs and gymnasiums across D.C., Maryland and Virginia for decades.

Rare Essence’s fans still call it the “wickedest band alive.” They’ve seen the group through peaks — like the success of singles “Body Moves,” “Lock It” and “Work the Walls” — and tragedy, namely the deaths of trumpeter Anthony “Lil Benny” Harley and drummer Quentin “Footz” Davidson.

But like most go-go bands, Rare Essence hasn’t built a strong national following. It hasn’t had a hit outside the D.C. region for years.

Johnson says his band wants to play SXSW, in part, to change that. He says the best way to market a band like his is to perform live. That’s how go-go music must be heard.

“People like live music, and that’s the main ingredient to go-go,” Johnson says.

There’s a good chance Tuesday’s District music showcase in Austin will attract an audience that’s more D.C.-aware than the rest of the SXSW crowd, but still, Johnson says it could be a challenging performance. Rare Essence shows attract familiar faces. Band members used to do shout-outs by reading the name and neighborhood of fans from a card. Now, Johnson says, the band knows most of the shout-outs by heart. They can’t expect that level of local love in Austin.

During SXSW, Rare Essence will probably play the same songs it performs in D.C., Johnson says, but the shorter set time means the group probably won’t break into extended jam sessions like it regularly does at home — unless the audience demands it.

“We’ve been in situations where people would walk in and not know what this is and stand around for the first couple of songs,” Johnson says, “but by the end of the set, they’re into it like everyone else.”

SXSW isn’t Rare Essence’s only attempt to define itself for new audiences: The band’s trip to Texas coincides with the release of its first batch of new songs in more than a decade. Johnson says the new release contains some of the band’s best music ever. Perhaps a few business meetings and a good performance will yield more concert dates outside the D.C. region and new ears for its fresh material.

Though scholars and music journalists have already declared go-go a strictly local phenomenon, Johnson suggests maybe they’re wrong. Maybe go-go just hasn’t broken out of D.C. yet.

“The reason for us even going to South By Southwest is for us to expand Rare Essence and go-go as much as we can try to get to that next level,” Johnson says.