The Bayou Booked U2 as the Opening Act

A Georgetown club under the Whitehurst Freeway: a 1939 pirate brig, a 1951 killing with police in the room, and Foreigner's first shows.

Show Notes

In December 1980, U2 played its second American show at a Georgetown club tucked under the Whitehurst Freeway, as the opening act. Decades earlier, the same room had a pirate brig for argumentative dates, and a 1951 shooting with two police officers inside.

Full story, photos and sources: https://ghostsofdc.org/2026/06/06/the-bayou-dc/

Narrated by an AI version of Tom's voice. AI also helps research and write the scripts; facts are checked against the original sources, and Tom reviews the episodes.

What is Ghosts of DC?

The lost and untold stories of Washington, DC. The buildings, blocks and people the city and region forgot.

The Beatles played their first American concert here. Sharks turned up in the Potomac in 1911. Ford’s Theatre collapsed in 1893 while government clerks worked inside.

Since 2012, Ghosts of DC has been digging through old newspapers, maps and archives for stories like these, from Georgetown to Anacostia and across the whole DMV. Now they’re a podcast.

Short episodes, most around ten minutes. Each one is built on the historical record and tied to a full post with photos and sources at ghostsofdc.org.

Something for the Metro ride or the walk to work.

Narrated with an AI version of Tom’s voice. AI also helps with the archival research, and facts are checked against the original sources.

On a Sunday night in December of nineteen eighty, a young band from Ireland played their second show in America. They weren't the headliner. They were the opening act, for a local DC punk band. That Irish band was U Two. The club, tucked under a freeway in Georgetown, was the Bayou. Foreigner played some of its very first shows there, and Guns N' Roses, Phish and the Dave Matthews Band all came through on the way up. But this room had a past long before any of that. In nineteen thirty-nine it was a pirate nightclub, with a jail cell for your date. And in nineteen fifty-one, a gambler was shot at the top of its stairs, with two policemen in the room. So how does one room under the Whitehurst Freeway go from pirates and gunfire to U Two? Welcome to Ghosts of DC.

I'm Tom. Or really, an AI version of my voice. I've been poking around this city's old nightlife for years, and no room I know of had more lives than this one. We built this episode from forty-two sources, from a nineteen thirty-nine newspaper photo to a twenty seventeen obituary in a concert trade magazine. The full list is on the post at Ghosts of D C dot org.

Before the freeway, this stretch of K Street was a working waterfront. There was a flour mill, a cement works, and a rendering plant known for its smell. Then, in the winter of nineteen thirty-nine, a New York showman named Don Dickerman, who went by Captain, moved into thirty-one thirty-five K Street. He ran pirate nightclubs, and his ad in the Evening Star did not ask permission. Ahoy, Washington. Give us the city. We'll take it anyway. The Pirates' Den opened on February seventh, nineteen thirty-nine, and Hollywood showed up. Errol Flynn was there, and so was the actress Madeleine Carroll. The Daily News ran a photo of her being let out of the brig on opening night. Yes, the club had a brig. A real one, with iron bars, off to one side of the bandstand. Years later, the Evening Star explained how it worked. If your wife or date became too argumentative all you had to do was signal the head waiter. Then waiters dressed as pirates hauled her off for a cooling-off period behind the bars. The Pirates' Den lasted about ten months. Over the next dozen years, the room went through club after club, and some of them had famous friends. The bandleader Earl Hines brought his big band in nineteen forty-four. A year later, Bob Hope signed up for a lifetime membership at the club there, and filled out the form in pencil. Where it asked his age, he wrote one word. Pass. In nineteen forty-eight, the government auctioned off the club's contents for unpaid taxes, right there on K Street. The lot included fifty oak chairs. And three slot machines. By nineteen fifty-one, the room was an after-hours spot called the Hide-Away Club. And early one January morning, the police dropped in.

It's January tenth, nineteen fifty-one, a little before five in the morning. Seventeen people are in the Hide-Away, listening to the juke box. Two police officers are there too, on what the Evening Star called a routine check. A gambler named Joseph Nesline goes upstairs to the men's room. Another gambler follows him up. They meet at the top of the stairs. And the man who followed him is shot dead. Nesline walks back down and hands his forty-five to the police lieutenant, and tells him one thing. I just had to do it. The dead man was George Harding, and he was no stranger to the police. He'd been convicted of manslaughter for a killing in nineteen thirty-three. The man he killed was the brother of a police inspector. That same morning, a second body turned up in the Potomac near the club, frozen to an old piling. Police said the two cases didn't seem to be connected. And before dawn the next day, the juke box at the Hide-Away was playing again. Against police orders. Nesline went on trial that April. The judge wanted the case in the jury's hands that afternoon, and he told the jurors why. Undoubtedly some of you will want to attend the MacArthur celebration tomorrow. The jury was out eighty minutes. It found Nesline not guilty of murder, but guilty of carrying a loaded gun, and the judge gave him the maximum, a year in jail. Then the judge said what he thought of places like the Hide-Away. The after-hours clubs are headquarters for ex-convicts, racketeers, gamblers and gunmen. Two years later, the room got a new name. It would keep that one for forty-five years.

In nineteen fifty-three, two brothers from Virginia took over, Vincent and Tony Tramonte. One was a lawyer, the other a dentist. By then the Hide-Away was gone, and the place had become a struggling Dixieland club called Jazzland. They named it the Bayou. An ad that September promised the only authentic Dixieland jazz in Washington, along with spaghetti, ravioli and steaks. Two months after opening, the place caught fire in a snowstorm. An Evening Star photographer shot the scene from the Whitehurst Freeway, right overhead. The Bayou was a club of its time, too. A want ad it placed in the Evening Star in nineteen fifty-four asked for waitresses who were fast, experienced, and white. In the Washington of the fifties, the classifieds were as segregated as the nightclubs. By nineteen sixty-three, the Bayou had added strippers. The Star's nightlife column described the new attraction and her signature number. The Dance of the Bashful Bride. Then, by the mid-sixties, the Tramontes switched to rock and roll. By the seventies, the national acts were coming. Kiss played the Bayou in nineteen seventy-four, and Talking Heads in seventy-seven. And in seventy-nine, a band called the Police. The best story goes back to April of nineteen seventy-seven. A brand-new band called Foreigner played a free show at American University, and two at the Bayou. Their guitarist told the Washington Post that June what made those shows different. We hadn't ever played together in front of an audience. Not everyone had a good night there. Mickey Mantle got turned away at the door, because he wouldn't put on a tie. In January of nineteen eighty, the Tramontes sold the club to a concert company. And that's when the opening acts got famous.

The buyers were Cellar Door Productions. The company grew out of Georgetown's old Cellar Door club, and it had connections to the major record labels. The calendar filled up fast. That July, Billy Joel recorded three songs at the Bayou for a live album. The album credits got the club's name wrong. They called it the Bijou. Which brings us back to December seventh, nineteen eighty. U Two played two sets that night, at eight and at eleven, opening for the Slickee Boys, a homegrown DC punk band. About two hundred people saw the first one. The next night, U Two played Buffalo. That same night, John Lennon was shot outside the Dakota in New York. U Two came back to the Bayou the following March, with the Slickee Boys on the bill again. And the parade kept going. R.E.M. played in nineteen eighty-one, two weeks before their first single came out. Stevie Ray Vaughan played his first Washington show there in eighty-three. Guns N' Roses played the Bayou on November first, nineteen eighty-seven, three months after Appetite for Destruction came out. The room could still be rough on the stars. Robert Plant got thrown out during a scuffle at closing time. And Todd Rundgren hated playing there so much he reportedly asked, isn't there another place in DC to play? Then came the jam bands. Phish played the Bayou six times, starting in nineteen ninety. The Dave Matthews Band played it sixteen times, roughly once a month, until February of nineteen ninety-four. By then the Bayou had been open for forty years. Its last few years would bring its saddest night, and its last one.

On September seventeenth, nineteen ninety-six, friends of a DC singer named Eva Cassidy held a tribute concert for her at the Bayou. That summer, she'd learned that the melanoma she'd had removed years earlier had spread. She came on stage and sang. She closed with What a Wonderful World. It was her last public performance. She died that November, at thirty-three. Cassidy was barely known outside Washington when she died. Her recordings made her a worldwide star in the years that followed. I have my own Bayou memory from its last summer. In nineteen ninety-eight, I went to see a Grateful Dead cover band at the Bayou. It was a few weeks before Phish played Merriweather Post Pavilion, that August. That September, the Washington Post reported the Bayou was being sold. Developers had a hundred-million-dollar plan for the whole block. A hotel, apartments, shops, and a three-thousand-seat movie theater. On December thirtieth, nineteen ninety-eight, the Post called the Bayou Washington's longest-lived nightclub. The next night, New Year's Eve, a band called Everything played the last show. You might know their song Hooch, from the Adam Sandler movie The Waterboy. The wrecking crews came in nineteen ninety-nine, and the whole building came down.

When we made this, in October of twenty twenty-six, the Bayou's old spot on K Street sat roughly under the loading dock of a movie theater. The theater opened there in two thousand two. There's a historical marker nearby, at Thirty-Third and Prospect Streets, that names the Bayou among Georgetown's lost nightspots. The pirates are gone, and so is the Hide-Away, and so is the Bayou. But the Whitehurst Freeway is still up there, right over the spot. The same freeway U Two played under, back when they were the opening act.

So that's the Bayou, and every club that came before it. Thanks for hanging out under the freeway with me. You'll find plenty more where this came from at Ghosts of D C dot org. Ghosts of DC is here to find the places this city tore down, and tell you what happened inside them. This has been Ghosts of DC.