Most Georgetown students come to the District?and leave?without ever knowing that go-go, a form of music that has united three generations of black Washingtonians, exists. If not for a chance exposure, Nick Shumaker (CAS ‘01), one of the creators of The Pocket, a documentary about D.C.’s go-go scene that will premier Saturday, Aug. 31 at the Lincoln Theater, might have been one of those students.
“My freshman year at Georgetown, my friend kept playing this song ‘To My Smokers’ by the Backyard Band,” Shumaker said. “I had no idea what it was, I thought it was some kind of relic from hip-hop past. Eventually I asked him what it was, and he said it was go-go. A couple of months later, I was looking through the City Paper and noticed some listings for go-go shows. At that time, the Backyard Band was playing five to six nights a week. I asked my friend if he wanted to go to a show and he just laughed it off. He said white kids just didn’t go to the shows. That’s when I became interested.”
Shumaker didn’t really act on that interest until last winter. Recently graduated from Georgetown, he was looking for a job. He thought he’d try freelance writing, and the urban culture magazine While You Were Sleeping picked up on his proposal to write about go-go.
“Nick called me up and told me he was doing this article for While You Were Sleeping,” said Mike Cahill (CAS ‘01), who works for National Geographic television and film. “He asked if I wanted to come, I think because he was scared and wanted someone to go with him. A couple of minutes later I called him back and asked him if I could bring a camera, and he said, ‘I hoped you were going to say that.’”
Immediately Shumaker and Cahill started think of the possibilities.
“I had no idea that it was going to become something like it is now,” Cahill said.
What it has become is the first full-length documentary about D.C.’s go-go scene made in the last 10 years.
THE STORY BEHIND THE MUSIC
“The first go-go song that was go-go as we know it today was Chuck Brown’s ‘Bustin’ Loose,’ because it was the first song to have the go-go beat,” Shumaker said. Nelly fans may recognize the chorus from “Bustin’ Loose” because it appears in his song “Hot in Herre.” Brown, known as the godfather of go-go, assembled his band The Soul Searchers in the late ‘60s, originally as a four- or five-piece funk group.
“As the ‘70s progressed, Brown got tired of the rapidity and monotony of the genre’s beats,” Shumaker said. “So he slowed his beats down, cutting the beats per minute from 120 to 60. This slowdown not only allowed his musicians to catch their breath, but it also allowed for an increase in audience participation. This got done through call-and-response, a method tracing back to African tribal days, but rarely seen in black music save for short stints in James Brown songs and the rise of black nationalism.
“The slowdown allowed Brown to create his beat, affectionately termed ‘the pocket’ by some players. Using congas, a repressed instrument in black music until the ‘60s, he used syncopated beats highly reminiscent of African tribal beats to bridge the empty pockets between songs,” said Shumaker, referring to the continuity between songs in live go-go shows.
“The beat sort of becomes like a hanger,” Ian Mackaye of Fugazi, a D.C.-based punk band, says in The Pocket. “You can put anything in there, but there’s always the beat.”
“Go-go followed popular culture,” Shumaker said. “As the younger bands took hold, they incorporated their immediate influences?primarily gangster rap in the ‘80s. As funk died out, political hip-hop took its place in the early ‘80s and West Coast gangster rap in the early ‘90s. But the beat Brown initiated remained and still does.”
For those not in the go-go scene, the word go-go conjures up images of white boot-clad women dancing in cages, Austin Powers style. However, in the ‘60s it was used to describe any kind of all-night dance party.
“It’s was kind of like a ‘60s version of the rave,” Shumaker said. “Smokey Robinson and the Miracles had a song called ‘Going to a Go-Go’ well before Brown started the actual beat. Before the 1968 D.C. riots, white artists like Tommy Vann traversed the racial boundaries segregation laid and kicked covers to predominately black audiences. Then the Young Senators ruled just before the riots until Eddie Kendricks of The Temptations fame picked them up. When they left, Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers took over and have essentially been in the District since.”
Today, go-go music is still centered on the live shows which gave the genre its name. There are five to six shows occurring every night of the week somewhere in the D.C. area, and 700 to 5,000 people attend each show. Musicians range from 10- to 70-years-old, taking part in an estimated $10 million-a-year local industry, Shumaker said.
Go-go, with the exception of brief stints, has failed to make a dent in any market outside of D.C.
“The way the music industry works with respect to black music is that you need a major distributor to get out of the city, where there is a regional scene,” said Shumaker, contrasting the go-go scene with some of the independent distribution of punk rock. “But to get picked up by a national distributor, they need to see that it is sustainable within a target audience, which is upper-middle-class white kids, between 12- and 15- years-old. To understand go-go, you have to go to a live show, and D.C. is so divided that white kids just don’t go to these shows.”
“The Pocket attempts to look at that scene,” Shumaker said. “The real D.C.?the neighborhoods that aren’t posed for tour buses and travel brochures.
While there have been a couple of books to mention go-go, it could seem as if the only time go-go gets mentioned in the media is when a club is shut down.
“The [local] media has had a lot to do with other media staying away from go-go,” Shumaker said. “In the ‘80s there was a rash of bad articles that came out that said that go-go was a causal factor for the violence in D.C.’s inner city. They used it as a scapegoat for warring gang stuff, crack?they said it was a forum where all the dealers would meet. You can’t say that there weren’t dealers there, but it is silly to say that go-go music caused drugs sales and violence. Those articles in the Washington Post scared other media outlets off. From a national context the same things were happening with rap?that it was causing gang warfare in Los Angeles?but it was able to sustain through it because it had sponsorship from companies like Swatch and Adidas, and major label deals.”
WHEN PEOPLE STOP BEING POLITE AND START GETTING REAL
“I taught myself how to film and edit?at Georgetown I studied economics,” Cahill said. “I used to make movies when I was a little kid. I had a camcorder and I would just make everyone in my family act. But I stopped, until I had to film this advertisement for my marketing class for these fake businesses. I was DJ Wack Nasty, so in my commercial I was at turntables in an empty room. I did this cut where I snap my fingers and the room is full?and that trick cut is what got me hooked.”
Cahill bought his first high-8 camera the summer between his junior and senior year, and won the Grand Jury and Audience awards at the 2001 Georgetown Film Festival for Lucid Grey, a film he created with Zal Batmanglij (CAS ‘02).
Describing his style as “raw and realistic” Cahill sites inspiration in the French New Wave and Alejandro Gonz?lez I?rritu’s films Amores Perros and Y T? Mam? Tambi?n. In the film, Cahill relies on all natural lighting, and doesn’t use any narration.
“I really don’t like narrators,” Cahill said. “First, I think they’re kind of cheesy, and I don’t like that type of writing. I like it raw. I like it when people tell their stories?real voices telling real stories.”
However, getting people to tell those stories was the tough part.
“It’s hard to get people to trust you within the go-go scene,” Shumaker said. “A lot of people in go-go past have approached the musicians, and after a week or two lost interest and didn’t do anything, in part because it is so difficult to access the bands.”
“At first people in the scene were like, ‘Why do white kids got to come in and do this?’” Cahill said. “But then they had the attitude like ‘Someone is doing it, we’ve got to give them props.”
Mike Bailey, the lead talker in The Uncalled 4 Band, one of the go-go bands featured in the film, said that he agreed to let Cahill and Shumaker film the band because he thought it would be good for go-go.
“Mike and Nick came to us and said that they like go-go and listen to it,” said Bailey, 21, who started banging buckets when he was 10-years-old. “They even knew a few things about go-go that I didn’t know. So I thought we had nothing to lose. I want more people to know about go-go, to have respect for it.”
“We were in a position where we had to prove ourselves constantly,” Cahill said. “We let the people we filmed see the work as it progressed, and then the word started catching on that we were good people. We had to build this level of trust. But now we’ve been welcomed with open arms. It is amazing, by the end we are just the two goofy white kids that everyone knows.”
Cahill thought that that kind of intimacy was good for the film. “We were making a film that was looking at a scene, a culture. How can the viewers get close if the filmmakers don’t?”
“Part of it was tricky, because go-go has traditionally been associated with violence,” Cahill said. “But it wasn’t like we were going to ignore that because we were close to them. You have to keep it truthful, honest, but with this constant of intimacy.”
One of the key components was sticking around long enough to get an honest picture of the scene, because people’s behavior is changed by the mere presence of a camera, said Shumaker and Cahill.
“When you’re documenting people, they are going to notice you,” said Chris Maddaloni (CAS ‘99) who took still photography for the film. “You hope that you are there long enough that they forget, and you try to edit to correct for it.”
Bailey estimates that over the past six months, Shumaker and Cahill have logged over 300 hours filming his band.
The Pocket was filmed entirely with digital cameras, using Final Cut Pro, a Macintosh program, to edit the film. The process is much cheaper than traditional filmmaking?making it possible to make films at a fraction of the budget previously required.
“This never would have been possible without a digital camera,” Cahill said. “It would have required a large production company and a large budget.”
Shumaker estimates that they spent $8,000 making the film, spending the money on a camera, Apple computers, additional hard drives and memory, the tapes and microphones.
In order to fund the project, Shumaker and Cahill are in the process of creating a non-profit company. The entire budget of the film has come from donations. Cahill and Shumaker would like to eventually sell the film to a for-profit distribution company.
COMING SOON TO A THEATRE NEAR YOU
After Saturday’s premiere of the film at the Lincoln Theater, go-go bands Little Benny and the Go-go All Stars, The Uncalled 4 Band, and punk band Q and Not U are going to perform.
Q and Not U, who grew up in the area and heard go-go throughout high school are excited to perform with a go-go band.
“I remember this cable access show that used to come on,” said Q and Not U guitarist Harris Klahr. “It was so grainy, so that’s what I started to associate with go-go, that graininess, you know, blowing out mics and fogging up lenses. It has so much energy it blew me away.”
“I grew up with an awareness and respect for go-go,” said drummer John Davis. “Even if our lives have been punk rock, we are still tied to it. It has paralleled punk, the way it has come out of D.C.”
“Some of the beauty of go-go is that is has stayed here, and thrived here,” said guitarist and vocalist Christopher Richards. “Localized music is a beautiful thing.”
Following the premiere, Shumaker and Cahill plan to take the film on the festival circuit. Currently, they are slated to participate in a hip-hop film festival that travels to universities across the country. They have also booked dates with independent theaters in Missouri, Florida, Maine and New York.
Shumaker and Cahill’s production company, Rolling Shin, is planning future projects, one about the Junkanoo, a Bahamian new year’s festival, and another about a man in Maryland who used to fight in Chechnya.
“We would like an intern,” jokes Shumaker. “We would like to expand to more filmmakers, editors and interns. Especially interns.”
While they are planning for the future, they aren’t complaining about the present.
“When good things are happening, you just roll with it,” Cahill said. “Without taking it for granted. Never take it for granted.”
“I never thought it’d be like this,” said Bailey, of The Uncalled 4 Band. “It’s gonna be a big help for go-go on the 31st.”
