Whenever I first meet someone in my community who likes music — or someone new from the scene who understands that music is community — the same chitchat question usually gets tossed my way: What’s your favorite venue around here? I have a standard reply, but I’m so perpetually hyped up about it, I tend to spit it out as if it were burning the inside of my mouth: “Rhizome. On the D.C. side of Takoma Park. Amazing spot. Amazing spot. Maybe the best D.C. music venue ever. You gotta go.”
And it really is amazing. And it really might be the greatest music room our city has ever known. And you really do need to go. And now, with a looming eviction threat finally evaporating this month — more on that in a minute — you will be able to go, and that’s reason to celebrate.
For now, you should know that Rhizome exists at 6950 Maple St. NW. It’s a simple, stand-alone, two-story house situated on a humble patch of gravel, surrounded by towering new condos. But under Rhizome’s roof, you’ll find countless musical worlds. Path-finding jazz. Left-field electronic music. Bruising hardcore punk. Ancient folk songs. Wild-style rap music. Classes on how to build synthesizers, or write poetry, or dye your pajamas the color of midnight. Rhizome also hosts art installations, and film screenings, and discussion groups about dreams and death, and jam sessions, and sound baths, and summer camps for kids who want to learn how to make graphic novels, or puppets, or techno music.
All that variety proves Rhizome to be a truly multicultural multipurpose room, but I still consider it a music venue above all. I’ve attended thousands of concerts over the past 30 years of my music-loving life, but the shows at Rhizome feel so unique, so intimate, they continue to slide into my permanent memory with astonishing ease. Like that night when the mythic Michigan noise band Wolf Eyes had packed the place so tightly, I got stuck in the back, watching all the hairy heads in front of me nodding like buoys on the ocean, everyone hearing a different rhythm in the band’s unmetered gnash. Or that dreamy summer afternoon when the legendary Maryland folk guitarist Max Ochs made his favorite blues ballads sound a thousand years old. Or that time the D.C.-area hardcore band Grand Scheme sparked two simultaneous mosh pits, one in the former living room, another in the former dining room.
Those are the indoor memories. Out in Rhizome’s side yard, I caught Janel Leppin leading her Ensemble Volcanic Ash through new jazz mazes. I heard Vivien Goldman reanimate her lost post-punk songbook with serious style. I danced to a Soso Tharpa DJ set that included a Sade remix so fantastic, it sounded like the entire world was unlocking itself. And for me, it kind of was. It was my first live music experience after 432 concert-less days during the pandemic, an absence from musical nightlife I could never have imagined. That said, nor could I have dreamed of a better reentry point than Rhizome.
Back in 2015, Rhizome was just an idea among six friends who wanted to start a community-minded nonprofit organization that could host outsider music, art and more. By 2016, they had moved into the house on Maple Street — a former residence converted into a later-defunct hair salon — and, by the end of the year, Rhizome felt like the most exciting music venue in the city, far and away. Underground out-of-towners who might otherwise skip Washington on tour were now landing shows at Rhizome, often performing with unsung local musicians of motley stripes. The overhead was low, and the energy was high.
Which had always been the point, really. “It has to do with making space for underrepresented and marginalized art forms and modes of cultural expression,” says Layne Garrett, one of Rhizome’s co-founders and its current program director. “[There’s] an emphasis on being as noncommercial as possible while still being able to pay people fairly for their work.”
Tickets are sold on a sliding scale at Rhizome. There’s no bar. Artists sell their own merch, and no, Rhizome doesn’t take a cut. Some shows are seated. Others are standing room, dancing room or moshing room only. Everyone involved — aside from Garrett and a production intern — are volunteers, who, with the help of various outside DIY promoters, have hosted more than 2,000 events at Rhizome over the past eight-plus years, with at least 80 percent of proceeds going directly to the artists.
And now there are more events to come, which until recently hadn’t been a certainty. In August 2020, Rhizome’s landlord, Maple Park Associates LLC, agreed to sell the Maple Street property to the real estate development company Petra — but the deal has been stuck in a years-long limbo, leaving the D.C. music scene in knots over Rhizome’s future. Knowing the venue would be forced to relocate, Rhizome eventually abandoned the idea of migrating to a new rental space and instead began searching for a permanent home. It found a former doctor’s office at 7733 Alaska Ave. NW, mere footsteps off Georgia Avenue.
To purchase the property, Rhizome secured a $350,000 grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities but still needed to raise an additional $250,000 to close. So at a town hall meeting in late March, organizers proposed a two-prong fundraising strategy, soliciting donations and microloans. If anything, the speed and enthusiasm of the public’s response confirmed how essential Rhizome has become to the District’s musical ecosystem. On May 1, Rhizome announced that it had raised the full $250,000 within 33 days, and as of May 15, it had received 664 individual donations and 38 loans. Garrett says they expect to close on the Alaska Avenue property in late May and will be able to repay their loans at roughly the same rate as their current rent.
There’s still more to do, though. Rhizome needs to raise another $85,000 or so to pay for a new roof, plumbing, electric, general contracting and more, Garrett says, walking me through the shuttered doctor’s office on a recent weekday morning. We shuffle from appointment room to appointment room, the walls dividing them not long for this world. Outside on Alaska Avenue, there’s no yard, but there is a broad sidewalk that Garrett hopes to turn into patio space. Maybe they can build a roof deck down the line, too. I ask when we might expect to catch a punk show or a jazz set where we’re currently standing. “A year from now seems like a reasonable guess,” Garrett says. I close my eyes and try to imagine it all — years and years of unimaginable sounds.
Then I keep them closed and steep in my gratitude. We are so fortunate to have Rhizome. So fortunate to live in a city where our overlapping music scenes share such a rich DIY ethic. So fortunate to have a space where seeking musical adventure allows us to cultivate community. For too many years, the conjoined forces of gentrification and real estate greed have run amok in Washington, extinguishing so many musical gathering places like this. But through the ingenuity of its co-founders and the support of its people, Rhizome gets to relocate, gets to survive, gets to continue bringing everyone together, right here. It’ll be an amazing spot. Amazing spot. Maybe the best D.C. music venue ever. You gotta go.
Rhizome is located at 6950 Maple St. NW. Max Ochs is scheduled to perform May 31. Ensemble Volcanic Ash is scheduled to perform June 28. For a full schedule, visit rhizomedc.org.
