SEATTLE — What do you know about Seattle’s teen dance ordinance?

Maybe you read that the TDO is a reason Redmond’s Old Fire House was once an unlikely music hot spot. Maybe you’ve heard a “Footloose” joke or two, about the dark years when Seattle kept kids out of dance clubs. Or maybe you haven’t heard of it at all.

If that’s the case: The teen dance ordinance, which was enacted in 1985 and repealed in 2002, drastically limited the ability of young people to attend concerts in Seattle. Music journalist Jonathan Zwickel (full disclosure: a former colleague) first heard about the TDO soon after he moved to Seattle in 2007 to be music editor of The Stranger. He was struck that such a bizarre piece of legislation — and one that seemed so counter to Seattle’s broader reputation as a musical hotbed — was such recent history.

His ongoing fascination with this slice of our cultural past eventually manifested in the seven-episode documentary podcast “Let the Kids Dance!” produced by KUOW and released this year. Since listening to the podcast, I’ve been struck by those same questions, and wondering what this piece of history could teach us about Seattle today.

What was the TDO? Among other restrictions, the law included both convoluted age regulations — if an event allowed minors, anyone under 15 needed a parent or guardian with them and anyone older than 20 had to be accompanying someone under 18 — and high costs, because venues had to have two off-duty police officers on the premises and $1 million in liability insurance. Nonprofits, schools and religious groups were exempt, but that cost was way too high for many club promoters, who instead shut kids out, which led to reduced ticket sales for bands and venues. People weren’t happy.

Don’t be turned off by the “ordinance” of it all — “Let the Kids Dance!” isn’t a dry story about public policy. Featuring 30-plus interviews from those who were there, “Let the Kids Dance!” is instead a complicated story about music, freedom, expression, anger, moral panics, conflicting values, clashes between youth energy and adult control, what happens when a city tries to legislate culture and how creativity thrives despite a deck stacked against it.

“Seattle was never what the world thought it was,” said Greg Bennick, an activist who organized against the TDO and co-authored the 2002 bill that replaced it, in an episode of the podcast. “When the Nirvana album broke in 1991 and the world descended on Seattle and every band wanted to be Nirvana and every club had grunge-like, Nirvana-like-post-grunge clones playing every night, it was never what the world thought it was, because the undercurrent was always the teen dance ordinance.”

So what led to the TDO? Seminal Seattle bands like Soundgarden and Green River (members of which went on to form Mudhoney and Pearl Jam) got their starts in all-ages clubs, with the support of all-ages audiences. Seattle’s youth culture was taking over the world, and our own youth were largely shut out of it. Who would do that, and why?

Answers trace back to The Monastery, an all-ages disco/gathering space opened on Boren Avenue in 1977 by a man named George Freeman. For some, The Monastery was an inclusive refuge, particularly for young, queer people. Others saw it as a dangerous, predatory place, plagued by allegations of drug use and sexual abuse.

“As a writer and as a human being, those kinds of amorphous, morally ambiguous times and places that were also immensely creatively generative — that, to me, is fascinating,” Zwickel said in an interview.

The Monastery and Freeman, who was interviewed for the podcast, were soon in the crosshairs of parents and politicians. This strife, centered on the music scene and compounded by a youth homelessness crisis, led to the formation of an activist group called Parents In Arms, who lobbied for legislation to keep young people out of music clubs, where they feared kids would encounter drugs and predatory adults.

According to later reporting in this paper, The Monastery “was closed in 1985 after undercover police, acting on tips from concerned parents, found numerous violations of drug, liquor and prostitution laws.”

Parents In Arms’ opponents argued that making all-ages events difficult to produce would drive them further underground, and thus further endanger the youth it was trying to protect. The Seattle City Council passed the TDO unanimously in 1985.

In the podcast, Zwickel excavates the many ways the TDO affected musicians and music lovers, and some of the stories he found are wild. Firsthand recollections of violent police enforcement that happened at venues like Gorilla Gardens, a birthplace of grunge. Stories of the Seattle Police Department’s even stricter enforcement of the TDO on Seattle’s burgeoning hip-hop scene, a scene built on young people and community, than on the rock scene. The wily ways some presenters skirted rules or exploited loopholes in the law — let’s just say they got very creative when it came to finding venues — and the activism by everyday music fans and rock stars alike that finally got the TDO repealed in 2002.

“Let the Kids Dance!” is a great example of a story finding its medium; the audio ephemera is incredible, as, of course, is the music. In the episode “Kill Lou Guzzo,” we hear the story of the titular song, which local band The Dehumanizers aimed at a local media figure (and longtime Seattle Times employee) who railed against Seattle’s punk scene; the song incorporated audio clips of Guzzo’s tirades on KIRO 7. There’s audio from Seattle City Council meetings, from concerts and from a Death Cab for Cutie show at Bumbershoot in 2000, where guitarist Chris Walla called then-Mayor Paul Schell’s office from the stage, angry that he had vetoed a new, less-restrictive all-ages dance ordinance, and had the entire audience shout “[Expletive] Paul Schell!”

Throughout every episode, big questions tug at the back of your brain, connecting the past and present. What more could have grown here, had reactionary politics not interfered? Is Seattle still a music city, or are we coasting on an old reputation? If we can legislate against our creative community, can we also legislate for it in a meaningful way? Twenty-two years after its demise, what can we learn from the TDO?

“Maybe we support artists?” Zwickel said. “We see that people are going to [make music] no matter what, and it can either be an act of resistance or it can be an act of collaboration, mutual growth and flourishing. Things as they are seem pretty grim, so why not try something different, why not harness this imagination, this, like, fantasy of being a ‘city of music’ and ‘city of literature,’ and think about what that really could be, and just try it.”

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“Let the Kids Dance!”

“Let the Kids Dance!” podcast is available on kuow.org and most major audio-streaming platforms.

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