In 2003, the federal government declared DC “does not have a serious problem” with meth amphetamine.

I’m no epidemiologist or addiction expert. But I’m gonna say: DC still doesn’t have a serious meth problem.

At least, not like Bakersfield’s meth problem. After years of hearing how evil the drug is, I’ve finally seen a place crushed by it.

I visited Bakersfield, a flat, dirty town about two hours north of Los Angeles, a couple weekends ago.

Not for its meth present, but for its musical past.

It’s the birthplace of the Bakersfield Sound, a brand of hardcore country music, pioneered by Buck Owens and fellow Bakersfielder Merle Haggard, that inspired the Beatles (here they cover Buck at Shea Stadium) and Stones and Dwight Yoakam and pretty much all good country rock.

I went there with friends to go to Owens’ old recording studio, located just outside city limits in Oildale, a sad dustbowlers’ destination. He was for years the bandleader on “Hee Haw,” and recorded the musical backing for that show in this West Coast studio, then he and other players in the cast would fake strum and lip-sync over during the videotaping sessions in Nashville.

Owens died two years ago, and his studio has gone pretty much to seed and is barely in operation. We were told that Owens’ old equipment, all sorts of Fender Tweed amps and red-white-and-blue Telecasters, still sits on pallets behind some locked doors next to the main room. Much as we asked, we weren’t allowed to see this goldmine. (We did, however, get a glimpse of a gold record for, ahem, Korn, which recorded its debut here, the last big album to come out of the studio.)

But, again, this town isn’t just about music anymore. It’s about meth amphetamine, too.

“Tweakers,” as the meth heads are known, are as much a part of the landscape as dirt. And this, remember, is where Steinbeck set much of “Grapes of Wrath.”

Young tweakers, old tweakers, tweener tweakers. They’d ride past the studio on teeny little bikes, which the sound engineer told us are part of the meth culture: The last possession a tweaker sells is his bike, because the car goes early, but he still needs some sort of wheels to get to where more meth is. It was a freak show. (Owens’ old nightclub, which is still open and quite popular, is called the Crystal Palace, but that’s gotta be a coincidence.)

On a trip to a 7/11 in early one evening, it occurred to me that every other customer in the crowded store was wasted on something other than booze. The zombies in the original “Night of the Living Dead” showed more life than this bunch. I can’t get that scene out of my head since coming back.

And it’s made me wonder: Why hasn’t meth hit DC like this?

I caught the end of the 6 O’Clock news on WJLA last night, the last few seconds of a piece on Tom Sarris’ Orleans House. I couldn’t hear what the anchors were saying, but I knew the place was only newsworthy if it was shutting down. I called up the Rosslyn landmark immediately.

Sure enough: “We’re closing on January 15,” said the woman answering the phone.

It’s being being torn down to make room for a another high-rise, she said. She sounded sad.

This hits me where I live. Or, well, lived.

I went to Orleans House before my prom in 1979. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I clearly remember being at that restaurant that night in a white tux, ordering prime rib (the “Mammoth Cut”) and eating jello from a huge salad bar shaped like a boat, and, though everybody in our foursome (all of whom I saw at a party in Centreville last Saturday, coincidentally) was either 16 or 17 years old, ordering a few bottles of wine. I also recall that the wine was Lancers, a mass-marketed brand in the ’70s, and that it came in a brownish clay decanter, just like in the ads, and that it cost $8 a bottle. I’d never ordered wine before.

I remember thinking this was the high life.

Before hanging up, I told the sad-sounding lady from Orleans House that I’ll miss the place. I think what I meant was: I miss 1979. Everything but the white tux…

On an average weekday afternoon, the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Adams Morgan is closed, with locked gates, and a homeless person or two lounges on the building’s steps. In recent years, local real estate investor and developer Brian Friedman has been trying to develop this prime spot just around the corner from 18th Street’s packed bar strip.

Initial plans called for converting the church into condominiums, says Friedman. But after the District’s Historic Preservation Review Board criticized the plans, Friedman completely scrapped the original idea and came up with a brand new vision: a boutique hotel.

If the plans are approved, the hotel would expand south beyond the church’s property into a space that’s now an office building that happens to house Washington City Paper.

The building is owned by the paper’s former owners. (In July, the newspaper was sold to Creative Loafing Inc., which did not buy the building.) “It absolutely shocked me: [a hotel] there in Adams Morgan at Champlain and Euclid—are you kidding me?” says Tom Yoder, a former part-owner of City Paper. “But would I have bet $10,000 10 years ago that there would not be condominiums like there are on Champlain Street? Absolutely.”

Yoder says the company’s board of directors has approved a contract to sell Friedman the building in December 2009. Washington City Paper’s management is currently scouting for a new location.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of Ruth Samuelson’s story was mistakenly published originally.

I said goodbye today to my 2001 Toyota Corolla.

The Brookland mechanic shop that was warehousing my car told me I had to come and take whatever I wanted. They wanted my car out of their lot. They wanted it junked. I had until this afternoon. When I arrived, I didn’t need to give my name. The dude just said: “Are you Jason?” and then handed over my old keys.

Maybe they really didn’t like my car.

In the shop’s lot, the car took in sunlight through its shattered windshield. Inside, the Corolla’s spent airbags flapped over the steering wheel and glove compartment. It already looked like someone had gone through my shit. That person was probably me right after my accident.

For some reason, I decided to give the car something I had never given it before: a serious cleaning. I dug under the seats and tossed out the old water bottles, the yellowed newspapers, the brochures for seaside resorts. I balled up bits of gum wrappers, bank statements, and old notes and tossed them out. I filled two trash bags with the big stuff. I pocketed 15 cents, five mixtapes, a friend’s blanket, one whiffle-ball bat, one trash bag already filled with older junk, one pair of black socks, one tennis racket, and one BK Star Wars toy.

But my favorite find: one extremely moldy sandwich in a plastic container. Now I know why my car smelled sometimes.

I did not take the sandwich home with me.

Over the weekend, the letter carrier dropped off the most recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine at my house. This particular cover—which featured a large “RO”—bore a striking resemblance to two other prior covers from earlier this year. All three magazines are part of an extraordinarily self-congratulatory effort to celebrate the magazine’s 40th anniversary. (The Atlantic Monthly, in comparison, turned 150 this year, and this month’s issue is the only designated anniversary issue, says spokesperson Amy Thompson. Instead, The Atlantic, like GQ, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, has published archival excerpts in recent months of some of their best-loved pieces.)

In this recent Rolling Stone, which Editor and Publisher Jann Wenner promises is the last of his series, there are 25 interviews with “artists, scientist and leaders who helped shape our time.” Guess how many women are included? Well, let’s check out the first page of the table of contents. Let’s see: there’s Al Gore, Bono, Bill Maher, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, George Clooney, Eli Pariser (from Moveon.org), scientist Craig Venter, religion writer Sam Harris, Eddie Vedder, Dave Matthews, Cornel West, Jon Stewart, Paul Krugman and Tom Hanks. Men:14. Women:0.

OK. Better luck next page? Slightly better: Billie Joe Armstrong (of Green Day), Kanye West, Chris Rock, writers Dave Eggers and William Gibson, Bill Gates, Bruce Springsteen, and Bill Clinton join Meryl Streep, physicist Lisa Randall and Jane Goodall. The final tally comes to Men: 22. Women: 3.

And all I have to say is: seriously? I don’t think it would have been reaching to swap in a Nancy Pelosi or a Tina Fey for Eddie Vedder or Bill Maher. I mean, was Oprah Winfrey really that busy? What about Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America? I called Rolling Stone for comment and to ask about the editorial process for how the list was composed. Spokesperson Beth Jacobson said she believed the top editors—Jann Wenner, Will Dana, Joe Levy, and Eric Bates—compiled the list. (For the record, no female journalists interviewed any of the subjects.) As for a response to my query about the lack of female interview subjects, I got none.

On Sunday, Mark Opsasnick spoke at Cameron Perks Coffeehouse about his latest book, The Lizard King Was Here: The Life and Times of Jim Morrison in Alexandria, Virginia, concerning the dead Doorsman’s school days at George Washington High School. Three of Jimbo’s classmates showed up to testify: Randy Maney, Bill Thomas, and Stan Durkee.

Randy called Morrison a “great writer”; Stan called him a “great intellectual.” But among such revelations that Morrison “hated rock ‘n’ roll” as a teen—preferring poetry and Kerouak Kerouac, and opted for thriftwear as opposed to the “Gant shirt” crowd—Bill Thomas related an alarming tale of a Morrison encounter—in 1991.

While taking his son Brian to baseball camp in Arizona, father and son stopped at a cafe in Flagstaff that curiously featured a photo of Morrison in its ad. Mentioning his personal connection to the rock god apparently freaked the waitress out, for she immediately left and surreptitiously made a phone call. Moments later, a hairy, shaggy, bum-like personage slipped quietly into the cafe and sat in the booth behind the Thomas’ with his back to Bill. Son Brian insisted that it was Morrison. Bill resisted turning around, and when he did—the ghost was gone.

Though Bill Thomas offered the tale somewhat reluctantly and with a shrug, as if he didn’t really believe it, he says his son still insists the apparition was Morrison. The story does give hope to those who have kept the Doors on the charts 36 years after the “official” death. (To that end, Rhino has just released yet another best-of collection.)

If true, it could be bad news for the Soft Parade. But you can still get your Lizard King fix when “the world-famous Doors tribute show” plays the State Theater this Friday, Oct. 5.

CORRECTION: Due to an error by poster Dave Nuttycombe, this post originally mispelled the name of Jack Kerouac.

In the pantheon of D.C. area weird religious places to go and gawk, you’ve got the George Washington Masonic Memorial, the Oz-like LDS Washington D.C. Temple Visitors’ Center and now L. Ron Hubbard’s house.

A bold, swanky sign went up less than a week ago in front of 1812 19th Street NW in Dupont, site of the “founding church” of Scientology that Hubbard set up in 1955. The house belonged to the church until the mid-’70s, when it was sold and reverted to a residence. It was repurchased by the Church of Scientology three years ago, according to acting director of the L. Ron Hubbard House and chairman of the Friends of L. Ron Hubbard, Bill Runyon. It took about a year to restore the house to L. Ron’s use of it in 1957, which is around when he performed the first Scientology marriage there and a few years before the FBI raided it, seeking clues about suspected ties to Communism. And now you can, by appointment, “walk through the Hubbard Communications Office, past the desk where Ron’s personal secretary typed his policies and technical bulletins and transcribed his recorded lectures.”

It sounds scintillating, doesn’t it? Tours have been offered for a few months now, but there was only a small temporary sign announcing their arrival until Runyon and friends convinced the city and the ANC to approve the new sign. Hubbard, who was a teenager on the streets of D.C., tearing it up as a young Eagle Scout, is a fascinating figure whose history has long been up for debate. Check out his Wiki. Can’t make time for the tour? Stay tuned. I’m going on Friday. It’s part of my passive-aggressive attempts to figure out my only brother, who envisions himself the L. Ron for a new age. Be afraid, folks. I know I am.

Don’t tear down MLK, the D.C. Historic Preservation Review Board said on Thursday.

The board granted historic-landmark status to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, giving the deteriorating glass-and-steel building a legal protection against getting demolished.

Former Mayor Anthony A. Williams broached a plan last year to sell the building and build a new central library on the old Convention Center site. The board’s decision came a day after the Washington Examiner reported the Adrian Fenty administration’s decision to shelve Williams’ plans.

Now, thanks to the efforts of former D.C. Public Library trustee Alex Padro, the library has been protected as D.C.’s most notable example of modernist architecture; Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed it in 1972. It is also the only downtown edifice that bears King’s name.

The city supported the historic-landmark application, something that Padro says could not have happened when Williams was mayor. “For years there was this battle raging between Williams and the library preservation and advocacy community,” Padro says. “Finally, [now] that we have a new administration, and Williams is out of the way…we get the board to approve it.”

Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper says there are no plans yet for any relocation of the library’s services. As for the building, the board will now have to approve any change to the first floor or the exterior. “We don’t know at this point that [MLK] will not always be the library,” Cooper says. “We also don’t know at this point that [it] will always be the library.”

No words evoke the ’70s and whiteness better than “Robby Benson.”

While Googling for a story about pickup hoops, I came across a clip of the closing credits from One on One, a movie that some folks rank among the top basketball flicks of all time. Here, Benson schools Annette O’Toole while flaunting a shaggy ’do and ballhandling skills both influenced by Pistol Pete Maravich. Warning: With Seals and Crofts providing the soundtrack, this could send viewers of a certain age into nostalgic shock.

The list of Most Endangered Places in D.C. announced yesterday by the D.C. Preservation League includes some interesting choices. You’ve got your graffitied frescoes in the old Franklin School at 13th and K Streets NW (now a homeless shelter). You’ve got your Takoma Theater in Takoma Park, built in 1923, which should be preserved because, among other reasons, it’s been used “by independent filmmakers for film previews, including Chris Rock.” Its current owner has been trying to make the case to level it.

Those seem worthy enough. The one I don’t get is the 1900 block of Martin Luther King Avenue SE, buildings only a crackhead could love. The fight to save this major eyesore at the intersection of MLK and Good Hope Road has been going on since at least 1997. And guess what? Ten years later, they’re still vacant, taped-off, and burned out. A fire gutted the buildings more than two years ago, so tell me again why they’re so historically significant?

It seems they are, according to the preservation league, “contributing buildings owned and managed by the DC Housing and Community Development (DCHCD) agency are contributing structures in the Anacostia Historic District, listed in the DC Inventory of Historic Places and the National Register for Historic Places.”

Who gives a fuck? Tear them down and build something the residents of Anacostia actually need and can feel good about. There are fights worth having to preserve historic D.C. This isn’t one of them.

Some more finds from the St. Elizabeths archives:

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The Depression didn’t seem so depressing for Washingtonians according to a March 13, 1935, page from the Washington Post. (Once again, sent to us by tireless truth-hunter Jeff Krulik. Should we add Jeff to the masthead?)

In addition to Ed Sullivan’s breathless “Broadway” column (”We are living in a fright-wig era, populated by such ‘colorful’ gentlemen as Huey Long, Dizzy Dean, and Max Baer“), the page is half-filled with 17 ads for various nightclubs, restaurants, and other establishments offering live music and entertainment.

The Jockey Club at 5th Street and Florida Avenue NE, under the management of “Unk Grinder” (quotes in original) offered “hot music,” “exhilarating drinks,” and music by the Jockey Club Orchestra, featuring Ray Rannie, vocalist.

It’s three floor shows daily at Child’s Gingham Club at 1423 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, where luncheon is 40 cents, dinner 60. Among the “5 Big Acts” are Fern and Lorraine (”Musical Comedy Misses in Smart Dances”), Verne and Arlene (”Direct from the Deauville, Miami”), and Mary-Jo Hamilton (”Red-Hot Songs”).

At Cafe La Paree, “Washington’s smartest restaurant and supper club” at 14th and H Streets NW, there is “never a cover charge” for Emory Daugherty and his Orchestra’s “dazzling floor shows.”

The Lotus at 14th Street and New York Avenue NW presents an “exotic review” featuring 16 stars three times daily featuring “Broadway Dancing Dolls” and adagio dancers Charles and Celeste, with Bill Strickland and his Capitolians. My next band will be called the Capitolians.

Club Troika at 1011 Connecticut Ave. NW also offers reviews three times daily “in the gay Gypsy manner.”

The Shoreham in Woodley Park continued offering high-toned entertainment into the 1980s. (Mark Russell was resident there for 20 years.) In ’35, there was ballroom dancing, German dancing, and the comedy team of Barrett and Smith.

Over at the swanky Mayflower Lounge, Sid Cowen “sings them all,” all being Russian, Italian, German, Spanish, and French tunes. For reservations, call Teddy at District 3000.

Off-topic item for the copy desk: When did clue stop being spelled “clew”? As in the headline, “Clew Claimed in Girl’s Death,” and another story involving a “church scuffle” in Hagerstown.

From the H-DC list comes this tidbit: The Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington has just launched an online exhibition, Half a Day on Sunday: Jewish-Owned “Mom and Pop” Grocery Stores. It grew out of an actual exhibit once shown the the Society; now it’s been converted to an online exhibit complete with photos, video, and a searchable database of Jewish-owned groceries.

Sadly, there’s few remnants left of what the exhibit documents. Supermarkets have long since killed off most corner grocers of any ethnicity. But Magruder’s and and Chevy Chase Supermarket have Jewish roots. And then there’s this tidbit: “In 1936, Nehemiah Cohen and Samuel Lehrman chose Washington for their new business venture and opened the first Giant self-service supermarket at Georgia Avenue and Park Road, N.W.”

As for the name of the project:

The grocery cooperative became a social group as well as a business community. At annual banquets and beach outings, grocers and their families established and nurtured a sense of community. On Sunday afternoons, many stores closed, and families picnicked at Hains Point or in Rock Creek Park, or had a rare meal out at Solomons—a kosher restaurant on Kennedy Street, N.W.

Kudos to the JHS on a fantastic piece of community history.

As reported last week in the New York Times and the Akron Beacon Journal, Alan Canfora—who was shot in the wrist during the Kent State shootings in 1970—recently released a recording of the incident in which, he claims, the listener can hear members of the Ohio National Guard being ordered to fire upon students. The digitally-enhanced 20-second clip comes from a 30-minute-long recording of the shootings originally made by former Kent State student Terry Strubbe, who recorded the incident on a reel-to-reel machine from his dorm room.

The article goes on to detail where and how Canfora obtained a copy of the original recording, and how he hopes the clip will convince the government to re-open the case. An interesting side note to the story, however, is who Canfora turned to for help with the recording: Dischord Records co-owner and Evens guitarist Ian MacKaye. It’s a revelation that has many people, including those at Idolator.com, scratching their heads:

There’s no explanation of how MacKaye got involved with all of this; perhaps Canfora thought he’d found a political ally in the Minor Threat mastermind, or perhaps he was just really impressed with the remastering job on In On The Kill Taker.

According to MacKaye, he and Canfora met years ago, when Fugazi performed at a benefit show for Canfora’s Kent May 4 Center in the mid-’90s. “He called me asking for advice, and I offered to take the tape to Inner Ear Studios and give him some thoughts on it,” MacKaye says.

“I remember Kent State, when I was eight years old, and it affected me profoundly. It was one of the first times I realized that the government was capable of killing its own people,” MacKaye says. “I studied Kent State in the ’80s. I was fascinated by it. But I’m not as well-acquainted with the case. I wasn’t there. He got shot…He can picture shit that I can’t.”

Though Canfora’s recording is bound to ignite some controversy, MacKaye is quick to downplay his own involvement in the events leading up to its release. “I’m just helping out a friend,” he says. MacKaye says he took the recording to the studio and simply adjusted a few EQ levels and attempted to filter out some of the excess noise.

According to several news sources, Canfora is reported as saying he could hear the words “Right here. Get set. Point. Fire,” yelled out in the enhanced clip. For his part, MacKaye isn’t as adamant as Canfora regarding the contents of the recording. “You can hear someone say, ‘Right here.’…You clearly hear a cadence,” he says. “The problem with the ‘Fire’ is that there’s a woman yelling. When I sent it back, I said, ‘Hey, I don’t think it’s totally evident that you hear a ‘Fire,’ but what you do hear certainly merits a review.’”

Coincident with Mark Jenkins’ erudite history of the Town Theater and downtown development, a bit of e-mail arrived in my inbox from indefatigable researcher Jeff Krulik. Jeff enjoys sending around scans of newspaper movie listing pages from days gone by. On the page from the June 2, 1972, Washington Post, there are several ads for businesses in the Town’s neighborhood that were closed by D.C.’s downtown redevelopment. These two are most prominent on the page and most typical of what the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation sought to abolish.

A couple things to note: In all my years of reading, listening, watching, discussing, performing, and studying comedy, I have never heard of the “fabulous” Strong Bros. Also, the original subhed on the Gayety ad surely read “The most erotic flick of the year.” F-l-i-c-k. The Post was, even more so in 1972, a family newspaper.