Almost Famous

Mark Wenner, the lead singer and soul of the legendary Bethesda band The Nighthawks, has never wavered from his belief that satisfaction comes from playing the music, not from money or fame

By Meredith Carlson Daly

On the edge of a wooded park in Gaithersburg, crammed between a 6-foot privacy fence and a neighboring townhouse, Mark Wenner takes center stage—or center porch in this case.

His tattooed arms are outstretched as he muscles the harmonica and leads his band, The Nighthawks, through a set of raucous, rocking dance tunes. In the sweltering summer heat, the private birthday bash is off to a swaying, swinging pitch with Wenner and his crew pounding out a fast pace of Carl Perkins, Muddy Waters and Elvis songs, sprinkling a Happy Birthday riff around “30 Days” by Chuck Berry.

It is an unlikely scene for these four middle-aged rockers—their drums, electric amplifiers and sound system spread out along the side of a garage. But this guttural music and the man who has maintained it for decades know how to rev up a crowd, even a small, suburban one with lawn chairs and coolers of ice water.

Since 1972, over the band’s 33-year history, private, back-yard barbeques for longtime fans have become a staple for the band’s sizzling fare.

In July, The Nighthawks played two back-yard parties in one day—70 miles apart. Fans who grew up listening to The Nighthawks at the old Twist and Shout or the Psyche Delly, both in Bethesda; or at the Cellar Door, Desperados and The Bayou in Georgetown, now have their own kids and can afford to relive their youth—in the privacy of their homes.

‘The Nighthawks were God’

Josh Arnson of D.C., one of those stalwart fans, grew up in Bethesda with The Nighthawks: “To a 14-year-old growing up in Bethesda, The Nighthawks were God,” Arnson says.

Arnson saw his hometown band at a Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School reunion this summer—a pig roast in Derwood—where classmates hired The Nighthawks for a real homecoming.

For Arnson, the reunion with The Nighthawks was a religious experience, of sorts. “It was like a Catholic nun going to see the Lourdes Cathedral,” says Arnson, a one-time musician himself.

Wenner, 57, had his own religious experience with music at a young age in 1950s Bethesda. His icon: Elvis Presley. When his dad had gone off to work in D.C. as a government lawyer and his psychotherapist mom was busy with patients, young Wenner took hold of the radio and some raucous rockabilly took hold of his young soul. “I was a rock ’n’ roll animal by the time I was 8,” he says.

It wasn’t long before the rambunctious boy was greasing back his brown wavy hair, joining the Shamrocks, a local gang, and cranking the sounds of soon-to-be legends, B. B. King, James Brown and Jimmy Reed.

Now, more than 40 years later, Wenner, the founder, lead singer, manager and marketer of The Nighthawks, has become a legend of his own in his hometown, across the East Coast and as far away as Europe and Japan.

He has replaced the greased-back look with a goatee and arms “sleeved up” with elaborate tattoos. Onstage he wears a black shirt with orange flames shooting up the front. But the eclectic dance music Wenner started playing at high school proms around Bethesda and Chevy Chase decades ago remains his signature identity—one that has kept him, a harmonica and the band on the road in bars and back yards earning a living full time, year round.

‘World’s Greatest Bar Band’

Wenner has brushed up against fame numerous times—coming close to a “big label deal” with Mercury Records in the 1980s, but he and his band relish, even prefer, their hard-won reputation as “World’s Greatest Bar Band.”

“The crux of this type of music is honky-tonk. It sounds the best in a place that isn’t the cleanest, that is loud and raucous,” Wenner says. “That to me is a very specific skill that I am proud of.”

While fans use grandiose adjectives and titles to describe the Hawks, the band members themselves have their feet firmly planted on the floor, albeit a sticky floor.

“A lot of people always say ‘Why didn’t you have that big hit, why didn’t you make it?’” says 56-year-old drummer Pete Ragusa, of Silver Spring. “They see it only in terms of the national big thing in the sky.”

As Wenner’s right hand and loyal business partner, Ragusa, who has been with the band since 1974 and is the longest-serving Hawk, sees it differently. “I know bands that have had big hits and—poof! they’re gone—overnight sensations, then off the radar,” Ragusa says. “We’ve managed to maintain a career for 30-plus years—that’s success.”

The band still packs in about 200 concerts a year, traveling weekend nights from spots like the Cave Run Rock-n-Blues-n-BBQ Festival in Kentucky to the Boston Harbor Hotel in Massachusetts to Bourbon Street in upstate New York. In between are the private back-yard parties and jaunts to Europe where they still tour.

In the Hawks’ heyday, from 1976 to 1986, the foursome performed in 48 states, 300 shows a year.

One habit has not changed since they first explored the road decades ago. When they are done playing, they head home, no matter what time or where they are.  “We don’t go to sleep, someone starts driving,” Wenner says. “I usually like the first shift because I’m always wound up.”

Even after a tour in California a few years ago, the four headed back in the middle of the night. “There’s no point in wasting a night of sleep,” Wenner says.

Time is not something Wenner wastes. He estimates the band has performed more than 8,000 gigs over his career.

‘Having a damn good time’

Wenner has had friends whose fame has done them in and he is wiser as a witness to their demise. “I’ve watched heroes ruin their personal lives because of heroin addiction, or suicide,” Wenner says, in the living room of his modest Kensington home near the Wheaton mall. “This is all I ever wanted to do. I am fulfilling my childhood ambition. To me, playing swing music to 500 people doing the jitterbug, singing an Elvis song, it doesn’t get better than that.”

Wenner had this epiphany at a recent gig at the newly remodeled Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park where his faithful fans came to dance and jig to the familiar beat. “Age doesn’t matter with them,” says Nighthawk devotee Josephine Ross, 70, of Greenbelt. “I’ve been listening to them for 20 years. I’ll go to bars to see them, and I am the oldest one on the dance floor. But it’s not like anyone notices they’re young and I’m old. You just always have a good time.”

That’s just what Wenner has been doing: having a damn good time.

Not only did he get to play his favorite blues tunes to a trusty crowd in his comfortable hometown, Wenner got the special privilege of riding his prized ’55 Harley right up to the hall and parking it outside—with no worries. “What else could I want—a pastrami sandwich on rye backstage?” Wenner asks rhetorically, mocking his Jewish roots.

It is his self-deprecating humor and a surprisingly modest ego that have kept him buoyant and resilient through the ebb and flow of the turbulent music industry. In his four decades, he has recorded 20 albums, played with legends Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Linda Ronstadt and many others.

Ivy Leaguer and ‘anti-snob’

What many fans don’t know is that the rocker has intellectual roots—he’s an Ivy Leaguer, a 1972 graduate of Columbia University in New York.

Wenner’s grandfather was Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist Movement, which advocated a nonorthodox approach to Judaism. Wenner shares many characteristics with his influential maternal grandfather, who sported a white goatee. Kaplan received his master’s degree at Columbia University, while Wenner’s father, Seymour Wenner, was a Harvard man.

Wenner himself attended Columbia during the fitful anti-Vietnam war movement and was among those arrested during the infamous Hamilton Hall 1968 campus protest.

Wenner, like his defiant grandfather, bucked the family’s wishes that he pursue medical school, and instead returned to Bethesda to ride motorcycles and start a blues band. “I knew what my DNA and upbringing were,” Wenner says. “I knew other people’s fathers didn’t go to Harvard. I knew other people’s houses didn’t have as many books or bookshelves, but that never mattered to me.

“I was very much anti-snob.”

Passion for music, not money

Unlike some of his peers, Wenner’s first passion is music, not money. There have been some big money makers in Japan and, back in the 1980s, in Atlanta when the band earned $10,000 over two days. But overall, Wenner says, “We’re still scuffling about at almost the bottom of the ladder.”

The band started in the early ’70s earning $150 a night for weekend gigs, “which was pretty good money back then,” Wenner says. Now they charge about $1,500, which lately has barely covered gas for Wenner’s guzzling 1998 Dodge van.

The band has been making about the same money for the past 25 years, he says.  “We’re grossing less than we made in the ’80s,” Wenner says. “We were the hottest thing on the Pike from ’76 to ’86.”

The band’s expenses were much higher back then. The band traveled with a road crew and a huge sound system large enough to perform in a 1,000-seat hall. Today, the band sometimes earns $2,500 a gig, but they can earn less than $1,500 on a weeknight. “We’re earning a living,” Wenner says. “It’s just not the most critical factor.”

A key to making $5,000 or more a night is one big hit, usually from an original song, Wenner says. He never got into writing his own music, he says, because whenever he thought of a song, it was already done. He is quick to point out that Elvis never had an original song.

“The reason why we were pulling in big bucks in the ’80s is because of our popularity,” he says. High school kids around the Washington area would hear the Hawks’ albums, like “Jacks & Kings” on the radio and demand to hear it. When they went off to college, they took their Nighthawk T-shirts and arranged for the band to play at their colleges. Now, many of them are successful college graduates celebrating their 50th birthday bashes and hiring the Hawks to play in their homes.

To boost their income, Wenner, Ragusa, and band mates Johnny Castle, 56, and Paul Bell, 50, have a few side gigs, teaching, and accompanying other musicians on albums. The band was featured in the TV show “Homicide” a few years ago. Ten years ago, Wenner played in the background of a Wrangler jeans ad, which paid about $500.

Wenner estimates the biggest selling album, “Jacks & Kings,” sold up to 20,000 copies. Even today, sales don’t bring in many profits, he says. 

No plans to slow down

Wenner and his Hawks are one of the longest running bands in the country, and have no plans to slow down. Wenner says they can’t afford to be just “weekend warriors” staying home during the week and performing only on the weekends.

But they have become leery of some clubs, after some of the crazy places that have booked them. “We’ve played in cowboy joints in Cheyenne, Wyo., hardcore biker joints down South and extreme yuppie sit-down-and-clap places up North,” Wenner says.

One of the strangest experiences they had was playing for a low-level gangster club owner one weekend. Wenner says the owner became enraged and threatened to shoot Wenner and his band after learning that the Hawks were playing at a competitor’s club across town. “He felt some kind of betrayal,” Wenner says. “Gangsters feel like they own entertainers.”

Onstage, he reminisces with the crowd about the old Bethesda in the days when his onetime dog Doobie, was famous for strolling up Wisconsin Avenue to score some scraps from Lil’ Tavern.

“Anyone out there went to Bladensburg High School?” Wenner calls from the microphone at the Greenbelt Labor Day Festival. Cheers and hollers echo across the lawn as Wenner introduces Ragusa, the drummer from Cheverly, who graduated from Bladensburg High in 1967. Wenner joked that Ragusa used to get beat up in Greenbelt.

“I grew up in Bethesda, I used to go to Rockville and get beat up,” Wenner says, though his muscular, tattooed arms belie his schmoozing abilities.

Still, the crowd is engaged, cheering and calling out songs. One drunken fellow yells out to Wenner who tells the crowd he has been asked to play “Rawhide” by the Blues Brothers. The crowd laughs as Wenner gently explains that the song was actually a theme from a TV show. He then leads the band into a soulful Southern ballad, a Johnny Cash number and set pleaser, “Big River.”

“We’re kind of the last of a generation,” says Ragusa. “We’ve been lucky enough to be with the artists that did all this music, like Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Otis Rush. Muddy would get upset if we didn’t call him on his birthday.”

Ragusa remembers a time in the 1980s, when the Hawks were hugely popular in the D.C. area, and he took a date to an upscale restaurant in Washington. As he walked in, an upstairs bartender yelled his name. “We were gods,” Ragusa says. “I was aware of it, but Mark and I never thought we were gods.”

Ragusa is still amazed at the record turnout at what he thought would be the band’s last concert in 1986 at Carter Barron Amphitheatre in Washington. Their longtime guitar player and co-founder Jimmy Thackery was leaving the band in a bitter breakup, wanting to go solo, and the Hawks invited some of the early players to accompany them.

After their encore, a throng of more than 6,000 roared, clambering for more; Ragusa spotted his father and two brothers in the center of the crowd. “I get choked up thinking about it,” says the husky, bald drummer. “My dad was overwhelmed by it. It’s a moment I will never forget.”

Their reverence for their local fans—an extended family—has kept followers, such as Bill Barker of Greenbelt, loyal. Barker has been following the band since the first regular gig on Saturday nights at The Graffiti on 22nd and K streets in Washington. “My friends told me this was a good band to dance to and I’ve been dancing ever since,” Barker says.

Short and heavyset, Barker is usually one of the first to dance. “His timing is awesome,” Barker says of Wenner. “He is to the blues what Frank Sinatra is to jazz.”

Older, gentler Wenner

Actually, Wenner is to music, what Wenner is to life—defiant, nonconformist and fiercely independent. While gregarious and at ease onstage, in his living room, without his harmonica or a microphone, he is subdued, more comfortable rustling with his four dogs than talking about himself.

His white rambler house resembles his personal philosophy—decorated simply and sparingly. The front porch or “the warehouse,” as he calls it, is clogged with boxes from shipments either for the band or for his bikes. When he’s not touring, he’s building a motorcycle.

The older, gentler Wenner keeps his formidable stash of classic motorcycles locked in sheds, and refrains from revving them up as much in the middle of the night, after coming home from gigs, because “it’s not acceptable behavior.” 

Wenner settled down a decade or so ago and married former TV anchor and local personality Kathy Brown. The couple has strong ties to the region. Kathy Wenner, 47, who grew up in Arlington, jokes that she graduated from Yorktown High School “a year behind Katie Couric.”

After a career in television and radio reporting at Washington’s DC-101 FM, and then as a morning news anchor at a CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Va., “Kathy Brown” traded her morning television shift for an evening copy desk job at the Washington Post and became “Kathy Wenner.”

She married Wenner 12 years ago, after following the band as a college fan. She marvels at his happiness and his ability to share it from the stage. “He just loves to play,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if he has 20,000 listeners or 200.”

The pair share a passion for literature—Faulkner and Hemingway are favorites. They have the same late-night schedule, both work weekends, and sometimes race to beat each other home by 2 a.m. Kathy tries to get to as many local shows as she can, but goes on her own and teases her husband about his lifestyle and her place in it. “It’s the band, the motorcycles, the dogs, then me,” she says with a heartfelt laugh. “He says it’s not true, but I know it is.”

Kathy says she has never longed to travel with her husband on tour. “It’s a bunch of guys on a stinky van,” she says, offering her broad smile. “Not much fun.”

In the fall, they spend a few weeks alone with the dogs at her father’s cabin in Vermont. “It’s a chance for these guys to rock ’n’ roll,” Mark Wenner says, motioning to the affectionate bevy of dogs draped around his legs. “It’s like dog camp for them and we’re the counselors.”

‘Definitely the bad boy’

But the younger, not-so-gentle Wenner, who wasn’t too concerned with “appropriate behavior,” found a constant companion with dogs and a steely disdain for the law. If he were a teen today, Wenner says, they would label him a juvenile delinquent and fill him with Prozac.

He says he wantonly vandalized cars and his Bethesda neighborhood. The police were often questioning him for crimes, some of which he didn’t commit. His highly educated parents didn’t know what to do with him. “My mother was a psychotherapist to everyone else, to me she was just a distraught mom,” Wenner says.

He was definitely the bad boy, says his younger brother Adam. “Mark was a troubled kid,” Adam says. Mark was more interested in being accepted by the Shamrocks, one of the local gangs. Mark described himself as “hostile, anti-social,” a period in his life when his hormones went “chemically ballistic.” He wore the green, corduroy varsity jacket from the Shamrocks, even though his parents forbid him from ironing the Shamrock leaf onto the jacket. He wasn’t allowed to wear it at school, so he wore it inside out. 

He would tell his parents that he was going to see double-feature movies in Bethesda and instead head downtown to the Howard Theater in D.C. with his friends to hear Jimmy Reed or B.B. King.

Then, in ninth grade at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, he discovered books. With the help of his English teacher, Bruce Lewis, he fell for Hemingway and The Old Man and The Sea. He dropped the greased hair and became a beatnik with scruffy long hair and scraggly clothes. “That ’50s existential man alone facing the world and surviving,” resonated with the teenage Wenner, he recalls. The Roy Orbison song “Only the Lonely” was a hit on the pop charts. “That whole mystique, he’s just a rebel, he’s just misunderstood,” hooked him.

Lewis got him addicted to books, of which he had a plentiful supply in his home—and Wenner ditched the Shamrocks. “I tried to be a greaser because I was afraid of being a nerd and reading all the time,” Wenner says. “But the greasers ultimately rejected me. They really didn’t want to talk about The Old Man and The Sea.”

Wenner took his passion for literature to heart—literally. His tattoos across his torso and arms represent his homage to Hemingway and Faulkner. On one arm he has an illustration from Blake’s famous painting, “The Ancient of Days.” Wenner joked with Muddy Waters that Muddy was black, but Wenner with his tattoos was “colored.”

‘Happiest person I know’

Those who have known Wenner from the early days know that since he first picked up a harmonica, he has remained the same iconoclastic, free-spirited soul. “Mark is the same [as] he was in eighth grade,” says Adam Wenner, who traded his college band gig for a fast-paced, high-paying job as a corporate lawyer.

“Mark is the happiest person I know,” Adam says, to which Mark replied, in a needling, older-brother-kind-of-way, “Yeah, I’m a lot happier than him.”

Although his band has taken him across the country and around Asia and Europe, Wenner’s Bethesda-area roots—and long-time friends—are important to him. One such friend, Greg Samuels of Frederick County, shared a passion for the same girlfriend and motorcycles in the early 1970s. Samuels now works as a mechanic at the National Institutes of Health, and is a loyal groupie of the Hawks, despite his dislike for all but their music.

“I don’t like bars, don’t like to drink, don’t like to travel,” Samuels says, smiling at the irony. He went to the first Nighthawk concert in February 1972, and says he hasn’t missed one local gig. He is indebted to Wenner for introducing him to the music of blues legends John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Carl Perkins.

For Arnson, the Bethesda fan who gave up his band and is in the corporate world, Wenner represents those who pursue their passion, despite the demands and definitions society has for mainstream success. “Once you lose those star-struck hopes of wanting to be the next Bruce Springsteen, you’re just playing because you love to play,” says Arnson. “Then it doesn’t matter if you are at Carnegie Hall or some kid’s pig roast.”

Meredith Carlson Daly is a freelance writer living in Silver Spring.