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What do baseball Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle and Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant have in common? Both were thrown out of The Bayou.

A decade since the last lusty notes stroked the irreverent, iconic Georgetown music hall, tales and echoes linger. Metro Teleproductions Inc. has gathered them in full and has begun post-production on an 80-minute documentary titled The Bayou: And the Ghost Played On.

From murder to redemption, from jazz to rock and roll, from striptease to Kiss, from Mister T to misadventure, from business-as-usual to anything-goes, the documentary, like The Bayou itself, will arouse the senses.

“We got to like the club,” author Stephen King says in one interview, “the way that serial killers get to like what they do.” Perpetrators drew from every corner across five decades. John and Ted Kennedy, LBJ, Bob Dole were earnest jazz patrons in the 1950s, sampling Count Basie, Buddy Rich, Lester Young, Joe Rinaldi and horn-playing prankster Wild Bill Whelan.

The Georgetown club, once an after-hours joint called The Hideaway, had been shuttered and left for dead after a late-night mob hit in 1953. Renamed and resuscitated by new owners Vince and Tony Tramonte and, for a time, partner Mike Munley, The Bayou would become Washington’s bedrock music hall, offering a heady mix of national and regional stars of varied genres.

Through it all, incongruities lapped the Bayou like the Potomac tide. Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper saw shows there; in the early 1960s, stripper Julie Gibson bedazzled crowds with her “tasteful” acts; actor Dustin Hoffman was carded. Sober workers and performers cited unexplained noises and events, the perceived doings of 1953 shooting victim George Harding, warmly dubbed George the Ghost. And, as the British pop invasion changed the music landscape, The Bayou shed its jazz-wrought identity by introducing the Telstars, the house rock-and-roll band for three years. It was only the beginning.

Foreigner made its club debut there, the band members so nervous their road manager had to decal footprints from dressing room to stage. The Bayou encompassed U2’s first American show, Bono and mates opening for the Slickee Boys; Billy Joel’s live cuts that shaped the album Songs in the Attic; Bruce Springsteen’s unexpected appearance during a Robbin Thompson concert, and so much more. One night, Joan Jett and her teenage girlfriends, The Runaways, had a late performance for a Bayou show, stoking a near-riot. Kiss had the amps so juiced that areas of the city lost electricity.

Ten years since the gritty, iconic Georgetown jazz club-turned-rock hall was sold and razed and the K Street waterfront changed, its embers still glow. MTI, in conjunction with the Potomac River Jazz Club, seeks financial contributions to help fund the estimable cost of producing the documentary. Because of the PRJC’s 501(c) (3) status, any such contributions are fully tax-deductible. Come on in, you won’t be turned away. Anyone with anecdotes or recollections (offbeat or otherwise) of The Bayou can nourish the narrative. You can never overfeed a ghost.

Anyone with questions or stories about the Bayou should contact Dave Lilling at (301) 608-9077, or by email, here.