Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.
In ancient Greek literature, the lost city of Atlantis was a fictional island that sank into the Atlantic Ocean. In late ’70s Washington, D.C., Atlantis was briefly the namesake of a key venue for the city’s punk scene, which itself was the namesake of a song from one of the scene’s most beloved bands. Appropriately, that song remained lost, or at least unreleased, for over a decade after it was recorded.
The Atlantis was the name of a club on F Street in downtown Washington, D.C. from 1977 to 1979, and some of the earliest Bad Brains shows took place there. The first time the quartet recorded a demo at Inner Ear Studios, which at the time was just a 4-track in Don Zientara’s basement, their repertoire included “At the Atlantis.” Every line of the song ends with “at the Atlantis tonight,” although frontman Paul “H.R.” Hudson’s vocal performance is such a blur that it’s hard to discern any other lyrics for sure—the lyric transcription site Genius asserts that he simply repeats “We’re living at the Atlantis tonight.”
By the end of 1979, the Atlantis had closed for remodeling, and Bad Brains, running out of venues where they were welcome in their hometown, had written the anthem “Banned in D.C.” and relocated to New York City. Remarkable video footage of a Bad Brains show at CBGBs in December ’79 features H.R. doing a backflip in a suit and tie during a blazing performance of “At the Atlantis.”
Setlist.fm’s last recorded instance of Bad Brains performing “At the Atlantis” was in March 1980. Two months later, the Atlantis reopened as the Nightclub 9:30, eventually relocating to a larger building under the name 9:30 Club. Bad Brains never recorded “At the Atlantis” for any of the band’s proper studio albums, perhaps simply because the club they wrote the song about was no longer called the Atlantis. So most of the world never heard the song until the 1979 demo was released as Black Dots in 1996. In 2023, the owners of the 9:30 Club opened a smaller nearby venue that was named the Atlantis in tribute to the ’70s club. Bad Brains, who last toured in 2017, have never performed at the new Atlantis.
Three more essential Bad Brains deep cuts:
“Attitude”
“Attitude” was the first of several Bad Brains songs where H.R. sang about ‘P.M.A.’—as in “positive mental attitude,” a concept popularized in the 1930s by self-help author Napoleon Hill.
“Re-Ignition”
“Re-Ignition” from 1986’s I Against I has become an unlikely hip-hop staple, sampled in songs by Chubb Rock, Lil Jon, and 2 Black 2 Strong.
“Until Kingdom Comes”
2007’s Build a Nation features some of the band’s finest traditional reggae material. “Until Kingdom Comes” was bolstered by a lush arrangement including a horn section, keyboardist Jamie Saft, and percussionist ‘Nathaniel Hornblower’ (an alias of the album’s producer, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys).
