On the afternoon of June 26, 1966, a 15-year-old kid from Chevy Chase reached through the open window of an equipment van parked behind Washington Coliseum, pulled out a loose canvas bag from the front seat, and bolted into a waiting cab. He didn’t know it yet, but inside the bag was Brian Jones’s custom-built electric dulcimer.
A Rolling Stone had just been robbed in what we now call NoMa.
Jones used the dulcimer to play “Lady Jane,” from Aftermath, on the Stones’ 1966 American tour. Now a teenager was riding home to suburban Maryland with it in a canvas bag.
What happened next is one of the strangest episodes in DC rock history. It involves a teenage girl’s letter to the Washington Evening Star, a 22-year-old music columnist, a record store on Wisconsin Avenue, a chauffeured Bentley from the British Embassy, and a follow-up caper that got six teenagers backstage at the Beatles’ last DC concert.
The Coliseum the Stones played
Before we get to the record store and the Bentley, it helps to know a little about the building where this happened.
The building at 1132 3rd Street NE opened in 1941 as Uline Arena, a barrel-vaulted concrete shed built by a Dutch-born ice-making magnate named Migiel Uline who had cornered the market on artificial ice in the District. The architect was a local guy named Joseph Harry “Joe” Lapish. The engineering, a thin-shell concrete roof system called Zeiss-Dywidag, came out of Chicago. The opening attraction in February 1941 was Sonja Henie skating her ice revue in front of about four thousand people.
For the next two decades the place hosted ice shows, boxing, wrestling, rodeos (Roy Rogers brought Trigger in 1944) and midget auto racing. The Washington Lions played hockey there, and the Washington Capitols, coached early on by Red Auerbach, called it home through 1951. Earl Lloyd became the NBA’s first Black player as a Capitol on October 31, 1950, but that game was in Rochester, New York.
In 1959-60 a jewelry entrepreneur named Harry G. Lynn bought the arena, renamed it Washington Coliseum, and pivoted the booking strategy toward music. For about a decade after that, acts from the British Invasion, soul, jazz, and folk circuits came through that barrel-vaulted shed off New York Avenue, including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones (twice), Bob Dylan with the Hawks, Patti LaBelle, Ray Charles, Bo Diddley, the Yardbirds and the Beach Boys. Patsy Cline was booked for a March 1963 show but died in a plane crash ten days before, and Dottie West stepped in.
By the summer of 1966, the Coliseum was a busy rock venue surrounded by warehouses, railyards, and the Uline ice plant. These blocks were just east of Swampoodle, the Irish neighborhood partly cleared for Union Station. The NoMa name came much later.
Brian Jones and the electric dulcimer
Brian Jones brought all sorts of instruments into the Stones’ music, including sitar on “Paint It Black” and marimba on “Under My Thumb.” For “Lady Jane,” off Aftermath, he played an Appalachian mountain dulcimer, with a specially made electric version for live performances.
A fan named Debbie Clark spoke to the Stones’ tour manager at Friendship International Airport (today’s BWI-Marshall). He told her the electric dulcimer had been made especially for Jones and was the only one in existence. That was why the band was so anxious to get it back.
The afternoon show, the open window, the cab
The Stones had two shows scheduled for June 26, 1966: an afternoon at Washington Coliseum, then an evening at the Baltimore Civic Center. They were touring America in support of Aftermath.
Outside the Coliseum after the DC show, Eddie Merrigan was waiting around with his older sister Rosalie and a friend named Bruce Grant, hoping to see the Stones come out. Rosalie had already called a cab to take them home to Chevy Chase. The equipment vans were parked behind the venue.
Bruce was leaning against one of the vans, his hand casually on the metal. As Rosalie told John Kelly of the Washington Post in 2023:
This guy came over and smacked [Bruce’s hand] with what looked like a screwdriver or something. That made my brother angry.
What happened next, Rosalie said, went by in a flash. Eddie reached through the van’s open window, grabbed a loose bag sitting on the front seat, and ran. The cab rolled up, everyone piled in, and it took off.
“What the hell did you just do?” Rosalie asked him in the back seat. Eddie didn’t know. He thought he’d taken something that belonged to the van driver.
They got back to Chevy Chase, and Eddie zoomed upstairs with the bag. Rosalie opened it and reacted, in her own polite paraphrase, “Oh [bad word].” It was Brian Jones’s electric dulcimer.
She also picked it up and figured out “Lady Jane” on it within an afternoon. She had no way to plug it in, but the fingering came fast. “It was a beautiful, beautiful instrument,” she said.
A teenage girl’s letter to the Washington Evening Star
News of the theft moved through the DC teen network fast. The Star’s Teen section ran a letter on July 9, 1966, from a reader named Debbie Clark. She had spoken with the Stones’ tour manager at the airport, and she knew the dulcimer had been custom-built and that the band wanted it back. And she was furious.
This letter is directed to the boy who took Brian Jones’ dulcimer at the June 26th Rolling Stones concert at Washington Coliseum. Because of this incident, the Stones may never play D.C. again.
You were being very foolish and selfish when you took the instrument. No one is benefiting by your unwise prank. The real Stones’ fans don’t want the Stones to remember Washington as a thieves’ den.
Rosalie convinced Eddie to return the instrument. The story of how it got back to the band came out in the Star, although Eddie’s name would not emerge until John Kelly revisited the theft in 2023.
Empire Music, Bethesda, and the Bentley
In July 1966, Eddie walked into Empire Music, a record store on Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda. There was a back room with a pinball machine and a jukebox where the local teenagers hung out. Most of the employees were in bands. Behind the counter was Mike Burke, who played in two of them: the Addicts and the Resumes.
“This kid came in,” Burke told John Kelly. “He said, ‘I’ve got something to show you.'”
Eddie showed Burke the instrument and told him where it had come from. By that point the theft had been in the Star and, in Burke’s recollection, on local television. He told the kid to leave the dulcimer with him.
Then he called Ron Oberman.
Oberman was 22 years old and wrote the Star‘s weekly “Top Tunes” teen and pop column. On this particular day in July 1966, he called the British Embassy.
Burke describes what happened next:
The next thing I know there’s a Bentley double parked on Wisconsin Avenue out in front of the record store. A chauffeur in full livery comes into the store and presents a letter from the British ambassador and says, “I understand you have something that belongs to the Rolling Stones.”
Mike Burke handed over the dulcimer, and the embassy arranged its return to the Stones.
Oberman wrote it all up for the Star on July 13, 1966. As was the custom, he included Mike Burke’s address. Crank calls started coming to the Burke family home in Bethesda from the greaser side of the era’s teen culture war, the kids who hated everything floppy-haired about the British Invasion.
The Evening Star later ran a self-satisfied editorial about its role in the affair, comparing it to columnist Walter Winchell brokering the surrender of New York mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter to the FBI. “Over the years it has often fallen to newsmen to act as discreet intermediaries between lawbreakers and the public,” the editorial purred. They closed by suggesting the Stones turn down their volume knobs in silent appreciation the next time they played DC.
Typical squares.
Eddie’s price: a Beatles caper
Eddie had also asked Oberman for a favor in exchange for returning the dulcimer. The Beatles were coming to DC on August 15, 1966 to play DC Stadium (the venue that later became RFK). Eddie and five Montgomery County friends planned to impersonate the Cyrkle, one of the opening acts, and try to walk straight backstage.
Oberman agreed to write about the prank if they pulled it off.
It worked. With a rented limousine and, somehow, a motorcycle police escort, Eddie and his five friends rolled up to DC Stadium and got backstage. Tom Hinton, one of the six, remembered Eddie as “a very persuasive young man.” Eddie and Tom even managed to meet the Beatles in their dressing room.
Oberman kept his word. His Aug 20, 1966 review of the Beatles show ended with seven paragraphs on the prank. The lede:
The success story of last Monday though, has to go to six Montgomery County youths who impersonated the Cyrkle, one of the acts on the bill, to gain admittance to the stadium complete with motorcycle escort.
Eddie Merrigan grew up, became a chef, and died of a heart attack in 1990. Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool in Sussex in July 1969. Ron Oberman died in 2019, and Mike Burke was living in Wheaton when Kelly interviewed him in 2023. He was at the 1966 Stones show himself. Asked in 2023 what he remembered of the concert, he told John Kelly: “I don’t remember. It was great? I don’t remember Woodstock and I was there for three days.”
A Coliseum that hosted everyone
The dulcimer theft was only one chapter in the Coliseum’s music history. The Beatles had played there two years before the Stones’ instrument disappeared.
On February 11, 1964, two days after their first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles played the first ticketed concert of their first American tour at the Coliseum. More than 8,000 fans filled the arena. A winter storm grounded the flights, so the band took a train from New York’s Penn Station to DC’s Union Station and arrived that afternoon.
They took the stage at 8:31 p.m. on a small round riser in the middle of the arena floor. Their road manager Mal Evans and a stagehand rotated the riser by hand throughout the set so the entire crowd would, sooner or later, get a face-on view. They played twelve songs, closing with “Long Tall Sally.” Fans threw jelly beans at George Harrison, who had said once in an interview that he liked them.
On November 28, 1965, Bob Dylan played the Coliseum on his tour with the Hawks (later the Band). The set was half acoustic and half electric. Photographer Rowland Scherman shot the show, and one of his photos became the cover of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits in 1967.
Two weeks earlier, on November 13, 1965, the Rolling Stones had played their first DC show at the Coliseum, the year before the dulcimer disappeared. The bill that night included Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. The Stones were on the 1965 American tour supporting Out of Our Heads.
And before all of that, the building had hosted Charlie Parker (with Johnny Hodges and June Christy) in April 1951, Duke Ellington at the first International Jazz Festival in Washington, Bo Diddley, Ray Charles, and a tour-bus list of soul, R&B, and country acts long enough that you could spend a Saturday reconstructing it. For about fifteen years, this barrel-vaulted concrete shed off New York Avenue was where DC went to see live music.
The fall and the long middle
A 1967 Temptations show ended in a riot that injured five, and the Coliseum struggled to attract major bookings. Concerts continued, but the opening of Capital Centre in Landover, Maryland in 1973 brought new competition. Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers played go-go shows at the Coliseum in the early 1980s.
By the late 1980s the arena was closed.
The building later served as a trash transfer station and a parking garage, a long way from its days as a concert hall.
REI, NoMa, and what’s there now
Douglas Development renovated the building, with CallisonRTKL as architect and Davis Construction as contractor. In October 2016, REI opened its DC flagship inside the main hall, putting 51,000 square feet of outdoor gear beneath the concrete barrel vault.
Today the building houses REI’s Washington store. You can shop for hiking boots beneath the roof that sheltered the Beatles and the Stones.
But picture that Bentley double-parked outside a Bethesda record store, with a chauffeur in full livery sent to collect Brian Jones’s dulcimer from a record-store clerk. That must have been quite a sight on Wisconsin Avenue.
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