LOS ANGELES NIGHT LIFE
IN THE 1980s
really prove it, but it seems like night clubs, bars and the like
played a bigger role in the lives of young Americans in the 1980s than they
do now. There was a lot less other stuff to do back then, with no internet
and only a handful of TV channels — few enough that they could foist
whatever crap they wanted to onto the viewing public, all those obnoxious
sitcoms with laff tracks and overwrought night-time soap operas, though
there was some good stuff too.
If you were to go back in time to the mid 1980s and walk into a club,
probably the first thing that you’d notice would be the smoke. It seemed
like most people smoked back then, at least when they were someplace
where beer and liquor were sold. Some clubs even had old-style “cigarette
girls” who walked around selling cigarettes and chewing gum from a tray.
So these places always smelled like stale cigarette smoke and maybe pot,
but also the sweetish smell of those Indonesian clove cigarettes that were
so popular at the time. Really you could smoke pretty much anywhere in
those days. Even at McDonald’s, they used to give out little gold-colored
tinfoil ashtrays with the golden arches logo embossed on them, though
some people just used one of the environmentally-toxic Styrofoam boxes
that the hamburgers came in and made that their ashtray.
People often all showed up at a club or bar together since no one had
mobile phones, and even by the
end of the decade, pagers
(“beepers”) were still mainly
for doctors and drug dealers.
But if you did need to reach
someone, just about all public
venues would have some pay
phones, usually over by the
restrooms. Calls were 10 cents,
and then went up to 20 cents in
the early 80s, but you could
always make a collect call. In
fact, when the phone company
eventually switched to an automated collect-call system, people would
game it by recording their name as “hey, I’m at the club/movies/etc.,”
sending a sort of primitive voicemail message for free.
the decade, I began to learn saxophone, which I think is a
very 80s kind of instrument. A lot of bands had saxophones — Oingo
Boingo, Bruce Springsteen, Fishbone and the Specials, or whoever —
though nowadays it’s mostly just for jazz. I had wanted to learn to play it
after once seeing a Saturday Night Live episode with Rickie Lee Jones
singing “Chuck E.’s in Love,” and for the live version they had David
Sandborn, I think, playing saxophone. My young impressionable mind was
somehow taken in by the idea of being that guy playing saxophone.
Anyway, I eventually learned to play reasonably-sorta-okay-enough, since
it’s not that difficult of an instrument. My experience on stage in the 80s is
pretty thin — I was just a teenager for most of the decade, even though
many teenagers played live music at clubs then, as they probably do now.
That said, I did get to do a couple nights at the 1980s Hollywood landmark
The Central just before it disappeared along with the era (though not
actually in the 80s — below). By freak coincidence, it was with a friend’s
band opening up for Chuck E. Weiss, the subject of the song “Chuck E.’s in
Love” and a longtime denizen of the Hollywood music scene. Naturally,
Chuck E.’s band had a saxophone as well, the late Spyder Mittleman who
also played for Tom Waits and was very well respected, and so I thought it
a big honor to get to play on the same bill.
The Central had a laid-back feeling, a dimly lit saloon with sawdust on the
floor. Sometimes there was a line to get in,
but not usually, and the beers were
reasonably priced. There was no curtain
or backstage, just a riser where the bands
played. In another 80s twist, I saw
George Wendt, the actor who played
Norm on Cheers, at one of the shows, just
on his own, having a beer and watching
Chuck E.
Now I should mention that those couple
dates I played at the Central were in fact
in the summer of 1991, a full year and a
half after the 1980s ended, but in many
ways you could say that the “80s scene”
managed to struggle on until 1993 — that
was the year the Central permanently
became Johnny Depp’s Viper Room. They
got rid of the sawdust and bar-room feel
and put in lots of black marble and
mirrors, a curtain and a backstage, and the place became way more
fashionable and sophisticated. Nothing wrong with that, just different. The
Viper Room had previously just rented the Central for its events, and only
months after taking over, it gained wide notoriety when actor River
Phoenix died there at a Halloween party.
And 1993 was the same year they finally closed Gazzari’s, a famous 80s
glam club just across Sunset Boulevard from the Central, and soon after
that they shut down Club Lingerie, another popular spot.
By then, it was about grunge, and even more so about hip-hop which was
still booming, and generally in the 90s there was always some good music
no matter what you liked. But old-school punk was gone, nu-wave
(whatever that really was) was long gone, glam was dying, ska was in
hibernation, and numbered were the days of cigarette smoke and
saxophones, for better or for worse.
Back in the 1980s, it seemed as if all music bands were
required to have their own bumper stickers, typically drawn
in ballpoint and Xeroxed onto sticker-stock paper. So it was
that fliers and stickers like the one above passed for music
promotion in the days before the internet.
When Americans nostalgize about the 1980s,
we always seem to mention the preposterous
haircuts of that age.
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(Ok, this blog post is kind
of a stretch, not really
history but just
reflections on an era, I
guess. Like with some of
these other topics, I am in
no way an expert on any
of this — these are just
some notes from my own
experiences at that time.)
These Krakatoa brand clove
cigarettes from Indonesia, along
with those of the rival Djarum
brand, were very popular and
widely available throughout
most of the 1980s, at least in
Southern California.
(Photo from cigarettespedia.com.)
Early in
I CAN’T