7/14/2023 0 Comments Chinatown punk wars madam wongs“There are a total on one and half places to go after hours in Los Angeles,” he wrote. In the October 1979 issue of the Hollywood punk scene’s vital zine Slash, contributor Phast Phreddie answered readers’ queries about after-hours options. “If you go somewhere else, and it’s kind of still alive, it makes you see that this is a bigger scene.” Oki-Dog was that “somewhere else.” “If you go into a small dark club, and there’s this music, and people dress a certain way, it’s separate from reality,” she said. For Block, Oki-Dog represented a continuation of the punk shows she began attending at the end of high school. But Oki-Dog, while it appears only in the margins of these histories, was crucial to building the scene’s sense of community.Īuthor Francesca Lia Block first went to Oki-Dog in the early ’80s and wrote the restaurant into her cult 1989 YA novel, Weetzie Bat. Histories of punk tend to focus on L.A.’s exports-the records, the people who made them, the zines that covered it all-and the performance spaces that incubated them. Or a scan of a highly detailed flyer that cartoonist Shawn Kerri drew for the Circle Jerks that depicts a nun standing before a classroom of bedraggled teens: a punk skanking prominently in the lower third sports a mohawk and a ripped T-shirt with “Eat at Oki Dogs” written in big bold letters. Look closely and you can find a screenshot of Germs guitarist Pat Smear taken from a 1982 rockumentary called The Slog Movie. (Based on a public records search, the two Oki-Dogs appear to share an owner, but I couldn’t reach anyone to confirm.) Its Facebook and Instagram accounts are chock-full of vintage images from Oki-Dog’s heyday. The owners of World Famous Oki-Dog, now located near the corner of Fairfax and Willoughby in West Hollywood, have embraced the restaurant’s punk reputation. the past few decades-even Anthony Bourdain grilled Gold about his love for Oki-Dog when they met a few years later-in large part because of the punks who congregated at the West Hollywood location at all hours of the day and night. Word of Oki-Dog has spread far beyond L.A. The food was cheap, the place never closed, and the punks were never turned away. But its convenient location was a boon for a community largely centered in West Hollywood. For some of the musicians, producers, zinesters, and scenesters who began to build the city’s punk ecosystem in the late 1970s, Oki-Dog may not have been the first choice for a hangout, or even the last. Years later, he was still an evangelist for Oki-Dog and its eponymous dish: two hot dogs, a slice of cheese, a slice of pastrami, and chili wrapped up in a flour tortilla, which he described as “a cross-cultural burrito that’s pretty hard to stomach unless you’ve got the tum of a 16-year-old.”Ī post-show visit to Oki-Dog would become a rite of passage for a generation of L.A. In the early days of punk, Gold spent many a night at the nearby nightclub, the Starwood, which gave many future rock heroes their first big gigs, and played cello in two short-lived bands, Overman and Tank Burial. The piece, “Trans-Global Junk Food,” doubled as an obituary for the late-night hangout of his youth: the 24-hour Oki-Dog on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, which had recently closed. In October 1990, the food critic Jonathan Gold reviewed an inexpensive fast-food joint on Pico Boulevard called Oki-Dog for the LA Times.
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