YESTERDAY’S HOT SCENE : In Its Heyday the After-Hours Club Had No Competition , but in Resurrection It Doesn’t Have the Same Charm

In the days before who and what was cool in Los Angeles night life was dictated by rich Eurodebs and British deejays with access to 75,000-watt sound systems, before the Viper Room, before the Gate, before the all-night rave, the after-hours club called the Zero used to be the only game in town. If you aspired to a certain kind of notoriety, your status was more or less derived from your relationship to the Zero, which didn’t even open until 2 a.m. Its denizens, featured in boldface in each week’s underground gossip columns, and the sordid things that supposedly went on in its back rooms were the subject of endless discussion.

When a big rock band swung through town, it usually made it to the Zero after the show. Touring bands are always looking for something to do at 3 in the morning, and somehow, behavior you would have found incomprehensible during the day seemed completely logical in the middle of the night at a place that was sort of illegal to be at anyway. Speakeasies in the ‘20s must have felt something like this.

At the beginning, if you had just started to work on your moon tan, it seemed like a big deal to figure out what corner of Hollywood the club occupied that week, and who was working the door. Sometimes you knew the location but couldn’t get past the doorman. Later, after you had been a fixture for a while, you might be on the guest list or even actually date the extravagantly made up woman who stamped your hands. Handling the door was always a big responsibility; a doorwoman once sent a regular home with a stern request: Never again arrive in beige pants.

And once you got in, it wasn’t exactly punk-rock heaven in there, but it was sometimes close enough. Guys from every band you’d ever seen at the Whisky huddled in the corners. At the makeshift bar, you could get limitless free cans of the very cheapest beer available at the Liquor Barn that day. Rockabilly and reggae pounded loudly in the squalid, peeling loft, as your headache would a few hours later in the morning, and there were usually one or two couples actually dancing on what passed for a dance floor. The club could be a humiliating place to be, actually, where your nose was often rubbed in the pitiful scraps of cool you thought you might possess, and where the famous singer passed out in a corner might wake up in a start, belch loudly and hit on your date without bothering to pick himself off the floor. Occasionally there were art openings at the place, or showings of avant-garde film.

Mostly, though, there were the regulars, the eccentrics who hung out as if your evening was a low-budget movie and their job was to push along the narrative. There was the beer-bellied porno-rock king, the charming English fop, the woman who once dated Tony Curtis, and any number of Blanche DuBoises relying on the kindness of strangers, the omnipresent rock star and his consorts, and the great blues singer who worked at a taco stand.

Other after-hours clubs eventually opened, places with multimedia entertainment and deejay-driven dance floors, in places with real licenses and swanky decor. The club was broken up by the cops a couple of times too many, even though a lot of the regulars were reputed to be off-duty officers, and its clientele was devastated by the late-’80s march toward sobriety by much of the Hollywood scene. (When you sober up, there are many fewer compelling reasons to stay up until 4:30 in the morning.) And when the club reopened as a gallery a few years ago, it didn’t seem the same.

But at an opening a couple of weeks ago, there were pretty good oil paintings by a man who still calls himself Tomata and who had once been the singer for Los Angeles’ most popular punk band, the Screamers. The regulars were back in force, slapping you on the back and continuing conversations where they’d left off a decade before, expanding on peculiar habits that had once seemed charming but now just annoyed. Nothing stales quite so quickly as yesterday’s hot scene. Nothing may be quite so disconcerting as seeing something you’d thought had perished long ago re-created in pasty flesh.