Kim Turner: In 1979, the punk rock scene in Los Angeles was exploding.

John Doe: Chinatown opened things up.

It was absolutely the home base for punk rock.

Louis Jacinto: Madame Wong's and the Hong Kong Cafe, they needed customers, and the bands needed venues to play.

Eugene Moy: What we heard upstairs was unharmonious.

Alice Bag: Both places had lines around the block.

Turner: Madame Wong's told bands, "If you play over there, you'll never play here."

Bag: And that's when the war started.

Keith Morris: It was just chaos.

♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts & Culture, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

♪ Martin Wong: If you were to go on a pilgrimage to find punk rock history in L.A.'s Chinatown, you would go to the main plaza, and you'd look up.

Madame Wong's was upstairs, and you can imagine waiting to see Oingo Boingo play, and the other side of the plaza, there's the Hong Kong Cafe, and that's where the punkers like Black Flag would play, but if you're walking through the plaza, you would have no idea that this is where punk rock history happened.

♪ ♪ Penelope Spheeris: The music scene in the early seventies in Los Angeles--and, I think, in the whole United States--was pretty dismal.

It was mostly radio carrying the Doobie Brothers, the Bay City Rollers, and all these other bands.

Jimmy Alvarado: There was a lot of disco and then Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, that whole California sound.

Elton John was very popular, and there was Bowie.

Jessica Schwartz: There was a lot of glam rock happening--or glitter rock, as it was sometimes called--on Sunset.

There'd be clubs where it would be the in thing.

Bag: You'd see musicians dressed in glam clothes with, like, stretchy spandex, glittery jumpsuits, and boas and big hair.

Morris: Say you go to a club hoping to hear some live music, and the best you were going to get was bands playing music that they've heard on the radio.

Jacinto: At that time, pop radio was not very good, and so it was a shift that was happening, and then punk happened, and it was liberating.

♪ Spheeris: Punk was just, "Tear down all tradition.

Let's change everything," and then the Ramones started selling really a lot of records, and the Sex Pistols with their one and only album, that thing really changed the world.

Schwartz: In Los Angeles at the time, Rodney Bingenheimer hears and gets a hold of music from the Ramones and starts playing it on K-ROQ, "Rodney on the Roq," and that's when people start to hear this new punk music.

♪ Morris: All of a sudden, there's actually a couple of dozen bands-- X, Bags, Dils, Eyes, Controllers.

The scene is starting to come alive.

Alvarado: Hollywood was the epicenter for the first wave.

You had the Weirdos.

You had the Bags.

You had the Germs.

You had the Zippers, and that was kind of, like, the nexus.

Dave Alvin: In the late seventies, we decided, "Well, let's go see what all this punk rock's about."

We started venturing up to Hollywood fascinated and captivated by the whole scene.

Schwartz: At the beginning, there was a bit more artistic freedom to do what you wanted to do.

There are bands that have musical influences, and then you have kids that are just learning to play their instruments.

It gives it this different sound, as well.

Alvarado: In the late seventies, music was very much about the people that were on top of the stage.

You saw those people, but you never believed that you would be on the stage that way.

Punk rock was the great leveler.

You started a band, and then you figured out how to play, so most of it was noise.

Bag: Punk just opened the doors.

There was this group, they definitely went out there and just started making noise.

The guitarist was just making feedback noise.

I thought, "This band has guts."

The lead singer took food and started smearing some of it on himself and throwing some at the audience, and the band was the Germs.

It was just like nothing I had ever seen before, and then there was the Weirdos... John Denney: ♪ I'm in I'm in... ♪ Bag: and the Weirdos, they were like a Jackson Pollock painting come to life, and the music was also really fast, but really melodic.

The lead guitarist was deranged.

He was pinching his guitar, and it was screaming like, "Aah!"

but it was good.

Gary Lachman: The punk bands, they had to be even more rebellious and even more wild and even more transgressive.

It's this kind of "break the rules," aggressive experience.

Bag: It blew my mind, and it also opened my mind to the possibilities.

I had to be in a punk band right then and there.

Spheeris: There was a time on the Strip where punk bands were booked all the time.

There were amazing shows, but they would get so crowded, and the fire department would come in to just kick everybody out.

Schwartz: There was also a lot of visceral energy, you might say, that was part of early punk shows.

Alvarado: Alice Bag was very, very dynamic, just exploded on stage.

Jacinto: Just with her performance would get everybody stirred up, and then there would be this back and forth with the audience that would whip us all into a frenzy.

Bag: My band played the Troubadour, and when we played the Troubadour, the punks just removed the furniture in a not-orderly way.

They started throwing tables and chairs into a pile in the corner so that they could dance, which seems unreasonable to club owners but seems perfectly reasonable if you're a punk and you know, like, "Hey, you're booking a punk show.

You know that, right?"

[Laughs] Schwartz: There was damage that was being done.

There was an expectation of violence, and that would draw a certain crowd.

Spheeris: It got pretty rowdy up there, and I think club owners just said, "You know, forget this punk thing."

Morris: It was just chaos.

It was just this massive ball of energy.

Bag: Some of the clubs just felt, "It's too out of control for us," and started banning punk.

Doe: The Whisky wasn't interested in booking us or any punk rock bands.

The Starwood wasn't interested.

The established venues couldn't care less.

Bag: It became difficult to find venues that were welcoming to punk.

Kristine McKenna: That first generation of punks would just rip through venues.

People would find someplace to do a show, and they would just trash the place.

Then no punk band could ever play there again, so they were always having to find new places to play.

Alvarado: Bands in the first wave focused primarily around a place called the Masque, which was in the basement of the Pussycat Theater on Hollywood Boulevard and Cherokee.

Jacinto: The Masque was basically a rehearsal studio in the day, and then at night, it was performance space.

Spheeris: You went down these skinny, little stairs that were totally illegal, and then you got all these little, tiny rooms, broken bottles everywhere, vomit on the floor, people passed out.

Brendan Mullen ran the Masque.

Brendan Mullen: It started out basically as a social club or a new rock and roll scene to emerge, and band after band played here, lot of craziness.

Bag: Brendan Mullen opened the doors to punk, and he really let a wide variety of people come in with basically no audition.

It was just, like, "Do you have the right attitude?"

Morris: The Masque was the clubhouse for all of these people, but LAPD and the L.A. Fire Department were always harassing him to the point where Brendan had to close the Masque down.

Mullen: Bye-bye.

Alvarado: The Masque was open for maybe 12, 14 months, and when it closed, it caused the dispersal because there was no central location anymore.

Jacinto: It was pretty short-lived, so before you knew it, it was gone.

Then there was suddenly no places for the punk bands to play because the big clubs still weren't booking them.

Paul Greenstein: There was a void in Hollywood, so there really wasn't anywhere to go, and as all that's happening, the scene's getting bigger, and the locations, venues are getting smaller, so the scene was not being represented.

One night, I was in Chinatown with a friend who's a photographer basically taking pictures of the neon signs.

Everything was dead.

There was nobody there.

We were the only people there, but you could hear this big party going on from this restaurant on the second floor of a building, so we went up in there, and there was nobody in the restaurant.

They were playing a recording, and we thought that was pretty funny, and the restaurant was called Madame Wong's.

I started becoming a semi-regular.

One day, I was sitting there at the bar, and I was talking to the bartender--his name was George--and I looked over, and I went, "They got this great stage here."

I knew there were no places to play, so I said, "Hey, George, you know, can I run some bands here?"

and he went, "Oh, yeah.

Sure."

I was not in the music business.

I was not a promoter.

I was just a guy looking to do things, so I came back a couple days later.

I said, "Well, what do you think?"

and he goes, "My wife says no."

[Record scratch] I said, "Why?"

and he goes, "She says no."

Schwartz: Esther Wong and her husband George owned Madame Wong's.

It had done relatively well, played Polynesian music.

Runchao Liu: She was from a wealthy family in Shanghai, and to avoid the communist takeover of China, her family moved to the States.

Schwartz: She worked really hard to build up her space, but at the time, in 1978, Chinatown wasn't bringing in a lot of tourists, a lot of money.

Moy: Chinatown already had a century of history in Los Angeles.

By the 1880s and 1890s, we had a fairly substantial neighborhood specifically designated on maps as Chinatown.

Martin Wong: There's been more than one Chinatown.

At the turn of the century, there was one where Union Station is now.

They relocated to the newer Chinatown, which was kind of a tourist place, and it was a real scene.

Moy: The new Chinatown opened in 1938 with ornamentation that reflected a Chinese theme.

The old timers started calling it Central Plaza, and the major restaurants that surrounded the Central Plaza really achieved success.

Martin Wong: In the fifties and sixties, Chinatown was really popular and happening.

It was a place to go.

Mamie Hong Weinberg: No matter if it was in the day or in the evening, it was bustling, people everywhere.

Moy: The majority of the business was mostly non-Asian, non-Chinese.

It was really a place where the tourists liked to come.

Greenstein: When I was a kid, we would go to Chinatown, and it was full of people.

This was in the early to mid sixties.

There were a lot of clubs.

There were a lot of restaurants.

There was always people there.

By the seventies, there was nothing, and there was nothing at night.

The whole night restaurant scene had just collapsed.

There was nothing going on.

Jacinto: This was an opportunity for Madame Wong's to bring in some paying customers.

Greenstein: I worked on them for at least 6 months, so then she said, "OK. We'll give it a try."

I said, "What's your worst night?"

and she said, "Tuesday."

I said, "Give me Tuesdays."

[Gary Valentine's "I Like Girls" playing] Valetine: ♪ Some guys like... ♪ Greenstein: They didn't have any idea of what I was going to do there.

I didn't have any idea what I was gonna do there, but I had pretty high hopes for it.

I did posters.

My friends and I put out fliers.

It was Gary Valentine and the Know.

He was in Blondie before they got famous.

Lachman: Earlier that week, I went on Rodney Bingenheimer's radio show on KROQ, and I said, "If you want some kind of scene in L.A., come to Madame Wong's," and they did.

Greenstein: They put on a great show, and I was hoping we'd get, like, 150 people.

We got, I think, like, 350 the first night.

Lachman: It was incredible, and it was packed beyond capacity, so it was kind of like, bang, that one evening inaugurated, or launched, punk, whatever you want to call it, scene October 3, 1978.

Greenstein: Going to Chinatown was exotic, not exotic because it was Chinese, but exotic because somebody's running punk rock bands.

Jacinto: The goal was to go see the bands.

We didn't care if they were at a big club, a small club, a basement, so we started going to Madame Wong's in Chinatown.

Doe: Once you were inside, it looked like a 1940s nightclub.

The stage was decorated with dried palm leaves or something like that.

It was totally odd, but who cared?

My whole reason for coming to Los Angeles was to become a bohemian.

Part of being a bohemian is to find places that are in decay, so it was perfect.

Greenstein: Mostly what I was booking was local, unsigned bands that I thought were good.

I liked the Plugz, I booked the Plugz.

I liked 20/20, I booked 20/20.

Lachman: This was a great time for unsigned bands.

Bag: My guitarist Craig Lee knew Paul Greenstein, who was booking Madame Wong's, and he invited us to play a show there.

Unfortunately, when we played there, it got a little out of control.

Morris: I was there the night the Bags played at Madame Wong's, and that was probably the night that sealed the fate of any more of us playing there.

Jacinto: I photographed that show, and it got a little crazy.

The kids got rowdy.

Bag: It was not a show that was out of the norm for us.

Greenstein: Alice got up there and screamed, and Craig would say, "Start throwing stuff," and people'd start throwing stuff.

Morris: I don't remember what happened to make Madame Wong lose her mind.

Mike Watt: I saw her throw the Bags off the stage, maybe 3 or 4 songs.

"This is not music.

You're out of here."

Bag: And I have to say, in this case, it was not as bad as the Troubadour, but we were banned after that.

Jacinto: It was the first and last time that the Bags played at Madame Wong's.

She said, "No more punk bands with girls in them."

Greenstein: One of the reasons Esther said no more girl bands was not because of what the Bags did, but rather because the Alley Cats.

Dianne Chai: ♪ Too much junk Too much junk... ♪ Greenstein: The Alley Cats played, and somebody fell into the cigarette machine and busted the glass, and Esther went, "No more girl bands.

It's girl bands get the boys all hot and bothered," and it was a rule.

I couldn't hire a band with girls in it.

That was probably the first time Esther started imposing her influence on what I was doing.

Prior to that, I had free rein.

Lachman: Originally, she provided the venue, and he was bringing the groups there, and it worked very well until too many things were broken.

Greenstein: It was not going where I wanted, and it was never going to.

I was working on booking for the fourth month when I stopped doing it.

It wasn't fun anymore, and I never came back.

Lachman: After that, she started doing the booking herself.

Liu: She became the person behind the venue entirely.

She would listen to tapes and then decide what bands to book.

Carla Olson: The bands that played there were great.

They were new bands, bands that didn't have record deals, bands that were a little more pop.

McKenna: I remember seeing 20/20 and the Zippers.

They were good bands, but they weren't punk bands.

Lachman: They were more or less mainstream but with more energy and attitude than what mainstream rock was producing at the time, like the Knack.

The Knack became really big, and that was the raw kind of sound you would get.

Jacinto: Madame Wong's became a place for "new wave" and power pop bands to play.

They were milder.

The music wasn't as fast.

Schwartz: New wave, although it's an offshoot of punk, has a little more of a polished sound, a polished look.

It's more danceable, as opposed to slam-danceable.

Morris: New wave bands incorporated other instrumentation.

There were keyboards, synthesizers, a little bit closer to pop music.

Lachman: New wave didn't share in that destructive aspect of the punk sound.

It was all more melodic, slightly lighter, but not necessarily saccharine, not like bubblegum pop.

Martha Davis: ♪ Over you ♪ Jacinto: Esther Wong loved the Motels.

Davis: ♪ Out of control over you ♪ Jacinto: That was one female-led band that she did like.

They weren't quite punk, but they also weren't what was being played on the radio at the time, so they were still pushing it a little bit.

They were constantly playing at Madame Wong's along with the Know... Valentine: ♪ Roadrunner, roadrunner... ♪ which was started by Gary Valentine.

They were, like, a little power pop trio, and Madame Wong's loved them, too.

Lachman: We usually packed the place, so she would get 200, 300 people in there.

I think we did about 30 shows there.

It was a great place to play.

Rudy Medina: There was one night my friend was telling me, "Hey, let's go see this band at Madame Wong's," and I'm like, "Uh, what's the name of the band?"

He goes, "The Police."

I said, "What a dumb name."

Sting: ♪ Born Born in the fifties Born Born in the fifties ♪ McKenna: When the Police came to Los Angeles, they did, like, this secret showcase, and it was at Madame Wong's because that was a controllable environment.

They weren't gonna be fans pressing in the door because that just didn't happen at Madame Wong's.

She ran a really tight ship.

Sting: ♪ Can't stand losing you You You Whoa ♪ Thank you.

Medina: I didn't go.

Ha ha ha!

I should have gone.

Doe: Chinatown had opened things up, and Madame Wong's, we played there once, but the Madame didn't like us because we were too loud.

Lachman: Eventually, she wouldn't have any punk bands play at all, just the innocuous, "nice" bands like myself, the Furies, Code Blue.

Greenstein: After I left, Esther closed the door on punk rock, but when she closed that door, she opened the door for the Hong Kong.

♪ Barry Seidel: The idea was to try to open a club.

I was head of A&R at Mercury Records for a while in New York City, and then I went out to California.

I had this friend in D.C., Kim Turner, who was running a pretty big rock club there, so I called Kim, and I said, "Why don't you come out to L.A., and we'll see if we could come up with an idea."

Kim Turner: I came out in February of 1979.

The music scene in Los Angeles was just exploding, and we form a partnership.

Seidel: Kim actually went to Chinatown and spotted the place.

Turner: I went down to Madame Wong's, and I looked over the courtyard and saw the Hong Kong Low restaurant.

It was just beautiful.

Seidel: At that time, there was no nightlife except Madame Wong's, and I was not against the idea that there was somebody a few doors away running a rock club.

I thought that was great.

A place where people can walk from one club to another in L.A., that was one of a kind.

Turner: We met with Bill Hong, asked him if he would be interested in letting us bring bands in and playing them upstairs.

Weinberg: My dad, Bill Hong, was the general manager of the Hong Kong Low restaurant, always known as the smiley guy with the big bow tie.

He just always was thinking of ideas to bring business back.

Seidel: He told us, "I don't know anything about rock music," and I said, "Your neighbor, she's having success with it, so we want to do it here."

Weinberg: He was adventurous and took a leap and said OK. Seidel: We made a deal with him that we would be the ones running the club upstairs.

It was the Hong Kong Low restaurant, so we'll just make it the Hong Kong Cafe, so Kim and I and our other partner Suzy Frank, we really didn't know what was gonna happen.

♪ Turner: Our opening night at the Hong Kong Cafe was June 5 of 1979 and featured Daily Planet with Elton Duck.

It was very exciting.

Everybody was having so much fun.

Seidel: We decided we were gonna be a real club.

That means we're open 7 days a week, 3 bands a night.

We started to hear about the punk bands, and we wanted to use them because we liked them personally and musically, and we started to realize there was a niche that we had to do or don't.

We decided that we were gonna do it, so we started booking bands like X, the Alley Cats, of course, Alice Bag.

Bag: It was great because they would book the bands that Madame Wong's was turning down.

Doe: I can remember seeing the Bags there and Fear and Circle Jerks and Top Jimmy.

Controllers were a band that I saw there, the Skulls.

Morris: Saw DOA for the first time, The Avengers from San Francisco.

We'd see the Go-Go's.

Bag: My band played the Hong Kong Cafe pretty often, and we found there was support there, that people did come to see us, and that people accepted our weirdness.

Doe: It was a place to get that energetic feedback.

We would play there couple times a month.

♪ He bought a sterilized hypo... ♪ You played loud.

You could barely hear the vocals.

It was incredibly sweaty, but there was something going on.

There was this level of communication between the people that were there and the level of something meaningful going on that every artist aspires to.

That was the thing you felt, and then people would fall into the stage, and you'd get knocked over, but it was all part of the price you paid.

Morris: At that point in time with Black Flag, we would play anywhere we were presented the opportunity to make noise... ♪ I'm about to have a nervous breakdown My head really hurts... ♪ and we played with a lot of great bands in Chinatown.

We had a mentality of, "Tonight's our last night on Earth.

There is no tomorrow."

That would be the punk rock mantra.

Greg Ginn would hit the first note, and it was like, "There's the switch, and we're going to watch this place explode."

Weinberg: My sisters and I, we were there for it all.

They were in high school, and I was 18.

It was just after my freshman year in college, so that was one of my first jobs.

The phone calls would come in, same line as the restaurant, so if you called the restaurant, my sisters and I would give you the whole rundown on who's playing that night, and we weren't always comfortable saying some of the names of the bands.

My sister wasn't even comfortable saying Dead Kennedys.

Yeah.

There were worse.

We had people with various multicolored hair--I'd never seen that before--and unusual outfits, and I couldn't wait to call my sisters to tell them, "Guess who I saw today."

People would come in.

They kind of look in, and then I would just point upstairs.

Spheeris: The ceiling at the Hong Kong Cafe was so low, but it was kind of cool because it had all these really ornate Chinese tiles on it.

Weinberg: My dad was innovative, and these tiles were popular in Asia, and he put them up on the ceilings, both upstairs and the downstairs dining room.

Seidel: There was a small area in front of the stage where most of the dancing was, but it could go out of bounds and be all over the place.

Jacinto: It was always packed, and you were right up against the band.

Everybody was dancing and just crazy, wild pogoing.

Bag: People were pogoing, and at the time, pogo was the dance.

Seidel: Pogoing is bouncing up and down but pretty violently.

When we had 400 people upstairs, the ceiling downstairs was going like this.

Weinberg: The ceiling above me was moving up and down, so I would move to the front of the restaurant because I didn't want to be in harm's way.

Seidel: The dancing was very violent anywhere--pogoing, banging into each other, picking people up and throwing them across the dance floor.

Weinberg: Sometimes things got a little out of hand.

There was property damage.

Seidel: Darby Crash was the lead singer of a group called the Germs.

The Germs and their crowd were reputed to be absolutely the worst.

"Don't use the Germs."

Darby would come into the club, and he would say, "Barry, we want to play the Hong Kong.

Why don't you let us play the Hong Kong, and you can take out of our money the damage?"

and I thought, "Hmm."

Bag: You weren't allowed to break stuff, and if you broke it, well, it would come out of your pay.

Like, I remembered, "Oh, I can't throw this microphone down because I'm gonna get charged for it."

Seidel: It became a "we owe you" thing, and that's where that came from, Darby's suggestion, and I used the Germs.

Bag: When you start working at a particular club and there are minimal losses, it becomes a better working relationship, which is something that we never had a chance to develop with Madame Wong's venue, although I'm sure there were bands that did.

Turner: There was a large courtyard in between the Hong Kong Cafe and Madame Wong's, an area where people could hang out.

Chinatown was just alive.

Weinberg: I think the punk rock fans liked the atmosphere of Chinatown.

It looked really cool as a backdrop for these shows.

Morris: Gin Ling Way was a gathering spot.

There would be people from our musical community that would just show up to hang out and drink beer and smoke cigarettes.

Doe: It was very raw and creative, and all these different people coexisted in kind of a beautiful way.

Chinatown was absolutely the home base for punk rock.

Bag: It's not just about performing and then getting off stage.

Part of it is being there for each other, seeing the other band, supporting them.

Jacinto: Two venues right next door to each other really speaks to the fact that kids were hungry for something new, something different, and there were so many of us that we could fill both venues on the same night.

Weinberg: To outside people, it would look kind of crazy, very abnormal for the typical Chinatown patrons, for sure, so I'm sure it made some people nervous.

Moy: I do remember going to dinner at Hong Kong Low and hearing the noise upstairs.

I grew up in the sixties.

We went to loud rock concerts, but what we heard upstairs was even louder and more unharmonious than anything that we had heard before.

Weinberg: We weren't getting a lot of late diners anymore, so the few that we had, yeah, could probably not hear themselves speak.

Turner: The merchants there who had been there for years were a little put off by the punk rock scene.

Moy: Some of the neighboring businesses were concerned because of the amount of trash, cigarette butts, and other debris that would be thrown on the ground.

Weinberg: A lot of people were complaining, and I don't think it was a respected decision to some family members, but my dad kept it going.

Martin Wong: Bill Hung loved people coming to Chinatown, and I don't think he cared if they had spiky hair or leather jackets or spray paint and stencils on them.

The immigrant mindset is just to survive.

Bag: When the Hong Kong was in full swing, there were lines around the block, and there were lines at Madame Wong's, too.

Jacinto: Both venues were very small, so it was always packed.

In front of the stage at Hong Kong, there were no chairs or tables, and everybody was right up on the stage, and at Madame Wong's, the tables were there in front of the stage, and everybody would sit and have their cocktail and listen politely to the bands.

Turner: We were just a stone's throw away from Madame Wong's.

We could see Madame Wong standing in her window looking at us, and she could see everything going on inside of our club, and she'd be going like this, you know, with a pair of binoculars looking into the club.

Seidel: We started getting rumors that Esther Wong, Madame Wong's, was threatening her bands.

Turner: Madame Wong's had told anybody that, "If you play over there, you'll never play here again."

Seidel: That's what started everything.

Olson: The first gig that the Textones played was at the Hong Kong Cafe, and then we were gonna get booked to play Madame Wong's, but when she found out that we were booked at the Hong Kong, Madame Wong says, "No.

You're not playing my club," so she canceled us the night we were gonna play, so we went down there with our guitars on and stood in front of her staircase and picketed her place.

Ha ha ha!

Seidel: When she started telling people they couldn't play her club, I figured, "I'm gonna have to pick up on this and use it."

Turner: I know she didn't like us, but we took advantage of that.

Suzy Frank: The war started when we started doing our advertising.

That's when it started because she would have an ad in the "L.A.

Weekly."

It would say, "Madame Wong's-- the first and finest in Chinatown."

We thought that was kind of funny, so the next week, we came out and we said, "The biggest and the best--Hong Kong Cafe."

Seidel: I changed the address of the club in our advertising.

We're located "in the heart of Chinatown at 425 Gin Ling Way."

I changed that to, we're located "in the heart of Chinatown, just a few doors away from what's her name's."

Frank: Then she started outlining her ad.

Seidel: The border around her ad had names of groups that played her club.

Turner: So Madame Wong's, her ad would say, "Home of The Police, The Motels, 20/20, John Hiatt, The Know."

Seidel: I copied the ad exactly, and I put different names.

I used Frank Sinatra, Liberace... Turner: "Lawrence Welk, Cher, Bob Hope, Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis, Jr." Seidel: We didn't advertise those people played in the club.

We just put them on our ad.

Frank: Madam Wong would call the fire department because we were packed.

Seidel: She used to complain.

Our club was only supposed to hold 200, 250 people, and on a big night, we put in there maybe 400.

Turner: It was way overcrowded, yes.

The fire department was there one night when Fear was playing.

They came into the club and closed it down.

Frank: The fire people were there all the time, but they would watch the show, and they loved the show, and they loved the bands.

Seidel: There was a time when she would be really quiet, and I knew how to rile her up.

♪ Turner: We looked and saw that Dwight Twilley was going to be playing at Madame Wong's, and it was also the same day that his new record was being released.

Wow.

There went the light bulbs, so we went to Tower Records on Sunset and bought his new cassette tape.

Seidel: In those days, Madame Wong's played tapes between bands, so we take the Dwight Twilley tape, and we carefully open up the cellophane, take the tape out, and, you know, it's tape, so you can record over that.

We went to the second cut, and we covered the little hole on top of the tape, and I have a friend named Kenny, and Kenny used to do this disc jockey kind of thing.

Turner: We wrote up a little spiel, and Kenny recorded onto a cassette player little advertisement for the Hong Kong Cafe.

Suzy made arrangements for a courier to deliver this tape to the sound man at Madame Wong's, and he's going, "Wow.

Dwight Twilley.

Wow.

This is great.

I'm going to slam this right into the cassette player and play it during the first break," so, of course, he did that.

Seidel: And in breaks Kenny with this big commercial for the Hong Kong, and it's loud.

Kenny: Hey, listen, kids.

Come on down to the Hong Kong Cafe.

Don't delay.

After being at what's your name's, you'd want to be there anyway.

Frank: We did a whole ad for the Hong Kong Cafe with the music blaring behind.

Kenny: Yeah, the Hong Kong Cafe.

Turner: And Madame Wong was just fuming.

She was really upset.

Frank: She got so mad, and everybody thought it was so hip that they started writing about it, about the bands and the protesting.

Seidel: We had a lot of coverage from the "L.A. Times," from the "L.A.

Weekly."

"Billboard" magazine ran a story.

We had press you couldn't buy.

Frank: The Hong Kong became really famous really fast, and Madame Wong, she hated us.

♪ Seidel: They called it the Won-Ton Wars, and they played it up.

They really played it up big.

Turner: Somebody from "BAM" magazine came up with it, and then they also called it the Chinatown Syndrome.

Martin Wong: Of course, they would use titles like the Won-Ton Wars.

It gets you to read it, first of all, and it makes the reader feel superior to these Asian-owned businesses in Chinatown and also to these punkers or new wavers that aren't playing the established music.

They'll just belittle it from every angle because, to them, it's funny, right?

Liu: It's a very racialized term because wonton is a food and you're using a kind of food to describe some business disagreements.

The wars were not about these two restaurants.

It was really about fans, musicians from different genres, and if you want to align with a certain type of music, you go to a certain venue.

McKenna: There's a lot of people who went to Madame Wong's that wouldn't go to the Hong Kong Cafe, and serious punk people look down their nose a little at Madame Wong's.

Bag: Both places were popular, but the audiences were different.

You kind of see the difference in the way people dress and the way they express themselves.

Jacinto: The punks were all punked out in their outfits.

They were wearing safety pins, creating their own clothes.

The hair was spiked up, and then the new wave crowd, the guys would wear skinny ties, the girls, you know, big, baggy, bell-bottom pants and platform shoes.

Lachman: In between shows, people'd be hanging out, so you'd have a clutch of the safety pins over there and the clutch of the skinny ties over there.

Greenstein: As more people got into it, then they all started choosing sides.

There was the hardcore guys who hated the skinny tie guys, and the skinny tie guys hated the punk rocks.

Alvin: We couldn't get a gig at Madame Wong's, so I decided, "OK. We'll go, and we'll stand in front of her office, and then she talked to us and firmly kind of said, "No.

You're never gonna play here," so when we got the call to do the Hong Kong, it was like, "Yeah.

Yeah.

Screw Madame Wong's," you know, which was kind of the attitude.

Lachman: She was a tough cookie.

She knew what she wanted.

If she didn't like you, that was it.

Schwartz: She made real business decisions, and one of those business decisions was not letting those punk bands play.

Because of that, Esther Wong was characterized as a dragon lady.

Liu: It is denigrating because Dragon Lady is a trope.

It's a persistent trope about Asia, about Asian women, and being a dragon lady is not just about being a bossy, determined woman.

If you look at Esther, she can be bossy, right, but was doing that for very different purposes than what others assumed.

McKenna: What she wanted to do wasn't what the Hong Kong Cafe was doing, was actually good that she set up this rivalry between the two clubs.

It added some energy, you know, to the whole scene.

Lachman: I don't know what she actually thought of the music, whether she actually liked any of it at all, but I know she certainly appreciated what it was bringing to the club.

Spheeris: I met Esther Wong because I wanted to talk to her about possibility of filming there at Madame Wong's.

I wanted to make a documentary about this new music and shoot the punk bands.

Esther Wong was an amazingly intimidating character, no BS, just the facts, and she wouldn't let me film there, so I ended up shooting at the Hong Kong Cafe.

[X's "Nausea" playing] "The Decline of Western Civilization" started out as a documentary about music, but my deep interest is really human behavior, and I had never seen anything like punk.

It was a total and complete revolution.

We were at the Hong Kong, and I filmed Catholic Discipline there.

Claude Bessy of "Slash" magazine had always wanted to be in a band and be the lead singer, and he decided, "I'm gonna call it Catholic Discipline because he was raised Catholic and wanted to rebel.

I went to all the clubs in Los Angeles and got to know the bands.

I filmed the Germs, and they were just so "I don't give a flying crap" kind of style.

Darby would just get really drunk on stage...

Crash: ♪ Agh ♪ Spheeris: and that would be the show.

People would come just to see how messed up Derby would be.

It was mind-blowing.

Morris: She filmed the Germs and then X, and it's really powerful stuff.

I mean, this stuff's happening in Southern California, and as the scene started to get bigger and there were more and more people, it started to get a little bit hairier.

The Circle Jerks, when she filmed us, we played with Alice Bag and her band.

We played with Fear, and we all would feed off the energy of the people that were in front of us.

Lee Ving: If there's any A&R people in the audience tonight, go die.

♪ 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4 ♪ Spheeris: When we shot Fear, Lee Ving would get in fights with people on stage.

He tried to agitate the audience and insult as many people as possible.

Ving: What a bunch of ugly-looking faces, man.

I know you were.

Spheeris: That was the punk rock attitude back then--push it to the limit.

It was a time in history that was unique.

Ving: ♪ I love living in the city... ♪ Spheeris: Punk was antitraditional music.

It was anti everything... Ving: ♪ Yes, I do I love living in the city... ♪ Spheeris: and people were scared to death of it.

Ving: ♪ I love living in the city ♪ Spheeris: They didn't know what it was.

It was like, "Oh, my God, we're being invaded by aliens, punk rock kids."

Medina: People didn't understand it, and, "Why do they look so weird?"

and it used to get exaggerated by articles being written and like, "Oh, my God, don't go to that punk show.

You're going to get killed."

John Beard: Punkers have been long at odds with police, and confrontations are not new.

Alvarado: The media at the time played up a lot of that stuff, and you ended up having situations where the police started getting involved to eradicate anything that did not maintain the status quo.

Doe: The punk rockers, they were revolutionary.

They didn't fit in.

People didn't understand them.

It was threatening, so we were hassled constantly.

Alvarado: You ended up with things like the Saint Patrick's Day Massacre at the Elks Lodge by MacArthur Park.

That was the first big punk riot.

Doe: The police beat the [beep] out of a bunch of people, and there were scars and stitches to prove it.

Morris: This was just going and clubbing people.

"Doesn't matter who it is.

We have that kind of authority."

Doe: Whether it's hippies or punk rockers or beatniks or you name it, the authorities don't get it, and we felt as though we were succeeding because we pissed you off, so we must be doing something right, but the 19-, 20-year-old boy with no shirt on running around in a circle is a great media image.

That has nothing to do with what punk rock is.

♪ Alvarado: Punk rock has been represented by the media as a straight, white, male thing, and that was never the case.

From the very beginning, there were people of different ethnicities, of different ideologies.

Punk rock was always an inclusive kind of thing.

Jacinto: The punk scene reflected the city of Los Angeles, which is extremely diverse, so everybody was there.

Spheeris: It also changed what women were allowed and expected to do.

All of a sudden, women could shave their head, put on some combat boots, drink a lot of beer, and swear with the dudes.

Bag: In the early punk scene, there was diversity of gender, also sexuality.

So many people bringing in different flavors from different communities really kept it fresh and quirky.

♪ Jacinto: Nervous Gender was a synthesizer band.

It was also a queer band.

It had Gerardo Velazquez; his boyfriend Mike Ochoa; Edward Stapleton, who was originally from Ireland; and it had Phranc, a Jewish lesbian, and they recorded an album "live at the hong kong cafe."

Back then, to see Nervous Gender was really putting to the fans that, "We're queer, and we're punk, and we're singing about being queer and being punk."

They were really, really out there.

People thought punk was too harsh, Nervous Gender was even harsher.

Even the punks struggled to take in Nervous Gender.

Morris: The punk rock community was very welcoming because we weren't going to allow anybody to make any kind of rules.

Jacinto: It was just us kids with a common cause to do our own thing without asking permission.

That's what the punk scene was in Los Angeles.

Alvarado: East L.A. had its own collection of bands.

A lot of these bands would play the Chinatown clubs, too, and they're part of this greater scene.

Medina: You couldn't put them in a genre.

Everyone was so different, like the first East Los Angeles punk rock band the Stains.

Rudy Navarro: ♪ Say I've got no imagination... ♪ Alvarado: The Stains was one of the first bands that mixed metal and punk together.

There's a lot of guitar virtuosity in that music.

They were amazing.

Doe: We were playing at Hong Kong Cafe, and all of a sudden, there were all these young, Latino kids there, and then I thought, "Oh, they're cool."

I remember seeing Stains and Los Illegals and the Brat.

Teresa Covarrubias: ♪ Try to fight, though it's just a game Trying to make kids like me insane... ♪ Medina: We started playing August 1979.

There wasn't a lot of support in East L.A. for original music.

People didn't understand what we were doing, like, "You got a lot of nerve trying to write your own songs."

Teresa Covarrubias was our vocalist.

Covarrubias: ♪ Look around and shut things down... ♪ Medina: Teresa was able to write lyrics, and then the bonus was she could sing.

Covarrubias: ♪ For the best ♪ Medina: The first venue that opened was the Vex, and so we used to play there regularly.

Alvarado: The Vex became that locus for East L.A. bands and was often used to give themselves credibility in playing clubs, so that would be a way that they would get into other places, like the Chinatown clubs.

Medina: Sid and I would go to the Hong Kong Cafe every night.

That's where I met John Doe and Exene.

They really helped launch our career.

We did a lot of shows with them, and then we started playing at the Hong Kong Cafe.

We did a lot of shows with the Undertakers, Los Illegals, too.

Doe: None of us had that sort of entree into a different culture, but because of punk rock, because of the East Side coming into the punk rock world, we did, and at the time, I didn't realize they had so many hurdles to go over to try to get booked, to try to be accepted because they're Latinos.

What the [beep]?

This is not part of our ethos.

The whole thing is that it's inclusive.

Medina: John Doe called me up one day, and he says, "Hey, Rudy, why don't you guys open for us at the Whisky?"

I was like, "Oh, my God, the Whisky?"

That's when things started happening for us, and then we started getting booked all over the place.

Doe: Chinatown and that whole scene allowed us to really work hard, get paid, and to graduate to playing the Starwood and the Whisky.

Olson: The clubs up on the Strip realized they were missing the boat.

Suddenly, they were willing to book bands like us, and there were so many bands that were starting to get record deals, like The Plimsouls, like the Pop.

Seidel: Many other bands got signed.

Bands like The Go-Go's, they all got signed out of the Hong Kong Cafe.

Alvin: The Go-Go's became huge, and other bands were making some money, and they were touring, so the scene changed in a lot of ways.

McKenna: It took a lot of energy to do that scene, and I think a lot of people just got worn out.

It was exhausting to be at shows all the time, to be high all the time.

Morris: When I walked away from Black Flag, I got out right at the perfect time because with the Circle Jerks, we just wanted to have a good time, but that was when it got really crazy because when the Circle Jerks started playing, all of these newer people started showing up.

Jacinto: This was the end of 1980, and a lot of the skinhead boy bands were starting to come in.

Morris: It went from people jumping up and down to actual physicality, like the slam dance.

Doe: The music was always aggressive.

It was the audience that changed, and if you're going to spit on me or throw drinks while I'm trying to do my work, I'm gonna stop, or I'm gonna punch you in the face, which, unfortunately, I did.

♪ Bag: There were times when it was great and inclusive, and there were times when the definition of what a punk could be became very narrow.

It's, like, a distortion of the punk scene that I had known.

♪ Frank: Darby Crash was the epitome of that timeframe, and Darby Crash ended up committing suicide.

Spheeris: Personally, I think it was probably an accidental overdose, but it was very tragic, and I think when Darby died, it was sort of like a turning point, and I thought, "Oh, OK.

It's over with."

Darby's death put a button on it, and things started to lose energy after that.

♪ Turner: That was in December of 1980, and we closed three weeks after that.

I found out that my father had cancer, and I had to move back east.

Seidel: and I had just signed an act that was really hot, and I was getting ready to produce the first album, so when Kim told me, I said, "Fine."

Frank: We just kind of picked a date, and we said, "We're gonna close the club."

Turner: The last night was New Year's of 1980 when Fear closed the club down.

Once they finished their set that night, that was the end of the Hong Kong Cafe.

Alvin: It seemed like it lasted a long time, but it really didn't.

Watt: It was sad for it to go away because, you know, we didn't know it was coming.

All of a sudden, there's no more gigs, so when it closed, it bummed me out.

I never played on the Hong Kong Cafe stage.

Seidel: It was fun.

It was harrowing, and it was over.

Weinberg: It's not that we grew fond of it.

I think we just got used to it, and it was gonna be so quiet upstairs now.

Medina: We spent, like, two years at Hong Kong, and then we went to Madame Wong's.

That's where we started packing the place.

Greenstein: Esther was still running this great club and presiding over this great scene.

Jacinto: Madame Wong's had expanded and had opened another venue in Santa Monica.

Spheeris: It was Madame Wong's West, but it didn't have the charm that the original Madame Wong's had.

It needed the Chinatown vibe.

Greenstein: In 1986, there was a fire at Madame Wong's in Chinatown.

I was told that the bar was destroyed.

That was really sad.

Schwartz: Esther Wong had put so much into her space, and then in the 1990s, Madame Wong's West shut down, too.

Turner: Years after we closed the Hong Kong Cafe, there were other people who had come in and tried to resurrect the club.

Weinberg: They reopened in the early nineties, and it stopped around '95.

It was much milder, way different from the punk days.

Man: We have the legendary Madam Wong, Esther Wong.

You realize that you're an already a legend in Los Angeles?

Esther Wong: Well, I wouldn't say that.

Man: Ah, yes, you are.

Isn't that right?

New music, do you like it?

Esther Wong: New wave?

Well, it's different.

Everybody had their different music, and I like that the most.

Greenstein: When Esther died, they gave her that title-- Godmother of Punk.

I don't think it's right, but I don't feel bad for it.

Esther was a force, and she is part of the history of the city of Los Angeles.

Bag: She didn't really allow punk in her club.

All she did was fight against the club across the street that was truly supporting punk, but I feel like Esther Wong was a businesswoman, and I respect that.

Lachman: She didn't like punk music but made a place available for unsigned talent of L.A. to perform.

Medina: She was definitely important.

Without her, I don't know if we could have launched our career, so she just made it possible.

Liu: I argue for us to see her as a punk because punk is not just about music.

It means that I'm gonna go against what you expect, and so she was doing a very punk thing by turning a restaurant into something new and rare for Chinatown.

[Click click click click] Mila de la Garza: ♪ Too many things I've left behind... ♪ Bag: Punk is still alive, and it's evolving.

You can see a band that's just, like, hardcore or screamo, or you can see a pop punk band.

Lucia de la Garza: ♪ Too many things Too, too many things... ♪ Schwartz: Punk music is alive because there's a need to belong and to not be marginalized.

Lucia: ♪ Too, too many things Sometimes I wonder if I cared... ♪ Martin Wong: You can see a direct line between the Linda Lindas and the punk and new wave shows in Chinatown.

Eloise Wong: I went to school in Chinatown, and the music program was underfunded, and so my parents decided to raise money.

Martin Wong: We started throwing these benefit shows to raise money for the music program, and the idea was that Chinatown has this history of cool punk shows happening there, so let's put on some shows, and we'd have these old punk bands from Hong Kong Cafe/Madame Wong's days play in Chinatown to support the community and kids.

Adolescents came back.

Phranc played for us.

The Gears played for us.

Mike Watt played.

It took off.

Eloise started going as a kindergartner, so she was on stage singing, and Lucia and Mila, they sang backups with Eloise.

They grew up going to shows.

Why wouldn't they form a band?

The Linda Lindas have played with the Avengers, guested with the Descendents.

They've played with Keith Morris and Alice Bag.

They're a part of this punk rock history.

You can tell they have that DNA in them, and in that way, the Linda Lindas are an outcome of the Chinatown punk wars.

Morris: The word "punk" has all of its connotations.

We didn't care about any of that.

We were just doing it.

Bag: It was not just a musical genre.

It was really a way to question your way of living.

Lachman: It's a spirit of DIY.

If you're creative and take the risks involved, you can do it yourself.

Linda Lindas: ♪ Oh!

♪ Jacinto: It's the philosophy that we just get to do this, period.

Linda Lindas: ♪ Oh ♪ Spheeris: Punk rock was anti-establishment, and the minute we stop questioning the norm, then we're stuck.

Alvarado: Question everything and blindly accept nothing, that comes from punk rock.

Medina: It's just your attitude and how you think and what your music reflects.

Morris: There's only so many notes you can play on the guitar.

There's only so many drum beats.

Let it be what it's going to be.

Linda Lindas: ♪ It's all the same Oh!

♪ Doe: Punk rock is just freedom.

Linda Lindas: ♪ Oh!

♪ Watt: One of the only rules-- don't be boring.

Surprise us.

Wake us up.

Linda Lindas: ♪ Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

♪ Eloise Wong: Thank you.

We're the Linda Lindas.

♪ Weinberg: It was a place for people to enjoy themselves and be themselves.

It was just such a cool thing to have in Chinatown.

Struggling musicians, they need a place.

They need a platform.

It was a very special time.

♪ Olson: It gave a band a chance, and it gave us a proving ground.

It gave us a place to grow.

It was a gift.

Seidel: It put a little more light on the punk music scene than it would have had if we didn't exist.

Greenstein: It was a thing, and it was an international thing.

People knew about it all over the world.

"Oh, there's two clubs in Chinatown in Los Angeles."

Jacinto: Madame Wong's and the Hong Kong Cafe, they needed customers, and the bands needed venues to play in, so it was a perfect fit.

Martin Wong: Why not Asian people in punk rock?

They're both underdogs.

There's something about L.A. where all these things can come together and coexist and have repercussions that no one would dream of.

Alvin: Everybody came from disparate backgrounds and disparate musical tastes, and for a while, we were all part of this scene, and it was a beautiful thing.

Doe: A lot of the really important scenes are very short-lived, and I'm incredibly grateful for the whole Chinatown experience and the people that allowed us to do it.

God bless the people who said, "Sure.

What the hell?

[Todd King & Greg Briganti's "Xtreme 80s" playing] ♪ Announcer: This program was made possible in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Department of Arts & Culture, The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Endowment for the Arts.