Beatniks go slumming safely at the Little Joy

SOMETIMES you want to go where everybody knows your name -- your band name, that is. Or the magazine you write for, the record label you work for, or the website you run.

So name checking is a little different at the Little Joy, the hip Echo Park gin joint where Jason From the Warlocks might be found hanging out alongside Todd From Sea Level and Evan From Viva K while listening to Jay From Arthur spin records and admiring the hallway murals painted by Travis From the Fudge Factory.

The former gay dive bar is now home to all things studiously self-conscious and extravagantly declasse -- the unshaven beatnik’s retort to the foppish poseur’s haven known as the Short Stop, which is located just a few jive steps east on Sunset Boulevard.

Within the Little Joy’s dim concrete and fake-wood-paneled interior, accomplished young patrons masquerading as worthless riffraff engage in witty tete-a-tetes while shooting 50-cent pool, downing shots, quaffing $3 Pabst draughts and slumming it in the bar’s graffiti-ridden bathrooms. The poetry-minded and scatologically inclined know that as bar graffiti goes, the candid verse in the acrid-ammonia air is as good as bathroom scrawl gets.

“ ‘I almost,’ and then I cut her off and said, ‘But you didn’t,’ and then we both cried,” is one minimalist masterpiece written in big loopy letters on the hollow wooden door in the women’s room. “Ya’ll seem stupid, ya know that?” is another.

The mahatma of mod behind the Little Joy’s word-of-mouth success is manager Joe McGraw, a devoted Eastside denizen and outspoken critic of the “business interests that control” city government, who is capable of quoting Yeats and the Dead Kennedys in a single breath and whose preference for bike riding doesn’t interfere with his enjoyment of hand-rolled cigarettes and vice versa.

“If you write about the Little Joy in the L.A. Times, I’ll have to cancel my subscription,” McGraw once told a reporter ominously, illustrating his feelings about keeping the bar an insider’s secret.

“The atmosphere I’m going for is a 16th century London public house,” he explained after throwing a record on the turntable in the bar’s tiny wooden DJ booth. “Where else can you talk freely?”

The Little Joy began its transformation four years ago when McGraw and a couple of well-connected audiophiles began hosting a country-western night there twice a month. The place was just derelict enough to feel dangerous, an elusive and coveted quality that added to its street cred and helped generate the initial buzz. Other than beefing up the jukebox, McGraw left the bar exactly as he found it.

“It still feels like the old Echo Park,” says regular Andrew From the Dying Californians. “It still feels like a fight could break out at any moment, even though there’s a bunch of lily-livered hipster dudes hanging out.”

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Little Joy

Where: 1477 Sunset Blvd., L.A.

When: 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. daily

Price: No cover

Info: (213) 250-3417