Where the Fringe Is Middle of the Road

A tour bus headed east on Melrose Avenue slows down near Wasteland, which, like many of the stores along this mythic stretch of institutional hipness, sells campy used clothes from every decade, hundred-dollar vintage pants and bargain designer shoes. On the sidewalk outside, a half-dozen kids sporting facial piercings and black leather, much of it studded with metal, casually ask passing shoppers for change, one grinning and holding a sign that says, “NEED BEER....” As a girl, who will not give her name, explains how the popularized, romanticized shopping district of Melrose Avenue, famous for its trendy wares and anti-establishment attitude, is littered with “yuppies and cell phones,” one of her friends spots the rubbernecking tourists and begins yelling.

“Keep moving!” he screams, turning his back to the tour bus and yanking down his jeans. “That’s what you get for slowing down.”

And this, the exposed rear end of an angry street punk, is exactly what any clued-in tourist should expect to see here. Anything less would be a letdown, for this one mile of Los Angeles is so fiercely alternative, so unapologetically cool, that its attitude has become downright predictable.

Some marvel at how this strip has managed to guard its indie spirit, while others grumble that the place is skidding on its reputation, that it’s become nothing more than a bus-mooning street punk, too cool for you and me but willing to take our money anyway.

“Melrose Avenue is like the L.A. version of Kings Road in London: It’s always been associated with youth culture, new trends, pseudo-subversive underground designers, art and fashion,” says Pleasant Gehman, night-life columnist for Los Angeles magazine and editor of the Underground Guide to Los Angeles (Manic D Press, 1999). She spent many years on Melrose in its heyday, the ‘80s, when punk rock and cheap thrifting were new, when their trends defined the street and the street helped define a culture. “Now the rest of the world has finally caught up to Melrose, so for some time it’s been established, but never quote-unquote establishment.”

So, yeah, punk and piercings don’t shock anyone anymore--very few things do--but Melrose continues to thrive as a sort of commercial subculture incubator, a place where extreme ideas germinate, grow, become mainstream. Wedged between two Chevron stations, the strip borders an upscale gallery-and-furniture-store district to the west, and, to the east, quickly becomes funkier, sketchier, more Hollywood. Those who work and walk here sense an invisible hand fending off the mall-ification now familiar to other outdoor pedestrian strips, Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, Pasadena’s Old Town and now Hollywood Boulevard. Alongside Melrose’s ever-rotating feast of fiercely independent storefronts, the Gap opened and closed a few years later, as did McDonald’s and Noah’s Bagels. Now, though, a Starbucks, Johnny Rockets and Urban Outfitters are doing well. So what’s the trick? Who fits in and who is cast away?

“Hey, we don’t even belong here, except for one thing: We’re eccentric,” says Sanders Chase, walking through his store, the Record Collector, a bright, neatly kept labyrinth of vinyl, room after room of floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with a half-million LPs ranging in price from $10 into the thousands. “The definition of ‘eccentric’ is that you stand still and everyone else bends to you--so you become the center instead of the fringe.”

This, he says, is what Melrose is all about, planting extreme ideas and tastes firmly in the middle of the road. Chase moved his store here 21/2 years ago, from a Highland Avenue location he’d had for more than 20 years, and says his clients, including Busta Rhymes and Michael Jackson, followed. He sells no CDs, mostly classical and jazz records and some of what he calls “weird music,” a wall of soundtracks, electronic classical (selling very well now) and the occasional 75-record Beatles collection. “But if you want rock or hip-hop,” says the chatty 50-year-old, “it’s all up and down the street.”

True, a few blocks down, Fat Beats offers the latest De La Soul and Outkast on vinyl while a deejay behind the counter mixes and scratches to a weekday afternoon audience of three browsers. Vinyl Fetish has your dance and goth, Head Line Records stocks ska and punk and books in-store shows and mini-riots. And then there’s Street Sounds, geared toward the European-style deejay set, whom owner Bob Bagha describes as only 1% to 3% of music lovers worldwide. But, like anything that thrives on Melrose, the stuff’s on the rise: “The total number of turntables sold in 2001 outnumbered the number of guitars,” he boasts, as a giant speaker on the sidewalk thumps and thumps. On the next block, a man sells CDs out of a backpack, an album that he and his brother recorded and pressed themselves. “Only $7,” he says. “It’s going to blow up. I mean it.” For some reason, I don’t doubt him.

The foot traffic on Melrose has the ebb and flow of lazy retail time, open at noon, closed by 8--or whenever. During the afternoon, the place is packed with scenesters, skateboarders, moms with strollers, kids from Fairfax High, guys with green hair and even more guys with just plain old regular hair. There isn’t much of a morning coffee crowd, or many places for them to go, and nothing is open 24 hours. Night life centers on upscale-ish dinner crowds at places like Melrose mainstay Chianti, Angeli Caffe (owned by KCRW-FM personality Evan Kleiman) and Tommy Tang’s, a couple of bars (Max’s, the Snake Pit), two small theaters and, particularly, the improv club and acting academy the Groundlings Theatre.

“There was a time when they talked about moving us off Melrose, to Universal CityWalk I think, which would have been very harmful,” says actor David Jahn, a Groundlings cast member and teacher who has spent more than a decade with the troupe. “That’s much more of a family-oriented place, whereas on Melrose, yeah, there are tourists, but it’s hip and you’ve got really creative people here.”

Every day of the week, the theater either has classes, where hopeful future members learn the trade, or performs one of its sketch-comedy or improv shows. Since moving behind its trademark brick facade in 1979, the Groundlings has graduated the likes of Paul Reubens, Lisa Kudrow and Will Ferrell, bringing to the street a slick industry audience and an older dinner-and-a-show crowd on the weekends. But Jahn recommends the Sunday night show, which is put together by students hoping to one day make the main troupe and is a little more out-there, experimental--a little more Melrose.

Most of the street, however, has little to do with comedy, Hollywood or music. It’s about clothes. And shoes. And more clothes. Everything from the latest disposable clubwear to ironically plaid golf pants. Need a sequined Mexican wrestler mask? Try Blue Demon. How about a chain-mail helmet? See Royal Flesh.

A few of the dozens and dozens of storefronts stand out as standards: the gleefully rude bondage-flavored Retail Slut, the vintage threads superstore Aardvarks Odd Ark, and Red Balls on Fire, with its facade of mirrored half-spheres. It’s been here for a decade, under the direction of designer-owner Petra Vieira, who sells whatever European brands are hot and makes her own slinky pants and dresses from used leather outfits. “The street keeps copying us,” she says over the blaring techno-noise of a John Digweed CD, “and they do it so fast!”

Over the years, she’s seen countless trends and stores come and go, but a few things always, always, always sell on this street. “Anything punk or rock ‘n’ roll,” she says, “and it has to be sexy. That’s Melrose.” A few years ago, when much of the street tried more high-end and expensive concepts, she opened a more sophisticated spin-off. But the invisible hand of Melrose wanted no such thing, and her second shop is now packed with close-out items. “It only sells here,” she says, “if it’s got some kind of edge to it.”

On a recent Friday afternoon, up and down the street, bored workers stand outside countless boutiques with similar window displays and names: Serious. Shrine. Flasher. Body Double. Booth. Few of the shoppers carry bags, and I ask three women how their weekday spree is going.

“You know, the stores are all the same, but so what?” says one, Mika Neefgaard, twisting her hips, showing off a $10 fringey suede belt she just bought at some place or another, the name of which she can’t remember. “If things go out of fashion so fast, who cares?”

The history of Melrose Avenue is littered with fads, rages, whims and the stores that pimped them, too many gone now to even list. In the early days of punk rock, the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, explains writer Gehman, the rent on Melrose was dirt-cheap, compared with, say, then-booming Westwood Village. So budget-minded, off-center shops selling campy gifts, screen-printed Ts and black jeans grabbed giant storefronts and gathered posses of orbiting hipsters. The street grew places like oddball toy-and-housewares shops Soap Plant and Wacko--they have since moved to Hollywood Boulevard in Los Feliz, essentially the Melrose of the mid-’90s--and the long-gone thrift thread shop Flip.

“This was where you could get a job if you looked like a hard-core punk, and it seemed like everyone was at Flip. My boyfriend was working there, and two girls from my band were working there,” says Gehman. “And everyone who worked there looked like Elvis or Madonna.”

A sense of alternative success and confidence took hold on Melrose, she says, and it hasn’t left, only grown older, wiser, more entrenched. Some describe the place now as a lesser civilization built in the shadow of a great one. “I think the street has actually lost character,” says Matt Joseph, owner of House of Freaks, a tattoo and piercing parlor located above a convenience store. His business used to be novel, weird, out there, but like much of what made Melrose different, it’s gone mainstream. There are now a half-dozen places here to get skin ink and body jewelry.

“When I first opened, the customers were more likely to get a tattoo of something because it was important to them, but now, they get what everyone else has,” he says, as two women at his counter shop for new navel rings. “People go into office jobs now with pierced eyebrows, and it’s no big deal.” And that, he says, is Melrose today: The middle manager with a nose ring.

Other old-timers are downright cranky about the mature Melrose, complaining that the creative energy is gone, that trend-setting crowds have given way to younger, less discriminating follow-the-leader types.

“This used to be a great street,” says Dean Miller, manager of the pop-antique store Off the Wall. “Now it’s, what? Women’s clothing store, shoe store, women’s clothing store, used women’s clothing store, shoe store.” Pointing up and down the street, he stands on the sidewalk beneath a sign that reads “Weird stuff,” flanked by a large spinning flying saucer and a 6-foot Ronald McDonald he has for sale. Miller talks about the old days, the ‘80s and even ‘90s, when the street had more rock ‘n’ roll character, when the jazz club Nucleus Nuance drew crowds, when Off the Wall used to be bigger and there were at least three competing high-end antique stores.

The stores that have been here the longest, been here for decades, have created their own markets and subcultures but don’t quite fit the stereotypical punk profile: Off the Wall, Wound & Wound Toy Co., L.A. Eyeworks, Wanna Buy a Watch, Golden Apple Comics. Miller still does brisk business in things like Frank Lloyd Wright furniture and Charlie the Tuna lamps and chandeliers from the Empire State Building. Heck, he’s sold three giant $2,000 fiberglass cows in the last four months.

Miller’s still fostering the street’s reputation as an easy place to find hard-to-find stuff. Need a neon sign made? Or a wind-up, bouncing Godzilla toy? How about a rare Bill Evans reissue? One store, Animate, sells not only Japanese animation DVDs, but also the pens and paper tailored for drawing saucer-eyed schoolgirls and robots that turn into space ships.

Today, newcomers such as G.A.L.A.X.Y. Gallery are, in the tradition of Melrose, turning extreme ideas into mainstream fare, standing still while the world bends to them. In particular, this art gallery, cafe and pipe store is hoping to bring the once-taboo head shop to the Abercrombie-and-Restoration Hardware crowd. When owner Russ Cress moved to L.A. from Ohio, he shopped around for the perfect neighborhood to open a store devoted to the culture and paraphernalia of “the graduated smoker,” the sophisticated pot enthusiast, to open “a place you could take your grandmother,” he says.

“What I realized was that Melrose wasn’t the coolest street,” he says, mentioning more raw urban soil in Silver Lake and Hollywood, “but it’s got this young, trendy demographic that we need.” So the street hit the spot for his enormous selection ranging from $6 carved wood pipes to ornate, handblown glass bongs in the $1,800 range. He’s even opened a bar where you can smoke a variety of perfectly legal substances from large hookahs. It’s predictably offbeat, essentially a gift shop located just outside the subculture.

Down the street, another man plies his trade, selling his own brand name to the casual shoppers. His name is Dutch, he’s 27, and he’s crouching on the street and asking for change, politely, quietly, wearing a lot of leather with a tattoo of a star under each eye. He loves it here on Melrose and walks all the way from his apartment on Hollywood Boulevard to gather a few bucks for the day. He describes it as “much more alternative” than Hollywood or anywhere else and insists that--are you kidding?--the place can’t and won’t change, no matter how successful he or anyone else gets.

“It’s just Melrose, man,” he says, as if stating the obvious. “It’s always going to be like this.”

Glenn Gaslin is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.