Welcome, Partyers of All Ages

On a night not that long ago in an Echo Park club, a crew of backward-baseball-cap-and football-jersey-wearing high school-aged hip-hoppers stands with their arms crossed like Run-DMC. They occasionally glance at a pair of girls behind them in a candlelit booth but don’t make a move to talk to them. One of the girls buys a drink for her underage friend, and they settle into an animated conversation.

On the other side of the dance floor, propped up against the bar, are a couple of fellows who look like the “Y Tu Mama Tambien” guys scoping out the scene.

Around 11:30 p.m., the crowd--equal parts Asian, Latino, white and black--inches toward the dance floor at Bassline, a hip-hop, reggae and drum-and-bass club at the Echo on Sunset Boulevard. Things start picking up with a rapid succession of DJs and mike-wielders. One kid shows up sporting a breakin’ outfit circa 1984, while some other boys who can really bust a move twirl about like mosquitoes. A remarkable and crucial social spot for high schoolers, all-age hangouts like Bassline provide an alternative to the doing-homework, watching-TV, slurping-on-a-Big Gulp routine, as well as the somewhat pathetic hanging-out-at-Denny’s, attempting-to-locate-a-house-party typical teen weekend.

Go into any neighborhood and it’s easy enough to find the local burger joints and 7-Elevens that form the core of everyday hangouts for the under-21 crowd. But the real draws are the all-ages clubs and Internet cafes scattered through the region that cater to their specific dilemma. These clubs operate sans liquor licenses and are a tough enough business proposition that many don’t make it for long. In just the last decade, once rockin’ all-ages clubs like the Alligator Lounge, Jabberjaw, Socco and Impala Cafe in L.A., PCH in Wilmington and Koo’s Art Cafe in Santa Ana have dropped off the map.

The result is a mixed bag of door policies that make it tough for the underage crowd to participate in much of L.A.’s music-driven nightlife. The Troubadour, the Whisky, the Roxy, the Hollywood Palladium and the Knitting Factory are generally all-ages and have fantastic bookings and exceptional sound systems. But if kids want to swing at the Derby or check out their favorite band at the Garage, no way, no how. And forget picking up on 21-year-olds at a goth or glam club.

The constant churn in what is and is not open to the under-21 crowd keeps them on the prowl for hangouts where they can mingle with members of the opposite sex who dig the same kind of music and might not go to their high school, where they can get up on stage and read bad death-rock poetry or have their bands play and where they don’t have to spend much dough. It’s a constant search for age-appropriate cool.

J.P. Caballero, 20, was standing outside this sad beach club in his neighborhood, Suzy’s in Hermosa Beach, while his friends’ band, the Rolling Blackouts, were whaling away on their instruments inside.

An authentic fanatic when it comes to music, Caballero doesn’t go to shows to look for a girlfriend or socialize with his pals. For him, it’s strictly about the bands, and the majority of them play 21-and-over clubs that won’t let him in the door. Suzy’s does occasionally have all-ages shows during the day, but after 9 p.m., Caballero’s only option is to sit in the patio and watch the show through a window.

“It’s kind of a drag because there is nowhere to go,” says Caballero. “People will have shows in their garage or their backyard, but there’s no real permanent place in the South Bay. Even at a place like Suzy’s, where they have midday shows, the cops will still come and harass everyone. That’s just the way it is. It’s pretty barren.”

For a while, a friend, Greg Sidman, 19, was putting on shows in his parents’ garage on a secluded street in Hermosa Beach.

“My parents were cool about it,” says Sidman, “until some dumb friend of ours started throwing bottles in the street and the police came. We could fit about 30 people in the garage and we would have local bands play. But one time, someone stepped in my parents’ shower and left footprints, and they got really angry about that, because people weren’t supposed to go in the house. It was a culmination of the shower incident and the bottles that ended it.”

Such is the tenuous life of the backyard underage scene.

There are a few major places, like the Chain Reaction in Anaheim and the Knitting Factory in Hollywood, but numerous kids complain that they’re missing out on the action. “I want to go to Club Sugar, Giant and Spundae, but they are all over-21 clubs,” says 19-year-old Mick Magno of Westwood.

Daisy Tigler, a 15-year-old Santa Monica High School student, says most of the kids she knows just go to a house and hang out. “Someone buys a keg,” she says. “I wish I could go to the Key Club and the Viper Room, but usually I have to choose between hanging out on the Third Street Promenade or going to one of these keg parties.”

And there are the underground raves. Scott Rose, who grew up in Milan, Italy, and moved to L.A. when he was 16, started hanging out around Melrose Avenue and saw fliers for different raves; about half were all-ages.

More than any other local happening, the unregulated nature of raves means they cater to the 18-and-under set. The phenomenon, which arrived in L.A. in the early ‘90s, tapered off a bit after extensive news coverage of drug use. Some evolved into aboveground clubs that are 21-or 18-and over. But underground raves are still fairly common in L.A.

“If you are really into the music and love it, it’s not hard to find little dance parties that still go on and people of all ages go,” says 21-year-old raver Heather Garrell, of Westwood. “There are Web sites like ravelinks.com, which have events for every day of the week.”

For kids who don’t care for glow sticks or Dr. Seuss hats, the night-life situation in L.A. is not entirely grim. In fact, for the kids without fake IDs and the 17-year-old girls who are not able to charm their way past doormen, there is a decent selection of all-ages hangouts.

Caballero plays bass in a hard rock band called dios and sports a flowing, free-form rock hairdo. When he was 16, he started hanging out at PCH, a smelly warehouse in an industrial district where numerous shows went on undisturbed for a couple of years.

Now, he’ll sometimes drive to Anaheim to check out a show at the Chain Reaction or head over to Sacred Grounds in San Pedro, where the all-ages-devoted folks who used to run Koo’s Cafe occasionally book shows.

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About a half-hour drive south of downtown L.A. in Fullerton is an all-ages hangout called the Hub. On a recent Saturday night, five young kids dressed in suits, called the Pop Narcotic, thrash around on a crowded, though roomy, leaf-strewn patio. The band’s singer leaps up on a table and then runs, mike cable trailing behind him, into the Hub’s coffeehouse next door while yelping the chorus, “This place is not for rent!” But mostly the lyrics to their Nation-of-Ulysses-sounding punk tunes are indecipherable.

The Hub is a noisy place with plenty of hipsters and punks, pasted with fliers and anarchist-environmental literature, though people in the audience usually stay seated and drink coffee while the bands play “I really enjoy the nights when they have bands here,” says 17-year-old Orange County resident Andrew Toews, “because generally they tend to be more underground, and being a musician, I like to check out the aspiring talent. It’s everything from indie-rock to jazz to hip-hop to hard-core. But the crowd is always the same people.”

Attached to the Hub is a unique video arcade called the Reagan Years, which is adorned with Michael Jackson and “Flashdance” posters and filled with arcade classics like Marble Madness, Galaga, Burgertime, Tron and Elevator Action. Each game costs a quarter, as they used to back in the Duran Duran era, and young kids, who might associate Pac-Man with their parents, hang out at the Reagan Years digging these low-tech games, which have more imaginative concepts than a lot of contemporary games do.

Cashing in on an interest in state-of-the-art PC and PlayStation games is Badlanz, a new Internet gaming lounge in the ultra-trendy Cahuenga Boulevard corridor, where it is surrounded by bars. But Badlanz is sort of a nerd hangout in a sea of hip.

It’s for kids who are more interested in battling mutant cyborgs than talking to girls. “I’ve been hanging out here all day every day for nearly a year,” says 14-year-old local David Provencio. “When I was on vacation, me and my dad [who sits next to him with a shaved head and eyebrow piercing] would come here from 5 in the afternoon and stay here until 4:30 in the morning. I do a lot of other stuff like basketball when I’m not here, but I’m always here.”

With its two-hours-for-the-price-of-one deal for students, Badlanz is popular with local Hollywood high schoolers. “I see these kids out in the street a lot,” says owner Dave Veillon. “Other local business owners like the fact that we give some of them a place to go.”

As for live bands, kids under 18 have several clubs that will allow them entry. One of the most essential is the Smell downtown, which has a real all-ages community behind it and draws kids from far-flung hoods for improv-oriented indie-rock and avant-garde metal nights.

On one particular Saturday evening, an experimental band with screeching violins and pounding drums called Young People performs, lighted by only a couple of bulbs pointing in odd directions.

A few bewildered and perhaps inebriated homeless people wander among the crowd of snappily dressed youngsters (along with plenty of oldsters). The audience is yawning a lot, though it is 1:30 a.m.

When the music gets kind of rockin’, a couple of girls twitch around spastically. “No one from our school has ever been here except us,” says 18-year-old Rebecca Kolsrud, who graduated recently from the all-girl Marlborough school. “The Smell has more interesting music than a lot of other places. I’ve been here about 20 times. It’s an original place, because they let homeless people in, which is really crazy. I kind of like it.”

Another popular spot for the KXLU-listening set is Fais Do-Do on West Adams Boulevard, which hosts a varied lineup of dance clubs and rock shows. Even at some of the bigger clubs that do have all-ages nights, however, the vibe can be less than kid-friendly.

“We are very aggressive at the front door,” says Troubadour manager Paul McGuigan. “If you try to use a fake ID, you’re forfeiting your ticket. If you get caught drinking in the club, you’re out, straight away. The kids hate us for that reason. But that’s good, that’s the kind of business we want to be.”

Business, after all, is the bottom line, and it doesn’t always work out. “I think the all-ages scene has been a sad casualty of the gentrification of much of L.A., with spiraling rents that have put a lot of the all-ages clubs out of business,” says Tim McDermott, owner of Scooter’s Records in Hermosa Beach. “I’m hard pressed to remember a time when kids had as few options as they do today.”

And now, one fewer. The Echo and its happening hip-hop club Bassline and the popular Punk Rock BBQ went 21-and-up for financial reasons. And the crowd is searching for new places to hang yet again.

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Adam Bregman is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.