They oughta name a drink after Alex Hernandez

ALEX HERNANDEZ by JOHN GILHOOLEY

When Alex Hernandez needs a day off from his bar Alex’s Bar, he goes to another bar, which if it isn’t the V Room is the darkest old-man bar he can find. (“We all look better in darker light,” he says.) And when Alex needs a day off from bands and music, he goes into his soundproofed studio where his bands the Bolides and Los Mysteriosos (plus friendly bands Blood Red Orchestra and Telomere Repair) practice and he screams and turns the guitar up to 11 and freaks the fuck out, he says. But has Alex ever actually taken a day off?

Bar talent buyer Jackie Ojeda has worked for Alex for three years and can’t ever remember a day when he didn’t come in. And when he does take vacations, they’re vacations like SXSW where you keep a business card with you, and when he’s finished with this interview, he leaves for Vegas to lead his Alex’s Bar Bowling Team in the world-famous Punk Rock Bowling Tournament.

And when he comes home, he will have a week to get ready for Alex’s Bar’s anniversary, marking eight years at what’s now one of Long Beach’s most vital live venues—bringing Black Flag, Blowfly and the Bay City Rollers to an unmarked gray bunker at Anaheim and Gladys founded and fixed-up by a lifelong punk promoter whose only square job ever was riding a mower for the city of Lakewood. Which he did with headphones on and mixtape rolling. Says Ojeda, who left the House of Blues to work for Alex: “The thing I seriously love is that he is all about the fucking music. It’s his fucking name on the place—that’s why he puts so much effort into it. Because it’s him.”

Twenty years ago, Alex Hernandez was 15 and sneaking out of his parents’ house (he’d tell them he was going to Skate Depot) to the defunct and parent-reviled Fender’s Ballroom at First and Linden, the infamous all-ages punk venue where Long Beach music burned itself first and worst—“There were 16-year-old kids smoking PCP in the streets,” he says. “We kind of ruined it for ourselves. . . . ” The first show he ever got permission for was the Replacements and the Mob at the Palladium, and to this day he says his mom still knows Black Flag and Slayer on instant listen—learned between beating on the wall when repeat rehearsals through a guitar amp ruined nightly TV time, he says. (“I think they finally bought me an amp with a headphone jack,” he says.)

He’d heard punk and it got him for life in the usual way, he says, graduating from backyard parties in Lakewood to illegal basement shows with Rodi Delgadillo (most known now as Good Foot’s Japan alum) downtown. Good Foot DJ Dennis Owens—at that time bassist for Suburban Rhythm—thinks that might have been then-longhaired Alex’s first “clublike” job: “He’d do the door—we trusted him, and he was a big guy so we figured no one would fuck with him!” There were so many kids downstairs with no ventilation relief that the walls would drip with sweat, Alex says, and he’d stand up at the top watching steam puff out around him.

At 20, he was pushing much-beloved booker Steve Zepeda to put friends’ bands on bills at the Foothill; at 21, he was booking the bar the Clipper, and for five years after that he booked into plowed-under landmarks like Java Lanes and Foothill, and then when he was 26 a gay country-and-western bar on Anaheim called Floyd’s—lots of mirrors inside, built in 1918, advertisements for Victrolas under a weak coat of paint on the eastern wall—came up for sale for less than what you might pay for a little-old-lady-owned used car. The right opportunity at the right time, says Alex, who pauses now to check the current clock: “And it took two years, 27 days and 14-and-a-half hours to open.”

When Jackie Ojeda first walked into Alex’s, she was sure she’d never get to find it again: “This huge cavernous bar I never knew existed!” she says now. Then (as now) there was no sign—just a red bulb over a door that opens from the inside, with prior experience or word-of-mouth tip (as bartender Jesse Wilder says) necessary to know to go around back. Inside, it’s cavernous still but cozy, too—Alex’s senses of humor and style perfectly manifested in luchador kitsch and velvet cheesecake, says Owens. On summer Sundays they’d serve barbeque off a gurney; on Christmas and Thanksgiving nights, Alex’s would be open with Owens and friends DJing and Alex wandering happily past. (“Instead of saying, ‘Hey, let’s shut down,’ he wants to be with friends!” says Ojeda. “That’s straight from him—he’s very sentimental about the holidays.”) On Tuesdays, CSULB kids karaoke; first Fridays are mod/psych/garage club Secret Affair, and unflappable Phil Shane flaps in at least once a month. They even have wireless; you can drink “respectable” beers (per Wilder) and do homework. It’s eight years in and it’s hard to consider Long Beach music without Alex’s, but it was just about a cave the day Alex signed his lease and started filing down the six digits of renovation work necessary to let a band play in his bar.

“I knew I’d do entertainment, of course,” he says. “That was the whole point of doing it.” Inspirations were CBGBs, Emo’s in Austin, Casbah in San Diego and the Black Cat in DC: long-lived rock & roll bars that defined by degrees both the music and the cities around them, respected as much themselves as the bands that played inside. But baby Alex’s Bar came cheap to buy and dear to fix, signed over to Alex in such dilapidated condition that the very first job was to round up all his off-work construction buddies and tear the building down to the frame. They all came in and slugged hammers, he said—replacing clay pipe, replacing pre-war electrical systems that put raw wire through joists—and Alex activated every available credit card and chased every available favor, securing the first sound system from a Guitar Center manager who traded for a nice big space to shoot an independent film. (Alex’s unreleased film debut; later the bar would find more fame in Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.)

There was no entertainment license yet so there was only drinking and a really good jukebox, says Alex. There were two lonely paintings hanging on the wall. Schedule fits-and-starts got Alex’s friends so used to false-alarm grand openings that hardly anyone came out the day Alex’s really opened—“I had to call everybody twice and reassure them!” Alex says, and the cash register that was supposed to be there at noon didn’t make it till four. Jesse Wilder remembers telling friends already regulars elsewhere about visiting Alex’s, who’d say, “Oh, man, don’t you get beat up if you go to that bar?” Well, no, he’d explain, and on the night of the first-ever Alex’s Bar live show—Throwrag headlining Halloween 2000 and playing on the floor because the stage wasn’t built yet, one of the rare events allowed without a full entertainment permit—he found a line all the way around the corner.

Now Alex’s Bar is the biggest small rock & roll room in town (just below places like Vault 350) and an intersection for touring bands that might instead play places like Spaceland, Troubadour or Echo and for local bands about to push up from Prospector and Que Sera. Next month Fast Dragon—the new loudrock band Long Beach loves—is opening for John Reis (Hot Snakes/RFTC/someone Alex thinks so highly of that he served Hot Snakes a homemade carne asada dinner, with chef help from Alex’s dad) and his new band the Night Marchers at their second-ever California show. That’s an event that demonstrates Alex’s Bar at its best: an out-of-town band that will drag every old sack out of their beds plus a hometown band that’s great and growing, together in a room with low lights and worthy beers that’s maybe a 15-minute cab ride from anywhere in the city. In LA, Black Flag ridiculously reunited—technically—for thousands at the Palladium. In Long Beach, they played Alex’s for a headspun few hundred, and Alex himself climbed onstage to grab a photo with Dez mid-song.

“He’s always been there for the bands first of all,” says Wilder, who’s been involved with Alex’s Bar as a bartender—fired on his birthday once!—band member (Forcefield ON and Mister Mister Miyagi), and just a customer during these eight years, and who describes Alex now as a boss, a friend and even a bandmate, though that band never played a show. “You know the Riverboat Gamblers—he loves those guys, and he’ll just fly them out to play his birthday! He likes to take care of them because he respects what bands do.”

“It’s a good atmosphere and a good room,” says bassist J.P. Caballero, playing Alex’s anniversary with dios (malos) this weekend. “When I wanna see the best of that part of the world, I go to Alex’s. You get less of the drift of people who come out to LA to ‘make it.’ That doesn’t happen in Long Beach.”

“You’ve heard it a million times, but Long Beach is a big city with a small town attitude, and that really holds true,” says Owens. “For the quality of life you get compared to any surrounding city, Long Beach can’t be beat! And Alex’s provides a place for all of us in this bracket to work our craft—DJing or playing in bands or being a seasoned drinker!”

Now Alex and Jackie BOTH explain how they hope 2008 will be a year for Alex’s Bar to really back local bands (he notes Crystal Antlers and Valley Arena as two promising bands) and help Long Beach rise inside Southern California music. By now all his original customers are married with mortgages and kids, Alex says—and their kids (who were barely teenagers in 2000) are coming to his bar now: “There’s some point where you stop going into work hung-over and grow up and show up every other weekend, and then once a month, and then every six months,” he says. “But there’s always a new kid to take your place.”

“So it’s the eighth year and just the other night Alex comes up to me—‘Hey, Jesse, do you know any of these people?’” says Wilder. “It was a Secret Affair night—those are the new kids. I was telling him—that’s the next generation. I flashed back to when I was 21 or 22 and going to the Prospector—that was our cool hangout. And this is the rebirth—that’s a cool thing! If you’re around long enough for there be a renaissance, you’ve hit a milestone.”

EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY AT ALEX’S BAR 2913 E ANAHEIM ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | ALEXSBAR.COM | THROWRAG, LORDS OF ALTAMONT AND GUESTS ON FRI | RAMONAS, DIOS (MALOS) AND MIKE WATT AND THE MISSINGMEN ON SAT | $10-12 | 21+

Tags: alex hernandez, alex's bar, bars, eighth anniversary show, Long Beach, mike watt, Music, throwrag