In Memoriam: Madame Wong

What with one thing and another, I missed the fact that Madame Wong died last month.


"Madame" Esther Wong 

According to CNN:

The native of China originally booked Polynesian bands to play at her restaurant, but when hardly anyone showed up to hear them she decided to take a chance on rock acts. Almost overnight in 1978, hundreds of people began showing up at her Chinatown restaurant to hear the new sounds, and she opened a Madame Wong's West in Santa Monica that same year.

"Before, I didn't think I'd ever like rock music," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. "Now I can turn it on, and it doesn't bother me."

As her clubs flourished, Wong quickly became known as a no-nonsense proprietor. She once halted a performance by the Ramones until the band members left the stage and cleaned up the graffiti they had put on a bathroom wall. She rarely booked female singers, calling them "no good, always trouble," and she was known to go into the audience to try to sniff out marijuana smokers.

"She would always take any problem or situation head-on, she was not afraid of anyone," her daughter told The Associated Press.

Wong auditioned performers by listening to their tapes, often while driving in her car, until she said her habit of flinging bad music out the window nearly got her in trouble.

"One day I almost hit the highway patrol car that was right next to me," she told the Times in 1980.

She was a character, and very important in the power pop movement of the late 70's. Everyone played there, including The Knack, the Go-go's, X, The Police, Oingo Boingo, and 20/20, the latter of whom who were regulars.

(Thus my skepticism of Doug Fieger's assertion, in the documentary Getting the Knack, that he did not know who 20/20 were, that The Knack were calling themselves 20/20 when the Oklahoma band was noted on the cover of Bomp!, and Fieger claimed to get excited, thinking it was his band that had gotten the press. I guess it's theoretically possible, but it's not very bloody likely, that he had never heard of them. Other useful things I learned from Getting the Knack: if you have a really serious cocaine problem, heroin takes the edge right off! Good tip!)

In any case, Madame Wong was a name I knew from the music press ages and ages ago, and while I wouldn't exactly call her a patroness of the art of power pop, no doubt her willingness to open her club to these bands helped break the logjam of disco and club music in the period.

A report on the memorial service from L.A. Weekly.

Thanks, Madame Wong! Rest in Peace.