Someone asked if I really saw Courtney Love strip at Jumbo’s Clown Room in 1989 and yes, I did, so here is the story as best as I can recollect it.
I had been to Jumbo’s one other time prior to this, it is an odd little place in a mini-mall in Hollywood, maybe it has changed over the years, this is how I recall it, mid-stupor, the stage has to be entered through the crowd and it isn’t a stage as much as it is an alcove. The girls walk from the back thru the audience to the stage. The floor has maybe ten tables that each seat three patrons comfortably. I don’t even think there was room for a pool table but I only visited this place a few times, there is a bar at the back and a pinball machine, back near where the "talent" waits its turn.
The beer cost just a little more than it would have been anywhere else at any normal bar and you did not have to tip the dancers if you were not sitting close to the alcove/stage. Most strip clubs have engineered the tipping and lap-dance extremes of the business so that if you are just there to drink and watch you are going to be intimidated to leave, but it used to not be like that and Jumbo’s was probably the best place to nurse a beer and maybe take a nap – the girls at Jumbo’s were all different shades of bad news. There was your basic Heavy metal cokehead, party girl groupies who had gone too far down the party powder highway to do anything besides make enough money for the next pile of coke. Then there were your pot head stoner types, still with a hippie look and a pretense to incorporating some legitimate dance technique into their bump and grind behind the funky little wood fence that cordoned off the stage/alcove from the crowd. There were sad, nodding junkie strippers with oddly drawn tattoos, this was back when having one single tattoo that looked like shit still carried a "wow" factor to it. Punk was at its nadir but there was still the beer belly has-beens with 1978 shaved and dyed haircuts wiggling the flesh for a few rounds and a place to crash.
If I recall correctly, the girls had to wear pasties on their nipples and had to keep some sort of g-string on at all times. There are different tiers in the LA strip industry – very few places are all nude and I believe they are not allowed to serve alcohol and there is a barrier to contact between patron and performer. Then there are tiers where the club can serve alcohol but the girls cannot be completely nude, they can, say, be topless and wear a thong, et cetera, I have not set foot in a strip club in LA since 2001 so all these laws may have changed, but the tiers went down and Jumbos was that the girls were close enough that you could slip a tip into their panty elastic but their nipples had to be covered with a pasty – so the tradeoff is you got some incidental contact but no complete visual. And you could drink. If any of the girls at Jumbo’s had been a little more together to get it together, they would be stripping at a better place, the only places lower on the totem pole from Jumbo’s were bikini bars, which I think are illegal now … and that is another story, so anyway, Jumbo’s was the bottom feeder of the problem girls of Hollywood substance abuse.
I went in with a friend of mine who was dating one of the strippers there. Look, I was 24 and green, and he was not too far ahead of up the naivete ladder, so in hindsight, I believe that he believed he was dating a stripper, but who really knows, the point is, I had a reason to go there and my friend was a regular, which always makes places like this a bit more comfortable. So we are sitting there and waiting for "his girl" to go up and the chicks who do go up are, well, to be honest, they are raunchy, there is no redeeming quality to their performances. But then after the third or fourth casualty of the night there is a hush and my friend says "I think Courtney’s gonna go on," and that doesn’t mean anything to me, but okay, there is just this little bit of anticipation in the air and then there is a scream and a "fuck you" and then another "fuck you", it is a girl over by the pinball machine drinking a beer. She has no pretense of stripping, her top is already off and her pasties are metal spikes attached to her nipples, like on a spiked bracelet. Years later it was obvious to me that she had a boob job AFTER her Jumbo’s stint, which was a misnomer if not downright false advertising about Courtney’s endowment. So someone yells "Courtney" and a few other guys yell "Courtney" and some loud heavy metal starts playing and she basically walks up to the stage, jumps over the wooden fence and sits on the stage, asks to smoke a cigarette of some guy’s at the table in the front row, then takes one of their beers and gets up on the stage. She doesn’t even dance for a beat of the song when she sees someone in the crowd and gives him the finger and spits a mouthful of beer at him, missing him, all of it landing on an empty table up front.
She is angry at this guy "kiss my ass" she yells, waving that finger for already the hundredth time, and she has a howling voice, like a cockroach making it into your ear, and she gets a wicked look knotted up on her face and tells him to kiss her ass again, without turning around and showing her ass (no great loss). By now some other guy has walked to the edge of the stage and is holding out a dollar, she walks over and starts talking to him animatedly, about what who knows but people start screaming, the place was basically dead but a frenzy is kind of building, and she is stoking the chaos by manipulatively sneering half glances at the audience with "I’ll get to you next, asshole" telegraphing out in half-second glances oozing with contempt. She was not one of those women stripping who reminded you they hated men or reminded you that they hated you, no, she was a higher caliber of evil, her presence put you ill at ease and eye contact with the blob of tornado flesh called Courtney reminded you that you hated yourself.
I don’t recall if she even took the guy’s dollar but some self-loathing guys had made it to the front and were putting out dollars and she grabbed them without even looking beyond her fingers, then she got back up on stage and started shouting to the bartender, shouting and then she just waked off, turning to yell "fuck you" a few times and give the finger to three or four regulars. By now the place is hopping with catcalls and whistles and guys trying to be funny with one-liners and other guys swearing they love her, but all of them yelling "Courtney! Courtney!" with varying degrees of amazement of having just seen the edge.
My friend’s only comment was that she got punched the week before and this was the mildest he had seen her. But all twenty guys scattered at those tables shouted her name and the memory stayed, it was the extreme whereby every subsequent bump and grind I have seen performed was rendered just a little duller, just a little less scandalous, meaningless and empty. That is what a visit to the edge is supposed to do. You don’t leap but you do die a little.