First Street Pool & Billiard Parlor

First Street Pool & Billiard Parlor is one of the more honestly conceived live music venues in Los Angeles: a full-on pool hall and a concert stage sharing the same floor at 1906 E 1st Street in Boyle Heights, with cheap beer, open turntables on Wednesday nights, and a crowd that tends toward the rowdy and the real. Eight pool tables occupy one half of the space while the other half is arranged as a proper stage room with a pit for the crowd. The venue has built a strong reputation particularly in the punk and hardcore underground, hosting acts like Naked Aggression, Verbal Abuse, Dropdead, and Infest alongside local bands that represent the broader street punk and hardcore communities of East and Central LA. The atmosphere is aggressively unpretentious. Happy hour runs most days from open through close. Pool tables rent by the hour. The bar stocks twelve beers on tap and pours without ceremony. For a certain kind of music fan and musician, this is exactly the kind of room that keeps a scene alive: no-frills booking, no velvet rope, no pretense, and bands that play loud enough to feel it from the pool table. Open mic and DJ nights fill in the calendar around punk and metal shows, and the crowd tends to include off-duty mariachi players, Eastside regulars, and visiting touring bands who find the vibe immediately familiar. First Street runs Thursday through Monday starting at 3pm and stays open late on weekends. For anyone who wants to catch underground punk, hardcore, or metal in a room that still feels like 1985 in all the right ways, this is one of the most reliable spots remaining in Los Angeles for exactly that experience.