Vintage The Hop Nightclub Matchbook 🐰 Los Angeles Rabbit Logo

Remember The Hop? 🐰 A Matchbook From the Righteous Brothers' Rock and Roll Nightclub

Size: 2" x 2"

If you went out dancing in Orange County or around Long Beach in the 1980s, this rabbit might look awfully familiar. He's the mascot of The Hop, the rock and roll nightclub that Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield - the Righteous Brothers - opened in Southern California, and here he is dressed for the club's fifties theme in a red jacket and dark shades, collar up, one elbow propped on the club's round logo like he's waiting for the doors to open. These are full, unstruck matchbooks with square cream covers and a maroon striker.

🎤 The Righteous Brothers go into the club business

Medley and Hatfield were Orange County boys. They started singing together there in the early 1960s, and the story goes that their name came from the Black Marines from the El Toro base who used to come hear them at a club in Santa Ana and holler "That was righteous, brothers!" after a song. They took the name in 1963 and then came "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'," the Phil Spector record that BMI later counted as the most-played song on American radio and television of the whole twentieth century, then "Unchained Melody" and "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration."

They went their separate ways in 1968, had a short reunion in the mid-seventies, and got back together for good in the early 1980s, and that's when they went into the nightclub business. Bill Medley's Wikipedia biography has the two of them opening The Hop, a rock and roll-themed nightclub, on Brookhurst Street in Fountain Valley in 1985 and then adding a second one in Lakewood; another history of the duo puts the Fountain Valley opening as early as 1982. The 1980s were good years for both of them - Medley's "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" with Jennifer Warnes, from Dirty Dancing in 1987, won the Oscar, and "Unchained Melody" came roaring back with the movie Ghost in 1990.

So this matchbook is a 1980s piece, not a 1950s one. The fifties were the theme, not the date - the chain's taller matchbook covers say it right on them: 50's - 60's NITECLUB.

🐰 Why a rabbit?

Look at the name. A hop was the dance itself - the sock hops in school gyms, the record hops a disc jockey ran on a Friday night, and Danny & the Juniors' "At the Hop," which went to number one in January 1958. And rabbits hop. The bunny hop was its own dance, too, a conga-line novelty that got started at Balboa High School in San Francisco in 1952 and was a hit record for Ray Anthony's band that same year. The story among folks who went is that the club's rabbit would turn up in costume and lead the whole floor through a bunny hop. Local legend also has it the Hops pulled a real crossover crowd - people who'd danced at the actual sock hops back in the fifties, out on the floor to the same records alongside their grown kids.

📍 Where the Hops were

This square cover keeps its town to itself - there's no address on it. The chain's taller covers list the clubs: Brookhurst Street in Fountain Valley, Clark Avenue in Lakewood, down near Long Beach, Mercury Road in El Toro, Park Sierra Drive in Riverside, and the Puente Hills Hop on Gale Avenue in the City of Industry. So this rabbit got around, from the beach towns to the Inland Empire.

The clubs ran on oldies. People who danced at the Puente Hills Hop remember a floor that leaned on fifties and sixties records with some surf music thrown in, right through the 80s and into the 90s, and that location is long closed now. The Lakewood Hop hung on long enough to host a tribute to the late Huggy Boy, the Los Angeles disc jockey who'd been spinning rhythm and blues on the radio since the fifties.

🔥 About these matchbooks

Every one I have is a full matchbook, never struck - the square cream cover with the rabbit and the round logo, the maroon striker and the staple. No match company's name shows on the outside, but the chain's taller covers carry the Atlas/Diamond name out of Los Angeles. Diamond Match goes back to 1881, and for most of the twentieth century it was one of the big national outfits - Universal Match and Lion Match were others - whose salesmen called on just about every club, diner and motel in America, selling them exactly this kind of giveaway. Matchbooks have a way of outlasting the places that gave them away, and a lot of the time they're what's left to remember a club by. Tuck one into a matchcover album, frame it next to a Righteous Brothers record, or set it on a shelf with anything from a Southern California night out in the 80s. If you ever danced at a Hop, here's your rabbit back. The supply is finite - nobody's printing matchbooks for The Hop again, and once these last ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.