The club was founded in 1976 by Jerry Roach,[1] a former bar owner who had turned to selling real estate, after receiving the property from a client as a commission payment.
After almost two years, a slow period hit the business and in February 1978 Roach decided to give the bands that played a relatively new form of music called punk rock a shot.
Bands who performed there include the Adolescents, FEAR,[3] Social Distortion, T.S.O.L., the Vandals,[4] Iggy Pop, Ramones, Dead Kennedys, 999,[5] the Misfits, Circle Jerks,[6] Wasted Youth,[7] Agent Orange,[8] the Go-Go's, Red Kross, the Minutemen, the Blasters, the New York Dolls.
[9] Cuckoo's Nest sat at the back within a shared parking lot of a liquor store, a transmission shop, a laundromat, as well as a bar and grill next door named Zubie's that had an "urban cowboy" motif, which attracted a mainly blue-collar crowd.
"[10] One night a group of cowboys even came out of Zubie's wearing football helmets and carrying baseball bats, looking to spill some blood in the crowded parking lot.
Another night at the club, an on-duty police officer drew his firearm on a cowboy who had come into the Cuckoo's Nest with a loaded 9 mm pistol, who claimed he had been jumped by a group of punks outside and was looking for revenge.
The Zubie's patrons would also be combative towards the security force of The Nest for defending the punks, which escalated into an all-out gang fight one night in the parking lot between them and a large group of rednecks during a T.S.O.L.
Despite this, several band members and patrons of the Cuckoos Nest claimed that the club bouncers could be as aggressive as the neighbors, and were known to drag anyone who got too out of control out the back door, where they would work them over.
They began harassing the punks, seeing them as the problem, and Roach soon found himself gaining the contempt of both his business neighbors and the city council and police, all of whom saw him as essentially fostering and encouraging delinquent and subversive behavior.
After an incident involving punk band names being tagged across a 100 foot long wall of Five Points Plaza next to a large slogan which read "Death to Huntington Beach Pigs!
Within the confines of the largely affluent Republican area of Orange County at the time, homophobia and classism was rife, and many people saw the homemade clothing and provocative hair of punks as a free pass to unload nearly socially encouraged ignorance and elitism.
Mike Ness of Social Distortion had part of the upper cartilage of his left ear bitten off in the parking lot during a fight that stemmed from a methed out punk, who didn't like that he was smoking a joint.
This ultimately led to an incident in the parking lot on the night of January 30, 1981, when an infamous punk and club regular named Pat Brown attempted to run over two police officers with his car.
In his 1981 film on the subject Urban Struggle, Roach suggested that perhaps this was the first time that the authorities would stamp out a fad, but also asserted that a scene with as much intensity as punk-rock could not and would not die out; it would merely go back underground and continue to bubble under the surface.
Roach, who went back to real estate after the club closed, said he was relieved it would be demolished: "I don't have fond memories of losing, of unfairly having my means of making money taken away from me ... "I still think I was railroaded, but that's the breaks.
"[10] The Vandals' songs "The Legend of Pat Brown"[2] and "Urban Struggle" cover the parking lot battles between Cuckoo's Nest and Zubie's patrons.
[12][dead link] We Were Feared – The Story of the Cuckoo's Nest, directed by Jonathan W.C. Mills and executive produced by York Shackleton, premiered at the 2010 Newport Beach Film Festival.
[12][14] Clockwork Orange County: The Rise of West Coast Punk Rock (2012), directed by Jonathan W.C. Mills, features performance footage from the 1981 Urban Struggle documentary and more recent interviews.