The Cathouse — GNR's Hollywood rock club

The Cathouse was a rock and metal club at 836 North Highland Avenue in Hollywood that operated in the late 1980s — the peak years of the Sunset Strip hard rock scene — and became one of the primary social hubs for the bands that defined that moment. Riki Rachtman ran it; he would later become the host of Headbangers Ball on MTV. The club was open on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and the crowd that came was the crowd: the musicians, the managers, the hangers-on, the people from whom a band either built a following or didn't.

Guns N' Roses were regulars at the Cathouse in the years when Appetite for Destruction was climbing the charts and then exploding. The band had grown up in the Hollywood club world — the Whisky a Go Go, the Roxy, the Troubadour — and the Cathouse was where they landed socially in the period of their breakthrough. Slash has described it as the place the band went between everything else, the room where the social infrastructure of the Sunset Strip condensed into a single Tuesday night. The aesthetic of the Cathouse — leather, denim, teased hair, the absolute confidence of a scene that believed itself to be the centre of the universe — is the aesthetic of Appetite for Destruction visualised.

The Cathouse closed in 1991, a year or two before grunge rendered the entire Sunset Strip hard rock world culturally obsolete. The North Highland Avenue building has been occupied by other businesses since. The scene that gathered in it — specific to Hollywood, to that moment, to that particular configuration of vanity and talent and excess — did not survive the decade.