The Starwood (former site) — GNR's early Sunset Strip shows

The Starwood club at 8151 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood operated from 1975 until 1988 and was one of the primary venues through which the Los Angeles hard rock and punk scenes developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Before the Whisky a Go Go had fully embraced hard rock, before the Cathouse existed, the Starwood was the room where the collision between punk and metal was producing the aesthetic that would eventually become the Sunset Strip sound. Van Halen played early shows here. The Germs. Fear. X. The club occupied a particular moment when the genre lines in Hollywood rock were not yet fixed.

Guns N' Roses played the Starwood in 1985 and 1986, in their earliest incarnation — before the lineup was stable, before they had management, before Geffen had any interest in them. The shows at the Starwood were among the first evidence that the band had something that the rest of the Sunset Strip scene didn't: a genuinely dangerous quality that wasn't performed, a sense that something could go wrong at any moment, that the musicians on stage were operating at a level of genuine feeling that the more polished acts around them were not. The early Starwood crowd saw it before anyone else did.

The Starwood closed in 1988 and was demolished. The site on Santa Monica Boulevard has been redeveloped. The club's significance to the Los Angeles rock story of the 1970s and early 1980s is acknowledged in histories of the period but is not marked at the address. It was the kind of venue that mattered enormously while it existed and left almost no physical trace when it was gone.