Whisky a Go Go

The Whisky a Go Go opened on January 16, 1964, at 8901 Sunset Boulevard on the part of the Strip that would become synonymous with Los Angeles rock music. Founded by Elmer Valentine and named after the Whisky à Gogo dance club in Paris, it was the first venue in the United States to feature a go-go dancer in a suspended cage above the stage — a gimmick that became a cultural phenomenon and gave a name to an entire style of dancing.

In the summer of 1966, the Doors served as the Whisky's house band, playing six nights a week to a crowd of industry figures, fellow musicians, and the emerging hippie audience of the Strip. Jim Morrison's stage persona — the leather trousers, the shamanistic intensity, the relationship with the audience that was simultaneously seductive and threatening — was developed night by night in this room. On one notorious evening, Morrison improvised the Oedipal section of "The End" mid-performance. The band was fired on the spot. It didn't matter — Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman had already seen them at the Whisky and signed them.

Before the Doors, the Whisky had already hosted the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Love, Van Morrison's Them, Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, and virtually every significant act of the mid-1960s Los Angeles rock scene. Led Zeppelin played early American shows here. Alice Cooper made his name on this stage. The Whisky was where the Sunset Strip's reputation as the centre of American rock was forged.

In a 1969 Playboy interview with Jann Wenner, Dylan recalled meeting Otis Redding at the Whisky. Otis asked him if he had any material, and Dylan happened to have the dubs from his new album. Dylan's admiration for Otis was well known — on his Theme Time Radio Hour radio show he would play Otis's heartbreaking classics including "Cigarettes and Coffee" and "I've Got Dreams to Remember."

As early as April 1966, Dylan is said to have offered Otis "Just Like a Woman." Robbie Robertson tells the story of how he and Dylan were talking about cover versions when Dylan asked who could sing the song. "Otis Redding, of course," Robertson answered, and the managers got in touch. Years later, Robertson ran into Otis's manager Phil Walden and asked why the cover was never released. Otis had indeed recorded the song, Walden said, but could never get the bridge right — "the words are about amphetamines and pearls, and he couldn't get those words to come out of his mouth in a truthful way. So, we had to put it aside." Robertson respected that: "If you can't sing something with complete honesty, then you shouldn't be singing that thing. And he was just being honest about it."

The Whisky was equally central to the glam metal scene that dominated the Sunset Strip in the 1980s. Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Guns N' Roses, and Poison built their followings by playing the Strip's circuit of clubs — the Whisky, the Roxy, the Rainbow, Gazzarri's — and the Whisky sat at the top of that circuit. A generation of LA bands passed through this room on the way to somewhere bigger, or didn't, and the ones who made it often cited the Whisky as the place where it became real.

The Whisky a Go Go continues to operate at the same address, presenting live music most nights with a focus on rock and metal, alongside legacy shows and tribute acts. It was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a historic landmark in 2006. More than sixty years after it opened, it remains an active, functioning piece of rock history on a strip that has lost most of what once made it famous.