For a bunch of small-town guys, that's a lot to take in." And they all look like they're in a band. When we finally pulled onto the Strip it was, 'Holy shit!' We're driving past the Rainbow, Gazzarri's, the Roxy, the Whisky, and there's gotta be, like, 100,000 people walking around. "We drove cross-country with everything loaded into an old ambulance van, a Chevette and a green pickup truck," lead singer Bret Michaels says. from the decidedly very un-glam environs of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. Poison, the band that would recast the Strip in their own good-time, day-glo image, arrive in L.A.
"And I ate those words a million times over." And with that, Eighties glam metal was officially born.įun Fact: Mötley's set list that night included a cover of the Beatles' "Paperback Writer." Recalled that band's frontman, Dave Meniketti, " sitting in the balcony overlooking the stage and watching a few songs, going, 'These guys are crap,'" he told Philadelphia's WMMR radio. When Sixx puts together Mötley Crüe in 1981, he debuts them at Starwood across two nights, April 24 and 25, as the opening act for Y&T. It was also where burgeoning hard rock and metal outfits like the Runaways, Van Halen and the Randy Rhoads-era Quiet Riot would play. The club was one of the dominant West Hollywood venues, having hosted Seventies rock acts like AC/DC, Rush and Cheap Trick, and homegrown punk bands like the Germs, Fear and the Circle Jerks. In 1980, Nikki Sixx played the Starwood - located just south of the Strip, at the corner of Santa Monica Blvd. Welcome to the jungle, baby, where you can learn to live like an animal and - if you're really, really lucky - even sell a record or two. And while not everything chronicled in the timeline below happened on Sunset Blvd., per se, the Strip has always been as much a vibe as a locale. Which is more than enough reason for Rolling Stone to take a look back on what is quite possibly the Strip's greatest decade of decadence - the 1980s.
The Sunset Strip was a cesspool of depravity." "We'd get drunk, do crazy amounts of cocaine and walk the circuit in stiletto heels, stumbling all over the place. Or, as Crüe frontman Vince Neil put it in the band's gloriously degenerate 2001 autobiography, The Dirt. not 100 percent, but 1,000 percent," says Poison singer Bret Michaels. Guns, Faster Pussycat and the rest of the Eighties glam lot were more than happy to take on. the Riot House, and initiate a groupie-shagging, television-smashing, motorcycle-down-the-hallway-driving den of debauchery.Ī lot to live up to, perhaps, but it was a challenge that Mötley Crüe, Guns N' Roses, Ratt, W.A.S.P., Poison, L.A. Or Led Zeppelin, who in the following decade would rent out up to six floors of the Hyatt on Sunset, a.k.a. Of course, Eighties metal men were far from the first rockers to run wild in West Hollywood - just ask the Doors, who functioned as the house band at the Whisky a Go Go in the late Sixties, and whose singer, Jim Morrison, balanced on a railing on the roof of a 16-story building on the Strip as if it were a tightrope. And nowhere was the party crazier, sleazier or more glam-rockin' than the Sunset Strip, where big-haired dudes and the girls who loved them turned the boulevard into their own personal playground. fffuuuun!" screeched Faster Pussycat's Taime Downe in 1987.
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