The Whisky a Go Go: Where the Strip Made the Counterculture

The Whisky a Go Go opened on January sixteenth, nineteen sixty-four, on the Sunset Strip at eight nine oh one Sunset Boulevard, and within two years had become the primary venue for what was happening in Los Angeles rock. Buffalo Springfield played their first shows here. Love, the multiracial band fronted by Arthur Lee, developed their sound on this stage. Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Janis Joplin: the Whisky's stage list in the mid to late nineteen sixties reads like a graduate seminar in what American popular music became.

The Doors held a residency at the Whisky in nineteen sixty-six that ended abruptly. During a performance of their song The End, Jim Morrison improvised an extended narrative sequence that led the Whisky's management to fire the band. The Doors went to the studio and recorded the song for their first album, released in January nineteen sixty-seven. The studio version runs eleven minutes and forty-one seconds.

The Rainbow Bar and Grill opened in nineteen seventy-two, a few doors down, and became the after-hours institution for the Strip's musicians and roadies. The Roxy Theatre opened across the street in nineteen seventy-three.

The three-block stretch of Sunset between Doheny and Crescent Heights produced more American rock music between nineteen sixty-four and nineteen eighty-five than any comparable geography in the world. The Whisky is still open. The stage is the same stage.