Decade of Decadence: A Timeline of the Eighties Sunset Strip

April 24, 1981: Mötley Crüe’s Coming Out Party

In 1980, Nikki Sixx played the Starwood — located just south of the Strip, at the corner of Santa Monica Blvd. and N. Crescent Heights Blvd. — with his pre-Mötley Crüe band, London. 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. It was also where burgeoning hard rock and metal outfits like the Runaways, Van Halen and the Randy Rhoads-era Quiet Riot would play. 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. Recalled that band's frontman, Dave Meniketti, "[I was] sitting in the balcony overlooking the stage and watching a few songs, going, 'These guys are crap,'" he told Philadelphia's WMMR radio. "And I ate those words a million times over." And with that, Eighties glam metal was officially born.

Fun Fact: Mötley's set list that night included a cover of the Beatles' "Paperback Writer."

1981: Getting Mowed on Gazzarri’s Lawn

Stephen Pearcy moves from San Diego to L.A. with Mickey Ratt — later known as Ratt — who become a house band at Gazzarri's at 9039 Sunset Blvd. Wrote Pearcy in his 2014 autobiography, Sex, Drugs, Ratt & Roll: My Life in Rock, "I saw so many people fuck on the lawns behind Gazzarri's that I actually got bored of watching and started to throw empty beer cans at them."

1981: Crüe Takes a Bathroom Break

"Did I tell you about the time I tied a girl up in the Whisky bathroom with Mick [Mars]'s guitar cable, and then went to get a bump of blow from Tommy [Lee]? I forgot she was in there! I think Vince found her and everything was [fine]. Ah, to be in Mötley Crüe in 1981 in Los Angeles." — Nikki Sixx, chatting with L.A. Weekly in 2011.

1981: Stephen Pearcy Makes a Rainbow Connection

In the Eighties, if you wanted to find rockers famous, infamous or striving to be either, the Rainbow Bar & Grill, located just down the street from Gazzarri's and the Roxy, was the place to be. When a young Pearcy takes his girlfriend there for dinner one night in 1981, they run into David Lee Roth and Ozzy Osbourne. According to Pearcy, the four of them spend the evening eating chicken soup and discussing aerobics.

1981: The Mötley House Opens Its Doors

As the Crüe's star begins to rise, then-manager Allan Coffman finances an apartment for the band at 1124 N. Clark St. — just steps from the Whisky. Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee and Vince Neil move in, and the roach-infested two-bedroom hovel, known as the Mötley House, becomes party central. "People would pour into the house for afterhours parties," Neil recalled in The Dirt. "Guys in metal newborns like Ratt and W.A.S.P. spilled out into the courtyard and the street. Girls would arrive in shifts. One would be climbing out the window while another was coming in the door."

1982: Seventeen-Year-Old Slash Dresses in Drag at the Rainbow

Years before Guns N' Roses got together, L.A. kids Slash and Steven Adler would regularly hit the Rainbow armed with fake I.D.s. On one particular evening, however, it's ladies night at the club, and longtime bouncer Steady isn't having it. Though he allows Adler in, he sends the budding guitarist packing. According to Slash in his 2007 autobiography, he goes home, gets good and drunk and hatches a plan to return to the Rainbow — dressed as a girl. "My mom thought my plan was hilarious," he wrote. "She outfitted me with a skirt and fishnets, piled my hair up under a black beret, and did my makeup . . . I looked like a Rainbow chick." His goal? To seduce his future bandmate. "Adler hit on every girl in sight, so I was sure that he'd hit on me." Once inside the Rainbow, however, Slash realizes his friend is long gone, and ends up doing the walk of shame back down Sunset, getting catcalls all the way.

September 28, 1982: Meat Blackie Lawless

W.A.S.P. main man Blackie Lawless ups glam metal's live game at his band's second-ever gig, which takes place at the Troubadour (another club, incidentally, that isn't on the Strip proper; rather, it's located a few miles west of the Starwood, on Santa Monica Blvd). W.A.S.P. debut a new stage gimmick at the show — hurling raw meat at the audience. Lawless claims inspiration for the stunt from hearing about a form of Sixties experimental theater called psychodrama. In time, he adds to the "psycho" part of that drama by drinking real blood (collected from that same raw meat), "torturing" a naked woman on a rack and donning a codpiece outfitted with a 12-inch round saw blade.

1982: Nikki Sixx Chases Lars Ulrich Down Santa Monica Blvd.

At the same time that glam is kicking into high gear on the Strip, bands like Metallica and Slayer are busy creating thrash metal in the same So-Cal environs. How well did the two factions get along? Not very, of course. "It was 1982 and Mötley Crüe had just put out Too Fast for Love," Ulrich recalled. "One night out in front of the Troubadour we're standing there in our Iron Maiden shorts and after a couple of, you know, cold Schlitz malt liquors, we saw Nikki and Tommy. And it was like, 'Fuck Mötley Crüe!' And I remember Nikki started chasing after me. And the one thing I could do, all five-foot-six of me, is I could run faster than he could in his 16-inch platform boots."

1982: The Yellow and Black Attack at Gazzarri’s

Another house band that often plays on bills with Ratt at Gazzarri's is Roxx Regime, which later morphs into yellow-and-black Christian metallers Stryper. "We would do three sets at Gazzarri's and make $150," Stryper frontman Michael Sweet recalled to axs.com.

Fun Fact: For a second, guitarist C.C. DeVille, later of Poison, joins — or, depending on who's telling the story, almost joins — Roxx Regime.

April 1983: Brits Hit the Strip

"We were so far away from that Strip mentality that we didn't even know what it was," says Def Leppard singer Joe Elliott. "But we put out Pyromania and we were in the States touring with Billy Squier. We had just done American Bandstand, and it was [Leppard guitarist] Steve Clark's 23rd birthday. So we went to the Rainbow, and then we invited a few people back to the Sunset Marquis, where we were staying, for drinks and stuff. We wound up having, like, 65 people trying to walk into Steve's room. It just got stupid. We had to start turning people away — and it was guys like Dio. But we had to say, "Dude, we can't let you in." Imagine saying that to Dio! But it was crazy. I mean, we were a band from Sheffield. We had never seen a scene like that."

1983: Nikki Sixx Swings

After partying at the Rainbow, Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil (with Sixx's then-girlfriend, Lita Ford, in tow), are accosted by a group of bikers. Soon, the cops arrive on the scene. Recalled Sixx to Hit Parader, "I was so busy fighting for my life that I didn't even notice them. All I knew was that this guy was running towards me with a mean look on his face, so I hit him with a chain. He turned out to be a cop." The bassist receives a beatdown and a trip to the pokey in return. Sixx later pens the Shout at the Devil tune "Knock 'Em Dead, Kid," about the incident.

June 23-25, 1983: W.A.S.P. Draw Blood

The Troubadour offers W.A.S.P. $10,000 to play a three-night stand, and Lawless comes up with a good-Samaritan gimmick to promote the shows: The performances will double as a blood drive. Blackie manages to rope in the American Red Cross, but the organization almost pulls out at the last minute after the National Director confronts Lawless about his own bloody onstage indulgences. Lawless manages to smooth things over, and Red Cross trucks park outside the club for the three-day stint. Every kid who donates a pint gets in for half price.

March 1984: Look What the Cat Drags In

Poison, the band that would recast the Strip in their own good-time, day-glo image, arrive in L.A. from the decidedly very un-glam environs of Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. "We drove cross-country with everything loaded into an old ambulance van, a Chevette and a green pickup truck," lead singer Bret Michaels says. "Nothing but gear and a dream. 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. And they all look like they're in a band. For a bunch of small-town guys, that's a lot to take in."

The members didn't have anywhere to live at first, "so we wound up staying at the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Blvd., which was a big rock and roll hangout — there was a coffee shop there named Duke's where everyone would go," Michaels continues. "Kim Fowley had heard our demo and he was interested in us. So we met with him and a bunch of other people and they took us to see Hollywood Rose in Chinatown. And it's like, here's the band that would eventually become Guns N' Roses….and they're playing in Chinatown….on a Monday night. To me that was awesome."

1984: Axl Rose and Slash Break Up, Make Up at Tower Video

Slash and Axl Rose briefly played together in Hollywood Rose, but the union quickly fell apart. One day not long after, the guitarist phoned his former bandmate at his place of work — Tower Video, across the street from the famous Tower Records on Sunset. Slash wanted to confront Rose about rumors that the singer had slept with his girlfriend. According to Slash in his autobiography, "[Axl] told me that of course he did, but that at the time I wasn't fucking her, so what did it matter?" The two reconciled and Axl tipped off Slash about a job opening at Tower Video. Wrote Slash, "Axl always chose to patch things up with grand gestures."

Fun Fact: In 1989, after Axl and Vince Neil embarked on a war of words in the press, Neil publicly challenged Rose to settle the score, mano a mano, in a backstreet brawl. The proposed location? The Tower Records parking lot. 

1984: Poison Opens Up

Not long after arriving in L.A., Poison play their first show on the Strip, at the Troubadour. "We got thrown on as an opening-opening-opening act," Michaels says. "Like, you go on at six but the doors don't open until seven. One of those things. We were the first of four or five bands on the bill. But there were a few people there."

One of those people? Jeff Duncan of Odin. "I saw Poison's first gig ever in L.A.," he confirms. But, he adds, "I was there because Odin had a full page ad in BAM for a show we had coming up. So I was taking all the copies they had at the Troubadour and folding them open to our page in the magazine."

1984: Ratt Moves From the Cellar to the Roxy

Following up the success of Out of the Cellar single "Round and Round," Ratt shoot a video for another track off the album, "Back for More," which shows them performing at Strip hotspot the Roxy. It features cameos from Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee, playing LAPD officers.

Fun Fact: The Roxy's upstairs VIP afterhours club, On the Rox, was the site of many parties hosted by notorious Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss.

September 1984: Slash Auditions For . . . Poison?

After Poison's original guitar player, Matt Smith, quits the band to return to Pennsylvania, he suggests Slash try out for the position. The guitarist packs up his gear and heads down to Poison's rehearsal space — actually the back half of a dry cleaners on West Washington Blvd. and South Palm Grove Ave. In Slash's own estimation, he kills the audition. "I played the shit out of those songs," he says. "And I got called back — twice." But at the final tryout he realizes it wasn't meant to be. "As I was walking in that last time, C.C. [DeVille] was coming back the other way. He came in with his hair all done up and was wearing stiletto heels. I had on a pair of moccasins. The Poison guys looked at me and asked, 'What do you wear?' I was like, 'This is . . . it,' you know? When I got the phone call that C.C. got the job, I wasn't surprised."

Michaels, for his part, concurs, "Slash really did kill it. And, actually, C.C. came in and he had barely learned our songs. He started playing his own stuff, like, 'I got these other songs! You gotta hear 'em!' So we immediately butted heads. But it all worked out for the best."

March 26, 1985: Guns N’ Roses Debut . . . Sort Of

Guns N' Roses make their live debut at the Troubadour, but they're not exactly the Guns N' Roses. The band at this time features Axl Rose and bassist Izzy Stradlin, along with guitarist Tracii Guns, bassist Ole Beich and drummer Rob Gardner. A flyer promoting the gig reads "L.A Guns and Hollywood Rose Presents the Band Guns N Roses." Not long after, Tracii Guns splits and continues on with his previous outfit, L.A. Guns. "Things had become really intense in the band and I wasn't having fun anymore," Guns says. "I skipped three rehearsals in a row and Axl calls me, screaming. Then Izzy gets on the phone, all calm — which is very Izzy. I was like, 'Look, I want to do this band, but this is really crazy, you know?' And that was that."

June 6, 1986: Guns N’ Roses Debut . . . For Real

Guns N' Roses play their first show with the classic Appetite for Destruction lineup in place, again at the Troubadour. The flyer this time? "A Rock N Roll Bash Where Everyone's Smashed" [sic].

1986: The Cathouse Gets Claws

Taime Downe and future Headbangers Ball host Riki Rachtman launch the Tuesday night "rock n' roll dance club" the Cathouse, inside Osko's, a rundown disco on La Cienega Blvd. Though opening night is hardly a smashing success, Lita Ford does give the club an auspicious start by puking in the bathroom. The Cathouse goes on to become a legendary den of excess, with the members of Mötley Crüe, Faster Pussycat and Guns N' Roses among its regulars — the latter two bands play the venue several times, and Rose can be seen wearing a Cathouse shirt in the "Paradise City" video.

Fun Fact: In October of 1989, Guns N' Roses film a video for the Appetite for Destruction track "It's So Easy" at the Cathouse. During the shoot, which includes Axl's then-girlfriend Erin Everly decked out in bondage gear, a drunk David Bowie shows up and proceeds to hit on her, setting Rose off. "That was when David Bowie was in the band Tin Machine," recalled Rachtman in an interview with Yahoo. "So Axl was running [down the street], yelling, 'I'm gonna kill you, Tin Man!'"

1986: The Flyer Wars

When glam-metal boys aren't at clubs, bars or strip joints, chances are you can find them at an office supply store, printing up massive amounts of flyers to promote their next gig. "The whole Sunset Strip was a big confetti factory, from the Whisky all the way up to Gazzarri's," Taime Downe said on VH1's When Metal Ruled the World. And it's serious business: "We'd be putting our posters up on telephone poles, [and] the next band would come along a couple hours later, rip yours down, put theirs up," added Dokken guitarist George Lynch. "It was a very competitive scene."

How to stand out, then? "Your promotion had to be a bit rude and crude to get the attention," Warrant guitarist Jerry Dixon told LA Weekly. "If you just put a nice happy picture of a band on there, nobody was gonna show up. We started being as crude as possible on the flyers and came up with some creative slogans for each show." Some of these creative slogans? "L.A.'s Number One Muff-Diving Team" and "Quality You Can Taste" — the latter accompanied by individual shots of each of the five Warrant members posing with a woman's face smashed into his crotch.

But by most people's estimation, the undisputed kings of flyerdom are Poison. "We were workaholics with a dream," Michaels says. "We would go out at midnight, paper the city and disappear by morning. You staple 'em up and you're gone. We'd find hot girls walking around the Rainbow parking lot and ask them to do a photo session up against a brick wall, and then we'd put 'em on a flyer." Poison's distinctive lime-green logo even comes about as a result of a fortuitous flyer-related accident. "We went to Sir Speedy on Santa Monica Blvd. and asked for white. Too expensive," Michaels says. "We asked for yellow. Too expensive. But they had a shitload of fluorescent green paper that they couldn't give away. We took all of it for a few bucks. So that became our color."

1987: The Battle of the Sunset Stars

"Within one-to-three square miles on a Friday, Saturday night, there were probably 50 to 75 bands playing," says Stevie Rachelle, who moves from Wisconsin to L.A. in the spring of 1987 to front the very Poison-esque Tuff. "I mean, on one corner you had Gazzarri's, and then there's, like, a bank, and then the Rainbow and then the Roxy. If somebody lights off a pack of firecrackers, anyone standing in front of any of those clubs might get hit. They're that close. Then you go another block and there's the Whisky. Another mile down, at the corner of Sunset and Crescent [Heights] is the Coconut Teaszer. Trying to get people to come and watch your band play at one of these places from, say, 9:30 to 10:15? There's a lot of choice. And then it's like, 'That band's drummer has a bigger drum set!' Or, 'Those guys have a faster guitarist!' Or, 'Their singer's hair is bigger!' There was so much competition to draw these people. Whatever you saw on Headbangers Ball or in Metal Edge, there were hundreds of those bands in Hollywood."

April 13, 1987: Mötley Crüe Peeks Under the Veil

Of the many gentlemen's clubs named-checked in Mötley Crüe's stripper anthem, "Girls, Girls, Girls," two are on the actual Strip — the Body Shop (whose neon sign proudly reads GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS) and the Seventh Veil. Mötley reportedly plans to film the iconic video for the song, shot on April 13, 1987, at the former. But due to the strict no-alcohol policy, they hightail it over to the latter.

1987: Enjoying the Rest of the Strip

Other places to spot hair metal dudes outside of the clubs? "There was a Ralphs grocery on Sunset and Fuller that became known as Rocker Ralphs, because everybody lived in the apartment buildings around there," recalls Stevie Rachelle. "So at any point during the day the aisles would be filled with guys in cowboy boots, strippers, porn stars . . . it was crazy. Gil Turner's liquor store, right by the Roxy, was another spot. And further down was Sunset Strip Tattoo, where the Mötley guys and everyone would go."

Tracii Guns: "Sunset Strip Tattoo was like our second home. Robert Benedetti, the owner of the place, loved all the rock guys. If it was two in the morning and we didn't have a place to stay they would just lock us in the shop overnight. We could drink, we'd have our girlfriends over . . . it was like a rocker homeless shelter."

Stevie Rachelle: "Oh — there was also a tanning salon that was really popular. The woman who ran it was fooling around with a lot of the guys in the bands. I slept with her. Not in the salon, but I know there were guys who'd go there, get tan and get a blowjob with it . . . and still not have to pay!"

December 23, 1987: Nikki Sixx Takes a Ride on the Wild Side

After a night out scoring heroin and partying at the Cathouse and other spots, Nikki Sixx proceeds to overdose in Slash's room at the Franklin Plaza, just north of Sunset. "I had already passed out when Nikki OD'd," Slash says. "But my girlfriend at the time managed to wake me up and get me in the shower. I was just, for some reason, really fucking belligerent and thrashing around, until finally I sobered up and realized what had happened. The paramedics came and they shot Nikki full of adrenaline and took him away."

The Mötley bassist is declared dead for two full minutes before being revived by the adrenaline, an experience that inspires the song "Kickstart My Heart." Says Sixx, "You take someone who hasn't slept, who's been on the road for almost a year and whose health is falling apart, and mix that with heroin and pills and cocaine and tons of alcohol, and what happened kind of makes sense. My body just gave out." After leaving the hospital the next day, Sixx goes home . . . and shoots up again.

Sixx wasn't the only Strip musician falling prey to the lure of hard drugs. "Particularly in the L.A. Guns/Guns N' Roses/Mötley scene, even a little bit with guys like Ratt, weed was not a thing — it was more about cocaine and heroin," says Tracii Guns. "And there are no good, positive stories to tell about that. I once played guitar for Johnny Thunders in Long Beach, and this was when he was actually sober. But right before we walked out of the dressing room he goes, 'Watch this.' And he just puts the whole junkie persona on. That's how glamorous it was in everybody's heads. It was important to put that vibe across. But a lot of guys took it too seriously. A couple of them died. A few others carried it with them for 20 years. There was nothing pretty about it."

June 17, 1988: Odin! Odin! Odin!

If any visual document captures the Sunset Strip music scene in the mid-to-late Eighties, it's Penelope Spheeris' The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. There's W.A.S.P. guitarist Chris Holmes guzzling nauseating amounts of vodka in a pool while his poor mother looks on. And Gene Simmons being interviewed while hanging out at Trashy Lingerie on La Cienega. And Riki and Taime discussing how a sleazy outfit is a surefire way to gain quick entry into the Cathouse.

And there's Odin. The band takes the stage at Gazzarri's as club owner Bill Gazzarri, who testifies that hunky singer Randy O. "is gonna be bigger than David Lee Roth," chants their name over and over. Things, of course, don't exactly work out that way for Randy and the band. But, says then-Odin (and now Armored Saint) guitarist Jeff Duncan, "Every band on the Strip had that sort of 'eye of the tiger' mentality. You watch that movie, and everybody in it is saying, 'I'm gonna make it.' Well, what if you don't? 'I'm gonna.'"

As for Odin's classic interview scene, which takes place in a hot tub surrounded by a bevy of bikini-clad women? "That was at Penelope's house," Duncan says. "We showed up and she had all this beer and the hot tub going. It was a pretty good plan, because if you drink alcohol and sit in a hot tub you get, like, twice as drunk, which I don't think any of us realized. For a while, whenever I saw that movie I was like, 'Oh god, look at us. . . .' But, you know, we weren't too different from any other band on the Strip at that time. We just got filmed doing it."

1988: It’s Guns N’ Roses’ Jungle . . . Everyone Else is Just Living in It

As Appetite for Destruction takes off in 1988 and 1989, the album's insane success fosters something of a sea change on the Strip. Recalled then-Guns bassist Duff McKagan to the New York Times, "We left on tour in June of '87 and were gone for a year and a half. There were no computers, no social media, hardly even fax machines, so we had no idea that people in L.A. made this shift in culture to look and sound like us. Imagine landing back on Planet Earth: People were all glammed out when you left, and now you could tell the photo of us they were trying to look like. There was the Izzy guy, the Slash guy, the Axl guy, the me guy, the Steven guy, and they were walking all over Hollywood. It was weird."

1989: Glam Hits a Saturation Point

"Once Guns N' Roses kicked in with Appetite there were definitely a lot of clones," says Jeff Duncan. "Just like a few years before that when Poison hit there were a lot of bands copying them. But everybody was just after the brass ring — the big record deal. And some people got it, but a lot of 'em also got massive advances that they couldn't pay back. And that was the end of that."

Tracii Guns: "I remember going to see friends' bands and being like, 'Man, you guys are just like Poison!' Or, 'You guys are this weird, Junkyard-meets-Jetboy thing. . . .' Nobody was coming up with anything new or valuable. Whereas if you really look at Faster Pussycat or Guns N' Roses or L.A. Guns or Junkyard or Jetboy, it was like, we all loved Mötley Crüe, but we loved this other stuff, too. We were adding a new angle to it. At the end, nobody was adding a new angle to anything. It was just, 'This is what's happening, so this is what we're gonna do.' But then again, even Pretty Boy Floyd had a song I liked. A ballad. But it was too late."

Stevie Rachelle: "There were so many bands around that they started running out of names. You had multiple Wildsides. You had Paradise and Pair-A-Dice. It got to the point where bands had to start using, you know, Queeny Blast Pop and Juicy Miss Lucy and Back Alley Sally [all real bands — Ed.]. The names got longer because all the one- and two-word names were taken. And how many blond singers with headbands do you need? You had David Lee Roth and Vince Neil and Bret Michaels and [Warrant's] Jani Lane and then . . . Stevie Rachelle! Another blond with a headband…"

October 5, 1989: Home Sweet Home

At the end of the day, if any band truly embodies the Sunset Strip in the Eighties, it's the one that started it all, Mötley Crüe. Fittingly, the band finish out the decade as its conquering heroes, as their fifth effort, Dr. Feelgood, released on September 1, 1989, debuts on the Billboard 200 at Number One. For the video to the album's second single, "Kickstart My Heart," the Crüe ditch the arenas they've been calling home for years to film an intimate performance at the Whisky — right down the street from the one-time Mötley House. As the band cruise down the Strip to the screams of adoring fans at the beginning of the "Kickstart" video, Vince Neil turns to the camera: "This is where it all began," he says.