Who got their start at whiskey a go go movie#

Who got their start at whiskey a go go movie#

They had klieg lights out front and this and that, movie stars. Rivers recalled: “They PR’d the thing really big and opening night at The Whisky was like a Hollywood opening. When Rivers and drummer Eddie Rubin became the Whisky’s house band, they became the template for the two-person band like the White Stripes.

So I called up Elmer and I said, ‘You still want to do this thing on Sunset?’ and he goes, ‘Sure.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s do it.’ Bill wanting me to work the night Kennedy got assassinated made my mind up to take the new deal, so basically I did and that’s how it came about.” That’s when he told Gazzarri’s tight-fisted owner, Bill Gazzarri: “Bill, I won’t be coming in tonight, and said, ‘Well, what do you mean? We’re open!’ I said, ‘Nobody’s open tonight!’ so that made my mind up-this insensitive bastard. Johnny demurred until the night of November 22, 1963. There was nothing happening.” Elmer, noticing the crowd that Johnny was pulling in, asked him to ply his trade at his club. In a 2016 interview for Las Vegas Magazine, guitarist Johnny Rivers recalled working at a club called Gazzarri’s, which he noted: “…was a small little restaurant in ’63. Had JFK not been assassinated, the Whisky may have just been another watering hole on the Sunset Strip. Perhaps overjoyed that the booth protected her from the unwanted grasps of the smarmy leches dancing beneath her, Patty shook her tail-feather to the records, and voila! For better or worse, an indelible image of the swingin’ ’60s was created, helped by Joan Labine who created the iconic combo of a fringed dress and white boots. Scrambling to find a replacement, Valentine offered the gig to Patty Brockhurst, the Whisky’s cigarette girl. It was a DJ offer that the young lady’s irate mother refused. It all happened because a mother discovered that her daughter won a contest to spin records in the Whisky’s suspended glass booth. He noted in a 2000 interview for Vanity Fair: “It was just so popular, right from the very first night. The partial list of groups (The Doors, Buffalo Springfield, Young Rascals, Them/Van Morrison, and Frank Zappa) who honed their act at Elmer’s place reads like a wing at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.Īnd if there ever was a Pop Culture Hall of Fame, Elmer deserves a plaque for introducing the term and concept of go-go girls.

Not only was this perpetually packed place a breeding ground for STDs, it was also a breeding ground for bands who took their early steps toward stardom on the Whisky’s stage. When John Lennon was 15, his Math teacher wrote on his report card that he was “certainly on the road to failure.” And when Elmer Valentine was 14, he ran away from his Chicago home and from a teacher who predicted that when the boy reached adulthood, he’d be sitting in an electric chair.īut just as John found his niche, Elmer found his as one of the owners of the go-to club in the 1960s called the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood.