Inside The Bars That Made The Sunset Strip In 1980s LA Legendary

Picture a film or TV character listening to a song by Guns n’ Roses. What do they look like? What are they doing? Is it a character played by Danny McBride, washing a Camaro in the driveway? A cougar buying college boys a round of shots? Or a guitarist with a lighting bolt across his eye, stretched out on the floor during a seemingly never-ending riff? Even decades after its fall from chart-topping prominence, glam metal—the eyeliner, the spandex, the sun-bleached, gravity-defying do’s that gave “hair metal” its thrust—has cornered such a specific subsection of our cultural imagination. We know it by its looks. We know it when we hear the almost-laughable electric guitar. We know it by the pop-heavy swagger, with its karaoke-ready lines about love and heartbreak that can somehow be memorized after just one listen. And we know that there is just one place where glam metal bands were living the most decadent and dangerous lives of 1980s rock gods: West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip… read more >