RIKI RACHTMAN (co-owner, the Cathouse; MTV VJ; Headbangers Ball Host) Dayle Gloria, as far as the underground clubs go, she was a big deal. When I met her, she was the DJ at Seven Seas on Hollywood Boulevard, which was kind of a seedy, hip, underground club. It was run by Ed Nash, and we kept on hearing about all these Wonderland murders. But I didn’t really know what was going on.
DAYLE GLORIA (co-owner, Scream) You know who Ed Nash is, right? Okay, so that was our boss. This was the guy who really started my career. And if you watch the movie Wonderland, that’s exactly how it was. [Nash, who owned the Starwood and was a reputed organized crime figure, was charged in connection with the brutal murder of four people at their home at 8763 Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon in 1981.] I was going through the kitchen to go to the office and I would see people blindfolded and handcuffed to a chair. And I would walk right through.
RIKI RACHTMAN So I came into this club, Seven Seas, I was like the new kid. I didn’t know what I was doing. And I got a gig there playing one night and then I started to get a bigger and bigger following. I got to play records, get loaded, and meet girls.
DAYLE GLORIA Me and another DJ there, Michael Stewart, would do all different kinds of music. But when it started to be a lot of Michael Jackson and all that kind of stupid dance music, we really wanted to open our place where we could play what was first called alternative music—Sisters of Mercy and Siouxsie and the Banshees and anything like that. So Michael and I went our own way because we had ideas for a different type of club. And that was Scream.
TAIME DOWNE The first Scream was downtown. I was good friends with Michael Stewart, and I’ve known Dayle since the early days. And I used to go to a lot of clubs when I first moved to L.A.—the fetish clubs and TVC15 and then Glam Slam. This was before there were any cool rock clubs.
DAYLE GLORIA Taime was the one who said, “You know, why don’t you have bands instead of just playing music?” So we all talked about that and we went looking for a building and we found this place, it was called the Ebony Theater. It was in a really, really crappy neighborhood. We had Molotov cocktails being thrown at us. And the very first bill we ever did was with Jane’s Addiction. And if I’m not mistaken it was the second show they ever did. Then we found a spot at the Embassy Hotel and that’s when everything got real serious. We started there in June or July of ’86. And that was the place. We had the first video room that any club ever had, we had the band room downstairs, there were different dance rooms, an outside patio, it was nuts. I mean, one thousand people, fifteen hundred people, two thousand. We got up to three thousand people. And here is my very first booking calendar: Guns N’ Roses played on August fifteenth, 1986. Jane’s Addiction on the twenty-second. Faster Pussycat on September fifth. Jane’s on the twenty-sixth with Wall of Voodoo. The Chili Peppers played the fourteenth of November. It was really crazy.
TAIME DOWNE At that time Riki was DJ’ing and promoting at a club called Ice. It was more of a dance club. It was at the Probe on Highland, where the Cathouse later ended up.
RIKI RACHTMAN I met Taime … I was dating this mud wrestler, and we went to a party at some stripper’s house. There weren’t even that many people there. It was me, my friend Keith, these two chicks, and Taime. He was just this guy that a lot of people knew and he worked at Retail Slut. He was just about to start Faster Pussycat. But I thought he was just the coolest cat. And I was like, “Dude, come down to Ice, this club I’m DJ’ing.” And he came down and he wasn’t really into it because it was a bunch of rich snobby girls from the Valley dancing. But we hit it off right away.
TAIME DOWNE We just talked about doing a rock club together. He had DJ’d fucking Tommy Lee’s wedding and shit before.
RIKI RACHTMAN I grew up in Hollywood. My parents were divorced and I lived with my mother, who was a schoolteacher. But my dad managed bands—Gary Puckett & the Union Gap; Lee Michaels, who had that song “Do You Know What I Mean”; Flash Cadillac & the Continental Kids; stuff like that. And my dad’s girlfriend was Karen Black. So I was also around that lifestyle a little bit. And I knew a lot of people who were club DJs, and I used to help them carry records. Then I started DJ’ing clubs myself, and I was really good at it. I was playing hip-hop and dance music and new wave but, you know, I had long hair, I was a rocker. Izzy came and hung out with me in the DJ booth at one gig, and that was before Guns N’ Roses even. At Ice I would DJ certain songs and then scratch, like, Mötley Crüe into it and do weird stuff like that. I did that one time at this huge club in L.A., and Tommy Lee was there with Heather Locklear. And Tommy came up and he goes, “Dude, you’re so good! Would you DJ my wedding?” And I was like, “Fuck yes, I would!”’Cause I loved Mötley Crüe.
Then when I met Taime, we started talking and I said, “Dude, I wanna do a club that’s a dance club, but all we play is rock ’n’ roll. Do you wanna help me out with it?” Because I knew that Taime knew a lot of people. So I took everything I knew from clubs, and he helped get a lot of girls to come down, and we just started from there.
TAIME DOWNE Riki and I put our brains together, and then I got a buddy of mine, Joseph Brooks, who was a DJ at TVC15 and the original Glam Slam and all the fetish clubs. We started over at Osko’s.
JOSEPH BROOKS (DJ, the Cathouse, Scream) Osko’s was this discotheque on La Cienega that was featured in a Donna Summer movie called Thank God It’s Friday. It hadn’t been updated since the ’70s. When we started in there in ’86 it looked exactly the same—mirrored walls, a ceiling that was all square mirrored tiles, and a DJ booth that was sort of perched over the dance floor in a very commanding way. It was like stepping back into a time machine. It looked like the inside of a big disco ball.
RIKI RACHTMAN You know in the movie The Metal Years, you see me and Taime saying the Cathouse was a place for us to get free drinks and meet strippers? That is exactly why it was opened. No other reason.
BILLY ROWE When Cathouse started, it was not well attended. You would walk in and there would be maybe a hundred people there. And it was a pretty big venue.
ERIC STACY It was basically just the guys in Guns N’ Roses and Faster Pussycat and Jetboy and their girlfriends and a couple of their friends. It was just this little unknown place where the guys in the band hung out on Tuesday night.
RIKI RACHTMAN The first night there were like 150 people there. And it wasn’t very good. But Gene Kirkland, who was a big rock photographer then, he was the first person in the door. And he walked in with Lita Ford. And I told the bartenders, “Give Lita anything she wants.” I was stoked there was a rock celebrity in the place. Because at that time, Guns N’ Roses, L.A. Guns, none of them were there yet. But Lita gets all fucked up and she winds up puking in the bathroom. Then when the night’s over, everybody’s coming up to me: “Dude, Riki, I’m sorry it didn’t work out…” And I’m like, “Lita Ford puked in the bathroom.” “Yeah, we know…” And I’m going, “You don’t understand. Lita Ford puked in the bathroom.” I thought that was the baddest thing in the world.
DAYLE GLORIA Nobody was going to the Cathouse. It was really bad. I think at one point it was me, Taime, Nikki Sixx, and a couple other people. And all of a sudden on, like, the fifth week, it exploded and it was packed.
RIKI RACHTMAN We opened on September 23, 1986. I kept on promoting it and it would get a little bigger, a little bigger. And then December comes along, and by that time Faster Pussycat had played their first show. And they weren’t very good at first. But Guns N’ Roses, I thought Guns N’ Roses were great. And they were about to release their first EP. And I was like, “Would you guys do a record release party at the Cathouse?” I talked to Steven and then I talked to Axl and they’re like, “Yeah. And we’ll even play acoustic.” And this is before MTV ever thought of doing Unplugged. So then I asked L.A. Guns if they would do it and they said yes. I asked Jetboy and they said yes. Faster Pussycat said yes. So we just set up acoustic guitars on the floor and had all the bands play. And that night we had, like, five hundred people. It really put us on the map.
TRACII GUNS With the Cathouse you had the benefit of going to a place that was a really cool hang, like the Rainbow, except instead of sitting at a table with friends you’re standing up, rocking out, there’s beautiful, beautiful women everywhere … and there’s bands playing, too!
ERIC STACY That was right at the same time the L.A. hard rock/glam revival thing was starting to bust open. So it was just like the perfect storm.
BILLY ROWE It was just sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. It was as cliché as that. Everybody would be there. And there were tons of girls.
TAIME DOWNE We changed [the Faster Pussycat song] “Whorehouse” to “Cathouse.” It was kind of about the Cathouse anyway, so I just figured when we do the record I’ll fucking change it to that.
RIKI RACHTMAN All the girls were dressed like whores. But, when I say that, they were girls that owned businesses. They were girls that were doctors. They were girls that were attorneys. But they dressed like whores. And the reason was it was fun for them. Because they were women that were very independent. They were the furthest thing from bimbos. But they knew they could come to the Cathouse and dress sleazy and still have a fun time. That became the style to the point of Women’s Wear Daily, Sportswear International, California Apparel News, all the biggest fashion magazines were coming to the Cathouse talking about the fashion.
TAIME DOWNE It was just so much cool shit. Every week there’d be someone new that I’d get to meet. Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top would be there. Steven Tyler. The Hollywood Brat Pack fucking thing.
ERIC STACY You’d see Robert Downey Jr. there, Keanu Reeves, all those guys.
BILLY ROWE Crispin Glover used to pull up on his Pee Wee Herman bicycle and hang out in front. Steve Jones from the Sex Pistols, he’d always be there.
TAIME DOWNE Every week I’d stroll up to the club and fucking Jonesy would be outside, his chest hanging out and his tummy all thin and Robert Plant–lookin’ … He’d be standing there just holding up the wall. And every chick that’d walk by, Jonesy would be like, “You fuck her? I bet you fucked her. I know you fucked her.” And that’s how I’d start my night at the club.
KATHERINE TURMAN I absolutely loved the Cathouse. I had a membership card. I’m not a person who enjoyed dancing, but the Cathouse was a place where you could go and sort of dance to rock and metal bands.
JOHNNY “DUKE” SIZEMORE (L.A. Scenester; Cathouse Regular) I’d be there every Tuesday and you’d always see Axl out on the dance floor.
RIKI RACHTMAN He would go out on the floor and dance by himself.
JOSEPH BROOKS Well, Cathouse was a lot of insecure guys and a lot of more secure women. And Axl, we had an extra chair in the DJ booth and he would come in and talk and hang out. And for the first hour or two, no guys would be dancing. Only girls would be dancing, and usually with each other. So to break the ice I knew the songs that would get Axl to jump up off his chair and go down on the dance floor. And he would dance like a demon. If I put on “Whole Lotta Rosie” by AC/DC I was pretty much guaranteed to get him out there. And I could keep him out there for an extended period of time if I played the right mix of songs. Anything by Queen. Anything by AC/DC. He would be out there kicking his heels up the whole time.
ERIC STACY It was maybe six months into the club when they moved to the address at 836 North Highland.
TAIME DOWNE We had to move it over to the Probe because the building we were in was falling apart. They were condemning it. We had no choice. The building’s not even there now. It was torn down like a year after we moved.
ERIC STACY And when they did that, every Tuesday night there’d be maybe fifty Harleys parked out front on Highland. And when you go inside there was this set of thirty stairs to go up to the first bar or whatever, and you’d walk in and Slash would be, like, throwing up or falling down the stairs. And then you’d keep going up and they had this little roped-off VIP area above the dance floor and in there you’d see all these actors and rock guys sitting back there and doing blow, drinking. It was just a crazy, off-the-hook party. Joseph would play great music, from Hanoi Rocks to Bauhaus to the Cult. Chicks would wear nothing and everybody was fucked up.
TRACII GUNS I would watch all my friends just out of their minds getting on motorcycles at one forty-five, two in the morning, with girls on the backs of their bikes. And me just wondering if they were going to, you know, make it a block. Like, “Wow, what the fuck is gonna happen?”
JOSEPH BROOKS The Probe was another ’70s discotheque.
RIKI RACHTMAN Scream was there on Mondays and Cathouse was there on Tuesdays.
DAYLE GLORIA Cathouse was more ripped jeans and big, big, big hair, while at Scream all the guys looked like [Echo and the Bunnymen front man] Ian McCulloch and all the girls looked like Siouxsie Sioux. But everybody kind of intermingled. I mean, Taime was a real chameleon.
JOSEPH BROOKS I DJ’d at both clubs, and there was some crossover for sure. But I wouldn’t play the Cure or Siouxsie at Cathouse.
TRACII GUNS Scream in downtown L.A. was where Guns N’ Roses filmed “Welcome to the Jungle.”
MICKEY FINN I can remember playing the Scream one time and Perry Farrell was so fucked up on acid. They were going on after us and he was backstage, curled up in a ball on a chair, holding his knees and bawling. And I remember going, “Damn, dude…” And an hour and a half later he’s onstage just fucking killing it.
DAVE NAVARRO Scream was where I got my education as a professional musician. The shows were usually at, like, two in the morning at these really seedy downtown rented-out spaces, and in the early days you had to have a passcode to get into these things. It was like, “Swordfish,” and then you get in. It was an exciting time for sure.
BILLY ROWE Everybody was drinking, doing lines of coke in the bathroom, flirting with girls in a way where if you did it now, you’d be behind bars, you know? If they had cameras back then, that whole scene would be in jail.
DAVE NAVARRO I’d go to the Cathouse to drink and meet girls. But we didn’t play the Cathouse. That wasn’t our scene.
KIM THAYIL (guitarist, Soundgarden) Chris [Cornell, Soundgarden front man] and I went and saw Guns N’ Roses at the Cathouse. They hadn’t gone gold yet, but I remember we went there with an A&R person from Geffen and they told us, “Their record’s going to be gold next week.” We’re like, “Okay…” That didn’t mean anything to us because we’re just kids in a band.
The Cathouse, there was a lot of fucking Aqua Net and spandex and we thought that was kind of stupid and silly. But we’re watching them play and Chris and I looked at each other like, “Fuck, these guys have some presence.” It didn’t seem rehearsed. It didn’t seem scripted. It didn’t seem assembled. They seemed like they were who they were and we loved it. And then we ended up touring with them like, four, five years later.
RIKI RACHTMAN We started getting a lot of the Sunset Strip bands. But to me that wasn’t the Cathouse. Even though I don’t have anything against, you know, Warrant, Warrant wasn’t a Cathouse band.
JOEY ALLEN Did we go to the Cathouse? Absolutely. Went there many a night. That’s where all the rock stars hung out, that’s where all the pussy was, that’s where all the drugs were. Sign this, suck that, snort this, that’s what I remember. You’d wake up the next day going, “Fuck, what happened?”
JOSEPH BROOKS People would come into the DJ booth, have sex six inches from me, do drugs a foot away from me. I’m talking about rock celebrities getting blow jobs in the DJ booth. I’d be like, “Are you serious? Can you take that somewhere else?”
JOE LESTÉ (singer, Bang Tango) I mean, I don’t want to be that guy, but you could easily go and say, “Oh, yeah, I just got a blow job in the corner by the stairwell over there.” That happened all the time at the Cathouse.
RIKI RACHTMAN Crazy stories? The one that always stands out in my mind is Axl Rose chasing David Bowie down the street saying he was gonna kill him.
JOSEPH BROOKS This is when we were at the Probe. The security guards came up to me and they said, “Look, we have someone at the front door and we don’t know where to put him in the club, we can’t have him just walk around. He’s a big celebrity. Can we put him in the DJ booth with you?” I go, “Who is this person?” They go, “David Bowie.” I said, “Yeah, of course,” but I was losing my mind. Because he was like my ultimate hero. And they brought him into the booth. He was there to see Guns N’ Roses.
ALAN NIVEN If I remember correctly that was after we’d just come back from doing a Japanese tour. And the Cathouse had moved to a new location, and we went in to shoot a video for “It’s So Easy” with Nigel Dick. It was a packed, intense night and Nigel and his DP got some great footage—probably some of the best live footage of the band in that period. And unfortunately, Axl decided that he was going to do a little bit of Story of O with [then girlfriend] Erin [Everly] to add in as concept footage. It was S&M, BDSM stuff. Blindfold and paddles and all kinds of things. You know, an entertaining way to make a Christmas card for the family. I told Axl we should just shelve it.
DUFF MCKAGAN So we played a set, and we played “It’s So Easy” three or four times. And something happened, I’m not sure exactly what, ’cause a lot was going on, but Axl, you know, that dude is the real deal. If he’s pissed off he doesn’t care who it is. It can be David Bowie and he won’t get away with it. But I don’t know what happened. Maybe Riki knows what happened.
RIKI RACHTMAN All I know is my security guard comes up to me and says, “Axl Rose is chasing David Bowie down the street.” Okay. I didn’t even know David Bowie was in the club. I would’ve loved to have met David Bowie!
ALAN NIVEN Bowie came to the live show, and if I remember correctly he was seen talking to Erin and that upset Axl. And the next thing you know is they were scuffling and screaming at each other on the pavement outside the club.
DUFF MCKAGAN That was a new one. That was definitely a new level. And you know, like, Slash grew up with Bowie for a while. There was that connection. So not only was our singer chasing David Bowie down the street but it’s also, like, Slash’s mom’s old boyfriend. So, yeah, that was one of the stranger happenings that I witnessed probably in my whole life.
RIKI RACHTMAN I stood there and I’m like … I just walked away. ’Cause there was nothing I could do.
KATHERINE TURMAN But an interesting thing about the Cathouse is that all the luminaries went there. I mean, if you were David Bowie, who I saw there, or Nikki Sixx or whatever, you weren’t bombarded by fans. It was just a place where everyone could hang out. I’d even heard that Nikki was there, you know, the night that he OD’d.
NIKKI SIXX We went out to the Cathouse, and then back to Franklin Plaza [Apartments], where Slash and Steven [Adler] had rooms. We just kept taking it further, and it reached the breaking point for me. 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.
RIKI RACHTMAN I just remember the night after because I went to Nikki’s house and he had kind of a Christmas party. And Nikki had OD’d and he looked like shit. But I think he got high that night, too.
ERIC STACY Riki and Taime also had the whole merchandise thing. Axl Rose started wearing Cathouse shirts onstage with Guns N’ Roses. Mötley was wearing Cathouse shirts. Obviously the Faster Pussycat guys. We would all wear them and spread the name all over the world.
TAIME DOWNE I was making more money off the club than I was with Faster Pussycat. I remember paying for shit for the band out of club money. That fucking paid the bills even after we got our record deal, because we didn’t get no huge deal.
RIKI RACHTMAN There was one night before the club was open that Axl came by and brought the “Paradise City” video with him, and we sat in the DJ booth watching it. And he takes his jacket off in the video and he’s wearing a Cathouse shirt. And I’m like, “I better order more shirts…” I still sell Cathouse shirts worldwide to this day.
And the thing was, as Guns N’ Roses got bigger, they always took the Cathouse with them. They were always playing the club, they were always mentioning us in interviews, they were always wearing the T-shirts. I mean, Axl helped me get my job at MTV.
TAIME DOWNE Axl put in a good word for Riki at MTV and I just remember I kept telling Riki, “Go for it. Fucking do it.” Then all of a sudden it was like, “I’m on MTV with Faster Pussycat, and we’re being interviewed on Headbangers Ball by my old partner from the Cathouse!” It was great. Fucking cool.