The Go Go Cage

The Whisky a Go Go opened at 8901 Sunset in January 1964, in a converted bank building, taking its name from a Paris nightclub that had been calling itself the Whisky a Gogo since the 1940s. What the Los Angeles version added was the cage. The club hired Johnny Rivers to play and put a young woman in a glass sided booth suspended beside the stage to spin records between his sets; during one set she started dancing up there, the audience took it for part of the show, and the club had accidentally invented the look that defined a decade. More suspended cages followed, along with a costume of fringed skirt and white boots that spread to discotheques across America and then the world, though the club did not put regular go go dancers on the payroll until 1965. Accounts differ on who the first dancer was, which is what tends to happen when nobody realises they are witnessing anything. The Whisky spent the rest of the sixties as the proving ground of Los Angeles rock: the Doors held the house band residency through the summer of 1966 before being let go, Love and Buffalo Springfield worked the stage, and Otis Redding recorded a live album there in April 1966. The club closed in 1982 and reopened in 1986, and still operates at Sunset and Clark under the same name, which on that boulevard counts as remarkable.