In any case, hippies, particularly younger ones, weren't looking for drink anyway. The circuit of nightclubs that presented personal appearances by the familiar stars of stage and screen were all but completely shut out of the 60s psychedelic rock explosion. 60s rock in the United States had its own institutions: their own concert halls, modeled on the Fillmores, free-form FM radio, and hugely successful bands that seemed to owe little to the traditional starmaking machinery of New York and Los Angeles. Rock music exploded in the minds of young people, with phenomenal economic returns as well. Regional bands played the local version of the Fillmore, and although they released albums through national record companies, those bands did not achieve success by appearing on television. One of the driving forces of live 1960s rock music was that it arose somewhat outside the confines of the regular entertainment business. Because of the way the Whisky did and did not advertise its shows, some of the exact beginning and end dates of some of the acts may be a bit vague, but I am confident that all the acts listed here played the Whisky during this period. This post is a review of all the performers at the Whisky A-Go-Go from January through June 1971, and an analysis of what it tells us about rock music and the record industry of that moment. We don't think of the Whisky as a home for "Jazz-Rock" and "Prog," but a review of the acts that played there in the first half of 1971 tell us just that. Surprisingly, however, for a few years the Whisky A-Go-Go became the locus for rock music in its newly-sophisticated form. Yet the Whisky was still in West Hollywood, and it was still important. Flashy hard-rock itself was a bit passe, too, since rock took itself awfully seriously now. Sensitive singer-songwriters expressing their feelings was the new pillar of the music industry, and those acts played the nearby Troubadour, not the Whisky. Them, The Doors, Cream, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin: they rocked the Whisky in style, and success followed.īy the early 1970s, although the rock music market had exploded, the Whisky was not the musical nexus of West Hollywood. Nonetheless, record industry tastemakers either went to the Whisky or heard about it the next morning, so if you rocked the Whisky, and in particular if you rocked with some style, you could rock the nation afterwards, whether you had been famous beforehand or not. Also true, the club only paid the minimum union scale, no matter how many records you sold. True, the little club on the crowded Sunset Strip held 500 patrons at most, and the mini-skirted Go-Go dancers elevated above the floor could be as big an attraction as the band. In the late 1960s, one of the ways for a rock band to get big fast was to play the Whisky A-Go-Go in West Hollywood. The Whisky A-Go-Go, at 8901 Sunset Blvd (at Clark) on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, sometime in the 1960s
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