In January 1964 the Whisky a Go Go opened here, and within months its small stage behind the bar was the most important music venue in Los Angeles. The Whisky a Go Go opened in January 1964 and within months had become the most important music venue in Los Angeles. It introduced the go-go dancer — originally a disc jockey in a glass booth above the dance floor, wearing a short skirt, whose visible dancing gave the club its atmosphere and its imitators their name.
The Doors were the house band here in 1966, playing five nights a week for weeks at a stretch, developing the long improvisational performances that made their live shows legendary. Jim Morrison improvised the spoken-word passages of The End on this stage, passages so sexually explicit that the club fired the band. They were rehired the following week.
Janis Joplin, Buffalo Springfield, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison, and the Grateful Dead all played here in the club's first decade. It still operates as a music venue, still presenting new bands on the same stage. Stand at the entrance on Sunset Boulevard and look at the marquee; behind it, the room is unchanged in its essentials since 1964.