Rocking Place To Be In La - All Go Go With Song, Dance And Whisky Flowing

The Age

Tuesday January 13, 2009

Douglas Martin

Elmer Aaron Valentine

Club Owner

16-6-1923 - 3-12-2008

ELMER Valentine, a self-described crooked cop who fled Chicago and opened the Whisky a Go Go, one of the most celebrated clubs in the history of rock music, on Los Angeles' Sunset Strip, has died of heart failure at Studio City. He was 85.

The West Hollywood club hosted the Byrds, the Doors, the Kinks, the Who, the Mamas and Papas, and Sonny and Cher, among many other stars.

Bob Dylan dropped by to play pool, Jimi Hendrix to jam. When the Beatles arrived in Los Angeles in 1964 on their first American tour, the Whisky was the place they wanted to see.

The Whisky opened on January 15, 1964, and almost by accident Valentine introduced what for years became a pop-culture staple: go-go girls suspended in cages. "It was just so popular, right from the very first night," Valentine said in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2000. "I tell you, I was just lucky."

The Doors, with Jim Morrison, were the house band, at least until the night he sang The End, which Valentine considered obscene. On one night, the club had performances by Buffalo Springfield, Love, Frank Zappa, and Van Morrison and his band, Them.

Although the club was at its peak in the 1960s, it was a focus for the punk and new-wave movements in the 1970s, hard rock and metal bands in the 1980s, and grunge in the 1990s, when Valentine sold his interest.

Valentine was born in Chicago, but at age 14 he left home and rode trains and hitchhiked to California. He served in the US Army Air Forces in Britain in World War II, and later joined the Chicago police. He rose to become a detective, and after his marriage ended, he encountered what he termed "a little career trouble". He was charged with extortion, involving the collection of bribes on behalf of a captain, but was never convicted.

He told Vanity Fair's David Kemp: "I used to moonlight running nightclubs for the outfit ... for gangsters."

After he moved to California, he and partners from Chicago opened a nightclub, P.J.'s. In 1963, on a visit to Paris, he visited a discotheque called Whisky a Go Go, and was enthralled by the enthusiastic young dancers. Valentine returned to LA and invested $US20,000 of his profits from his share in P.J.'s in what became the Whisky. He gave a one-year contract to Johnny Rivers, then a 21-year-old rocker and bluesman, who turned out to be wildly popular.

In between Rivers' three sets, Valentine wanted to suspend a record-playing DJ in a glass-walled cage - as they did in Paris. The mother of the girl who won a contest to be the DJ would not let her take the job, so the cigarette girl, Patty Brockhurst, wearing a slit skirt, was drafted; she spontaneously started dancing. "Thus out of calamity and serendipity was born the go-go girl," Kemp wrote. Another dancer, Joanie Labine, designed what became the official go-go-girl costume, fringed dress and white boots.

Later, with partners, Valentine started the Rainbow Bar & Grill and the Roxy Theatre, also in West Hollywood, retaining an interest in them until his death.

Valentine is survived by his daughter, Kimberly, and a grandson. NEW YORK TIMES

The Whisky Au Go Go nightclub in Brisbane was fire-bombed on March 8, 1973 and 15 patrons died in what, at the time, was Australia's worst mass murder. Two men were jailed.

© 2009 The Age

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