In the fall of 1990, inside a fully functional second floor magic shop located above a methadone clinic on Hollywood Boulevard, Bryan Rabin made his first splash on the Los Angeles scene (alongside his partner, the late actor Jimmy Medina) with a traveling, if extralegal, after hours club called The Lounge. “It was the Wild West. We’d just drive around at night and look for spots.
I was 20 years old, full of moxie, and we’d just tell people we wanted to throw a bar mitzvah in their space,” recalls Rabin, noting the club migrated from photography and film studios to empty lofts and attracted everyone from Billy Idol to Thierry Mugler and Wolfgang Puck to dance there. “We moved every week to keep away from the police and had to call or fax everyone the day of each party.” From there, he opened Prague in a Czechoslovakian meeting hall on Western Avenue, the 1940s style lounge Highball in West Hollywood (in what is now Harlowe) and a burlesque club on Cosmo and Selma simply called Burlesque where Scott Ewalt, who deejayed Kenny Scharf’s Cosmic Cavern parties, spun 45s of grindhouse and ’60s garage rock bands for folks like Ron Athey.
Rabin became his own boldface name in the pages of and when he opened Cherry, Hollywood’s longest running rock club, in 1994. This glam rock mainstay hosted a fashion show with Alice Cooper handling a live boa constrictor; Courtney Love debuted a Hole song topless, and the club was even featured on and served as a precursor to hospi.