Sunday, April 14, 2013

Guns N Roses History Lesson - Sunset Grill & El Compadre Restaurant

Before Guns and Rose's became the biggest band in the world they were broke and nearly homeless.  They shacked up in a cramped storage unit in Los Angeles behind the world famous Guitar Center & Sunset Grill, using it for rehearsal and for sleeping.

The grill as it looks today after a renovation.
 The Sunset Grill became immortalized in the Don Henley song by the same name. It is said that he came up with the song by his trips behind the grill to buy heroin from GNR member Izzy Stradlin. Not sure how accurate that is, because that song came out in 1985 so the timeline's might not match, but there may be some truth to it.

Here is the only video I could find for "Sunset Grill" .... I didn't look too hard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXVht8y-a4Y

The band's local watering hole was a local Mexican Restaurant called "El Compadre".  Not much has changed in the restaurant since that time and a few of the waitstaff is familiar with the local GNR folklore. I know this because I'm there at least once a week badgering them for stories.


Great food. For Guns fans only!
GNR at El Compadre.


Below is a photo of the storage unit area behind Guitar Center / Sunset Grill as it looks today.


The white building is the middle school that a few of the band members have mentioned in their books. The kids playing outside during recess would wake the band up if they were sleeping. Most of "Appetite for Destruction" was written back here.

Today the Sunset Grill is home to a shitty stand up comedy open mic that I have been known to frequent.     @chrisgehrt

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4 comments:

  1. AnonymousDecember 20, 2016 at 3:32 PM

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  2. AnonymousDecember 20, 2016 at 3:51 PM

    Cool website and great pics ! I read in The Saga Of Guns N' Roses that Don Henley wrote Sunset Grill based on the "serious moral decay" he witnessed, especially in the alley behind the grill where GNR lived and partied in a storage room Izzy Stradlin had rented. Weekends saw hundreds of rowdy, partying teens and every type of deviant and misfit imaginable. What doesn't add up is Henley wrote the song in 84. Stradlin didnt rent the storage room until the summer of 85. The timeframe was so close PR reps couldnt resist encouraging and spreading the BS rumor.

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  3. Adam JonesFebruary 24, 2019 at 10:22 PM

    There seems to be some confusion over the location of the Gardner rehearsal space. According to Mick Wall in "Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns N' Roses": "The building was located in West Hollywood, behind 7508 Sunset Boulevard near the junction of North Gardner Street, a one-room space of around 12 feet by 12 feet that was officially designated a 'storage area' (it’s now behind a shop called the Russian Bookstore). Just over the road was the Guitar Center, and nearby the Mesa/Boogie amp showroom. It wasn’t a dwelling space at all: it had a roll-up aluminium door, no bathroom, kitchen or air conditioning, and until Izzy and a couple of friends found some lumber abandoned behind the unit and used it to build a rudimentary gallery that just about slept three if you lay very still, was entirely unrecognisable as one." 7508 Sunset is *across the street* from the Guitar Center. Here's a photo of what appears to be the rehearsal unit (note the Guns N' Roses graffiti), and another one of the alleyway opening onto Gardner. https://www.flickr.com/photos/adam_jones/47151591752
    https://www.flickr.com/photos/adam_jones/47151590542/

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