Gibson Guitar Town on The Sunset Strip Charity Auction Saturday, Dec 3rd

by Dana Feldman

Gibson Guitar Town on the Sunset Strip, which is administered by the Gibson Foundation, is wrapping up the yearlong tour of the strip and the announcement has officially been made that these spectacular guitars will be auctioned off all in the name of charity.

The event will take place starting at 2:00PM on Saturday, December 3rd at Julien’s Auctions Beverly Hills Gallery located at 9665 Wilshire Boulevard. The public was invited to come and take a look on the evening of Tuesday, November 29th with a viewing party. On display were personal items from the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe, Cher and films including the classic hit “The Big Lebowski,” as well as the art guitars. For those unable to attend in person, the auction will also be available online at www.julienslive.com.

Proceeds will benefit the Los Angeles Youth Network, an organization that provides homeless adolescents with outreach, food, emergency shelter, transitional living as well as educational enrichment programs. Also benefitting is the West Hollywood Library and the West Hollywood Arts & Cultural Commission which supports the public arts and the artists on The Sunset Strip.

These art guitars are ten feet tall and are positioned all throughout the legendary music boulevard in the heart of Hollywood. Each celebrates various aspects of the strip’s history and influence on music with guitars honoring The Doors, Ozzy Osbourne, Slash, Brian Wilson, Motley Crue and Cheech & Chong. Other guitars have themes of the architecture and nightlife of the famous boulevard.

Guitar Town on The Sunset Strip has become a must-see larger-than-life public art display that is a celebration of the places and people who have shaped this legendary part of Los Angeles. Since August of 2010 there have been more than twenty of these which have been prominently displayed along the 1.6 mile stretch of road. They can be spotted in front of historic locales including legendary venues such as Whisky a Go-Go, the Roxy Theatre, the Comedy Store, and the Andaz Hotel. A handful of these art guitars have been signed by the artists of which they represent.

Todd Steadman, Sunset Strip Business Association Executive Director, says of the display, “We enjoyed hosting Guitar Town on The Sunset Strip this year.” In honor of the artistic lifestyle that the strip promotes, he adds, “The guitars celebrated the boulevard’s history while also giving local artists the opportunity to showcase their talents in a one-of-a kind setting.” Adding in regards to the benefit of auctioning these guitars to charity, “We are pleased that the proceeds from the Guitar Town charity auction will benefit and inspire countless individuals in the Los Angeles area and beyond.”

Here is a list of a few of the art guitars included in the auction: “Light My Fire” honoring The Doors, “Prince Of Darkness” in honor of Ozzy Osbourne (signed by Osbourne and Slash), “Candy Stripe” is a jewel-encrusted guitar celebrating Katy Perry, “Dressed To Kill” for KISS, “Dr. Feelgood” honoring Motley Crue (signed by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil), “Jimi Rocks” in honor of Jimi Hendrix, “Good Vibrations” in honor of Brian Wilson (signed by Wilson), “Good Time Tonite” honoring Peter Frampton (signed by Frampton), and the “Slash Guitar” celebrating Slash (signed by Slash and Ron English).

Guitar Town on The Sunset Strip is supported by the Sunset Strip Business Association, the City of West Hollywood and the West Hollywood Marketing & Visitors Bureau. The display is administered by the philanthropic division of Gibson Guitar Corporation, the Gibson Foundation.

Learn more: Guitar Town • Gibson Foundation

The Roxy’s Nic Adler

Nic Adler is having a busy day. So much so that a few hours after announcing the lineup for September’s Sunset Strip Music Festival, the voicemail inbox on his cellphone is full. After growing up in and around the world famous Roxy, Nic has taken over the reins of the club from his father Lou Adler, who first opened the Roxy’s doors the same year Nic was born, and now Nic is building the history-laden venue a decidedly twenty-first century presence on social networking sites across the internet. Nic and I chat about everything from how he first found his way to those sites, to how he’s used the worldwide feedback to improve the Roxy experience, to the fact that the Strip itself will be closed to traffic for the first (officially sanctioned) time ever so that some of the festival’s performers, which include artists from Chris Cornell to LMFAO, can perform out in the street.



“I literally grew up with The Roxy,” Nic says of his childhood in Los Angeles. “That’s where I went after school. I’d literally get picked up and dropped off at The Roxy at 2:00 in the afternoon, and I’d run around with the different crews and jump on stage. And then as I got older I did come clubs, I used the Whisky as an all ages club when I was fifteen, and then I became a band manager and found my bands out of The Roxy and The Whisky. So for me it’s in my blood, it’s in my DNA. I can’t seem to get away from the Strip, or at least very far from it.”



After a period of mid-teen rebellion against The Roxy and rock music in general, even going so far as to dismiss an early Guns ‘n Roses demo tape of Welcome To the Jungle when Izzy Stradlin’s girlfriend tried to play it for him, Nic was eventually handed the keys to kingdom by his father. “My dad was getting these calls, I think it was a Black Crowes show that we had at The Roxy. There was all these questions from the agents, and my dad just looked at me and he goes, ‘I’m done. It’s time. Get down to The Roxy and take care of this.’”



“And for me it’s been great because I’ve been able to manage bands and do other projects, and still always have that home base in the middle of LA, and I have great relationships with the managers and bands, so it’s good for me too, it puts me in the right place. But at the moment it wasn’t something that I was dying to do.”


After taking over the club, Nic’s first order of business was to redefine what The Roxy was supposed to be in the face of the rise of competing music scenes in other LA neighborhoods. At the same time he began finding his way into social media after his girlfriend chided him over the sorry state of not only his MySpace page, but The Roxy’s official website as well.



“In the next couple days I met this girl Kyra Reed, and she was introduced to me as Blog Woman, ‘this Blog Woman is going to come and talk to you.’ And I was in an open place where I was kind of looking for the next way for The Roxy to excel, and she comes in and sits down and says ‘Do you know about community?’ And I’m like yeah, I guess I know about community, where I live, my neighbors. Then she started explaining to me the importance of community and paying it forward and doing things to help your neighbors, but in an online networking space.”



The Roxy’s stale website was promptly replaced with a WordPress blog template which saw two new blog posts per day. “People would comment and say ‘I don’t like The Roxy because your drink prices are too much.’ And I could be like ‘Wow, okay, thanks for pointing that out, just so you know, the average price in LA is this, but you’re right, we should bring our prices down.’ And we were able to have an honest conversation.”
That kind of interaction set Nic on a path toward helping establish a social media presence for not just The Roxy, but the entire Sunset Strip. In addition to announcing his own club’s shows on Twitter and giving away free tickets to his followers (the latter of which more than paid for itself through the resulting free publicity), he decided to use The Roxy’s Twitter feed to retweet an upcoming concert that was taking place at The Viper Room down the street. Ten minutes later, The Viper Room retweeted one of the The Roxy’s shows. The Comedy Store and others soon followed.



“We went from a closed door community,” Nic says of the Strip’s various landmark venues, “and it probably had that feeling on the outside too. Like red carpet or the velvet rope, or you have to be somebody. And we’ve just opened that up to anybody who wants to participate in it.”



Of course promoting a local venue through the internet, even one as famous as The Roxy, means interacting with people around the world, many of whom might never be able to make it to the club one way or the other, but Nic still sees value in that. “As long as people are talking about it, it’s relevant. And I think that’s something that The Roxy had lost, and the Sunset Strip had lost, with some people, was that it just wasn’t relevant today. So the fact that people are talking about it every day.”
“We even target tweets in the middle of the night, we schedule tweets that are whatever bands that would hit in those different time zones. So in the middle of the night we’re tweeting about German bands that we might have, or a French DJ that’s coming up, so that we try to get some involvement from people over there. It’s definitely in our minds when we write our tweets: at two in the morning, who are we talking to?”



“We’re also trying to reach the bands and the agents and the managers. And when they go onto Twitter and they see that The Roxy has sixteen thousand followers, and they believe in Twitter and they know the relevance of Twitter, they’re like ‘Wow, The Roxy must have their shit together, because why do they have all these fans, why are people following them? They must understand what’s going on.’ And with what’s going on in LA, with the competition with forty different venues, to have any kind of leg up is what we’re looking for right now. And the bands too, the bands love Twitter. So when they know that we’re gonna retweet them, and we’re gonna help promote them, it’s just an added bonus.”



He’s even gone so far as to cut his local print advertising to one third of what it was previously, in favor of funding the man-hours spent promoting The Roxy on Twitter. The club has come out ahead financially in the process and seen no dropoff in results, leaving him feeling more satisfied that he’s able to see tangible results in the form of his club being discussed publicly by social network users on a daily basis.



The upcoming Sunset Strip Music Festival will include LMFAO, who started off performing at The Roxy’s smaller club upstairs before eventually gaining enough of a following to begin playing in the main club, and recently sold out both the House of Blues and The Roxy in the same week. Former Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell brings something different to the festival (“We want that rock band that people are gonna be excited about,” as Nic puts it) along with other acts like Shwayze and The Donnas, as well as a number of other acts yet to be announced.



“Just to walk on the street, and to see bands playing on the Sunset Strip, I can’t even believe that it’s happening,” Nic says of the fact that this year’s festival will include outdoor stages on the street. “I come outside of The Roxy every night, and I’m literally looking up and down the street and going, ‘What’s it going to be like with ten thousand people on this street?’ And that’s one of the things we wanted to do, and that’s why we put two stages on the strip and we have alternating bands between the two stages, because something when I was a kid was people walking up and down the strip, and we’ve lost that a little bit. We’ve become more of a one-destination street where if you’re going to The Roxy you drive your car there, you park it, you go to The Roxy, you get back in your car and you go somewhere else. We want people to go up and down the street, walk back and forth and talk about what they did on this corner, or who played in that club. We’re trying to bring back that authentic Sunset Strip experience.”

The Sunset Strip Music Festival will take place in West Hollywood on September 10th-12th. Follow The Roxy on Twitter. Follow Nic Adler on Twitter. Learn more at TheRoxyOnSunset.com

interview by Bill Palmer