A real father figure on the Sunset Strip
Late club owner Mario Maglieri ruled the scene with a cigar and kindness.
Mario Maglieri was a central character in the story of Los Angeles youth culture.
And Sunday afternoon at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, those who knew Maglieri, the late fixture of the Sunset Strip who coowned both the longtime pizza-pasta joint to the stars and the iconic club the Whisky a Go Go, gathered to share tales of how a music scene created a family.
Maglieri, who recently died at 93, was feted on the same stretch of land where he helped build a rock ’n’ roll hub. Starting in the mid-1960s, the proprietor and longtime manager of the neighboring rock club the Roxy ruled the neighborhood with cigar in mouth and a patriarchal kindness.
One measure of his mark lay in the volumes of stories floating around the Rainbow on Sunday.
“Many of us grew up over here because we’d come over from the San Fernando Valley,” said photographer Brad Elterman, standing outside at a door to the Roxy’s upstairs club. In the 1970s he captured a shot of John Lennon and Ringo Starr after the Beatles’ breakup.
“We were 16 or 17, and there were no parental controls at all,” Elterman said, adding that Maglieri “was like a father to so many of these young kids who came over to discover the magic.” Another photo Elterman took on the Strip captured Bob Dylan hanging with Robert De Niro.
The Rainbow, Roxy and Whisky a Go Go represented a bold contrast from his parents’ place in the Valley, Elterman said. It “was like you’d entered two different civilizations. It doesn’t have the feel of that today, and I can’t really explain why. Maybe it was because I was 18, but maybe it’s because inside were Jimmy Page and Robert Plant.”
Sipping a beer, longtime music manager and former label boss Jim Maley recalled time spent at the Rainbow in the 1970s with wide-eyed wonder.
“I was here seven nights a week for seven years,” Maley said, noting that at the time the Rainbow was one of the only rock ’n’ roll bars in town, making it a destination for touring bands and musical expats.
Maley, who said that over the years he’s “done everything in the business except make a lot of money,” had an office at the nearby Hyatt House (now the Andaz), and when the Who’s notorious drummer Keith Moon was living there in the mid-1970s, the two would grab lunch and inevitably end up at the Rainbow’s bar.
Recalled Maley: “One time we came here and [Moon] was pretty buzzed, as usual, and he started playing drums on the table. We’d already ordered — and they actually threw him out because he wouldn’t stop banging on the tables.”
Standing in line to sign Maglieri’s guest book, hairdresser Richard Vasquez pulled out a baggie filled with old ticket stubs from the Roxy dating to 1978.
“He was so distinguished. We felt secure when he was standing next to us,” Vasquez said of Maglieri. “I remember him standing outside, smoking, taking the head count in front of the Roxy.”
Actress Debbie Dutch called Maglieri her “rock ’n’ roll father. I could come and he’d be sitting out here with his cigar and I could talk to him. He called me Blondie.”
Dutch said her thenboyfriend was in the studio with George Harrison during her time spent in the neighborhood, and when she wasn’t helping out on backing vocals she’d hit the Roxy to dance: “Different wig on every night, with a different name — and I was underage and I never had to worry about anything.”
She pauses, on the verge of tears. “It’s my youth. This is like the end of part of my heart. And everybody feels the same way. Mario was like our father.”