LA’s Viper Room kicks off our new series about the places that put the <i>geist</i> in the <i>zeit</i> of their eras .

It’s no secret that ghosts lurk in the basement bar of the Viper Room. Ask Ms Rita Fiora, she’s been working the ticket booth there for the past seven years.

“I’ve had my hair yanked, a hand on my leg. Oh yeah, they’re grabby, the guy ghosts,” she says. “But there’s a chick ghost too, she was texting me once from a dead number. I’d talk out loud to her, and she’d text me a response. She was mad that I couldn’t see her.”

Mostly, when Ms Fiora tells ghost stories, people ask her, “Was it River?”, as in Phoenix. The James Dean-ish star of _Stand By Me _was only 23 when he died of an overdose outside the West Hollywood club.

It was 31 October 1993, barely two months after Mr Johnny Depp and a business partner had bought a 51% share in the Viper Room, and already it was known as one of LA’s coolest spots. It was a place where rock stars and young Hollywood could let loose, without fear of paparazzi. A place where legends played, and other legends in the audience would routinely jump up on stage and join them. And its reputation was building fast when tragedy struck. It was the club’s formative trauma. Ever since, Mr River Phoenix and the Viper Room have been uttered together in the same breath – like Mr John Belushi and the Chateau Marmont.

“None of the ghosts are River,” Ms Fiora says. “But he’s not the only person who died here. People talk about the 1990s, when it was Johnny’s place, but that stage goes back to the 1940s.”

The Viper Room sits on the Sunset Strip at the western end of Sunset Boulevard where it bumps up against Beverly Hills. This stretch of the most storied boulevard in Los Angeles has enjoyed a mythic place in pop culture thanks to decade-defining venues such as the Whisky a Go Go and The Roxy. Of all the hallowed venues that remain though, the Viper is the first, the original and the least tampered with. The Whisky has its Doors legends, and The Roxy has the biggest room, the loudest stage. But the Viper Room is gem-like – small and perfectly formed. The acoustics are impeccable, and it’s so intimate that it’s filled to capacity with only 196 people. It’s also essentially the same room as in the 1940s. If those walls could talk, they’d have stories from the days of the mobster Mr Bugsy Siegel.

In Mr Siegel’s day it was known as the Cotton Club, then the Greenwich Village Inn, a fabled gangster hang-out, frequented after Mr Siegel’s death by crime boss Mr Mickey Cohen (Mr Siegel’s former enforcer). As The Melody Room in the 1950s and 1960s, the venue was first a jazz club (hosting the likes of Mr John Coltrane) and then a rock venue (welcoming The Doors). In the 1970s, it was home to all things glam rock as Filthy McNasty’s (featured on the cover of Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard album in 1974), and in the 1980s, as The Central, where the hair and the volume went to 11 thanks to the likes of Mötley Crüe.

It was Mr Tom Waits that suggested to Mr Depp that he buy the place – he even proposed the name, the Viper Room. And at the time, Mr Depp craved a private sanctuary for him and his friends. “I wanted a place to escape,” he once said. And so he re-launched the venue. It became known as “Johnny’s place”– not to be confused with Johnny’s Booth, which is an actual VIP area at the club. (“He had it built specially,” says Ms Fiora. “You can’t see into it, because of the one-way glass, but you can see out and watch the gig.”)

The star-studded launch featured a set by none other than Mr Tom Petty, and a crowd that put the Grammies and the Oscars to shame. Instantly, the Viper Room was the place. Stars realised it was a safe place to party, and so they did. Stories abound of Ms Kate Moss behind the bar. Or Mr Quentin Tarantino crawling around on the floor looking for his wallet yelling, “it says Bad Motherf***er on it!” And on top of it all, there was burlesque, in keeping with the venue’s illicit traditions – Mr Depp specifically wanted it that way. The Pussycat Dolls had a residency there for six years, long before they took on the later, “Don’t Cha” line-up.

But it wasn’t just a scene. The music was spectacular. Mr Johnny Cash played solo there, showcasing his first work with Mr Rick Rubin – Mr Depp felt his performance was a cleansing after Mr Phoenix’s death. And Mr Cash was one of many huge acts to play this intimate venue – Messrs Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen along with Guns N’ Roses… And if the stars weren’t on stage, they were in the audience.  

“It was one of rock’n’roll’s greatest hideaways,” says Mr Frank O’Neill, the Glaswegian production manager at the Viper Room for 13 years. “You’d have Al Pacino in booth one, Joe Strummer and Iggy Pop just hanging out in the office, and who’s that bloke up there in the mixing booth with the hot blonde? Oh it’s Tony Curtis. That’s the kind of place it was.”

Stars just came to hang out. It became their local. Cher, Sir Mick Jagger, Messrs Bryan Ferry and Michael Hutchence… a few regulars got so used to getting on stage and playing together, that they formed a band, the Neurotic Outsiders – Messrs John Taylor (Duran Duran), Steve Jones (The Sex Pistols) and Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum (Guns N’ Roses). Madonna’s label Maverick signed them up in a flash.“As far as celebrity bad behaviour, it wouldn’t be right of me to say,” says Mr O’Neill, grinning. “But Mel Gibson would come in pissed up quite a lot, causing trouble!”

No doubt the heyday of the Viper Room was in Mr Depp’s era. When he sold up in 2004, the venue went through some uncertain moments – movie Sundays, for example, or its experiment as a straight nightclub.

But the ship has been steadied since. In 2008 it was bought by Mr Harry Morton, son of Peter, the Hard Rock magnate. And it has returned full bore to its rock’n’roll roots.

“I was doing shots with Dave Grohl the other night,” says Ms Fiora. “They all come in – Dave, Steven Tyler, Slash. And believe me, it’s just as wild as it ever was. I was in Johnny’s Booth the other day, and a band member was having sex with a groupie. He said, ‘Hello love! I’ll just be done in a jiff!’ I’ve gone into our offices and found complete strangers doing rails of cocaine.”

Los Angeles has a way of erasing its own history. And already there have been some ominous developments on the Strip. A beloved old café, Dukes, has been replaced by an outpost of the Irish pub chain, Rock & Reilly’s. There’s talk of turning the Hustler Hollywood store into a hotel.

But the Viper Room is keeping the torch burning with a passion. This is a venue that aims to put on three bands minimum per night, every night of the week, 362 days a year. Almost everyone who works there is a musician – Ms Fiora is in a country band, the head barman Mr Tommy Black is a bassist for Mr Scott Weiland (of Stone Temple Pilots) and even the general manager, Mitch, is a singer.

Who knows, maybe the ghosts were musicians too? You can’t blame them for sticking around.

“They honestly don’t bother me,” says Ms Fiora, setting herself up in her booth minutes before the doors open. “It’s one of the privileges of working in a historical venue. Because I know people died here, but you know what? People lived here too.”