Faster Pussycat came together in Hollywood, California in the mid-1980s, the brainchild of vocalist Taime Downe, a former co-owner of the famed Sunset Strip club The Cathouse. The band is an American hard rock and glam metal band from Los Angeles, formed in 1985 by vocalist Taime Downe, guitarists Greg Steele and Brent Muscat and bassist Kelly Nickels. The name of the band was derived from the Russ Meyer film Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! Before recording a note in the studio, Nickels was sidelined and just before the band recorded their debut album, Nickels got into a motorcycle accident and broke his leg in seven places, so he was replaced by Eric Stacy from Champagne Darling Cool. Rounded out with drummer Mark Michals, this lineup embodied the raw, street-level sound that set the band apart from its more polished glam metal peers.
The band's breakthrough came quickly amid the Sunset Strip gold rush of the mid-1980s. As labels signed other bands affiliated with the Sunset Strip, like Guns N' Roses and Poison, Faster Pussycat signed a record contract with Elektra Records, which released their debut album Faster Pussycat in 1987. That self-titled release reached number 97 on the Billboard 200 chart and spawned notorious singles and videos for songs like "Cathouse" and "Bathroom Wall." The band's true commercial peak arrived with their follow-up, 1989's Wake Me When It's Over, on which the band moved away from the glam metal of their first album to a more blues influenced sound , and which became a certified gold record featuring the hit ballad "House of Pain." Throughout this era the classic lineup of Downe, Steele, Muscat, and rotating rhythm section members built a reputation as, in the words of one retrospective, "perhaps even more so than L.A. Guns and the mighty Guns 'n Roses," exemplifying "the down 'n dirty, street struttin', gutter crawlin' ethos of pure '80s L.A. sleaze metal." The band's career arc followed the classic hair metal trajectory of rise, plateau, and collapse. Their third album, Whipped!, arrived in 1992 just as the industry shifted, and though it was a strong effort, it showed further progression but emerged into a much changed musical climate, falling victim to a combination of the recession and the success of the Seattle bands. Elektra dropped the band while they toured America with Kiss, and after selling well over a million records worldwide and an eight-year career, the band played its final show together on July 6, 1993 in Japan. Along the way they endured significant lineup turmoil, including drummer Mark Michals being jailed on drug charges and replaced first by Frankie Banali and then Brett Bradshaw, and they left a lasting screen document of the era through their appearance in the rockumentary The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years. The band reunited in 2001 with much of its original core, though further changes followed, including Greg Steele's departure mid-tour and a period where two rival lineups both toured under the Faster Pussycat name.
In the years since their initial breakup, Faster Pussycat has remained intermittently active, built around Taime Downe as its sole constant member. The group has since gone through numerous lineup changes leaving Downe as the only constant member, and after breaking up in 1993, they reformed in 2001. They released a fourth studio album, The Power and the Glory Hole, in 2006, which pushed the band's sound in an industrial rock direction. They were a successful hard rock band during the late 1980s and early 1990s, having sold over two million records worldwide , and their legacy as pioneers of Sunset Strip sleaze rock has only grown with time. In 2020, Jeff Mezydlo of Yardbarker included them in his list of "the 20 greatest hair metal bands of all time." That enduring reputation for gritty, high-energy live shows is exactly what drew Wayne Dennon's lens to the stage. Wayne photographed Faster Pussycat once, capturing a 2008 performance that now lives on as part of this archive's tribute to the era's great rock and roll survivors. The 26 photographs from that night, viewed more than 20,000 times by visitors to this site, stand as a small but vivid record of a band that never stopped embodying the raw spirit of the Sunset Strip that gave it life.
