It was the summer of 1987, and for fans of hard rock, Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles was the only place to be. The clubs of The Strip, as it is known, were full of shaggy-maned, (largely) good-looking, attitude-charged and overwhelmingly male wannabes prepared to step over their own dying mother to become the Next Big Thing.
This was a moment in time. Ratt had stuttered with their third full-length record, the previous year’s Dancing Undercover (although it still sold a million). Girls, Girls, Girls was the third consecutive Mötley Crüe album to go quadruple platinum (four million copies). Guns N’ Roses’ soon-to-be-stellar debut Appetite For Destruction was fresh in the racks, and Poison had leapt from an independent to a major label. Even David Coverdale wanted a slice of the action, meticulously retooling Whitesnake for optimum traction on MTV.
At the heart of it all were Taime Downe, frontman of Faster Pussycat, and Riki Rachtman, who would go on to host the MTV show Headbangers Ball. As roommates, the pair had dreamt up and created their nightclub The Cathouse, a den of iniquity and decadence that each week drew six hundred party-hungry rockers to the corner of La Cienega and San Vicente.
In doing so, Downe and Rachtman became a platonic power couple in a Hollywood scene captured on celluloid so memorably by director Penelope Spheeris in the following year’s The Decline Of Western Civilization Part 2: The Metal Years, in which Faster Pussycat perform their songs Cathouse and Bathroom Wall at the club.
“It was an era in which anything went – and I mean anything,” the singer says now, beaming at the memory. “All of the bands were there, all of the strippers. Every night was a party. It was the place to be, just a cool hang. And I was young enough to be like…” he shrugs his shoulders. “Yeah… whatever. Bring it on.”
Faster Pussycat toured with a Who’s Who of the hard-rock world, including Alice Cooper, Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, David Lee Roth and Motörhead. However, while Faster Pussycat’s early music was charged with a sleaze-laden simplicity, their albums gradually became darker and heavier, and it’s no surprise that Downe later became involved with industrial rockers Pigface, or that his other group The Newlydeads followed a similar path.
“I don’t like doing the same thing over and over,” Downe told Classic Rock in 2022. “To me, whether or not [a song] has a distorted vocal or banging cans in the background, it’s all catchy rock shit.”
After arriving in Hollywood, Downe’s ambitions were modest. “I wanted to put a band together and play the Troubadour,” he recalls, referencing the iconic 500-capacity club on Santa Monica Boulevard where he once worked the lights. “Or maybe the Whisky [a Go Go, of similar size, on Sunset]. I dreamt about the simple shit. And then everyone started talking about a record deal.
"Soon there were other hoops to jump through; get the record out, go on tour, get a gold disc. And then, without warning, everything collapses and you’re left wondering: ‘What do I do now?’ Before I knew it, Faster was done.”
In 2026, four decades on from those heady days, Downe continues to lead a downscaled but doggedly persistent version of Faster Pussycat. At just short of 62 years old, the man who almost killed himself in a relentless blizzard of alcohol, drugs and nicotine has been sober, clean and cigarette-free for almost a decade. This resilience withstood the sternest of tests last summer when his fiancée, Kimberly Burch, went overboard and was lost in the Caribbean Sea during an 80s-themed cruise, on which Faster Pussycat were one of the attractions.
The singer’s life and career might have been turbulent, but while talking to Classic Rock from his home studio in California he projects a zenlike mindset.
“Today it’s a whole different world,” Downe states. “Without record companies to pay for tours, and with no real money coming in, it can be a struggle.
“What I’ve learned to do,” he continues, acknowledging the wider picture, “is to enjoy the good things while they last. Life goes by pretty fast.”
Born Gustave Molvik, Downe grew up in Seattle as part of a rock-friendly family and with a father who played guitar. By the age of four the youngster had followed suit and also knew his way around a drum kit.
After relocating to California during the mid80s Gustave evolved into Taime (a name his Italian grandmother had coined). “I was twenty-one and wanted to be a rock star, so I moved to where the hot women and cool bands were from,” he says now.
Mick Cripps, later of L.A. Guns, had been involved at the start, but Downe says that those who ended up joining him – guitarists Greg Steele and Brent Muscat, bassist Kelly Nickels and drummer Mark Michaels – were hand-picked. Word on the street got around quickly. Vicky Hamilton of GN’R and Crüe fame became their manager. For Faster Pussycat, timing could not have been any better. Their debut gig at The Central (later The Viper Room), saw Axl Rose dancing enthusiastically.
The Decline Of Western Civilisation Pt 2 arrived in cinemas at an equally opportune moment for Faster Pussycat, its unintentional pathos capturing all facets of life on the Strip – the huge egos, the desperation and self-belief to the point of complete and utter denial.
“It was a good film, Penelope did a great job,” Downe acknowledges. “And it was right as our band was coming out.”
He adds: “We were a fun band, our shows were packed and we pimped ourselves out. We weren’t even that good, we were just young and hungry. And at that time all of the bands hung out together – GN’R, Jetboy, L.A. Guns, The Sea Hags and us. The great thing was that the bands helped each other out.”
With a record-label feeding frenzy going on, every major needed its own so-called ‘hair metal’ band, and within a year of Faster Pussycat’s formation Elektra Records landed theirs.
Fortune was less kind to Kelly Nickels, who was involved in a motorcycle accident just before the group entered the studio with Poison producer Ric Browde, so Eric Stacy took over on bass (Nickels subsequently joined L.A. Guns). In vogue for his work on Poison’s debut Look What The Cat Dragged In, and having helped grease the wheels of the Elektra deal, Browde brought valuable additional skills as an arranger.
Banged out largely in one take for an extremely modest $35,000, Faster Pussycat proved to be a functional-sounding debut of above-average songs, and where else but The Cathouse to throw its record release party, attended by Gene Simmons of Kiss?
The band had taken their name from the 1975 film Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, so they were thrilled when its director Russ Meyer, known for his series of ‘sexploitation’ films, agreed to produce a bump-and-grind video to promote one of the album’s three singles, Don’t Change That Song. Sharing a love of well-proportioned women, Downe bonded with the filmmaker.
“It was fucking cool that Russ made a three-minute movie for us,” he recalls fondly. “Russ used to call me Tammy. He brought in some of his girls for the shoot. I got given a couple of Kitten Natividad’s bras as a souvenir.”
But Don’t Change That Song might never have been recorded. The band had been planning to record their own rendition of Shocking Blue’s much-covered 60s hit Venus, until the British trio Bananarama beat them to it, and with the album coming up short, DCTS was written in the studio in “around an hour”.
Among the band’s first overseas tours was one in Europe with their pals Guns N’ Roses, whose own debut was by now gaining traction. Many who attended the last show of the five-date UK leg, which also featured The Quireboys, at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, reckoned Faster Pussycat were the best band of the night. Responding to such a suggestion in a previous dialogue with Classic Rock, Downe theatrically placed a finger to his lips, grinned and said: “When the reviews came out we had to tiptoe around Axl. He would get angry about that shit.”
Today Downe is more diplomatic: “Those guys were our buddies. Being twenty-two years old and in Europe for the first time was an incredible experience. We had half an hour on stage and we fucked shit up,” he relates proudly.
The Faster Pussycat debut album went on to sell half a million copies in the US, and soon the band were heading out in promotion of a second record. Overseen by the experienced John Jansen, Wake Me When It’s Over revealed a more musically adventurous side to the band and, fuelled by three singles, including House Of Pain and Where There’s A Whip There’s A Way, it became their biggest seller.
“The bottom line is that we were trying to do better,” Downe explains. “If the music got darker, we were still learning our shit.”
Reminded that the band’s sound was memorably once described as: “Not glam, not punk, but somewhere in between”, he says with a smirk: “It’s glunk. Naah. We’re just trashy rock’n’roll. We’ve been labelled so many times, I don’t know what we are. We’re just old. Or maybe we’re classic. Don’t ask me.”
In January 1990, three years after that first European tour with Guns N’ Roses, Faster Pussycat returned to the UK to headline Hammersmith Odeon as part of a package with The Almighty and Dangerous Toys. “I’ve got a plaque – ‘Faster Pussycat at Hammersmith, sold out!’” he announces with pride.
A third album, 1992’s Whipped!, Downe recalls, was created “a little more under John Jansen’s control”. With hindsight, he regrets writing thirty songs and discarding twenty, instead of “ten that were killer”.
With the grunge revolution on the horizon and a whole host of record label issues Faster Pussycat needed to overcome, it mattered little anyway.
“For us, Elektra just fell apart. And once we lost our record deal the [booking] agency dropped us, so there were no more tours. Without another record deal your band dies. That’s just how the music business works. When Seattle came in, it was all over for the LA bands – even Mötley Crüe. So I stopped doing Faster Pussycat until 2000. I just experimented with other shit and had some fun.”
That involved relocating to Chicago, where Pigface’s Martin Atkins and Bill Rifelin were based. After returning to California he formed The Newlydeads, whose line-up also included former Bang Tango bassist Kyle Kyle.
When the Faster Pussycat reunion came it was with a mix of originals (Downe, Greg Steele and Brent Muscat) and members of The Newlydeads, and the remix collection Between The Valley Of The Ultra Pussy that gave an industrial twist to the band’s best-known songs.
In 2006, the long-awaited fourth studio album, The Power And The Glory Hole, walked the thin line between glam and mechanical sounds.
“To me, industrial music is cool,” Downe insists. “When it’s done well – like by Nine Inch Nails, Wednesday 13 [former Murderdolls frontman] or Marilyn Manson – it’s fucking amazing. I like to do a bit of this and a bit of that. At sixty-one years old I’m glad I haven’t spent my life doing just one thing.”
For a while there was not one but two versions of Faster Pussycat doing the rounds, with Brent Muscat having left and put together a rival line-up with Eric Stacy and Brett Bradshaw.
“All of that only lasted for, like, a minute – I killed it quickly,” Downe reveals. “I started this fucking band. It’s my band.”
When the mood takes them, Faster Pussycat continue to release new music, although just like more contemporary acts they now do so in dripfeed mode, a few songs at a time.
“Yeah,” he says. “But when we have a whole batch of songs we put them all together. I still believe in albums. It helps that I have a studio right here in my house.”
Even without the ‘fringe benefits’ of the old days, Downe professes to taking genuine enjoyment from touring. “Oh yeah, that’s why I still do rock’n’roll,” he says enthusiastically. “I don’t go out in a fucking van, not unless we’re in the UK. In America we’re on a bus and I have my own place to chill out. I take my dog. We play clubs and I’m cool with that.”
When asked about the possibility of the original Pussycat playing together again, it’s clear that those doors are firmly closed: “It’ll never happen. I hear occasionally from Greg [Steele], but [Brett] Bradshaw is dead and Mark [Michals, the original drummer] is missing. He’s probably dead too.”
Taime Downe found sobriety almost a decade ago because he had to. “I had been a chain smoker since the age of fifteen, and alcohol and cocaine went along with smoking, so I had to quit everything,” he says. “My whole life had been cigarettes, shots and a bump. I didn’t do a whole lot of drugs back in the day, though I used them socially, so in later life I figured I should catch up.
“At fifty-two I walked away from all of those things at the same time, so that was tough,” he continues. “Even when got sober I had to stay away from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings because everyone there was smoking.”
Besides being hangover-free, the change has massively improved Downe’s health and overall quality of life. For quite a while he has been working on a memoir with Leif Eriksson and Martin Svensson, the Swedish ghostwriters involved in books on Matt Sorum (former GN’R drummer) and Poison’s Rikki Rockett.
“It’s going to be a very, very bad book,” he says, laughing at the prospect of having a book about him. “Will it tell the complete truth? Of course. But dude…” [there’s a pause] “why the fuck would anyone want to read about me? All the same, it does give cause for contemplation.”
Without fail, each day Downe takes time to go for a long walk. He talks excitedly about an upcoming motorcycle trip to Mexico with a gang of friends including former GN’R guitarist Gilby Clarke, plus a road trip back to Seattle to see his mum. He’s still the best of friends with his former Cathouse co-host Riki Rachtman, who refers to him as him as T-Dog.
“Riki and I talked on the phone, like, half an hour ago,” he says. Although Downe hasn’t spoken to Axl in a while he remains in regular contact with Slash, and former Quireboy Spike.
All things considered, Taime Downe is in a pretty good place these days. More than a year has passed since the crushing loss of his fiancée at sea, but such an experience isn’t something that one is ever likely to recover from.
“I’m doing okay, dude,” he insists. “What happened to Kimberly was tough. But you rebuild. Like I said, I’m gonna take a motorcycle trip with my buddies, and you do your best to move on.
“Slash was one of the first to reach out. His girlfriend Meegan [Hodges] lost her daughter in another tragic situation [in 2024, 25-year-old Lucy-Bleu Knight took her own life]. Those guys offered a lot of great advice.”
He shrugs and breaks into a smile: “A lot of good friends have helped me through – Riki [Rachtman] and Fred Coury [former Cinderella drummer] among them. I’ve got to try to keep on living my life.”
Faster Pussycat play the Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood on December 30.
