IN the 1980s the Sunset Strip — a stretch of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood packed with bars and clubs — was the center of the hard-rock and hair-metal scene, spawning bands like Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe and Poison. Based on the Broadway musical, the film “Rock of Ages,” which opens on Friday, starring a leather-pantsed Tom Cruise (at left and right) as the self-destructive, baboon-owning sex god Stacee Jaxx, fondly spoofs the era. It’s 1987, and the boys look like girls, the groupies look like strippers, and the hair is highly flammable. Meanwhile, as a small-town blonde named Sherrie (Julianne Hough) and her aspiring rocker boyfriend, Drew (Diego Boneta), try to succeed amid the sleaze, church-lady protesters are fighting to shut down a club called the Bourbon Room.

Apart from Guns N’ Roses, whose 1987 debut studio album “Appetite for Destruction” is a hard-rock landmark, the music of the Strip is often dismissed as disposable, and the scene is remembered as a cheerfully depraved Aqua Net playground. To get a fuller sense of what the Strip was really like, Sia Michel spoke with Duff McKagan, the former bassist of Guns N’ Roses, whose song “Paradise City” is sung by Mr. Cruise himself in the prologue; Bret Michaels of the glam-rockers Poison, which has several songs in “Rock of Ages”; and Sebastian Bach, the former lead singer of the New Jersey band Skid Row, who has a cameo. These are excerpts from the conversations.

Bret Michaels

THEN Frontman of Poison.

NOW Singer, TV personality, entrepreneur.

NEW IN TOWN Driving out there in a van [from Pennsylvania], it was an eye-opening experience. We chugged down the Strip in our very dilapidated ambulance van. We had gotten there on a Friday day. We had nowhere to live. We’re driving past the Rainbow, Gazzarri’s, the Roxy, the Whisky, and everyone was just on the street partying. We were like, ‘Is this really happening?’ It almost looked like Times Square in New York. The van moved about 10 feet in an hour. For small-town guys it was a surreal moment.

THE SUNSET VIBE Imagine it being one big insane frat party, like an over the top “Animal House” toga party, but it happened all the time, almost nightly. We’ve seen nakedness, debauchery, sex, drugs, everything you can think of. Everything crazy that you could do, every crazy thing that could be done was done. Most of the bands that came there were small-town kids that had no clue and got to Hollywood. It’s like when you go to Vegas, it unleashes this primitive animal instinct to party.