POP MUSIC REVIEW : Guns N’ Roses Lets ‘er Rip in Stones Warmup

The Rip magazine/Cathouse third-anniversary party at the Park Plaza on Friday night--a ferocious bacchanal that culminated with a near-two-hour set by Guns N’ Roses--was strictly 21-and-over. The men and women who labor long hours merchandising the hard-rock life style to the rest of America came together to live a little bit of it themselves.

It was the kind of party where the fellow behind you wearing a Junkyard jacket was actually a member of the band, where the beer ran out by midnight and where there were so many scantily clad females on the prowl that a woman who pointed out her minuscule bustier to a guy couldn’t even get his interest.

No copy of Rip on your coffee table? Never stopped by the Cathouse?

The Los Angeles-based Larry Flynt publication is what Rolling Stone could be if the latter featured hard rock and were edited by your little brother--complete with skateboard tips, long investigative pieces that focus on things like the breakup of Dokken, and pictorials comparing the cleavage of metal teen-dreams Doro Pesch and Lita Ford.

Hollywood’s Cathouse has always been a 14-year-old’s fantasy of what a rock ‘n’ roll club might be like, a place that features ferocious loud metal, half-clad leather girls in go-go cages, and real-life rock stars who not only hang out, but even jam. It’s owned by Taime Down, lead singer of Faster Pussycat, and Riki Rachtman, sometimes host of Headbanger’s Ball on MTV.

The anniversary show’s big news--Guns N’ Roses’ appearance, a full dress rehearsal for their Coliseum gigs with the Stones later this week--was supposed to have been a secret. But it wasn’t: Few in the local hard-rock community talked about much else all week.

The outside of the Westlake-area venue swarmed with news crews, fans and ticket scalpers. Several hundred people on the guest list stood patiently in line, shivering in their sleeveless T-shirts and tattoos.

Wolfsbane lead singer Blaze Bayley resembles the popular conception of what an ax murderer looks like, short and unshaven with long, greasy hair. When he talks to the audience, he sounds as though he is reading from cue cards; when he sings, he bellows. After each song, he goes, “Woooo!” Wolfsbane is a bad heavy-metal band that you might kind of like in spite of yourself.

Faster Pussycat actually sounded better in the cavernous acoustics of the Park Plaza than they did clean at the Palace a few weeks ago.

And Guns N’ Roses . . . well, woooo! This second of two “surprise” shows last week in preparation for its date with the Rolling Stones at the Coliseum (the first show was at the 400-capacity Cathouse on Tuesday night) preached to the converted in fine style.

Axl Rose writhes like a stripper, slithers across the stage, modulates his voice from Joe Cocker snarl to Steve Tyler shriek--as ferally in control of the stage as any singer since early Bowie, convincing even in an extremely bathetic version of Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which he dedicated to an OD’d friend. The Cathouse show was more a club show, five guys playing the songs they know for a bunch of friends; this was a full-fledged stadium show, million-dollar lighting apparatus, bombast, half-stepping and all. This band’s ready.