POP MUSIC REVIEWS : Flair Is Missing From Ratt at Irvine Meadows

Where, oh where, oh where is the Pied Piper when you need him?

Ratt was infesting modern-day Orange County Saturday night rather than medieval Hamelin, so one could only suffer while the noxious critter visited a musical plague upon Irvine Meadows. It was the worst performance by a major rock band that this reviewer has seen since the days of Black Oak Arkansas in the early ‘70s.

Never mind magical powers of rodent removal--any piper who could blow a competent tune would have been a godsend, because melodic coherence was beyond the four men of Ratt. On record, the veteran Los Angeles pop-metal band offers a certain dumb appeal by anchoring its libidinous songs with catchy, sing-along choruses and peppering them with tasty guitar work. On stage, no such luck.

Singer Stephen Pearcy’s hack-and-scratch voice, so limited that it makes Lou Reed sound like an opera star, was flat ugly. Good back-up vocals can make a bad lead singer tolerable, but Ratt’s bassist, Juan Croucier, was a guy you wanted to muzzle even more than Pearcy. And guitarist Warren DeMartini’s performance collapsed as well, offering unvarying shrieks of no certain shape or tone.

The debacle wasn’t even a case of musical values being sacrificed to showmanship: Pearcy meandered through the performance without flair. Ratt’s big special effect for the evening was the attempted unfurling of two huge, yellow, inflatable condom-like contraptions emblazoned with the legend, “Ratt & Roll.” Fittingly enough, one of the phalluses barely made it to half-mast.

L.A. Guns saved the night from being an utter waste with a set composed mainly of raunchy rockers played with well-honed abandon.