POP MUSIC REVIEW : Exploring a Ratt Hole at 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 for 93 minutes while the noxious critter visited a musical plague upon Irvine Meadows. It was, without a doubt, the worst performance by a major rock band that this reviewer has ever seen (Black Oak Arkansas, circa 1973, is finally off the hook).

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 its records, the veteran, platinum-selling pop-metal band from Los Angeles 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 plain buck-ugly. Good back-up singing sometimes can make a bad lead singer tolerable, but Ratt’s bassist, Juan Croucier, was a guy you wanted to muzzle even more than Pearcy. Does Croucier rhyme with excruciate? Every time this pathetic, off-key yowler opened his mouth, it sounded as if he’d just been kneed in the groin.

Let’s stop and think of something nice to say before we get on with the vivisection.

OK: Ratt’s absence of harmony made one appreciate even more the fine job that Michael Anthony and Eddie Van Halen did in that department last week when Van Halen played at the Pacific Amphitheatre.

And yes, it was more honorable for Ratt to embarrass itself in real-time than to resort to the canned or electronically boosted backing vocals that so many hard rock bands employ nowadays (ah, Warrant and Trixter are coming to town soon. It would be interesting to see how their back-up singers could manage with just a clean signal coming from the microphones).

As if Ratt’s vocal problems weren’t bad enough, guitarist Warren DeMartini’s performance collapsed as well. Co-guitarist Robbin Crosby has left the band (his sub was a keyboard player whose presence barely registered), so DeMartini had all the room in the world to show his stuff. He responded with unvarying shrieks of no certain shape or tone.

Things barely improved when the veteran German metal guitarist Michael Schenker (an alumnus of Scorpions and UFO, now a member of the McAuley Schenker Group) sat in late in the set. In a long, indulgent sequence of back-and-forth speed-burning, Schenker and DeMartini turned musicianship into the infantile game of you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine.

This debacle wasn’t even a case of musical values being sacrificed to showmanship: Pearcy meandered through the performance without enthusiasm. In his derby and mascara, he tried to affect the old “Clockwork Orange” thug image. But Pearcy didn’t put out enough energy to seem even a minor threat--except maybe to the front-row fans he sloshed with beer at one point.

Ratt’s big special effect for the evening was the attempted unfurling of two huge, yellow, inflatable, condom-like contraptions. Fittingly enough, one of the phalluses barely made it to half-mast.

Ratt has just released a compilation called “Ratt & Roll 8191”--a title that is supposed to read like a monument inscription attesting to a decade of success. If this show was a true indication of where Ratt is at, one can only conclude that somebody forgot to punctuate the dates with an “R.I.P.”

Second-billed L.A. Guns saved the night from being an utter waste by contributing a convincing 50-minute set composed mainly of raunchy rockers played with well-honed abandon.

Tracii Guns (he was a co-founder of Guns N’ Roses before starting his own band) cranked out raw, meaty, unpretentious guitar licks while looking like a refugee from a punk rockers’ softball tournament in his work shirt, heavy boots, and cap with turned-up bill.

Singer Phil Lewis was an elegantly decadent foil to Guns in a black velvet body suit draped with purple-lined cloak. Ideally, the Englishman’s voice would have packed more heft. But he was tuneful enough, and worked the stage with energetic assurance.

Along with its main diet of fast, blazing numbers, L.A. Guns offered a well-turned slow song, “The Ballad of Jane,” and a heavy, mysterious, Led Zeppelin-style atmospheric number, “Over the Edge.”

Opening act Bang Tango was vocally weak and never got in sync. Contraband, an ad hoc assemblage that includes Schenker, Guns and Ratt drummer Bobby Blotzer, plus members of Vixen and Shark Island, did not perform as advertised. Schenker and Guns did turn up together at the end to contribute to Ratt’s cellar-band sacking of “Walking the Dog” and “Honky Tonk Women.”