POP MUSIC REVIEW : Seattle Bands, Spinal Tap Rule Rip Party

To hard-rock stalwarts, the annual Rip magazine anniversary party is what Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party is to movie guys and the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Ball is to partisans of the waltz: the chance to hang out on the highest, purest level without the intrusion of real life.

Rip, which has evolved from a gutty little hard-rock ‘zine into sort of the house organ of the sweaty-chest crowd, is of and for the hard-rock dudes, and its parties typically attract the cream of hard rock’s elite, both on stage and in the audience.

A couple of years ago, Guns N’ Roses played the gig. Last year, it was Faith No More. The Rip party is also a good place to evaluate the state-of-the-art in blond hair dye, and to check out the latest in tight, cleavage-enhancing fashions.

At the fifth anniversary party on Sunday at the Hollywood Palladium, the rumor was that Metallica was going to play. They never showed, so the sold-out crowd--Rip sells tickets to its parties--had to settle for gloomy sets by what seemed like half the long-haired population of Seattle.

Pearl Jam, which seemed perturbed by the affair, played a perfunctory set of grunge-metal, punctuated by sneering comments from lead singer Eddie Vedder: At one point, he crooned a couple of verses of a Fugazi anti-sexism song a cappella, and the crowd, perhaps thinking he was getting ready to launch into a power ballad, cheered. The band seemed very real.

Seattle’s Alice in Chains played a slick set of monochromatic, Cult-style rock. Soundgarden, sounding full, and hard-edged, and bluesy--if a bit more generic than usual--blasted through half its new album. Afterward, members of Soundgarden and Pearl Jam merged to form Temple of the Dog, whose poppy tunes were sort of anticlimactic after Soundgarden’s intensity.

But for most people, the highlight was probably Spinal Tap, in what was announced as the group’s first set in eight years, highlighted by guest star Joe Satriani’s entirely appropriate weedle-a-weedle-a guitar soloing and a four-bass version of the Tap’s classic “Big Bottom.” As they sing in “Break Like the Wind,” “We are the dust of the future past.”