A Six-Year Itch Strikes Punk-Rock Mainstay Fear : Pop music: After laying off for a half-dozen years, the group reunites at the Palladium tonight.

The prospect of being insulted once again by the best, plus the legendary slammability of Fear’s music, will draw a full house of nearly 4,000 to the Hollywood Palladium tonight, where the former mainstay on L.A.’s punk-rock scene will reunite after a six-year hiatus.

The success of the booking (Fear will also play Sunday at the Roxy and Monday at the Anaconda in Santa Barbara) might surprise some, but not the group’s leader, Lee Ving.

“Now there are other bands who have gotten great success by doing things that are similar to what we did,” the singer said last week at a Mexican restaurant in Culver City. “It made me think that perhaps now is the time to be selling this thing, to be out there promoting it and playing it, because it’s in the zeitgeist, it’s time . . .

“Not to blow our own horn, but I think that we started this speed thrash, speed metal, I think we were the first ones to do it. . . . I think that it’s time for the people that invented it to come out and show that the guy who invents it does it best.”

In its day, Fear’s volatile shows and its searing 1982 album “The Record” were widely praised, their crudeness toward women and gays often being explained away in those pre-PC times as some kind of tongue-in-cheek, double-edged satire.

But at lunch, wearing a T-shirt with the silhouette of a Stealth bomber in the design of the Batman logo, Ving didn’t appear to be joking. If anything, he came on like a pro wrestler turning himself into a right-wing archetype with a practiced line of patter.

“There are some real bad things goin’ on in this country,” he said, speculating on why the climate is right for Fear’s return. “The crack dealers are taking this country over, they need to be put away. . . . There’s child abusers and rapists and murderers. They need to be put away forever. . . . There’s this guy Saddam Hussein, who’s responsible for the death of some of our good soldiers, who’s still breathing over there. He’s not dead, and our job’s not done over there until he is dead.

“These are the kind of things that need to be said. I think that this kind of mentality is what has brought people around to our way of thinking, because this is the kind of thing that I’ve always said.”

And the gay-baiting?

“Man, if you show me that you don’t have a sense of humor, I’m gonna come after you,” said the man who is proud to be called the Don Rickles of rock. “I believe morons are made to be offended, so if they miss the point, I feel nothing for them . . .

“You can play and have a lot of people come see you and they’ll be very polite and they’ll get up and dance and leave their drinks and purses on the table and that kind of junk, and they only really hear about 20% or 30% of what you do.

“But if you really get in their face . . . it wakes people up. Some that don’t expect it are much more alert after they’ve been severely insulted than if someone had just parked their car and shown them to the table with infinite politeness. And so I get their attention.”

Ving, who moved to Austin from Los Angeles two years ago (“too many immigrants”) has maintained a career as a character actor and also heads a honky-tonk country band, Range War. He and original Fear-mates Philo Cramer and Spit Stix (joined by new bassist Will McGregor) expect to be on the road soon, and plan to record a new album for L.A.-based Restless Records. New songs, familiar sentiments.

Said Ving: “ ‘Honor and Obey,’ it’s a song about our respect for the institution of marriage. The girls will love this one. And then there’s another one about brotherhood, it’s called, ‘I’m Just a People Person.’ Heh heh heh heh heh . . . “