C’mon, Relive the Noise

That is not his hair. The man called Ratchet is alone on stage for a moment, indulging in the mindless bliss and ego of a heavy metal guitar solo. The wig on his head looks like roadkill, long and frazzled and soaked in hairspray, but the leopard scarf across his forehead at least matches his spandex tights.

The song title hardly matters by now, as his solo erupts in all directions, fast and shrill, intentionally ridiculous with moments of “Popeye the Sailor Man” and “Smoke on the Water” dropped in with equal weight. It’s all about to peak when Ratchet abruptly stops to pick his nose.

When it’s over, Ratchet (a.k.a. Russ Parrish) steps up to the microphone, his grinning head bobbing up and down, absolutely certain of his own greatness, to declare, “That was awesome, dude! Give it up for the lead guitarist!”

This is a typical Monday night at the Viper Room, where a band called Metal Shop headlines a weekly attempt to revive, not revile, a spectacular time in local rock history, when heavy metal dudes in makeup and big, big hair ruled the Sunset Strip. Some fans come for the comedy or to witness a frivolous era they are too young to remember. Others aim to relive a youth of booze and noise and hedonistic sex, still looking the part in rocker threads or vintage T-shirts, even if all that long hair is a faded memory.

That scene never ended for some headbangers. So even as the metal ‘80s return at the Viper Room as a source of comedy and volume, some fans and players are still living it from the first time around, confident of its return to dominance. It’s as if grunge and the post-hip-hop nu-metal of Korn and System of a Down never happened.

Metal quickly reinvented itself (again) in ‘90s, finding vital inspiration in the darker, thrashier sounds of the Southern California acts Slayer and Metallica, the latter of which escaped to San Francisco in 1983 to build an empire of platinum albums and arena tours. And now, after a decade of internal collapse and still-unreleased recordings, Guns N’ Roses is slowly returning to action.

The hair metal revival (both ironic and un-ironic) exists outside that world, though it still resides in the same Los Angeles basin where it was born. It can be found in small rooms like Paladino’s in Tarzana or at the Key Club in West Hollywood, where Club Vodka and Gazzarri’s Night (with its traditional wet T-shirt contest) embrace the noise. Cinderella and other ‘80s acts frequently reemerge for die-hards at the House of Blues. And the occasional package tour of such reunited metal gods as Poison or Warrant delivers the old hits in the big rooms.

“It was so much fun,” says Tara Roreen, a fan from the old scene who’s now a Tarzana computer analyst in her mid-30s and, at the moment, handing out band fliers outside Paladino’s. “It was before HIV and before we became aware, and sometimes it’s nice for even five minutes to remember that stupidity and freedom that we had.”

The most vibrant corner of this revival is still the Viper Room’s Monday-night Camaro club, where Metal Shop regularly shares the stage with rockers from across the generations. Members of Weezer, Papa Roach and 311 are regulars. One week, the visiting members of Cinderella laughed so hard that guitarist Jeff Labar forgot his own solo. (“They’re making fun of me!”) Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Paul Stanley of KISS have also appeared, embracing the comedy while celebrating the flamboyant hard rock tradition they helped create.

Soon after Ratchet’s epic solo, the stage is crowded again, with ex-Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and guitarist Tracii Guns and singer Phil Lewis of L.A. Guns joining the clowns of Metal Shop to tap their shared histories on the Strip. Lewis leans into a microphone and sneers an old Guns tune, “Hey, little girl, you’re a nasty little sleazer.... We were close and getting so much closer!”

McKagan stumbles amiably from one microphone to the other, his famous platinum hair now dyed a deep black. But it’s not all joking here tonight.

And there is a noticeable shift in the air as Tracii Guns erupts with the springy riff from Van Halen’s “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love,” that 1978 epic of decadence and swagger, and a key influence on much of the metal that came after.

Suddenly, Metal Shop singer Michael Diamond (a.k.a. Ralph Saenz) becomes Diamond Dave, drawing on his years fronting the Atomic Punks, a popular Van Halen tribute band. The dim-bulb expression leaves his face as he adopts David Lee Roth’s signature moves, his chest out, delivering shoulder-high karate kicks. This is no longer for laughs or nostalgia. This is being played for real.

Fans send fists and devil’s horns high into the air, maybe without noticing that a line between parody and sincere metal pomp has been crossed, or probably not caring.

The Viper Room’s metal rewind began more than two years ago, when co-owner Sal Jenco brought in Metal Shop, a parody from the same crew behind the popular disco tribute the Boogie Knights. “It started out as, I’m going to create an environment that embodies the worst of the ‘80s: spandex, zebra prints, wet T-shirt contests, pentagrams, ‘Hail Satan,’ metal,” Jenco says, reclining in his office with a cigarette. “I just had a feeling: this is funny.”

It was initially designed for a lesbian night at the club, with a chain-link fence guarding the stage. Crowds came. And somehow ‘80s metal was back.

“We all know you can’t put your arm around a memory,” says Jenco, quoting an old Johnny Thunders Heartbreakers song, an original punk and metal influence, “but with a little smoke and mirrors, you get close enough to it.”

The host is Josh Richman, an actor and onetime regular at the Cathouse, the infamous ‘80s metal club in Hollywood. Tonight he carries a cane with an eight ball handle and repeatedly calls Camaro “the best rock club in the country.” Much of which can be credited not only to Metal Shop, but also to the contemporary acts brought in to open the show by talent booker Dale Gloria, former impresario of the Scream club.

“Metal Shop will play a song by a quintessential ‘80s metal band, and the singer of one of those bands will be here with 100 chins and get up there, and Michael Diamond will sing the guy under the table,” Richman says. “But nobody gets bummed.”

Back in February, one of the opening bands was Hand of Doom, a straight-faced Black Sabbath tribute act led by Melissa Auf der Maur, formerly of Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, an unlikely female stand-in for Ozzy Osbourne. She prefers the darker ‘70s hard-rock psychedelia of Sabbath or Led Zeppelin, with “the masculine and feminine coming together,” and the images of warrior kings and misty mountaintops.

Hand of Doom just released a live album of Sabbath songs recorded at the Whisky. But Auf der Maur’s taste for ‘80s metal stretches no further than the copy of Motley Crue’s “Shout at the Devil” she owned as a teenager. “The ‘80s thing? No thank you.”

But last year she recorded a version of Poison’s anthem-like power ballad “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” for a movie project by the makers of “Mr. Show.”

Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters and Nirvana joined her on drums and guitar. “I did a really authentic, caring version of it,” she says now. “It was fun to sing, and it was actually a pretty good song. I hated it at the time.”

They are older now, deep into their 20s and 30s. The hair is short or hardly there at all. They’d traveled from far away for a communion with ‘80s metal heroes Dokken, Ratt, L.A. Guns, Firehouse and more. What they find instead is a locked gate, a couple of security guys on folding chairs and a marquee that reads: “Hollywood Palladium Welcomes Rock Fest Canceled.”

They stare in disbelief and anger: the third-grade teacher from Oakland, the insurance man from Albany, N.Y., the guy who flew in from Honolulu, the Kansas City, Kan., trucker who made sure he was in Hollywood, and that trio of Sacramento brothers blasting a Ratt CD in their stretch limo.

The scattered fans who arrive through the night are told the show was canceled after Dokken’s drummer was hurt in a car accident.

“Hey, they canceled, bro!” Chris King says, talking into his cell phone. He’s a 26-year-old rock musician from Hancock Park, dressed in baggy jeans, with a small cross over his throat. On the line is a friend who was to meet him at the Palladium after October’s Oscar De La Hoya-Fernando Vargas fight. “Negative! Negative! Ratt canceled, man!”

Back in the ‘80s, metal fans and wannabe rock stars crowded the Sunset Strip, from Gazzarri’s all the way east to the Coconut Teaszer. Poison, Guns N’ Roses, Motley Crue, and a thousand anonymous bands that never went anywhere, were all there on the Strip handing out fliers for their next gig before ending the night over pizza and booze at the Rainbow with some local artist and repertoire man.

Hair metal soon dominated the charts and airwaves. Right up until the moment Nirvana erupted from the underground in 1991, taking the indie rock ethos to the masses. No makeup required. And metal was never the same again; within a few years it was already the subject of nostalgia, with still-young rockers wondering where all the good times went. Especially that night at the Palladium.

“I told my boss, I don’t miss Ozzy and I don’t miss a hair band,” says the trucker, Charles Velasquez, 27. His own hair is cut close to the scalp.

“All I ever go to is hair bands. Except for country. I’ve never been to a ‘90s band.”

Metal shows on the scale promised by the Palladium show are hard to find, although Poison has found success and big crowds playing nostalgia tours. Nathan Kahn, 29, wanted a bit more of that and had flown down from Oakland.

“I grew up on metal and I heard of all the nostalgia around metal rock shows, and I wanted to rekindle the flame,” says Kahn, sipping a beer outside the locked gate. He’d been ready to party in the parking lot. “Call me cheesy; call me an idiot, dude.”

“Oh, what a crowd we got here tonight!” the singer declares from the stage at Paladino’s, a busy nightclub anchoring a Tarzana mini-mall. (Motto: “Rockin’ the Valley!”) “How many people here love Bon Jovi? We’re going to take you way, way back now!”

Slippery When Wet is a Bon Jovi cover band. It’s not as pretty as the real thing, but the singer at least looks the part in a fringe leather jacket, thick wavy hair down to his shoulders and a fine approximation of Jon Bon Jovi’s giddy, open-mouth grin.

He leans toward the women crowding the stage, his black velvet shirt open to his belt. The room is far from full, but the chicks are singing along like teenagers, dancing with their drinks to the anthem-like “You Give Love a Bad Name.”

At one nearby table, a hipster in earplugs and a porkpie hat isn’t watching the band at all. His eyes are on the ladies, especially a small bachelorette party of women slow-dancing with a man-size blowup doll, “Boy Toy” scrawled onto its chest, after a long night of beers and shots.

Keeping the hair-band dream alive for this grateful audience is Jimmy D., talent booker at Paladino’s. Most nights here are a mix of ‘80s-style metal acts and pious tribute bands. “I saw a market for it because the Valley is full of mullet heads and longhairs,” he says.

Last year, Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins became a regular customer, threatening to start a tribute band of his own. Which ultimately led to a surprise gig here by the Foo Fighters themselves, as opening act for the Atomic Punks.

Survivors from the original scene also come to the club, Jimmy D. says, but he’s hungry for new talent to feed the metal scene. “I don’t think the older bands are going to bring it back,” he says. “Those guys couldn’t write a good song if their lives depended on it. Also, the scene went with the looks of the band, and most of them are either bald or overweight.”

No booze, no show. A tough break for Steve Summers, manager of Gotham City, a topless bar and sometime rock club in Canoga Park. Which explains the handwritten “Concert canceled” sign at the door.

Summers is also the singer of Pretty Boy Floyd, a veteran glam-metal act scheduled to make its fifth appearance here in as many months.

Two hours ago, city building inspectors announced that Gotham City didn’t have the proper permits to present live music and also serve drinks in the back room, interrupting Summers’ dream of continuing the long tradition of mingling hard rock with naked women, metal with porn. No booze, no show.

“Tonight the city tried to mess with us,” Summers says with a shrug, as the night’s scheduled bands pack up their equipment. “Stuff happens.”

Beside his desk is his own gear--the leather pants, chains, platform shoes, makeup. The walls are lined with purplish carpeting. Cases of Bud sit by the door.

Right outside his office the real work is being done, as young women take turns at the brass fire pole, unpeeling their bikini tops to the romantic sounds of Rob Zombie or Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher.” A rerun of “Frasier” unfolds silently on a TV above the bar.

The promised concert at least drew a larger crowd, with longhairs and glam rockers mingling with the regulars. Leaning against the ATM machine is a member of the night’s opening band, the Peppermint Creeps, in white pancake makeup and an X drawn on his forehead, Manson Family-style. He’s staring balefully at the stage beneath the disco ball.

Summers doesn’t miss the old scene that launched Pretty Boy Floyd and has few expectations to match those when MCA Records signed his band a decade ago. He sits at his desk, where a small TV is connected to black-and-white surveillance cameras. “We’re all young,” he says. “We’re getting offers for deals, not that we could be multimillionaires. On the road, we sell merchandise and we don’t do too bad. And no one’s disappointed by what we do.”

Quiet Riot never played Gazzarri’s. And yet it’s fitting that the band has come for one night to the Key Club, built right above the old burial grounds of Bill Gazzarri’s defunct metal warehouse, where Van Halen and Guns N’ Roses played some of their earliest shows on the Strip.

Quiet Riot is still part of that history. It joined Ratt and Motley Crue in the first wave of ‘80s metal to hit the masses, thanks largely to MTV. Back in 1983, the band’s “Metal Health” album hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200, becoming the highest-charting debut ever for an American metal act. The band’s good times ended long before that decade was over, but tonight Quiet Riot can still fill a room with true believers.

“We played songs for you to sing along to in your car on a hot summer day,” singer Kevin DuBrow says from the stage. He looks fit and essentially unchanged in his snug velvet pants, stringy black curls rolling over his shoulders.

Marshall amps are stacked high on the stage, and the band’s hit version of Slade’s “Cum On Feel the Noize” has the singer twirling a big striped microphone stand over his head, as if he were still playing arenas.

The songs are simple rock anthems, just thick chords of basic metal, with hyperactive noodling at the edges.

But near the close of 90 minutes on stage, Quiet Riot rips through a surprisingly faithful take on the Who’s “My Generation,” which leads to the inevitable lyric: “Hope I die before I get old!”

The song is a classic and a curse on every generation of rockers. But age is not an issue for DuBrow tonight. His band is making its old-school metal, at once timeless and hopelessly dated, without compromise or hesitation.

For Quiet Riot and its fans, an ‘80s metal revival hardly seems necessary.

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Steve Appleford is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and frequent Calendar contributor.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Heady Metal Days

“Oh man, we came into L.A. from the desert and we hated everybody, and we tried to go in and start fights. And we did. We did 13 shows in L.A. in 1989 and 1990, and we started a bunch of [trouble]. My favorite stuff was Cro-Mags, Slayer and Metallica, the stuff that was changing things. In the late ‘80s,

I really didn’t like the stuff they were calling ‘metal.’ It was weird, man.”

NICK OLIVERI

Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age

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“Van Halen equals good, Warrant equals baaad. Glitz and glam was never anything that I could really take seriously. I’d rather sit and listen to something deep than look at something ridiculous. If I wanted that, I’d go see a good movie.”

MIKE DeWOLF

TapRoot

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“The problem is that everyone is [mad] at us because we had too much fun. That’s all.”

PHIL LEWIS

L.A. Guns

*

“I love it strictly for the nostalgic value. Those bands were big right when I was starting to shape

my musical tastes and were

on the radio all the time.

“So, hearing those songs now definitely brings back some fun memories of childhood. But, fortunately, they haven’t influenced me enough to start teasing my hair up and wearing lots of foundation.”

JARROD MONTAGUE

TapRoot

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“I grew up with ‘80s metal. I was a huge Metallica fan, Anthrax, even hair bands toward the end of the ‘80s. My wall was nothing but posters of hard-rock ‘80s bands.

I even liked Poison. I mean,

you don’t have to write that.

“You generally had to hide that love for Poison if you were a Metallica fan. I would be down for some of the music, but some of the words were a little shallow, even for us deep 13-year-olds.”

TIM FLUCKEY

Adema