HOME SLEAZE HOME: STEEL PANTHER NIGHT RETURNS TO THE KEY CLUB
Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 5:00pm by Anso DF
When the Key Club in West Hollywood closed its doors in December 2009, the eight-legged party beast Steel Panther had to find a new hair rock habitat for their weekly shows. At first, it was a relief when Michael Starr and crew cock-strutted a few blocks down Sunset to the House of Whites Blues: admission got cheaper, the room bigger, and sound better. But, for the sleaze of hair rock, a music venue/shopping mall/tourist trap isn’t the preferred setting. So sometime around March, I started to long for a return to the safety of a drug-friendly sweat hole with dark corners and unpolice-able bathrooms. After all, the Key Club was once the site of Ben Gazzari’s eponymous rock club, where the sleaze don once proudly showcased his barely-legal harem and, for VIPs, his somewhat prescient home video skills; meanwhile, HoB has a freakin’ gift shop.
You’d want maximum possible sleaze, too, once you survey the crowd. It’s mostly tourists (literally and figuratively), but filled out with solitary guys like me, unaccompanied and dead serious, fidgeting through extended bouts of boob-flashing (our sighs seem to say “Just show ‘em already and let’s get on with the Whitesnake covers!”) and secretaries-gone-wild sing-alongs (not to be a sandy vagina, but I submit that “Don’t Stop Believin’” is not hair rock). Our visual mating call is a non-ironic hair metal shirt and a general vibe of impatience for the super hits.







