Steel Panther’s On the Prowl tour includes special guests Tragedy and Crobot, all together invading our area with three shows: NYC’s Irving Plaza on March 16, Philly’s Keswick Theatre on March 17 and Sayreville, NJ’s Starland Ballroom on March 18. On the Prowl features 13 new songs with such highlights as “Never Too Late (To Get Some Pussy Tonight),” “Pornstar” and “Magical Vagina,” while “1987,” perhaps the album’s best track, laments the foregone era Steel Panther are satirically trapped in. Instead, as of February 24, fans were be treated to Steel Panther’s modern dose of metal mayhem. Ironically, the band possess so much talent that had they been around during the heyday of the eighties and composed radio-friendly lyrics, they might have been among the biggest artists in the world. Definitely not for the kiddies, tales of womanizing, drug abuse, and other hair metal tropes, along with boasts about the power of heavy metal, have become sing-along anthems at their equally entertaining live shows. It’s not just that drummer Stix Zadinia, guitarist Satchel, frontman Michael Starr, and bassist Spyder adopted the big hair and spandex look, but their clever and explicit songs recall the over-indulgent debauchery of the times. For those who appreciate the band, however, the quartet are a dream come true, a pitch-perfect parody of the eighties’ Hollywood / Sunset Strip metal scene that produced Guns N’ Roses, Quiet Riot, Poison, and Mötley Crüe. Low-brow, crass, misogynistic, outrageous, controversial and offensive: just a few of the terms used by critics to describe Steel Panther. Stix Zadinia discusses the band’s great new record, On the Prowl, and upcoming tour, then takes a trip back to the mid-eighties, before cell phones and social media, when sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll were more than an Ian Dury and The Blockheads song or a Denis Leary television show… it was a way of life.

Panther on the prowl