“Well after Stix tweeted it, that was his trip to rehab actually,” Starr reveals. “He’d been up for, I dunno, he says two days, but I think it was 14 days he was up straight. And he was just tweeting – tweaking and tweeting the whole time. It was the perfect time for us, because it gave us time for him to recoup, and to put the finishing touches on Balls Out. Everything worked out. The only bummer is that we didn’t get to play with Van Halen,” he states plaintively.
With Van Halen out of the mix, the stage is set for Steel Panther to take the crown as reigning hair metal champions – not that they’re out to replace Diamond Dave and co. “You know dude, I don’t think anyone can do that – that’s just the way it is. Van Halen is Van Halen. Our job is just to go take over the world with Steel Panther, maybe fill the void in a way where we’re gonna bring some fucking extra juice to Soundwave with our style of music. Our style of music is a little bit different than everybody else’s, in that we not only talk about what’s really going on in the world – like, who doesn’t want to hire an Asian hooker? You know what I mean? That kind of stuff. I really think that element is missing in today’s music. We wanna bring that with us to Australia and really rock some balls,” he proclaims.
That quest to take over the world will see the band hit our shores for the very first time, bringing a stratagem of biological warfare in tow, it seems. “First we’re gonna hit every continent. The first one we’re gonna go to is gonna be Australia. The best thing for us to do is just lay down the groundwork with most of the slutty girls out there. Because the girls that are backstage and like to fuck are the kind of girls that not only spread diseases, but they also spread the word of heavy metal. So that’s where we want to infiltrate – the vagina of Australia, and work that magic,” he declared with Patton-like resolve.
Last year saw the release of follow-up LP Balls Out, which doesn’t exactly chart what you would call lyrical growth. “Both Balls Out and Feel The Steel are about partying and fuckin’, straight up that’s what they’re about. Really to say that we’ve changed what we sing about, what we talk about – no, I think the difference you’ll hear is that we’ve put more songs on it because we told the label ‘fuck you, we’ll put more songs on it’,” he reveals. “Then what we did, instead of saying, ‘Oh, what would Bon Jovi do?’ we started saying, ‘What would Steel Panther do? We’re Steel Panther now, what are we gonna do?’ We had so many new experiences, like playing on the road, playing in Europe and Canada. I think that really inspired our guitarist Satchel, because he writes most of the music, it inspired him to write a bit differently. Then the contents of the songs, I dunno if they’re that much fucking different, but at least they’re a little more worldly,” Starr muses.
One of the album highlights stands to be 17 Girls In A Row, a track which opens with Starr wailing the memorable line “I fucked 17 girls in row last night / And ten of them gave me head”. As you would expect, it is an opus rich with metaphor. “Unfortunately for me, it’s a metaphor because I didn’t write that. Stix wrote the words for that one, that’s his champion – he’s the one that did 17 girls. But I gotta tell you just out of a little animosity, they were all fucking ugly. When you’re fucking 17 girls in a row, it’s definitely not about quality,” Starr states.
When Tiger Woods visited Australia in 2009, his world of “transgressions” famously became unstuck. But don’t expect Steel Panther to meet a similar fate. “Well the cool thing about us is what we do – fuckin’ chicks and partyin’ – it’s all there for all to see, where Tiger Woods was undercover. Which is why we wrote the song [Just Like Tiger Woods]. It was so cool for him to have this facade of this prim and proper golf dude, but on the side, behind closed doors, he’s fucking hookers and lying and cheating and just doing heavy metal shit. Steel Panther will definitely get involved in that type of behaviour, but it’s not going to be a surprise. It would be a surprise if we went over there and started playing golf and wearing polo shirts,” Starr declares.
