It’s late morning at Duff’s in Brooklyn, and the smell of yesterday’s beer mingles with today’s hairspray. That can only mean one thing: The boys from Steel Panther have arrived from L.A. to talk about their new album, “Heavy Metal Rules.” And with deep song titles like “All I Wanna Do Is Fuck (Myself Tonight),” “Always Gonna Be a Ho” and “Gods of Pussy,” there’s a lot to talk about.
The new album, the band’s fifth, finds the debauched glam rockers doing what they do best: partying with hot chicks, blasting melodic, Sunset Strip anthems and looking bitchin’ (their word) doing it.
The band launched a guitar pedal called The Pussy Melter, which was banned by resale site Reverb. Earlier this year it followed up with a new one, The Poontang Boomerang. And just last week, the heavy metal horndogs with a heart announced the Gods of Pussy Animal Rescue Activation, inviting a local animal rescue charity to come to its current shows and solicit donations. For the concerts tonight and Wednesday at the Gramercy Theater, the band was linked up with PuppyKittyNYC.org.
What follows is our illuminating and intellectual chat with Satchel and Lexxi Foxx.
Keeping with theme of your new album, “Heavy Metal Rules,” what is the No. 1 rule of metal?
Satchel: Heavy metal comes from rock and roll, and it’s all about rebellion and doing whatever the fuck you want, and I think we live our life like that. Obviously we like to have a lot of sex, we’re very promusocus, that’s a big word, our bass player doesn’t even know what that means. He is very promiscuous but he doesn’t even know he’s promiscuous.
Lexxi Foxx: Does that mean you’re sneaky?
Satchel: No, but that was a great guess and I’m impressed that you even took that chance. Its rock and roll and heavy metal is an extension of rock and roll, and it’s about doing what you want when you want, and I think we embody heavy metal, especially this day in age when people are very sensitive. We write songs about whatever the fuck we want, we don’t worry about getting played on the radio because we don’t care and heavy metal does rule. We stopped paying attention to what was popular decades ago.
Lexxi: I agree with that. Heavy metal rules so much because there’s so many different kinds of heavy metal. Poison is heavy metal, Anthrax or Megadeth. My favorite metal is obviously the glam heavy metal thing where you look bitchin’. You grow your hair out even though you’re a guy, and you’re like, “Fuck you, dudes, I’m gonna look how I wanna look.” You can throw rocks at me and call me bad names, like really effeminate bad names, but it doesn’t matter because heavy metal rules. So that’s the No. 1 rule.
In the ’80s, metal bands were accused of being Satanists. People don’t seem to be worried about that anymore, but when you guys started out in the late ’90s, #MeToo wasn’t a thing. Has there been a pushback against Steel Panther?
Satchel: Absolutely. There are people like that and there’s always going to be that, especially if you go online and social media and stuff like that, especially a band like us, because we write very dirty words about subject matter that could be deemed sexist or racist. We have a huge fanbase and the people that don’t like it, listen, there’s going to be people out there that take offense to almost everything, especially when it comes to music or comedy, and especially when you put the two together, there’s people that would really like to see us get hit by a bus. But that’s when you just have to write it for what you enjoy. We love the subject matter we write about mainly because we approach everything with humor and we don’t single out any group.
Lexxi: Satchel even singles me out sometimes. Sometimes Satchel will say shit about me.
Satchel: You’re easy to make fun of because you’re not very smart.
Lexxi: I know, but there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t smart, we don’t put them in a specific category, like Satchel said.
Satchel: You’re right, there’s a lot of stupid people out there in the world. I even wrote a song about it called “People Are Stupid.”
What happens after a Steel Panther show?
Lexxi: We pick the chicks out, we’re grading on a curve depending on where we are. We have a little afterparty. We get some things, I won’t say what they are, to make us feel better.
Satchel: Cocaine.
Lexxi: Cocaine. And what we do is we go and we go hang out. We go to a city and find out where the coolest place to go is.
Satchel: Strip joint.
Lexxi: Then we go there and if the strippers aren’t hot enough we bring the chicks…
Satchel: Hookers.
Lexxi: .. that we pay for. After that we go where we’re saying and we…
Satchel: Have sex.
Lexxi: On a bed or a couch. It depends if we’re staying at a hotel or a bus because sometimes we bring them on the bus depending on how close the next city is dependant on how fast you have to cum. So if we’re playing in Cleveland and we’re only going to Pittsburgh we have all the time in the world because it’s close distance.
Satchel: Fuck ‘em all night.
Lexxi: But if say we’re playing Cleveland and we’re playing London the next day, we have to hurry up because we have to catch a plane. So that takes a lot of knowledge and knowhow to know that you can’t always get the hottest chick in the room because if you want to cum you have to be like, “Where are we playing tonight?”
Satchel: And I’m not worried about catching any of the diseases that he has because I already have them.
Lexxi: We have all the diseases. So we’re not scared about flop and swaps. We don’t need to get swabbed. I tell the doctor, “Don’t put that in my penis, I’m telling you, yes, it’s going to be positive.”
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