If You Really Really Love Me

You are locked on THE ZOO, the listener-supported, commercial-free rock station bringing the deep cuts and the loud ones back to the speakers, and right now the needle drops on a song that looks like a power ballad, smells like Aqua Net, and behaves like a ransom note. Steel Panther, "If You Really Really Love Me," from the 2011 album Balls Out. Two minutes and twenty-five seconds. That is not a typo. That is the whole joke and the whole craft, stacked on top of each other until the spandex creaks.

The band that cut this track has four names you will hear in any Sunset Strip story that refuses to stay serious. Michael Starr on the lead vocal, the man born Ralph Saenz, selling the chorus like a man who has practiced the mirror face since kindergarten plays. Satchel on guitar, born Russell Parrish, the one who actually built the verses once Starr tossed him a scrap. Lexxi Foxxx, born Travis Haley, on bass and the hair that does half the talking. Stix Zadinia, born Darren Leader, on the drums, the piano when the gag calls for it, and the clock that keeps a fake ballad from turning into a real one. Credits on the song land with those four, which is how Steel Panther usually writes: everybody in the room, nobody pretending the lyric came down from a mountain.

Here is how the song got born, and it is a better story than most sincere ballads can manage. Starr walked in with a fragment, something like "I really, really, really, really, really want to rock with you." Satchel heard the stack of reallys and decided that was the hook worth keeping. He told interviewers later that the verses came first, because the verses were the song. Once the first verse was down, the rest spilled out. The list of demands is the whole point. If she really loves him, she will tolerate a night of video games, a friend named Melanie, and a definition of loyalty that would get a normal man thrown out of the house. AllMusic heard it as the obvious rock ballad on an album that otherwise refuses to sit still. Songfacts heard a rock star asking for liberties on account of the job. Both readings are correct, and both are the gag. The band is not confessing. The band is holding up a funhouse mirror to every hair-metal slow song that ever asked a girl to understand.

Satchel has said he loves the length. Two twenty-five. He is a fan of the early Beatles singles and the Ramones tracks that got in, said the thing, and got out before the pose had time to wilt. That is the secret under the joke. Steel Panther can play. The chops came from years of tribute work, including Van Halen, before the wigs and the stage names locked in. You can hear it in the changes. The melody is sticky in the way a 1987 ballad is sticky. The production is clean enough that a program director in 1988 might have added it if the lyric sheet had been left in the car. Jay Ruston produced Balls Out, the same hand who produced the 2009 debut Feel the Steel, with engineering from Bobby Bruner and mastering from Paul Logus. Basic tracks went down at Clear Lake Audio in Burbank, overdubs and the mix at TRS West in Sherman Oaks. Recording ran from August 2010 into May 2011. Satchel said they tracked five songs at a time so the band would not smear fifteen ideas into one blur, and that by the end they figured ten or twelve of them could have been singles if the world still worked that way.

Balls Out is the second studio album, released through Universal Republic at the end of October 2011 after a short push from an earlier street date. In the United Kingdom, "If You Really Really Love Me" was the first single. In the United States the label led with "17 Girls in a Row," which tells you something about what each market would allow on a music channel. Stix, on the way to the video shoot in a downtown Los Angeles warehouse, shrugged at the logic and said they were doing the clip because that was the song with somewhere to go. The video itself stayed on the performance side of the line. The album did not. Dane Cook narrates the opener "In the Future." Chad Kroeger and Nuno Bettencourt turn up on "It Won't Suck Itself." The rest of the track list reads like a set list from a club that lost its liquor license on purpose: "Supersonic Sex Machine," "Just Like Tiger Woods," "Gold-Digging Whore," "Weenie Ride." First week in the States, nearly twelve thousand copies, a debut at number 40 on the Billboard 200, number 5 on Hard Rock, number 12 on Rock. Britain put the album at 37. For a comedy metal band that started as a club act, that is not a punchline. That is a chart position.

The origin story is half myth and half parking lot, which is how the band prefers it. Around the turn of the century the four of them were working the Strip under Metal Shop, then Metal Skool, playing the hair-metal songbook with spiky wigs, leather, and zebra-striped everything, plus the comic take on sex, drugs, and rock and roll turned up past the point where a straight band would flinch. Hollywood started showing up. They landed on The Drew Carey Show as themselves, played a metal band called Danger Kitty in a Discover Card spot, and heard one of their songs used as theme music on MTV. In 2008 Universal Republic signed them. Feel the Steel arrived in 2009, cracked the Billboard 200 at 98, and went gold in Britain. Balls Out was the follow-up that refused to mature. Satchel said they did not think of it as a sophomore record. They thought of it as a second debut, the same record as the first one, only better, because the first one had already been the joke played straight.

That is the lane. Spinal Tap had the stonehenge and the amps that went to eleven. Steel Panther has the set list and the ability to actually solo through it. "If You Really Really Love Me" is the moment on Balls Out where the costume fits so well you forget it is a costume, right up until Melanie's name hits the second verse. The gang vocals behind Starr belong to the same circle that sang on the rest of the record, including Joe Lester. Nothing on the track is accidental. The short runtime, the stacked reallys, the ballad chords under a list of non-negotiable demands: it is a studio band doing an arena band doing a joke, and the joke holds because the band can play the arena part without winking the tempo away.

Steel Panther never stopped being that band. Later albums kept the same contract with the audience: play it tight, say the quiet part loud, leave the sincerity to somebody with a smaller hair budget. The Fanthers, the official fan club run in league with the group, grew out of a fan page into the place where presales, forums, and the in-jokes live. If you want the records, the tour dates, and the version of the story the band is willing to print, the official site is steelpanther.com. The book of faces is facebook.com/steelpanther. The picture feed is instagram.com/steelpanther. The short-message wire is x.com/Steel_Panther. The fan club door is fanthers.com, with the Fanthers page also parked at facebook.com/FanthersCOM.

And if you want the station that will play the two-minute ballad next to a 1976 deep cut without apologizing for either, you are already on it. THE ZOO lives at thezoorocks.com, listener-supported, commercial-free, built for the album rock that still knows how to swing. Steel Panther, "If You Really Really Love Me," Balls Out, 2011. She can prove it in two minutes and twenty-five seconds, or she can change the station. On THE ZOO, we already know which way this one goes.