Love Me Bad

If the Sunset Strip had a Chicago cousin that never bothered with the hairspray budget, it would sound a lot like The Last Vegas kicking the door in with "Love Me Bad." Track ten on Whatever Gets You Off, the band's major-label debut, clocks in at five minutes and eighteen seconds of boogie-glam swagger, a freight-train riff, and a chorus that does not ask permission. Chad Cherry leans into the microphone and lays it out plain: the beauty of it all is that you love him when he is bad. No apology, no soft landing, just a backbeat that hits like a kick drum in a packed club and twin guitars that know their way around a blues lick and a punk shove. This is album-rock with the collar up and the amps already hot.

The Last Vegas came out of Chicago in the early 2000s, a hard-rock outfit that drew from glam, punk, and sleaze without turning any of it into costume drama. The core that cut this record was singer Chad Cherry, guitarists Adam Arling and Johnny Wator, bassist Danny Smash, and drummer Nate Arling. Adam and Nate are brothers, which explains a lot about the pocket: the rhythm section does not negotiate, it locks. Their cited bloodlines run through Aerosmith, Guns N' Roses, Mötley Crüe, Cheap Trick, and Skid Row, which is a Chicago-to-the-Strip map if there ever was one. Cheap Trick is the hometown tell. The rest is the education you get from too many nights studying Too Fast for Love and Appetite for Destruction until the riffs start writing themselves.

They paid their dues the old way. Lick 'Em and Leave 'Em arrived in 2004 on the independent label Get Hip Records, followed by Seal the Deal in 2006. After they left Get Hip they cut a five-track EP, High Class Trash, in 2007. One of those songs, "Raw Dog," had already turned up in the video game Guitar Hero II, which put a Chicago sleaze band in living rooms that had never set foot in a rock club. The self-titled album in 2008 was recorded with almost no promotion and still carried the bones of what came next. Six of those songs were rebuilt for the major-label record, and "Love Me Bad" was one of them. On the 2008 disc it was titled "Love Me (When I'm Bad)" and ran just a few seconds longer. The idea did not change. The production did.

The break came in December 2008, when The Last Vegas won Guitar Center's On-Stage contest, billed as a chance to make rock history. They beat something on the order of eight thousand entries. The prize was an opening slot on Mötley Crüe's Saints of Los Angeles tour, cash, a pile of Gibson gear, a management deal, and a recording contract with Nikki Sixx's Eleven Seven Music. Spin had already tagged them Best Discovery out of South by Southwest that same year. Suddenly a band that had been grinding Midwest rooms was on a winter run with Crüe, Hinder, and Theory of a Deadman, and the people holding the checkbook wanted a record.

Whatever Gets You Off landed on April 14, 2009, catalog ESM 510, their fourth full-length and first on a major imprint. Nikki Sixx, Sixx:A.M. guitarist DJ Ashba, and songwriter-producer Marti Frederiksen shared the board with the band. Frederiksen's résumé already included Aerosmith, Crüe, and Ozzy Osbourne, so the polish was never going to sound timid. The track list runs eleven deep: the title cut, "I'm Bad," "High Class Trash," "Loose Lips," "Apologize," "Cherry Red," "Another Lover," "Dirty Things You Do," "White Lies," "Love Me Bad," and "Outta My Mind." "I'm Bad" was the first single and spent a week as the iTunes Single of the Week in February 2009. The video was shot at Chicago's Double Door, where drummer Nate Arling later told the press a stripper jumped him in a bathroom stall before the cameras were even warm. That is the neighborhood this music lives in.

"Love Me Bad" sits late on the album the way a good set saves a burner for when the room is already leaning forward. The verse rides a storm-on-the-rise image, Babylon beats, hearts thumping like a kick drum, no safety net, a fire off a freight-train wreck. Cherry's vocal is part come-on and part confession. The chorus does not complicate it. You love me when I'm bad. Credit on the earlier version runs to Cherry, Adam Arling, Wator, Nate Arling, and then-bassist Anthony Rubino, which is a reminder that this song had already been road-tested before Sixx and company rebuilt it in Los Angeles. Danny Smash is the bass player on the Eleven Seven album. The guitars stay greasy rather than clinical, the kind of riff work that recalls Faster Pussycat's swing and Skid Row's bite without copying either. Sleaze Roxx, reviewing the record in 2009, called the whole album the sound of a band that knew this might be the shot and refused to hold anything back. "Love Me Bad" is one of the tracks that earned that line.

The rest of the story kept moving. Tours followed with AC/DC, Guns N' Roses, Buckcherry, and Papa Roach, plus headline dates in more than a dozen countries. Bad Decisions arrived in 2012, Sweet Salvation in 2014, Eat Me in 2016 on AFM. There were quiet stretches, the kind that make fans ask if a band is still standing, and then a Summerfest return in Milwaukee in 2024 that proved the amps still worked. The lineup has flexed, with Bryan Wilkinson added on guitar in later years, but the Chicago stamp never came off. Hard glam boogie, they call it on their own site. That is as good a tag as any.

Put "Love Me Bad" next to the Crüe records that helped bankroll it and you hear the family resemblance without the carbon copy. Sixx and Ashba knew what a sleaze chorus was supposed to do. The Last Vegas already knew how to write one. The beauty of it all, as Cherry sings it, is that the bad behavior is the point. On The Zoo we still play records like this the way freeform album rock was built to be played: deep cuts, backstories, no commercials stepping on the riff. Park it here with the rest of the station at https://thezoorocks.com/. The band keeps the lights on at https://www.thelastvegas.com/, posts the road photos on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/thelastvegas, runs the same handle on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/thelastvegas/, and still has the old rock-and-roll dispatch on X at https://x.com/THELASTVEGAS. Sleaze lifers who have been writing this band up since the Eleven Seven days keep the archive at https://sleazeroxx.com/. Turn it up. The chorus is not subtle, and it was never supposed to be.