2024 just got a whole lot more sexy with California’s greatest export STEEL PANTHER about to kick off their 2024 Australian tour! The band that put glam and spandex back into heavy metal will be heading out On The Prowl across Australia this October, kicking off at Perth’s Metro City before bringing the non-stop party to Adelaide, Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne.
Get ready for what is set to be their wildest, dirtiest, hardest, heaviest, and most rocking tour yet as they showcase their mega-hit love songs such as Eyes of a Panther, and Community Property alongside fresh tracks including Friends with Benefits and On Your Instagram.
For the uninitiated, Steel Panther was formed in 2000 and is comprised of Michael Starr (lead vocals), Satchel (lead guitar), Spyder (bass) and Stix Zadinia (drums). Hailing from Los Angeles [the epicentre for rock n’ roll in all its debauchery and glamour], Steel Panther has established themselves as the world’s premier party band, melding hard rock virtuosity with parody and criminally good looks. Stix Zadinia talks to Hi Fi Way about the tour.
You must be looking forward to finally getting back on the prowl here in Australia?
Oh dude I we love coming to Australia. I can’t wait to come down there.
Even better still, you are remembering us good folk here in Adelaide this time.
I know, dude, I don’t know why we didn’t play there the past one or two times. I thought that was strange, but I’m very excited to go back to Adelaide. I think the young ladies were probably mad, but they don’t think their parents were too mad!
How’s the tour going so far?
The tour is going amazing, man. We did almost two months out in Europe and we killed it out there and the fans were fantastic. I’ve been home for about a month or I will have been home for about a month before I got to go back out for another month, and then I come home for two weeks. Then I come to Australia. We’ve been doing it long enough now that people know what to expect at our shows. They know to come and just check all their cool at the door and just come in and just be as weird as you can be. We’ve had a lot of weirdness in the good way!
It seems to be a very fine line these days between what’s acceptable and what’s not particularly now people have lost their sense of humour. Does that faze the band anymore?
Are we concerned with the climate and the culture? Fuck no! I think that and this is just my personal opinion, I feel like people are more sensitive than they used to be. I think that this is a small percentage of people who are very, very loud about it. I think the vast majority of people are consistent with how they were ten years ago and how they were fifteen to twenty years ago. I think there’s more platforms for people to make noise about being super sensitive and with Steel Panther it is what it is. We are who we are and changing because we are afraid to offend somebody. Just don’t fucking listen! Go change the channel. Put something different on. We do what we do and there’s people that like it. So, if we started to change it then those people that liked it, they’d be like what? What are you doing? And that is never been the Steel Panther way.
Exactly, I’m sure there will be a lot of younger fans coming out on this tour.
I think it’s awesome that people will be bringing them along, and then it’ll be up to them. I like this or I don’t like this and nothing about our band, in my humble opinion, is going to define someone in in this life, you can like a band and you can hate a band that doesn’t make you who you are. I’m saying so come to the show, bring your team and you’re definitely going to show them how a proper rock show should happen, in my opinion.
What does a month off tour look like for yourself?
I’m a golf junkie, so I play more golf than my body wants me to play, and so sometimes I’m forced to have to not play. I sound like a douche, but I love golf and I love to fish, and when I’m not doing that I’m chilling, I’m writing music, I’m doing a little bit of partying, but you know, we save the partying mostly for the road. So, I kind of like, recuperate, regenerate, reinvigorate and then get ready to come out and throw down super hard. I’m not a spring chicken anymore. When I’m home it’s nice to gather myself and just get ready for the next run because we are perpetually on tour.
Have you been stoked with the reviews for On The Prowl, which is awesome? What are your thoughts on the album?
Oh dude, that’s nice of you to say, and it’s nice to hear, and I love that we’ve gotten good reviews. It’s very funny to us because when we put our first record out, I can’t tell you how many reviewers were just like nay saying. Like oh God, this man, they’re talking about sex, and they’re talking about boobs and it’s going to be a one trick pony, and if you even last for the fifteen minutes of fame, good luck and then good riddance. That was the general vibe and now we’re like six albums deep, a couple DVD’s, a couple live recordings. Yeah, it’s like cool a one trick pony that did it six and eight times. I’m proud of On The Prowl. We did it ourselves, we produced it, we wrote and recorded it ourselves. Then we had Jay Ruston mix, who we’ve been involved with on every single record, and he’s a magician. To me it sounds like a half a million dollar record, if I’m honest. We did it for literally a tiny fraction of that because we did it ourselves.
Does that set a bit of a blueprint for what might be the next album?
It certainly set a blueprint for how to do it if we’re going to do it like that again. There’s definitely things that we can improve upon as far as engineering, Michael starts vocals at my pad and there’s ways we can we can consolidate and be more efficient but. There’s definitely something to be said for every cause, we did it separately, Satch did the guitars at his place, Spider did the bass at his place, and I did the drums at mine and then we did vocals at my house and that’s how we s assembled the record. But there’s something to be said for everybody getting in a room and jamming the parts out and having that live connection vibe. I think it comes through in the in the performances. Going forward, we’re going to probably do a mix of things. We’ll DIY it and I’ll do it super cheap. I think that we’re going to go into some nice studios and make some music.
How is it having Spyder in the band now and what do you think he brings to the band that you may not have necessarily had from a from a bass player perspective?
Oh, he’s as far as a bass player, he’s a machine. He plays so well, he plays clean, he plays aggressive, his tone is great. He’s a killer bass player and I think together he and I as a rhythm section like, you’re going to find different rhythm sections, but you’re not going to find better ones. You’ll find ones that are as good, but together he and I are just holding it down and he’s a rad dude. We’ve known him forever and he was right there under our noses. We just didn’t realise that he was the guy until we got him in the band.
The collab with Dweezil Zappa was super cool. Are you looking to do a little bit more of that when you start making another album? Do you have anyone in mind?
Absolutely! We don’t have anyone in mind right now, we’ve done that on every single record so far we’ve collaborated and we’ve had many guests on songs on our records. We’re always open to that because I think that there’s too many rock ‘n roll islands. If you look at rap and hip hop, there’s so many features and so many collaborations, and then they get to share them with their fans that they cross pollinate exposing yourself to way more people. It’s fun when you have somebody, especially somebody that you know you like on your song or record, I think it’s just cool man. I think there’s more joy in doing stuff like that because you’re spreading it. If we did a collaboration with let’s say, rapper Tech N9ne, just throwing it out there. All of his fans who have never heard of Steel Panther would now be exposed to us and vice versa. So, I think it’s cool for the community. I think it’s cool for people to listen to and fans to get excited about. I’d be open to any sort of collaborations, almost!
Did you think being on America’s Got Talent changed people’s perspective of Steel Panther?
Oh yeah, we noticed the amount of traffic going to our websites, it felt like it helped achieve the goal that we want to achieve out of that. We didn’t want to win it, we wanted to go on and I mean don’t get me wrong winning’s cool. But, because of the nature of our band and how DIY we are, we wouldn’t have want to sign a deal with America’s Got Talent like that would have been counterproductive for us. We did get in front of six million people each time we performed. That’s twelve million sets of eyeballs that watched us and maybe there was some redundancy, but that’s a lot more people than if we go on tour. So, we noticed like an uptick in traffic and store sales was a little bit better and we did get the occasional person who saw us on America’s Got Talent, went to the store online, immediately bought stuff and then returned it because they started to do a deep dive and they’re like. I can’t get down with this band.
Is the Australian tour focused on the new album?
If our history stays the same, we’ll probably do a bit of everything we have. We have six records now and if we didn’t do a little bit of everything, I think there’d be a lot of people that would be like, oh, that’s cool, I like the new record, but I really like, you know, record one or two or whatever. I think we’re going to put something in there for everybody.
Interview By Rob Lyon
Catch Steel Panther on the following dates, tickets from TEG MJR…
