My week to help The Stranger's Campaign For Real Rock started off fine enough: with an insider's help, I sneaked into Mötley Crüe's dressing room. Tommy Lee was the first band member I saw, chillin' on a couch, and all I could think was "Heather Locklear... Pamela Lee... stupid fucking hairdo." Then I got a load of Nikki Sixx's wife, Baywatch babe Donna D'Errico, decked out like a groupie. Beefy Vince Neil was on the dressing table, its lights throwing unflattering shadows from behind--he reached out his hand to me and said, "Hey, I'm Vince Neil," and it took all the muscle strength I had in my body to not reply, "No shit."

As for the show, it was all radio hits and "Fuck yeah's," cannons which blasted out tons of Mylar confetti, and topless dancing babes. Tommy Lee pounded his drum kit in front of a huge gong that he hit only once, providing much hysterical laughter in my group when it made a lame clunk instead of a BONNGGG. Tommy also entertained us with a hysterical soliloquy: he went on a huge rant about the four months he spent in the clink--for shoving Pamela while she held their baby--how the only way he made it through that hell was by "thinking about all you guys every motherfuckin' day," never once mentioning how shitty it is being a wife-beater. Immediately after that he began imploring the girls in the audience to show him some "titties," for what seemed like an hour, finally bitching that "Seattle has no titties" and that he was going to Portland tomorrow to see some really fuckin' big ones. I'm told he said the same thing about Yakima the night before.

More comedy ensued when a new song was played, and there was a mass exodus to the lobby; then there was the extended guitar solo that got restarted in the middle, just like in Spinal Tap. Nikki Sixx bemoaned the fact that "people only talk about how we're in jail or always going to rehab, but no one ever says anything about the great love songs we write," before blowing into "Same Old Situation," during which the two dancing babes simulated lesbian sex. Their encore consisted of a cover of "Anarchy in the U.K.," in which Sixx came onstage in orange coveralls spray-painted with swastikas. Those Nazis were quite the anarchists, you know.

Three days later I arrived at Parker's Casino to find the Blue Öyster Cult show sold out at $25 a ticket--against all my expectations. I forgot that I was probably the only one there who hadn't seen the band since 1981, and my annoyance that their giant, fire-breathing Godzilla wouldn't be making an appearance on Parker's two-car-garage stage was old angst to them. These were suburbanites, oldsters, long-time fans. Everyone downed tequila and flew the devil horns in anticipation, screaming like crazy during the ridiculously long drum check--no one hams up a soundcheck like an aging '70s rocker.

The band came out with "Burnin' For You," a fairly lame song that had the crowd nearly shitting itself. Buck Dharma played hideous headless guitars, changing models after every song but favoring one made to look like a slice of Swiss cheese. Eric Bloom looked like a cross between a classic Hell's Angel and a pirate, while their bass player just looked like the latter. Aside from Bloom's "How the fuck are ya, Seattle?" there wasn't another swear word to be heard during the entire hit-studded set. Practically every song had a guitar solo, and the drum solo got almost as much applause as the drum check did.

"Godzilla" was ruined by a horrible backing vocal track that sounded like Donald Duck was sitting in, but the off-duty strippers from Sugar's didn't mind. "Don't Fear (the Reaper)" followed, and then it was time for the encore, which kicked off with a ripping cover of Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak" that had even the card table dealers dancing.