By Lisa Burke
March 14th 2016, Crazy Girls, Hollywood CA: For the second half of my Monday night adventure, I went from stoner doom metal night at Los Globos in Silver Lake to see Guns ‘N Roses tribute band Hollywood Roses at the Crazy Girls strip club in Hollywood, because when you live in Los Angeles you are capable of these kinds of adventures if you so desire. Rock Mondays at Crazy Girls has been a regular night for the last month or so, hosted and promoted by Nick Fuoco, who is the singer of his own Alice Cooper tribute band called Nightmare. Crazy Girls has had rock nights in past years and then it kind of died out when favorite rock ‘n roll stripper Malice left the scene, but it is once again making a comeback with new bands and new strippers. I’ve been trying to attend an entire show here from start to finish since Nick started this but have yet to do so with everything else that’s been going on lately. I figured this was such a fun second adventure in one night, with all my favorite Guns ‘N Roses songs that I can totally sing along to with one of my very favorite Guns N Roses tributes in Los Angeles, that I better not miss it. The timing worked out great and I arrived with moments to spare before Hollywood Roses took the stage.
This band is led by look-a-like front man and king of the Axl dance, Colby Veil, who’s got all things Axl Rose completely fine tuned, which really adds some extra entertainment to the whole performance. His vocals are very stylistically in key to that of Axl Rose which makes it super hard to beat him out in competition, and he is successfully still able to channel young Axl from the Appetite For Destruction years. They played for what seemed like forever, and I could have easily heard two more hours of it. The set featured all the fun Appetite For Distruction songs such as ‘Night Train’, Mr. Brownstone’, ‘Rocket Queen’, ‘My Michelle’, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, and ‘You’re Crazy’, among others. He also did some unusual tunes for a tribute band of this nature and my favorite of the night which was ‘Think About You’, and then what was originally an Aerosmith song cover of ‘Mama Kin’ done in the Guns ‘N Roses style, and also ‘One In A Million’ to round out the performance. Courtney Cox from The Iron Maidens was in attendance on this night, and got on stage for a guest appearance to help out on guitar for a couple of tunes including ‘Welcome To The Jungle’. The guitars were totally up to par with Slash and Izzy, ‘Duff’ was being Duff, and Steven Adler was channeled on the drums as it should be.
One of the challenges at this venue is, despite the decent sized stage complete with stripper poles and the house completely filled with comfy black booths and chairs, there is a lack of sound system which leaves every band to fend for themselves if they want to have a chance of decent sound quality here. Probably the best you can hope for until this changes is ‘decent sound quality’, which Hollywood Roses pulled off as well as possible. Now, as for how it works with the strippers here, it’s really random, and on this night we had one dancing in the front on her own pole while another crawled around on stage searching for dollar bills or something of that nature. I’ve noticed that most of the strippers don’t even listen to or understand rock ‘n roll or metal, and this is usually apparent in the dance moves. Twerking is not metal, and while it is a turn on to some, it is kind of a cop out in my mind. I mean who cares as long as they are half naked and the regulars throw change, right? Well, I care because if I were up there playing I’d want strippers who could dance to my music and make me look better. On this night in particular, I actually did think at least one of the dancers understood it enough, but in general I’ve seen this to be a challenge for some. Overall, this night was packed like I’ve never seen it, and each week seems to get slightly more popular and with the little to no cover charge along with fairly reasonable drink prices, you can’t go wrong. More strippers wouldn’t be a bad idea either, as I feel the numbers have diminished since the first few times I saw rock ‘n roll and metal bands here. Check it out any upcoming Monday if you like sex, booze, rock ‘n roll, metal and plenty of fun and crazy girls, because that’s what you’ll find frequenting this fine establishment.
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