2017, Features, Interviews — March 23, 2017 at 7:00 am

Satchel of Steel Panther

“…there’s going to be people that hate us and always hate us and always leave bad reviews on iTunes and those people can just suck my dick, but for us we’re a really consistent bitchin’ heavy metal band and if you’re into bitchin’ heavy metal that gets pussy this is another bitchin’ record, so…”

From Release: Lower The Bar is Steel Panther’s fourth studio album and is the follow-up to their 2014 chart topper, All You Can Eat, which debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Top Current Comedy chart and #24 on their Top 200 Album chart. “LTB” is set for release on March 24, 2017. Earlier last year, Steel Panther premiered “Live From Lexxi’s Mom’s Garage,” the band’s first full length film/DVD featuring a live ten-song acoustic concert interspersed with comedic vignettes.

After waiting on hold listening to a Slash song on repeat for a good ten minutes we got to speak to Satchel about Steel panther’s new album ‘Lower The Bar’, Australia, cover tunes, power ballads, and much more… this is how it kicked off…

This is Satchel, sorry I’m late!
That’s alright mate, you’re the guitarist I expected it…
I know… well usually it’s the singer that’s late *laughs*

So where do we find you at the moment?
The same place I always am, at a strip joint.

Good reception in there too!
Oh my god, well we told them to turn it down and all the girls are just dancing silently right now, it’s kind of weird but it’s still sexy.

Let me start by saying this is a first for me as you were my missing piece and I’ve now interviewed all four members of the band over the last five years, how does it feel completing the set?
Well you know it’s a good feeling, I feel like you can’t really have a complete set without Satchel in there. That’s what the ladies say…

Congratulations on the new album, it’s kick ass. Sales pitch time. Can you give us your quick pitch as to why people should grab the album next week!
The short sales pitch is we really need the money, the band is incredibly deep in debt and our singer I don’t know why he did this but he bought a Tesla last year and apparently you can’t return those things and he totalled it and it wasn’t insured, so really we’re just paying of a Tesla that he wrecked two weeks into it. So we really need the money so if anybody has money please just give it to us because we promise that we won’t waste it next time on a Tesla.

It is of course called ‘Lower The Bar’ yet there’s not one song about Limbo on it, but for the songs that are on it, did the writing process for this album differ at all from your previous three?
Well the thing is you can actually limbo to every song on the record, so even though they’re not about limbo you can still limbo to it so I think that’s cool. The writing process is always pretty much the same, I mean I do a lot of the heavy lifting and I’m constantly writing because I’m constantly having sex and doing drugs and when you’re high and getting laid all the time you can be very creative, like jotting things down with sharpies on girls tits you know and just taking pictures of it so I have a heap of ideas all over the place. I just got last year I got a brand new iPhone 3, you know the iPhone 3? It’s killer… it’s got a recording app you can press record and you get your own recordings on there it’s amazing, so I threw away my cassette player which sucks because now I can’t listen to all the other cassettes that I have like I just bought the new Danger Danger cassette, well not the new one, the one with ‘Naughty Naughty’ so I can’t listen to that cassette anymore which sucks.

I still maintain that ‘Community Property’ is still one of the best power ballads ever written, but on ‘Lower The Bar’ we have ‘That’s When You Came In’ and ‘Wasted Too Much Time’ which are outstanding. How important is it for you guys to have these big power ballads on your albums?
You know it’s not really something that I think about because let’s face it, getting rich off the big ballads that stopped when Nirvana came out and killed bands like Mr Big and Extreme and then it didn’t matter, after that it’s just something that comes totally natural to us because we love to get pussy and when you have an awesome power ballad it will get you laid, and I mean you’ve been to a Steel Panther show right?

Oh yeah!
So you see when we play ‘Community Property’ girls literally take their clothes off and just throw their clothes at us and we can see what they look like naked and you don’t really have to do any foreplay we just bring them backstage and put our penises inside them and that’s really cool. It’s not something that’s pre-planned, I personally just write what I feel and when I feel a song like that ‘Community Property’ came very quickly and it felt very natural, so did ‘That’s When You Came In’, it just came out really quickly and that’s one of my favourite songs that we did ‘That’s When You Came In’ I love that song. ‘Wasted Too Much Time’ I love that too.

I loved the acoustic version you did of ‘That’s When You Came In’ but rocked up it came out really well…
Well I appreciate that, we actually recorded it in the studio before we did it live but we wanted to do something live that we hadn’t done because it lent itself to acoustic and on the album ‘Live From Lexxi’s Mom’s Garage’ there was nothing but girls in the room so playing that song upped our opportunities to have anal sex with women.

Now this is your fourth album, ‘Hysteria’ by Def Leppard was their fourth. Will ‘Lower The Bar’ be your ‘Hysteria’?!
Well you know that’s a good question, ‘Hysteria’ I felt that was more of a departure for Def Leppard you know from their earlier works like ‘Pyromania’ and ‘High and Dry’, they were definitely more raw on their earlier records and ‘Hysteria’ was very polished and was obviously great, the songs are great but their sound was very different and I feel like that we really haven’t changed that much *laughs* we continue to do what we do, I mean we’ve got some stuff that we haven’t really tried, I mean there’s some sounds that we haven’t gone for like ‘Now The Fun Starts’ is a different vibe for us on this record, but it’s still pretty raw, all the lyrics are what we normally write about for the most part and we still sound like the same band in comparison to our last records I think. But yeah, I think that this record for us is continuing to put songs that we feel are great songs out there and that’s the main thing for us, there’s going to be people that hate us and always hate us and always leave bad reviews on iTunes and those people can just suck my dick, but for us we’re a really consistent bitchin heavy metal band and if you’re into bitchin’ heavy metal that gets pussy this is another bitchin’ record, so…

Guitar wise, I noticed in the Poontang Boomerang video that you’re playing a Charvel, is this now your axe of choice?
I am, I’m playing Charvel now and I love the way they play I love the necks and they play great, they feel great and they look bitchin’, that’s the other thing about them I like, they’ve always been bitchin’ guitars too, and of course ‘Poontang Boomerang’ is an ode to every girl in Australia that we’ve had sex with basically.

I first saw you guys ten years ago this year when you were still Metal Skool and I’ll never forget you hanging above us on the roof of the key club doing the eruption solo. Now in the last decade a lot has happened, has there been a highlight for you that still blows you away?
You know there’s so many and that’s one of the cool things about being in Steel Panther there’s so many things that happen all the time, like hanging from the roof in the Key Club, I did that a lot, there was one time in particular where I fell from the roof, about ten metres but I was OK I landed on a really fat chick so she was Ok and I didn’t break any bones and it worked out alright but speaking of fat chicks, we were doing a show we did a festival in Louisville, this girl had lost and I’m not kidding you about two hundred pounds and wanted to show her tits really bad and we got her to show her tits on a camera, it was a big huge megatron TV and I think there was a lot of young boys there and I think it may have turned them gay it was really bad, but very memorable.

Of course I have to ask when we might see you back in Australia?
As soon as possible, I don’t have any dates yet but I know that we’re going to try and get down there this year I can’t wait man, Australia is awesome.

Australia just loves the Panther, like the rest of the world but what do you think it is about Steel Panther that Australians just love and connect with?
You know we love Australia and I think that Australia has so many gorgeous women that are very easy to fuck has a lot to do with it and the girls there know that we love to fuck ‘em and that’s a true connection, girls that love to fuck and a metal band like us that loves to fuck them, I think that’s why most people come to show. The guys come to the show because they’re hoping there are some girls we don’t have sex with that they can have sex with because we can’t fuck more than one or two hundred girls a night, and that’s a lot.

It’s somewhat easy to say what’s changed within a band over their time together but what would you say is the one thing that’s stayed the same in your time together?
I think that we all truly love playing in a band together and that’s a rare thing, a lot of bands break up because of just that reason, they fight I mean we see that shit all the time there’s bands that can’t be in the same dressing room together, and they just don’t like each other and we just really enjoy playing with each other we love hanging out with each other and we love each other so much that we actually let each other fuck each other’s girls, that’s the thing we’re not uptight about that. You know when David Lee Roth had sex with Valerie Bertinelli it was like Eddie van Halen got mad, it’s like dude you’ve gotta chill out it’s David Lee Roth, of course Valerie Bertinelli was going to have sex with David Lee Roth it can’t be boned.

You guys started by doing amazing covers of tunes and have released a couple of singles of songs, but has there ever been thought of a covers album from you guys?
Well we did a cover on this new record that’s the first time we’ve ever done a cover and put it on a record, but you know what that’s a good question because we’ve done covers and we did covers for so long and we did them so well and when we started doing original stuff there were people that just hated us for it, they didn’t want us to stop doing covers because we did the covers really good *laughs*. I don’t know if our fan base that likes our original songs would wanna hear us do all covers either *laughs* to me personally as a song writer and musician I love writing my own songs and I love performing my own songs but I don’t know if anybody wants to hear our version of ‘Panama’ or if we could even compare with Van Halen’s version of that, we could copy the feel of it, great and probably do a great version of it that sounds like them and it’s fun to try and do that but the original version is always better because those guys did it, they had a vibe and that’s the reason we all love that song, same as we like Whitesnake’s ‘Slide It In’ record and Van Halen’s ‘1984’ that was a time when all those bands were at their prime and we’re just trying to stay in our prime in our late fifties and early sixties.

Lastly let’s look ahead to the future, finish this sentence for me, by the end of 2017 Steel Panther want to…
Be herpes free… I don’t know if that can happen, I don’t know if you can get rid of that. We also want to sell out Wembley Stadium seven nights in a row, I don’t even know why I said that I don’t think that’s gonna happen either but you’ve gotta have goals. Actually the sad thing is we’ll probably sell Wembley Stadium out seven nights in a row before we get rid of our herpes.

Well you can always hope…
*laughs* Yeah you can always hope, like I said gotta set goals right.