Metal in Metairie
There are some locations that you can visit and, for a brief moment, wonder if you've stepped into an anomaly in the space-time continuum. For a second or two, you may question reality or your own sanity.
One of these locales is the Rainbow Bar and Grill in West Hollywood—where it feels as though you stepped back in time to be smack dab in 1987, complete with '80s metal music being blasted over the speakers, dudes with hair comparable to what Def Leppard looked like in 1987, and ladies rocking leather and 80s fashion, as if time hadn't moved an inch. Here in the Greater New Orleans area, maybe you, too, can experience an occasional evening of stepping back in time to the era of '80s metal, almost as if you're a low-tech Marty McFly.
Before COVID, these events were more regular than the occasional occurrence that they are now. Back then, it wasn't unusual to roll into Hurricanes Sports Bar, for example, or some other bar and feel as though you were suddenly in the mid-80s, including the hairstyles and fashion. Some of them even had that haze of cigarette smoke, since smoking in bars in Jefferson Parish still seems to be a thing.
Why is this genre seemingly the standard in Metairie? "Metairie has always kind of had a continuum of your old school rockers. That kind of was the place they accumulated," Steve Blaze, guitarist and founding member of one of the biggest rock bands to come out of New Orleans, Lillian Axe, observed.
Derrick LeFevre, who sings and fronts Rock Show NOLA, Phaze V NOLA, Contraflow, Floodline, and others (he was also the singer for Lillian Axe in the early aughts), joked, "I'm from this area, so I'm trying to stick close to home." He also noted that "these people grew up on this stuff just like I did, so they gotta go hang out somewhere to hear it still. So that's why we still exist."
So much has changed since the '80s, when '80s metal was in its heyday. Blaze noted, "The biggest difference is the lack of venue. There are not as many venues. Back in the early days, every city, from Shack Bay to Larose, to Thibodaux, to Houma, to the Lights Fantastic in Cutoff, Louisiana—Baton Rouge, Shreveport, Monroe, Metairie, Chalmette—every city had rock clubs. We'd play Hammond on a Wednesday night for four or five hundred people. We'd go to Lafayette on a Wednesday night and do the same thing."
Some of the old venues just don't exist any more. A lot of factors could be at hand: changing times, Katrina, COVID, etc. Blaze recalled some other old venues he used to play with Lillian Axe as they were starting to make their way, and he mentioned, "Stan's Hard Rock out at the Lakefront. I could probably write a hundred different venues just down in Louisiana that we played over the years. There were a lot of them but very few right now."
LeFevre recollected, "There seemed like there was a club on every block in Fat City: the Quarter Note, the Show Boat. You could probably play every night of the week if you wanted to. But Fat City pretty much got shut down once Cynthia Lee Sheng took office. I think they kind of wanted to revamp that entire area, so a lot of those places don't exist anymore." He also added, "There are really not a whole lot of clubs left like they used to be. COVID killed a lot. It changed the environment."
Granted, music goes through changes, and tastes and opinions vary with the times. "Music seems like it always works in cycles," LeFevre observed. "It's like you'll go through a cycle of this thing. It seems like the classic rock and stuff was in for a little bit. Now, it's starting to seem like the '90s stuff is coming back again, so it's constantly changing."
Blaze had a similar remark, "Rock 'n' roll music is always going to be around. It's always going to take punches. It's going to go in cycles. With everything, it's going to go in cycles."
Take, for example, one of these changes that both musicians are currently a part of—acoustic duos. Both Blaze and LaFevre play in their own acoustic duo. Blaze said, "We play everywhere, from the Tap Room—we got hired for a bridal shower, if you can imagine that—to St. Ann Wine Bar."
"I kind of break it up between different bands, so I get a little taste of everything," LaFevre noted when talking about his various bands. With his acoustic duo, he said, "We've been doing some gigs over at DBC, and then we also got some gigs coming up at Moonshine Bar and Grill."
That acoustic switch-up isn't the only avenue that both musicians explore. "I've got another side project called Maiden LA. It's an Iron Maiden tribute," Blaze mentioned. "We'll play at Southport Hall."
Rock Show NOLA, one of LeFevre's bands, does regular tributes to various bands from the '80s, including Journey, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, and Styx. He also mentioned playing Southport Hall occasionally and Rock 'N' Bowl, as well.
His other bands play around, too. "The main places that we play around Metairie are Whiskey Cowboy Saloon on Causeway, Moonshine Bar and Grill, which is on Rye Street right across from where Clearview Mall is. And then there's Hurricanes."
While both musicians are busy playing, it's not the same as it once was. "I don't know if it's because the crowd is changing or there's so many other places around," LeFevre observed. Blaze ventured that the major difference is a lack of "hiring bands and putting on live music. They don't pay. It's sad because it used to not be like that."
While you can definitely still go out and venture into the '80s on occasion, the local Greater New Orleans scene isn't as happening and populated as it once was. The cutting edge has phased into nostalgia. Blaze wistfully mused, "I wish it could return to having a thriving, local music scene again."
