RATT (Band)

Stryper

Is Dave Grohl Rebooting Probot With Hair Metal Kings Ratt? Maybe So...

Dave Grohl and Ratt team up​When Dave Grohl released his Probot project in February 2004, it opened a whole new world of metal to a new legion of kids whose only exposure to the hard stuff may have been whatever was on MTV or VH1 Classic. Here was Grohl teaming up with crusty scumlords like Le ... More >>

The Top 10 Hard Rock and Metal Guitarists of the '80s

Yes, yes, shred until you bleed!​Well, it's the day after Christmas and many of you probably have some holiday blues. Maybe you had a rough Christmas. Maybe your family is making you crazy. Maybe you didn't get that brand new navel ring you wanted or perhaps you filled up on so much food and e ... More >>

Friday Night: Motley Crue & Poison At Toyota Center

Photos by Jay Lee​Motley Crue, Poison, New York Dolls Toyota Center June 10, 2011 "This drink tastes like rank hooker ass," says the man in the club-level bar, clad in an oversized Motley Crue shirt from one of the last Crue Fest jaunts in Houston. It must be a bad batch of Bud Light coming f ... More >>

Walk on the Wild Side

One tour unites three very different faces of glam-rock.

The Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp From Hell

Rocks Off recently got invited to cover something known as Rock & Roll Fantasy Camp, which works a lot like baseball fantasy camp, except none of the participants can field a line-drive grounder. Among the idols rock campers will meet include 3 Doors Down, Mark Farner, the drummer from the Hooters a ... More >>

Slim Thug: Now Tweeting Church!

Aren't we all, Slim?​Welcome to another fabulous edition of Magnolia City Mixtape. Rocks Off doesn't want you to miss even a smidgen of news from Houston's music scene, so we mine the Internet, sifting through Twitter feeds and Facebook profiles and harvesting every piece we can find. So witho ... More >>

Notable Bar & Venue Closures Of 2010

Craig HlavatyAgora: Not reopening for a while.​Houston had quite a few bars close down in 2010. They were your favorite places to drink, mingle, talk to a conquest, bum a cigarette, and spend money you didn't have, and they all mostly left with whimper, or in one bar's case, about a dozen fire ... More >>

Top 10 Recent TV-Show Soundtracks

​A few choice adjectives come to mind when musing on bawdy Eastbound & Down character Kenny Powers. "Inspiring" is not one of them. However, as Rocks Off watched this week's season finale of the side-splitting HBO series, we were pleasantly surprised as we heard indie troubadour Kurt Vile's a ... More >>

Last Night: Ratt At Warehouse Live

Photos by Groovehouse/ See a slideshow​Ratt Warehouse Live July 22, 2010 Must have been a slow night at the strip clubs Thursday. Sorry, cheap shot. Actually, Ratt deserves a lot of credit. In a summer where tours are wilting right and left and every day seems to bring another "rescheduling" ... More >>

New Bar's Jukebox Takes The Grand Prize

Craig Hlavaty​Thursday night, after seeing the Houston Symphony cover Queen and then running to Warehouse Live to bathe in Ratt, Rocks Off went to the opening night of Brad Moore's new bar in Montrose, Grand Prize. Formerly Ernie's On Banks, GP was hopping from 9 p.m., when the first drink w ... More >>

Top 10 Celebrity Music-Video Cameos

​Ratt, "Round and Round" Thursday night, Ratt hits up Warehouse Live with what passes for their original line-up. At their peak, the band was a gritty and decadent alternative to bands like Poison, skewing closer to Motley Crue in terms of excess and drug abuse. ​The band managed to ... More >>

Lady Gaga: Your Guide To Local Ticket Giveaways

​OK, Rocks Off campers, here's fair warning right now that next week will be all about hair metal and Lady Gaga, leading up to the latter's two-night stand at Toyota Center next Sunday and Monday and the big Ratt show over at Warehouse Live on Thursday night. All right, not everything will b ... More >>

The 6 Absolute Ugliest Custom Guitars On The Planet

​Rocks Off is currently in the market for a good guitar yet has next to no money, so for the past few months we've been tantalizing ourselves by poring over the multitude of guitars of the Internet. There are some mighty pretty signature guitars out there, including Angus Young's signature Gib ... More >>

There Are No Coincidences In The Rat(t) World

​We here in Houston are going to be besieged by rats -- not just the four-legged kind, but the ten-legged, ten-armed, sucking-talentless kind, too.How else to interpret two announcements? One: "New Report Ranks Cities At Risk For Rodents This Year -- Houston Is Number Three." Two, from the officia ... More >>

Dive Bars

A handcrafted tour of the best, most obscure places to lean on a stool in Houston.

Lo-fi, High Expectations

Will Sebadoh end up ruling the DIY world it helped create?