Exerpt...

...Earlier that same Friday night, a different kind of 1980s recollection got under way at the Badger Bowl, the combination bowling alley and music venue south of the Beltline. It was a performance by the hair-metal tribute band Cherry Pie, and it also proved electrifying to fans — who were, like the musicians, a good 15 years older than the Houses in Motion set.

A quintet founded in 1999, Cherry Pie shares a name with a hit song by hair-metal avatars Warrant. The band mounts a scaled-down version of the sort of hard-rock arena events I sometimes attended 20 years ago. There are risers on the stage, which is made hazy by swirling lights and smoke. The musicians wear leather pants or ripped jeans, and they have gigantic hair. "People think we might be wearing wigs," keyboardist and guitarist Josh Becker told me.

Packed into the venue were clubgoers primed for fun. Many of the women wore bright red Cherry Pie camisoles. At the beginning of the performance, someone in the audience jubilantly shouted at lead singer John Swenson. "He wants to know if we're going to 'rock out,'" Swenson said drolly, forming air quotation marks with his fingers. "We are going to 'rock out,'" he continued, repeating the gesture.

There were air quotes around everything that followed, beginning with the set list, which drew from both the pop-metal repertoire (Mötley Crüe's "Kickstart My Heart," Whitesnake's "Still of the Night") and the synthesizer-heavy genre once called AOR, for album-oriented rock (a Journey suite of "Don't Stop Believing" and "Any Way You Want It"). The show was flamboyant. Swenson stomped and shrieked, and drummer Frank Babeck twirled his sticks with gusto.

Like hair metal in its heyday, the show was equal parts machismo and kitsch. Cherry Pie's act might seem merely silly, in fact, were it not for the enthusiasm of the audience members and the expertise of the musicians. Swenson's singing was especially impressive, because whatever your feelings about the vocal stylings of Journey's Steve Perry or Mötley Crüe's Vince Neil, those hyper-tenors are not easy to imitate...

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