In this batting cage of punchlines, the one-liners are lobbed underhand at the Flying Machine. Tonight, after 1988, the Revlon-glazed Britny Fox takes the mound and it’s like tee-ball for the rookie wag.

But be forewarned, it might be the dudes-that-look-like-ladies that have the last laugh.

"I’ve been uncool for so long that I’m cool again," continues Belanger. "I’ve always lived it. Since the ’80s to now, I’ve been into this music, I’ve been playing this music, I’ve been looking the way that I do. And a lot of other Midwesterners have, too."

And there’s truth to his words. With chic celebs like Lara Flynn Boyle making it hip to don ’80s rockwear once more, bands like Buckcherry, the Backyard Babies, the Donnas and American Hi-Fi all playing up their ’80s influences, the release of a much-talked-about new book that gleefully dissects the genre, Fargo Rock City, by Akron Beacon Journal writer Chuck Klosterman, and a smattering of big-haired metal tours planned for this summer, another cloudburst of White Rain rock is set to soak the masses, making them as slippery-when-wet as Clevelanders long have been.

The thunderheads are amassed above the Hard Rock Café the following eve, when the L.A.Guns are set to perform — the line snakes better than halfway through Tower City’s upper level.

"Is that a ‘yeah’? Is that a ‘fuck yeah’?" lead Gunner Phil Lewis goads the mostly middle-aged audience after asking them if they’re having a good time, to which they respond loudly in the affirmative.

"Everybody’s goofy, everybody’s cool. I like that, man," Lewis marvels at the sight of a packed house of furry dudes and the women who love them. And as the 200 or so in attendance mouth the words to the "The Ballad of Jayne," a song so syrupy it would make Mrs. Butterworth back that thang up, it becomes apparent that while ironic hipsters may be reawakening to this form of music, Clevelanders have never forgotten about it.

"In the Midwest, it never became taboo to like metal," says L.A.Guns drummer Steve Riley. "Whereas on the coasts, it seems like people try to keep face and just want to go along with what is current, and everything else before that sucks. But in the Midwest, that’s never been the case. It’s always been fun to stop in Cleveland. That’s a true loyal crowd that never wavers."

"Cleveland’s my favorite city on the road," concurs Chris Laparage, tour manager for Britny Fox. "There’s always people coming out to see the shows."

"Most of our bands, if they’re going to tour, they’re going to base it around the Midwest," says Dennis Clapp, vice president of Spitfire Records, a label that has put out records by such hair-metal stalwarts as Autograph, David Coverdale and Enuff Z’Nuff. "The Midwest is by far [the best] on average."

But why is this? Why does this form of music seem to connect more with us Midwesterners? Is it that we just like to wear headbands, or is it a little more complex than that?

To help answer this question, I turn to a man who once consumed nothing but McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets for seven straight days. Anyone that can make it through a week of seagull-colored chicken byproduct obviously has the intestinal fortitude to stomach Trixter — almost as difficult a task — and Chuck Klosterman is one such dude. He’s the author of Fargo Rock City, an equally capricious and insightful look at hair metal from a guy who lived it, which even has Stephen King raving, "Writing about American pop culture doesn’t get any better than this." Even more impressive, it’s landed reviews in The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, and has garnered the Akron resident comparison to Lester Bangs, the legendary American rock critic.

Like Bangs, Klosterman isn’t squeamish about rooting for musical underdogs. He grew up a hair metal devotee in North Dakota, where kids start driving their dad’s pickups as soon as they can see over the steering wheel and begin drinking warm beers in the back of them shortly thereafter; and you’d have to pay $455 for him to surrender his copy of Cinderella’s Long Cold Winter. Because of such convincing credentials, the aforementioned question was posed to him.

"In a way, it’s kind of easy to make a theory as to why metal stayed popular in the Midwest, because people in the Midwest are blue-collar and their lives are based around common-sense entertainment. And they’re not really that interested in a band like Sonic Youth who’s trying to make them deal with something," Klosterman says. "For the most part, they want the iconography of their rock and roll artists to be more interesting than that.

"You can look at in a positive way or a negative way, and I think both are true. In the positive way of looking at it, people in the Midwest are less egocentric. People on the coasts think they’re very interesting, and they want artists to be like them because they already think they’re interesting enough to be artists. People in the Midwest aren’t like that. People in the Midwest say, ‘My life is simple, and if I’m gonna spend $29 to go see someone live, I don’t want to see myself. I want to see something that I can’t see when I go into the fucking bar to talk to my friends.’

"The negative way of looking at it, is that people in the Midwest might have less interesting lives and they want escapism, whereas maybe somebody who likes Pavement, who likes Yo La Tengo, doesn’t want to escape from life, but have a musician show them something interesting about the life they have."

But it’s not so cut-and-dried. There’s also the relationship between fan and artist that’s somewhat distinct to metal. As Klosterman notes in Fargo, glam metal artists made kids feel hypernormal, like they were the cool ones because they had been invited to this kickass rock and roll party where Bret Michaels served up love on the rocks and Lita Ford kissed them deadly. It was them and Kiss versus the world, and everybody else was the outcasts, not them.

"One of the things that I loved about Kiss is that they always implied a sense of persecution for being a Kiss fan," Klosterman says. "It’s like you’re in this huge army and everybody was trying to stop you from liking Kiss. Nobody was trying to fucking stop us from liking Kiss. But Paul Stanley was always like, ‘And no one’s gonna change me.’ Like ‘Crazy Nights,’ the whole song is like fighting the people who want to stop you from liking Kiss. Who are these people? I don’t know. It wasn’t like a Cure record or a Smiths record; they’re telling kids, ‘You’re weird, but it’s OK to be weird.’ And that’s great. I’m glad there’s bands like that because there’s a certain kid who needs to hear that, but Kiss and Guns N’ Roses and Mötley Crüe records were like, ‘If you like our music, that makes you cool. We’re cool for you.’ Vince Neil is so cool, all you gotta do is listen to it."

In this way, glam metal gave a degree of power to kids who may not have had much in their day-to-day lives. This created an incredible bond between artist and fan, an intimate connection that really made the latter feel like they were a part of it all, which engendered a fierce loyalty from both sides that has long been metal’s bread and butter.

"There was definitely a connection to the fans that was lacking in a lot of other forms of music," says Anastasia Pantsios, a rock journalist and photographer who has covered hair metal since its inception for magazines such as Circus, Creem and Hit Parader and once managed popular local glam-metallers Zaza. "Something like that has kept it alive to this day. I swear to god, Mark Slaughter’s voice to me is like sticking a nail in your ear, but this band has never failed to do autograph sessions, this band had a huge fan club and every fan club member got a pass where they could come back after any show they went to, and that was really typical. Bands of that genre did not isolate themselves. Working both as a journalist and a photographer, I really enjoyed that energy. When you went to a Poison show, you didn’t get treated like dirt."

And who wanted to get treated like dirt in the ’80s, the halcyon days of hair metal and perhaps the ultimate decade of excess? When looking back at those times, it’s virtually impossible to separate the bands of that age from the political and social context of the Reagan era from whence they sprung.

If there was a trademark of the Reagan administration, it was unblinking self-absorption. This was, after all, the "Me Decade" to the next power, where Gordon Gekko, the praetorian stockbroker from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, was the slithery sign of the times, and whose "greed is good" ethos of instant gratification was manifest in everything from J.R.Ewing’s power moves to Reagan’s insensate, buy-now/pay-later voodoo economics. The seriousness of ’60s idealism and the identity politics of the ’70s was waylaid by a steely, He-Who-Has-The-Most-Toys-Wins consumerism. Reveling in extravagance became the main signifier of success.

Where was this intemperance more paramount than in hair metal? From Kip Winger’s blinding chompers to the absurd four-necked guitar of Nitro’s Michael Angelo, every aspect of the scene was as exaggerated as Al Pacino’s accent in Scarface. Perhaps the most peculiar aspect of it all was how it suddenly became acceptable for macho, skirt-chasing metal dudes to don more makeup than their moms. No doubt the sexual liberation of the ’70s — particularly David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust androgyny — contributed to an atmosphere where gender bending was a bit more acceptable, and indeed, Bowie — with a nod to the New York Dolls — was ground zero for glam.

This feminization of pop metal was also abetted by the advent of MTV at the beginning of the ’80s. With the emergence of videos, music became even more visually oriented, and artists responded in kind by striving to achieve as much eye-appeal as possible. This resulted in bigger hair, louder attire and mascara for days. Of course, this wasn’t confined to glam metal — Flock of Seagulls, anyone? — but the "leather boys with electric toys" certainly took the ball and ran with it, spiking it in the end zone of utter excess. The mantra of these rockers was the title of one of Poison’s biggest hits, "Nothin’ But a Good Time," and the precision-permed stars of the decade certainly had their fair share.

Locally, bands like Spoyld, Outta the Blue, Lipstick and the Fashion Police stuffed clubs.

"The shows were packed with chicks in high heels and miniskirts, guys were just crazy, there was sex all over the place, people loved going to the shows, it was a party," says Mitch Karczewski, whose Spotlight Entertainment has consistently booked hair metal acts since the ’80s.

And with Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and Guns N’ Roses all dropping records that sold over 10 million copies on the national front, while Mötley Crüe, Poison, Ratt, Warrant, Cinderella and dozens of others also notched sales as immodest as their getups, perhaps only the thing that outsized these bands’ locks was their wealth.

But if we learned anything from Poison, it was that every rose has its thorn, and, indeed, this was true for ’80s glam metal. After reaching a zenith in popularity around 1987, the scene began to rapidly deteriorate due to the rampant oversaturation of a myriad of faceless acts — Babylon A.D., Tora Tora, Southgang et al. Then, in 1991, a mangy trio from Seattle introduced a new word into the rock lexicon, one that to this day has every hair-metaller quivering in his or her snakeskin boots: Grunge.

"What kind of chick wants to go out with a fuckin’ dirty gas station attendant when they can go out with [guys who dress like] rock stars, like us? We’re good-looking, they’re not. Who gets laid? We do, they don’t," says Justin Sayne, guitarist for Cleveland glam-metal upstarts Shock Cinema.

"Who wants to go home with a sourpuss? He’s going to be a sourpuss in the sack," adds the band’s bassist, Corey Rotic.

Shock Cinema’s words, still loaded with resentment 10 years after the release of Nirvana’s glam-ending Nevermind, demonstrate that the hairsprayed legions have never quite come to terms with the Doc-Martens-to-the-ass that grunge supplied them, kicking them from the spotlight and making them second to perhaps only Paul Reubens as the greatest guffaw-getter of the ’90s.

"Essentially, what had happened is that throughout the late 1980s, [hair metal] was the most populist music there was," Klosterman says. "At one point, of the top 10 records in America, seven or eight were metal records, but it was really critically unpopular; there was no interest in it from rock writers. So when a band like Nirvana came out, and the groups that followed, it was very easy then for the critics to immediately bury all these bands they didn’t like, and I think a lot of the fans felt like the music was just kind of ripped away from them. They were sort of made to feel like they were very uncool for liking Warrant."

"You always hear people say, ‘Oh, that is so ’80s, you’re so ’80s.’ Back in the ’80s, did you ever hear anybody say, ‘Oh, you’re so ’70s?’ In the year 2000, are they saying, ‘Oh my god, you’re so ’90s?’" wonders local axeslinger Billy Morris, who, in addition to owning the Revolution rock club and playing guitar in the long-running Kidd Wicked, now also serves as guitarist in Warrant. "That is the only decade that got stigmatized. I guess the ’80s metal bands like Warrant, Skid Row, all those bands brought it on themselves for having long beautiful hair and shaking it around onstage. It’s just unfashionable to write a song about cherry pie, have a good-looking girl in your video and five good-lookin’ guys having a party, but isn’t that what’s fun?"

Totally, dude, but at the beginning of the ’90s, fun became as taboo in rock as modesty was the decade before. It wasn’t as if hair-metallers suffered from an unprecedented form of pop-cultural persecution — after all, disco was arguably much more maligned by the end of the ’70s, as evidenced by events such as the infamous "Disco Demolition Night" in Chicago, where thousands of disco records were destroyed at a White Sox game — but they did become as much the antithesis of cool as the Sahara. The new big sellers were artists seemingly more put off by fame than enamored with it: the perpetually depressed Trent Reznor, the moody Billy Corgan, the aloof Eddie Vedder. Rockers were no longer allowed to smile, and those that did were sent packing.

"The record companies started dropping bands left and right, the Britny Foxes, the Tuffs, the Pretty Boy Floyds, they didn’t even give these kids a chance. Belkin dropped them, Agora dropped them, nobody wanted to do the hairspray bands," Karczewski says. "I took the shot, because back in the ’80s, nobody would give me those bands, none of the national agencies would give them to me. Now comes ’88, ’89, ’90, and all of a sudden, the big guys didn’t want them anymore. So I started taking all the hairspray bands, and booked them everywhere. Basically, what I got were bands that would normally play Gund Arena playing the small clubs in Cleveland. As the period went on, the music survived in this town, whereas it didn’t survive in other towns. We kept the hairspray bands alive."

Aqua Net sends their thanks. Indeed, the 250-plus rockers that pack the nearly sold-out Revolution to see 1988 on a recent Saturday is enough to have that company’s shareholders breaking out the bubbly. "Gonna start a fire," singer Al Paris wails. Whatever, dude, just keep it away from the hair, lest this place go up like Chicago in 1871. All these lionlike manes coupled with yards of zebra-skinned spandex are like a safari in the jungles of proud immoderation.

"The whole alternative thing was all very ugly," Belanger says without a whiff of irony. "It wasn’t glamorous. Pam Anderson wasn’t making videotapes with anyone from Smashing Pumpkins. The same goes today. When Tommy Lee and Heather Locklear broke up, she didn’t go off with one of these new guys, she went of with another ’80s guy, a Bon Jovi dude."

Indeed, there is no shortage of ample-bosomed, platinum-haired chicks at the show who fawn over the rippled pecs of the shirtless Belanger.

"When you come to see a Warrant show, good-looking girls are all in front of the stage. Guys get to come out and look at those girls, rip-roarin’ guitars, it’s good times!" says club owner Morris, who seemingly wears a perpetual smile.

"I don’t care if people call me ’80s. I’m touring the country on a 40-foot tour bus, playing all the big amphitheaters across America. I have three guitars. I’m endorsed by guitar companies. I have a guitar tech. I’m happy. All these metal guys and grunge guys can call me ‘glam boy,’ ‘hairspray boy,’ whatever you want to call me, but you guys got your job to go to, shovel your garbage, and I’ll be onstage. Yeah!"

And if Morris, Belanger and the boys in Shock Cinema seemingly talk much more about the trappings of glam metal than the actual music itself, it’s for good reason. It’s not that the music is ancillary or terminally awful — Shout at the Devil rules, admit it, admit it — but it’s certainly secondary. Kind of like hip-hop, glam metal is a culture — of which the music is but one aspect — as much as it is an art form. It’s deliberately flamboyant, excessive, and as far removed from everyday living as possible. It’s meant to enable its fans and practitioners to ride on Mötley Crue’s proverbial "wild side" and live vicariously through party-hardy idols, who are, in reality, little more than Max Factored conduits to a fantastical state of being. It’s a lifestyle. And it’s a simple one.

"The lifestyle is basically just going out with your friends, drinking, getting into the music, trying to pick up chicks, trying to get laid and just not getting attached, not settling down," Belanger says.

"We eat, breathe and sleep fun," Rotic says.

"Our goal is to be, like, rock stars," singer Shane Vain adds. "Rich and famous rock stars."