Travis Haley – aka ex-Steel Panther bassist Lexxi Foxx – recently formed a new band, Hollywood Gods N' Monsters.
Consisting of Haley, Diggity Dave (known for his appearances in MTV's Pimp My Ride and Battleground Earth), rapper HYPE, vocalist Kris “7even” Aragon, guitarist Brian Jennings and drummer Danny Parker, the band – who call themselves "the biggest smash-up band in the world" – made their live debut last Friday, December 10, at Boondocks in Scottsdale, Arizona.
You can get a glimpse of what the band mean by "smash-up" with a look at some of the fan-filmed footage of their live debut below.
Gathering material from, as Diggity Dave puts it, "a bigass American jukebox, where all the records in it have melted together," the band create medleys of a wide variety of classic hits from the worlds of rock, pop and hip-hop.
“We are not a cover band,” Diggity Dave explains further. “This is original stuff we're creating, and it's a living, breathing history of music. We equate it to what DJs are doing, but in the form of a full band smashing together the songs every generation has grown up with."
Doing away with the the more typical two-songs-combined mash-up style, the group spins as many as six or seven well-known songs – by Chic, Queen, Aerosmith, the Sugarhill Gang, Blondie and DMX, in one example – into a tightly-executed arrangement.
“That's why the DJ scene has conquered music – because people want to go to a show and identify and recognize the songs they're ingesting," Diggity Dave says. "They just want to be enveloped in the music they know, their friends know, and hell, even their parents know.”
For their part, Haley's former band, Steel Panther, are still searching for his permanent replacement.
Earlier this month, Steel Panther announced that – via a March Madness-style bracket – they would enlist the help of their fans to determine the 10 final candidates for the role of bass guitar player, with the band making the ultimate pick from the final group of 10.