Corporate Whore Groupies

The ABC show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has returned to our sleepy metropolis. You remember, they were here once before and called upon the talents of local artist Stretch to build a sculpture for the home of fireman Steven Johnson. Well, this time, it was no sculptor they enlisted to add color to the proceedings but rather local glam-punk band the Rich Boys.

Actually, it was the construction company, owned by the father of Rich Boys guitarist Carl Redcorn, who booked the band to play. The targeted house, a 900-square-foot shack in the Northland near North Chouteau Tfwy., was being demolished to be “made over” as a 5,000-square-foot dream home by soul-patched he-man Ty Pennington and crew.

The original plan was to have the Boys play on the wreckage of the old house, but when clubs editor and Heartbeat City columnist Megan Metzger (who, for the record, was the one who’d heard about this) arrived at a quarter to nine last night, the band was set up in the back of a giant flatbed truck, floodlights all around, near the site of the new home.

The scene was very building-site, with enormous trucks roaring around and scads of construction workers and TV people in matching blue shirts and white hard hats standing around to watch the band. Despite a staticky mic cord and the fact that they were contained, like zoo animals, in an aluminum cage six feet off the ground, the Rich Boys wailed through about 40 minutes of crunchy, sassy rock and roll. They chewed up and spit out anthems like “I Gotta Go” and “I Wanna Be Your Man.” The lyrics to the show-closer, “Corporate Whore,” were fortuitously inaudible in the wind: Look so fake/Look so good/Corporate whore, I couldn’t ask for more.

No celebrities were sighted, but it was a fun — and surreal — show. That’s too bad, because I would’ve totally groupied out if Ty’s old Trading Spaces pal Paige Davis had been there — corporate whore, I couldn’t ask for more. Indeed.