Farrell: Silicone Sister doesn’t care about your mermaids

Above Bomboras Grille on Hilton Head Island is The Art Cafe. It’s a paint-your-own-pottery studio where the walls are lined with dishes, mugs and cookie jars of happy creatures, all stark white and waiting for some color.

Naked pitchers hang three from a peg. Tables are covered with tiles, plaques and knickknacks that await a personal touch.

The situation is precarious, to say the least, and as the members of Silicone Sister put on their nylons, their leggings, their wigs and their makeup March 13 before their post-St. Patrick’s Day parade concert, a scene of mayhem entered my mind.

This was worse than four bulls in a china shop.

It was four local hair band glammed-out cover rockers in a suburban kitsch shop where Christmas gifts get made for aunts.

One false move or enthusiastic air guitar solo, and there’d be an earthquake. We’d be surrounded by a sea of shards. We’d be up to our ankles in lost crafts.

While the band wrapped their necks in dog chains and shimmied into snakeskin leggings and tiny patent leather shorts, I lost myself in the surreality.

If this were a music video, it would start with four men from Bluffton and Hilton Head in trucker caps and T-shirts, three of them dads, checking out the pottery wares with false interest.

Then there’d be a short guitar intro.

And poof. They’d be transformed. Their hair would go long and wild. Leopard print would appear here and there. Eyelids would be smeared with blue powder.

Drumsticks would drop from the sky and into Chip Larkby’s hands. Guitars would wrap their straps around the bodies of Jevon Daly, Andy Pitts and Gary Pratt.

And then it would start.

“Welcome to the jungle we got fun and games

We got everything you want honey, we know the names”

Rabbit statues would come to life and head bang along with puppies and kittens who couldn’t contain themselves.

Princesses would apply Wet N Wild lipstick and spray out their suddenly uncrowned and permed hair.

The ratty wig would pop off Daly’s head and walk itself over to sip from a chalice that’s suddenly filled with Budweiser. Then it would quickly sneak back to his skull before he ever noticed it was gone.

This didn’t happen, obviously.

But I did watch four young-side-of-middle-age men go from “just guys” to rude, sexually charged head-bangers in 15 fast and well-practiced minutes.

And not a single unpainted starfish tchotchke was broken.

Silicone Sister has been playing together for 12 years. They all have other gigs too, performing solo or in bands familiar to the Hilton Head and Bluffton music scenes, such as Lowcountry Boil, Jojo Squirrell and the Home Pickles, Unicorn Meat and La Bodega.

But it’s their Silicone Sister performances that let them get loose — that allow them to indulge their teenage dreams of being in Warrant or Poison or Whitesnake. That allow them to become something else altogether, specifically Taime Downz, Jani St. James, Billy Cummings and Robb Foxxx, the band’s alter egos.

After everyone in the band was dressed and diving into their makeup bags, Pitts — Bobby C. — realized his lipstick had been left downstairs on the stage under the PA system.

Bomboras waitress Nicole Miller offered to get it for them.

“No,” said Daly, whose switch to Taime Downz was apparent in his tone. He didn’t want her touching their equipment.

“Insult much?” she said.

“Have you ever seen a Silicone Sister show?” he asked her, sounding like Daly again.

“I’ve seen you guys.”

“Well, I don’t remember you,” and again he was Downz.

Fans know to come to Silicone shows with thick skins, but Daly said the band has been banned from some local restaurants — only to be asked back — and is considered too racy for the Hilton Head Island St. Patrick’s Day parade, which they were only asked to play in once.

“We didn’t do anything vulgar,” Daly said of their single performance.

Pitts laughed at the lie.

“We’re some of the best insulting people,” Daly continued. “People will ask us ‘Hey it’s my brother’s birthday. Make fun of him.’ ”

During the show, fans who jump on stage had better be prepared to have the cigarettes ripped from their hands, beer poured on them or maybe even have the phone they are texting from snatched and dropped.

And don’t think of making requests.

“We’re probably going to play every song you want to hear anyway,” Pratt said.

The music they play, songs like “Hot for Teacher” and “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” are pure nostalgia for fans and are reminiscent of when music became a passion for Pitts and Daly, who grew up on Hilton Head.

“Van Halen, ‘Appetite for Destruction,’ ‘Welcome to the Jungle,’ you cannot erase those memories,” Daly said.

“As soon as I heard Eddie Van Halen,” Pitts said, “that was it.”

As adults they set out to study the music note for note.

“Before that, I could fake it really good,” Pitts said.

Before the show, Pitts and Larkby bounced around to work out the jitters.

“I always am nervous,” Pitts said. “A few songs in, though, and I’ll be OK.”

Daly said he doesn’t get butterflies in his stomach.

“I don’t know what it is,” he said as he waited for their entrance. Then a painted sign in the studio caught his eye.

“ ‘Always be yourself unless you can be a mermaid,’ ” he read out loud. “Ugh. Vomit.”

This story was originally published March 18, 2016 at 5:32 PM with the headline "Farrell: Silicone Sister doesn’t care about your mermaids."