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Expanding Its Power Base

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SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Powerman 5000 deals with the big themes. Intergalactic revolution. Colliding planets. Robots on parade. But the high-throttle rock band really knew its world was changing the moment it noticed another kind of alien in its midst: girls.

The quintet’s blend of industrial-strength guitars, sci-fi imagery and oceans of adrenaline had already earned Powerman 5000 a core male audience. Things began to change several weeks ago, right around the time the band’s new “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” album went platinum and its members became stars on MTV.

“Before, you were playing in front of 100 sweaty boneheaded guys beating the crap out of each other in the pit,” says Spider One, the band’s singer. “Now suddenly you’ve got a line of girls at the barricade screaming. That’s one element I never even thought of before. It wasn’t really a part of what we did. We weren’t trying to be Backstreet Boys or Sugar Ray or something.

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“Maybe that’s a good sign. That means you’re communicating on a bigger basis than just kicking each other . . . in the pit.”

Not that Spider didn’t always have big plans for Powerman 5000, which performs with Kid Rock at the Hollywood Palladium on Saturday and Sunday. Inspired in part by the larger-than-life examples of early David Bowie and KISS, Spider drew on his appetite for science fiction, horror, comic books and other pop culture extremes when creating the high concept for his band.

“I always joke about all this useless information that I’ve gathered up over the years is finally paying off,” Spider says with a laugh. “All those movies and whatnot that I grew up watching, and still do, those are the cool things that start the creative process, instead of just relying on your own everyday life to draw upon. To me that would be pretty boring.”

In this way, Spider, who says he’s in his late 20s, shares much in common with his older brother, horror rocker Rob Zombie, whose own music blends raw metal passages with the macabre and hot-rod culture. But it wasn’t what anyone might have expected from a couple of kids being raised near Boston by a father who labored in a factory and a mother who worked part time in a drugstore.

“It’s still a mystery to us,” says Spider, who now lives in Los Angeles with his wife. “Sometimes Rob and I will sit around and wonder: How did this happen? But they were very open to let us do what we wanted to do, and not in a liberal, hippie kind of parents way. But something inside told them we were not idiots and let us see whatever movies we wanted to. They let us do our thing and explore and find a bunch of cool [stuff] out there.”

Just as important to Spider was the do-it-yourself ethic of punk and hip-hop, which made it possible for someone without any musical training to contemplate life as a rocker. “A lot of kids love Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Beck and want to be guitar heroes,” Spider says. “For me it was more the idea that you could be in a band and not necessarily be a ‘musician.’ It was more about the energy and the vibe.”

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Still, “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” refines the band’s sound, retaining the high-decibel attack of 1997’s “Mega!! Kung Fu Radio” album, while bringing more of a melodic backbone to the material. Powerman 5000--which also includes guitarists Adam 12 and M.33, bassist Dorian 27 and drummer Al 3--found some source material in the hook-filled pop of the early-’80s new wave of Blondie and the Cars.

“I realized how cool a lot of that stuff was, and how great the songwriting was,” Spider says. “It’s real simple, but if you listen to the Cars’ first record, every song is incredibly catchy. I drew a lot of inspiration from that, and made me want to make a record that--and a lot of bands would hate to admit--was more accessible, and something that you could walk away singing along to.”

To that end, the band recorded a version of the Cars’ “Let the Good Times Roll” for the new album, stretching out the song to the band’s own metal extremes while remaining true to the classic pop hook. Powerman 5000 initially recorded the tune as a lark, without any intention of including it on the album, Spider says. But they liked the results.

Ironically, while preparing for the “Tonight the Stars Revolt!” sessions, the band considered former Cars leader Ric Ocasek as a possible album producer. “We knew he had done some production and we tried to contact him, and he wouldn’t return our phone calls,” Spider says with a laugh. “This is our way of getting back, destroying his song.”

BE THERE

Powerman 5000, with Kid Rock, Hollywood Palladium, 6215 Sunset Blvd., 7 p.m. Saturday sold out, Sunday, $27. (323) 962-7600.

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