Bad Boys of Rock

He spent the day before getting loaded and shooting at his bandmates, just another Thursday night, another round of drinks, another battered department store for Mike Rodden.

The Hinder bassist and his bandmates have spent the past two years on the road, libidos as outsized as their record sales, pants around their ankles, leaving behind a sticky trail of blood, sweat and beers.

Rodden is a dude well-acquainted with his ID, a grown man who gets to live like a teen boy, that golden promise that makes guys like this want to become rock stars in the first place.

"After we left last night from the show, we all decided we were going to stop by Wal-Mart, there was like a $100 minimum, and we just went in there and ransacked the place," Rodden says from a tour stop in St. Louis, recalling a typical day in the life of this bunch. "We bought an arsenal of pellet guns and had a little war out in the parking lot, drunk as hell, we could barely walk. It was an interesting way to end the night."

Interesting. Dumb. Juvenile. Dumb. Fun. Dumb.

If you plucked the average longhair from his bar stool and made him a rock star, chances are the guy would kick the tires of celebrity a lot like these dudes have.

And you'd probably do the same.

It's not pretty, but at least the chicks are hot, right?

"One of my favorite changes so far is that the chicks are getting a lot hotter now," Rodden says, commenting on his band's success. "Once we started selling a lot of albums, they started getting really hot -- and pretty damn easy, too. So that was a good change."

Rodden sounds like a man who's thoroughly enjoying his newfound status in life, and that's a big reason why his band has sold well more than 2 million copies of its 2005 debut, "Extreme Behavior."

After the hair-metal boom of the '80s, when Aqua Net-abetted rockers weren't out for nuthin' but a good time -- and some penicillin, perhaps -- the popular rock landscape became populated with a lot of dour, stone-faced types, for better (Kurt Cobain, Eddie Vedder) and for worse (Scott Stapp, Aaron Lewis).

It's easy to mock the likes of Cinderella, L.A. Guns, Warrant, et al. for being disposable -- they certainly were. But the ensuing grunge bores (Candlebox) and milquetoast modern rock dullards (Staind) were just as lightweight, but at least the former bands got drunk, got the girl, had a good time and actually smiled every now and then.

Those dudes didn't take themselves too seriously -- and neither did anyone else.

That was the whole point.

"Most of the bands that have been out in the last 10 years have just been kind of boring to me," Rodden says. "There's nobody like there used to be where you'd see a guy passed out on the street with a bottle of Jack and two chicks around him, which tends to happen a lot out here with us. We take advantage of what we get to do, but we don't take it for granted. We drink a lot, which keeps us happy. We're still kind of in La-La Land."

On the surface, though, these guys don't seem like the most probable additions to the ranks of tongue-wagging rock 'n' roll wild men. Though the Oklahoma quintet currently is headlining the "Bad Boys of Rock Tour" with debauched, strip club urchins Papa Roach and Buckcherry, their debut is filled with moody, wet-eyed ballads like the breakout hit, "Lips of an Angel."

"I really miss your hair in my face, and the way your innocence tastes," frontman Austin Winkler sings earnestly, with batted eyelashes on "Better Than Me." "And I think you should know this, you deserve much better than me."

It's kind of hard to imagine something like that coming out of Vince Neil's mouth -- at least not without a belch.

Sure, Hinder's debut comes with the requisite ode to one-night stands with the kind of wayward women whose names they can't seem to remember, but when Winkler does sing about getting drunk and stoned, it's usually to get over some former flame who's left his heart in tatters.

Of course, with their good-lovin'-gone-bad conceits and well-worn modern rock trademarks -- mildly gritty, hound dog vocals, a polished guitar crunch that's occasionally gruff but never menacing, choruses that explode like a punctured keg -- the band has been a frequent target of critics, with popular music Web site the All Music Guide dubbing "Extreme Behavior" the worst album of 2005.

"We definitely pay attention to what the critics say," Rodden says. "If it's good, we're like, 'Killer.' If it's bad, we're like, 'Who gives a (expletive)?' Obviously we're doing something right, because people come to our shows and they like our music, so if some writer for a magazine just doesn't like us, it really doesn't affect us at all. Everybody can't like you, you know what I mean?"

Of course we do.