One of the longtime fixtures (and a weird and somewhat mysterious part of the club’s legend) in Bogart’s backstage production office was and continues to be the Heavy Metal Wheel of Sex, a wall-mounted roulette wheel adorned with a handful (heh, heh) of fairly standard sexual acts along with a broader and slightly horrifying spectrum of less desirable outcomes (including the dreaded “She Falls in Love with You” and “Crabs,” two of the more palatable possibilities), all of it based on the exploits of Metal groupies whose activities were on constant display after shows.
THMWOS shimmered into being during manager Dan Reed’s watch in the late ’80s. Although Reed attended the birth of the Wheel, his memories of the event are gauzy around the edges, like a soap-opera flashback.
“We took a drum head and wrote a bunch of stuff on it and drilled a hole in the middle and started spinning it, and that’s how it started,” Reed says. “I went back a few years ago; my father was in the hospital and we were close, so me and my son drove up there. We went up to the (Bogart’s) ticket window and I said to the girl, ‘My name’s Dan Reed, I worked here many years ago and I was wondering if someone could just let us walk through the club?’ A guy came to the door and let us in, and I said, ‘Thanks a lot, my name’s Dan Reed, I used to work here …’ and he said, ‘I know who you are … Heavy Metal Wheel of Sex, right?’ That’s right.”
Perhaps the most notorious incident surrounding the Heavy Metal Wheel of Sex happened in the ’90s when Folk singer/noted mopemeister Michelle Shocked took exception to the Wheel’s graphic descriptions. In response, an unnamed jokester added “Date with Michelle Shocked” into one of the slots. On a return visit, Shocked’s husband Bart Bull came to the production office to get paid, saw the now-even-more-offending-and-personal Wheel entry and tore the whole thing off the wall and threw it in the trash.
“So we made a new one,” longtime Bogart’s employee Aaron Gizara says. “That one had ‘A Date with Bart and Michelle Shocked.’ ”
“As they say, ‘He who has the microphone wins,’ ” Walter says “Well, he who has the Heavy Metal Wheel of Sex always wins.”
The next time the wheel was saved was when Clear Channel took over and mandated that non-essential ephemera be removed from the production office.
“The guy that hired me was in the office taking down all the (promotional band photos), and every one was signed and he was just throwing them in the trash,” Gizara says. “So I sifted through what didn’t make it to the dumpster and grabbed a handful of things. We had to keep the Heavy Metal Wheel of Sex. It’s been motorized.”
Although the Heavy Metal Wheel of Sex remains on the premises to this day, Reed was relatively quick to attribute its creation to the misguided folly of liquored-up youth and to gently disavow its place in a decent and sophisticated society, which is an absolutely appropriate response for a guy with kids. The fact remains that there is no way to underestimate the power of sex to activate the juvenalia sector of the male mind, and so The Wheel (and the bust) goes round and round.
This article appears in Jul 22-28, 2015.