If anyone ever invites you to an East Bay Rats party, cancel whatever plans you may already have and go. Seriously. SFist has never seen anything quite like what we saw Saturday night -- a three ring circus of awesomeness, including a ring of fire, a boxing ring, and the ring of music.

If you don't know the legend of the East Bay Rats Motorcycle Club, think of it as having an aesthetic somewhere between Mad Max and Edward Gorey. Rather than tricked-out Harleys with glitter paint, the Rats take pride in cobbling choppers together from as many different bikes as possible, and then spray paint them in flat black. It's part of the grand tradition of California car-modding artistry Tom Wolfe philosophized about. Little did he know that a generation after The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby they'd be installing a stripper pole into the roof of dented muscle car, with burlesque dancers riding atop it into a throng of people to the accompaniment of a marching band. You heard us right.

Pictured above are Inspector Double Negative and the Equal Positives rocking an entire warehouse. Pictures of bikers, strippers and chicks fighting after the jump.

You know you're at the right party when after paying a five-dollar cover you walk past a posted release of liability and a sign alerting you to the presence of potential carcinogens and teratogens, through a crowd of more than a thousand people, and in the center is a boxing ring where two beautiful women are about to beat the crap out of each other.



SFist would like to point out that there probably aren't a lot of things sexier than a chick in tight jeans and boxing gloves trading jabs with another chick in low-cut top and boxing gloves. We're pretty sure dudes are sexier when boxing, too, but that's not our area of expertise. You can judge for yourself below.




Horror of horrors, just as Therm was lighting up their Fire Art, 'Lil SFist ran out of batteries, and missed an opportunity to photograph the burlesque dancers ride in on their flat-black chariot complete with pole for dancing. But the dancers, both male and female and all scantily-clad, made it into the ring and put on quite the show, complete with synchronized dance steps and pom-poms. Are you sure you want to move to New York or LA?



The Extra Action Marching Band was really, really together. The drumline pounded out cadences ranging from James Brown's funk to Tito Puente's mambo. There is little in the world that SFist likes more than listening to a competent horn section floating it's melodic lines over staccato rhythms. The young woman dancing on the left -- she ended up fighting another woman who outweighed her by two classes and won. How hott is that?



Here are the pictures of said car. We're letting Jalopnik know that they can drop by and use any of these pictures. It's not every day you see something so obviously genius. Yes, we know that Outkast's Big Boi probably has three or four of these in his garage, but do his have quite the same level of post-industrial, creatively destructive styling? Probably not.




As you would expect, the boxing was violently cathartic and ambiguosly sexual. For all of you anti-hipsters, we're sure you would have enjoyed seeing all the kids with an ironic appreciation for Pabst Blue Ribbon stumbling around the ring, busting each other's lips and cracking each other's noses open. And for the pro-hipster Vice-magazine subscribers out there, we have your fantasy become reality -- four chicks fighting in the ring at once! One of them even got the piss knocked out of her. Really.

To tell you the truth, the event was a bunch of wholesome fun. We knew that the Rats had a great reputation for tolerant security, and heard at the party that a few of the members ride with the Oakland Police Department during the day. We s**t you not, every single pair of boxers hugged after their respective bouts. If SFist had kids, we would have taken them. Why not? SFist originally came along to support our friends in Inspector Double Negative and the Equal Positives, whose bassist Nando is a proud Rat, and they didn't disappoint, finishing the night with a lively show. We only had maybe three beers, but who needs to get drunk when you're having all this fun until four in the morning? We were plenty intoxicated, and it wasn't from the industrial chemicals -- purely the spectacle.