On November 5, 2021, Nita Strauss was in Las Vegas for a very special performance. The Los Angeles-born guitarist, who made her name in Alice Cooper’s band, had been booked to play World Boxing Organization (WBO) super featherweight world champion Mikaela Mayer to the ring for her title unification fight against IBF champion Maiva Hamadouche.
“I know that Mikaela-walking-on-stage face, and I can’t wait to see it up close in person again,” Strauss said in a press release promoting the fight at The Theater at Virgin Hotels Las Vegas. “It’s going to be a great, great feeling to look across a stage at her again.”
On the surface, this may have read like a stock quote talking up a corporate booking, but that wasn’t the case at all. Strauss first met Mayer in 2003, when the future world boxing champion was just 12-and-a-half. A fan of Black Sabbath, Tool and System of Down, Mayer had been playing bass in her bedroom for over a year and was seeking to join a band : Strauss, fellow guitarist Tina St. Claire, and drummer Kirsten Schluter had three-quarters of a group, but no bassist.
“They said: ‘We need a bass player, can you meet us at the mall?’,” Mayer told The Guardian‘s legendary boxing writer Donald McRae in 2022. “I was beyond my years and I looked the part in my black top with light brown hair and black tips and all my piercings. Even though they were older than me, they were like: ‘Okay, this girl likes our kind of music…'”
Mayer was in, and Lia-Fail, LA’s newest metal band, was born.
The quartet played their first show at the legendary Whisky A Go-Go in. Hollywood in September 2003. The following summer they embarked upon their first tour, with Mayer’s dad Mark acting as tour manager and unofficial chaperone for the teenagers. And then in 2005, the group entered a Battle Of The Bands contest in LA with a unique opportunity for the winning act.
“The prize was to play four or five shows on the Warped Tour,” Nita Strauss told Metal Hammer earlier this year. “So, in our infinite wisdom, we thought, ‘Well, we’re already borrowing a van and trailer – we should go on and do our own tour.’
So they did: 15 show across 13 states.
“It was rough,” Strauss recalled. “We made no money, we were hungry and thirsty and tired. Two of the girls were old enough to drive, so they took turns while the other two of us navigated. We had no crew members, it was just four girls slugging it out on the road. We were eating food from gas stations, cramming into hotel rooms, outrunning tornados…”
The headliners on 2005’s Warped Tour were Avenged Sevenfold, Fall Out Boy, Dropkick Murphy’s, and My Chemical Romance. Lia-Fail played one of the small side stages, as did an emerging emo-punk called Paramore.
“It was difficult,” Strauss recalled, “but it’s still the most fun experience I’ve ever had.”
“It takes a lot of balls for a group of kids, girls no less, to roll into a new town with people you’ve never met and go give the performance of your life, hungry and cold and tired every night, to people you’ve never seen before and are never going to see again,” Strauss told ESPN.
The tour would be the high point of Lia-Fail’s career: following their second US tour, Mayer quit… and went off the rails.
“One of my horrible first boyfriends was giving me problems about being away,” she explained to The Guardian, “such a stupid teenage thing. I broke up with him shortly after that, thank God. Then I had my party phase. From about 15½ to 17 I put my dad through hell, wouldn’t come home for weeks at a time… I was rebellious, like: ‘I’m going to my boyfriend’s house to hang out, smoke pot, do whatever I want.’ I got kicked out of my original high school and ended up in a school where all the bad kids go. That’s when I found boxing and had this epiphany: ‘I don’t want to continue on this pointless path. I want to be successful, I want to be good at something’,”
And she was. Mayer won a bronze medal at the 2012 World Championships and fought for the US at the 2016 Olympics. The following year she turned professional, and on Halloween night three years later, she became the WBO female super-featherweight world champion. Last year, she was was named Sports Illustrated‘s Female Fighter of the Year.
Not a bad second life for a failed rock star.
Tonight, August 29, WBA and WBC super welterweight world champion Mayer will fight Britain’s WBO super welterweight world champion Chantelle Cameron over 10 rounds in Birmingham, with all three world titles going to the winner. No prizes for guessing who Nita Strauss will be cheering on.
“This girl and I have been through the fire and in the trenches of DIY touring together,” Strauss said of her former bandmate in 2018. “I’m proud as hell of her continuing to kick ass!”
