The soundtrack accompanying your wait under the '59 Cadillac woodie for your bartender's iced tea will be, if nothing else, a break from the norm.

Rock Star isn't a meet — yep, m-e-e-t — market, in that oppressive, it's-all-about-the-hookup-and- uh-what-was-your-name-again way. Nobody seems particularly aggressive with the mack. No one's behavior really gets out of hand, if our observations hold true.

Still, there are odd kicks, like the one provided by a trio of club girls — one in a white babydoll dress that gave her posterior only slightly less exposure than Angelina and Brad's Ethiopian adoption trip — who made continuous loops around the Hard Rock interior. They'd occasionally stop to grind on each other or scream loudly across the room. Guys across the room occasionally whooped back.

Oddly, this went on for a couple of hours, long after the guys stopped whooping back.

Sorry. I've digressed.

With the muggy summer heat punctuated by cool trades, most Rock Star patrons opted for the Hard Rock's outdoor patio for conversation and a shorter bar line. Here, the talk was mostly about the opposite sex, Saturday and (in one elegantly moussed surfer dude's case) the supposed chemical makeup of Jagermeister.

Inside, a few booths were still available just before midnight, the pit around the woodie bar was teeming with casually dressed young bodies, and folks grooved wherever they stood instead of on the dance floor. Kids snapped cell-phone pics. A girl in a flowery sundress played with some hanging bead work. And we couldn't help but admire the fashion cojones of one guy in fuzzy white jacket, jeans, sneaks, gold chains and baseball cap. (So very Kanye of you, dude.)

A fiftysomething couple wandered in, circumnavigated the room once and left within five minutes. Must've been the Audioslave.

And on that musical note, I'll praise Rock Star's eclectic mix-CD soundtrack of multidimensional rock, reggae and pop — a welcome relief from clubland's usual, ubiquitous Top-40 hip-hop and R&B.

We entered to Steppenwolf's air-guitar classic "Born to be Wild" and exited to a deliciously funky remix of Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out." In-between it all came Pepper, AC/DC, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N' Roses and Run-D.M.C. Rock star, indeed.

If the dudes behind the turntables would've thrown on some LCD Soundsystem, White Stripes or System of a Down, I might have whooped across the room, too.