ANYONE WHO SPENT a night dancing under the bordello red lights at the late Storyville would agree the club was totally conducive to getting your freak on. It was the perfect hookup spot for cats with good hair and wireless communication devices: guys flossed Billabong shirts, females got jiggy in spike heels, and everyone could spit the words to Jay-Z's "La La La (Excuse Me Again)" or whatever joint was bumping in the background. But the vibe was different for those who arrived solo, as I did, toting a copy of Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers. Like Genet's narrator, I was a lone voyeur – only I was the girl shaking her hips in too-tight pants, thinking Tevin Campbell and Color Me Badd were still cool.

Which didn't matter much, since 75 Degrees draw the kind of crowd where anything goes. They'd touted this show as their "Hot Tub" performance, which sounds like the kind of party where truth or dare and a keg of Sierra Nevada are served up as the main course. Foreign Legion's Marc Stretch kicked it off with his assistant Maurice – who offered a 50 Cent car air freshener to the first person who could show him a BART ticket, and passes to Centerfolds for anyone with a California ID that proved she was born before 1991. While the hot-tub theme wasn't particularly original, it seemed to confirm a bit of gossip that's circulating through the Bay Area underground – that 75 Degrees frontperson Rick Bond, MC Stretch, and DJ Malachi are actually fraternity dudes trapped in the bodies of hip-hop dudes. (Hot-tubbing isn't the sole territory of frat boys, but a Friday-night dip at the Playa Chateau in Tahoe definitely comes to mind.)

Still, there's nothing but love here. Malachi won many a cold, writerly heart with his mix tape, The Love Love Movement. You have to appreciate the DJ's signature tongue cut, when he scratches records with that fleshy muscle – a move that's more brazen than Pam the Funkstress's chest cut, but that's part of Malachi's charm. And no earthly delight quite compares to the pleasure of watching Stretch rap on "Happy Drunk" with Prozac, his Foreign Legion cohort. With a little stretch of the imagination, Bond might be a lothario plucked from the world of Genet: staid for an MC but also cocksure, with his derby tilted rakishly to one side.

That night 75 Degrees also performed the most tender, rhapsodic number I've ever seen at an underground hip-hop show. "Fly Away" would have been your typical woman-done-me-wrong song save for two extraordinary features. The first was Stretch. If you've ever seen Stretch – who is built like a linebacker – and can imagine him delivering a woman-done-me-wrong rap, you'll want to root for him. The second was Big C – 75's version of the Neptunes' Pharrell Williams – who stole the spotlight from Stretch when, after the last chorus of "Fly Away," he sung the contralto part from Snoop Dogg's "Beautiful," which is arguably the finest faux sensitive-guy turn in mainstream rap.

As a live band, 75 Degrees can be compared to Crown City Rockers, another group I've alternately applauded and dissed. While Crown City experiment with airy '70s jazz sounds, à la Miles Davis's Filles de Kilimanjaro, 75 hold it down with high-voltage bass and drums. It's like the difference between a T-bone steak and Buffalo wings: 75 are just plain crustier and funkier. That night the band showed off their musical chops on "I Got Your Album and I Took It Back," which, according to Big C, is about the black man putting the white man's shit back on the shelf. Bass player Freddy Funk brought the house down with his solo, during which he manhandled the bass the way Jimmy Page would a guitar.