Mötley Crüe
Talking to Nikki Sixx backstage at the
Moscow Music Peace festival, in August 1989, a self-styled
'anti-abuse' festival set up by their then manager Doc McGhee
as part of his court-induced punishment for being convicted of
importing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of drugs into
the US some years before, I couldn't help but remark how
strange it was to find them - Mötley Crüe, the
reigning kings of bad boy rock - giving out advice to fans
about the dangers of drug and alcohol abuse. How, not so long
ago, nobody would have predicted they would one day be in such
a position. Unless as some sort of sick joke, of course.
Nikki smiled and showed his fangs.
“Dude,” he said, “that's been the story of
Mötley Crüe right from the start. Nobody predicted
anything for this band. They just waited for us to crash and
burn.”
And it's true. For if ever there was a
band for which no-one saw any future at all, it was Mötley
Crüe. Unlike Guns N' Roses, say, or even Metallica - the
ones who eventually spearheaded the next-generation of
metal-rock bands that came in their wake - the story of
Mötley Crüe was not something anyone, not even the
band, could have foreseen. Unlike GN'R and those that followed,
there was no existing rock scene for Mötley to kick
against when they started back in 1981, only a miasma of
half-assed punk bands that barely filled the clubs of LA and an
FM radio scene swamped by power-ballad warbling dad-types like
REO Speedwagon and Journey. Sure, AC/DC had just released Back
In Black, but they were Australian. And yes, over in the UK
there was the beginning of the sonorously titled New Wave Of
British Heavy Metal, but that was, well, British, dude. The
only all-American band out there in 1981 that even came close
to the excitement bassist Nikki Sixx - formerly of Sunset Strip
habitués London - and his near-twin, drummer Tommy Lee -
formerly of the gutter - envisaged for their nascent outfit
when they first began talking seriously about such a thing was
Van Halen. And even they were built on the mind-blowing
dexterity of the Van Halen bothers' playing skills and the
sheer balls-out bravado of their
crazy-as-a-loon-though-clearly-no-fool frontman.
What Nikki and Tommy were thinking about
had nothing to do with being able to reinvent the sound of the
guitar or doing acrobatic cartwheels across the stage. What
they wanted from their shows, Nikki said, was something
“more on a Broadway-type level, or old Tubes or Alice
Cooper stuff. I mean, after Kiss made 20-foot high flames eight
feet around, you can't top that with a little
smoke-bomb.”
As far as Nikki and Tommy were concerned,
rock had reached its peak in the 70s with acts like Alice
Cooper, the New York Dolls, Aerosmith and early-70s Brit
glam-rockers, Sweet. Their mission, they decided, before the
tape self-destructed, was to bring that kind of visceral thrill
back to popular music. To bring the sex and drugs back into
rock'n'roll, if you will. Or die trying. Something else they
would come dangerously close to succeeding at over the next few
years…
All they needed were a guitarist and
singer. Not necessarily guys who could sing and play really
well - LA was full of those sorts of dudes, oldsters over 25
who dreamed of being in Led Zeppelin - but young dudes that
looked the part. Enter by the backdoor guitarist Mick Mars and
vocalist Vince Neil, the latter as bright and as Californian
dumb-blonde as the former was pale-faced and from the Goth side
of the moon, or Newfoundland as it was sometimes known.
“I always wanted to get into theater and Broadway and
stuff,” Vince told one writer early on. “I want to
be rich too. One day I want to pull up in a nice big Cadillac
and hand my dad the keys.”
Starting out by opening for anyone stoopid
enough to let them at the Starwood, it was Mars that came up
with the name, an idea he'd been nursing since 1977, but it was
Nikki and Vince that threw the shapes that soon had the band
bumped-up to headliners, all backcombed hair, killer leathers,
stiletto heels and badly applied make-up, breaking house
records at the Troubadour, selling out the Country Club and the
Roxy, barnstorming all the places only major-label bands
usually did good in. As Nikki said, “These kids have
never seen something like this before. They weren't around ten
years ago when rock was a real extravagant visual
show.”
It took the release of their own
independently financed debut album, Too Fast for Love, to
finally bring the majors around, intrigued by the fact it had
sold 20,000 copies in LA alone by the time they'd heard of it.
Signed by Elektra in 1982, the re-released album - remixed by
former Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker - promptly jumped into
the US Hot 100 and within a year the name Mötley Crüe
was becoming known all over the world, primarily thanks to the
new medium of MTV, but particularly in the UK where a new
all-colour, all-rock magazine called Kerrang! put them on its
cover and rubbed their hands in glee as sales of the mag soared
in response.
From there the tawdry tale of Mötley
Crüe is a more familiar one. Google their discography and
their upward trajectory throughout the next decade is easily
traceable. Shout At The Devil in '83 - the sort of glorious mix
of glam, punk and metal contemporaries like Quiet Riot and
W.A.S.P. could only look on with drooling envy - took them into
the Top 20 for the first time; Theater Of Pain in '84 -
arguably the greatest album Ratt never made - slammed open the
doors to the Top 10; Girls, Girls, Girls, the first truly
non-derivative, almost all killer, nearly no-filler Mötley
album, went to No. 2 in '87; and Doctor Feelgood, in '89, still
their greatest album by far, and just possibly the kind of Bob
Rock-produced record Guns N' Roses should have made instead of
the laborious Use Your Illusion sets, finally gave them the
No.1 - along with four Top 40 hit singles - their
bad-to-the-bone reputation so thoroughly deserved.
So far, so fucking Crüe Rools, dude.
Behind the kick-ass façade though, trouble was brewing.
Not just chick trouble, either, bro, or the kind you run into
at a strip club, snorting coke in the john, but the real, in
your face, up to your ass kind of trouble. The kind you don't
go looking for, not even if you're Mötley Crüe.
First to feel the burn had been Vince, in
1984, who drunkenly drove his 1972 Pantera into oncoming
traffic on his way back from a liquor store in Redondo Beach,
killing his passenger, Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas 'Razzle'
Dingley, and seriously injuring the passengers of the car he'd
collided headlong with. Vince, the only one unhurt by the
accident, was charged with being DUI and vehicular
manslaughter. He could have been looking at 10 years in jail
but the band's lawyers somehow got his sentence reduced to 30
days in the slammer, where he eventually served just 18.
Apparently unrepentant, the band later released a box set
entitled Music To Crash Your Car To. Ha, yeah, dude, pretty
funny… not.
At the same time, Nikki was gradually
succumbing to a massive heroin habit that would culminate, in
1987, in a near-fatal overdose. Declared legally dead on the
way to the hospital, he was only saved after one conscientious
medic gave him two last-chance shots of adrenaline straight to
the heart, bringing him gasping back to life, Uma Thurman in
Pulp Fiction style. The band later made music out of that
episode, too, on the Dr Feelgood track and Top 20 single,
'Kickstart My Heart'.
But still, he carried on, often going
straight from the stage to his hotel suite where he would spend
all night hallucinating as he injected heroin and cocaine into
his arms, his neck, even his penis. Ouch!
“I feel like my skin is rotting off
me,” he wrote in his diary in November 1987. “I
smell like shit and my shit has more and more traces of blood
in it [and] I feel like I'm about to burst into tears at any
minute.”
“I was a party animal back then,
sure, but Sixx was out there,” said Tommy recently.
“He always wanted to try to mix up drugs to see how far
out there he could get. I'll never forget being in a hotel in
Canada with him. We ran out of blow and stayed up all night
shooting up Jack Daniel's. We were so fucked, we totally forgot
we could just drink it.”
Tommy and Mick, meanwhile, though managing
to steer clear of smack, were also heading south. For Mick, it
was vodka, a tall pint glass of which he would pretend was
water and drink straight down before, during and after the show
each night. For Tommy, it was a mixture of all of the above.
But mainly it was sex. Or love. Or young lust, or whatever the
hell you want to call it. Not just bitches and hoes either but
actual life-changing affairs. First with Melrose Place TV star
Heather Locklear, then when that got boring, Pamela Anderson,
then wowing the red-blooded male world in Baywatch.
When it all came to a disastrous head on
their ill-fated Japanese tour of 1988, where the lack of drugs
bent them so badly out of shape Vince nearly decapitated
himself smashing a giant-size jar of mayo into a mirror and
Nikki was arrested for throwing a bottle of Jack Daniels at the
head of a passenger on the Bullet Train, management finally
stepped in, convinced that if they didn't “some [of them]
would come back in body bags,” cancelling a planned UK
tour, giving the laughable threat of “snow on the
roof” of Wembley Arena as their excuse while back home in
LA they insisted the band check into rehab. Which, amazingly,
given their worsening attitudes at the time, they actually did.
(Which only shows how utterly fucked up they must have been.)
“There were nights,” admitted
Tommy, “where I went to bed saying 'I hope I wake up'.
The Girls, Girls, Girls tour of '87 and '88 was the most
dangerous time. That was strip club after strip club after
cocktail after cocktail after drug after drug. People were
taking handfuls of pills no matter what they were, you know?
'Who cares? Let's just get fucked up.' That was the scariest
time, all the other stuff leading up to it was just
practice.”
The fact that they came back with their
strongest album to date, Doctor Feelgood, might have been the
perfect end to the Mötley Crüe story, or the start of
a whole new, much more successful and together chapter, a la
post-rehab Aerosmith. Instead, as we now know, their problems
had only just begun.
Having ridden the crest of a wave with the
release of the still excellent Decade Of Decadence compilation
in 1991, it seemed like Mötley might be one of the few
'hair metal' bands to survive the ground-zero approach grunge
brought to rock. Four months after Decade had peaked at No.2,
however, Vince had walked out - or been pushed, depending on
whose druggy memory you believe - and things would never be
quite the same again.
There was no doubting the credentials of
Vince's replacement John Corabi, a singer-songwriter-guitarist
of some considerable talent, formerly of The Scream. But the
album he made with them - the ill-fittingly self-titled
Mötley Crüe, in 1994 - did everything except live up
to the band's name. Lyrically, Corabi tried to take things away
from traditional Crüe subjects like sex and drugs and into
more, well, grown-up areas, describing himself as “the
normal guy,” and Nikki as “the demented guy.”
But the resultant album only reached No. 7 and by Generation
Swine, in '97, Corabi himself had been replaced - by Vince. continue
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