21st century Crue fans are so lucky! At this moment I can go to any number of webpages & get a Crue fix. I can reach for four autobiographies on my bookshelf & read about the band at a depth that I wouldn’t have dreamt of in 1988 (I actually only own The Dirt but happen to have Nikki’s & Vince’s bio’s on loan. Tommyland will have to wait.). It really wasn’t until the ‘90s when things started getting surreal for Rock fans. Ozzy’s TV show with his family . . . I mean the idea of having that kind of candid access into his life was far more of a novelty than it may seem today. What I mean is that despite Motley & Ozzy & Metallica selling millions of records they were still rarely seen on prime-time TV & were mostly relegated in the press to genre mags, only making it into mainstream press whenever they did something outrageous or married famous actresses. I would say in the case of Motley, less info was a lot more. There’s almost nothing left to tell . . . & a lot of it was already told & retold in the ‘80s & early ‘90s.
So, 1988. A whole year of no Motley public activity. They crashed & burned in Japan & back home in December 1987. 1988 was to be a very important year for them. The decisions they made in 1988 lead them to have the biggest record of their career & allow them to finish their decade of decadence on a high note. As soon as they got their shit together they started pre-production in L. A. & didn’t get up to Canada to record with Bob Rock until the next year. The near silence made the writers at Blast!, Hit Parader & other magazines speculate on the success of the band & give us some of that celebrated legend which has come to overshadow the fact that they wrote some of the best songs of their generation. The second Hit Parader article by Ernie ‘Spuds’ MacKenzie has Nikki talking about rehearsals & his fight with addiction. Set time machine controls to 1988!!
(click to enlarge & READ)
Stay tuned for Motley in the year 1989 & more lead-up articles to the release of Dr. Feelgood.
No comments:
Post a Comment