Welcome to The Sleaze Patrol Files, a collection of Motley Crue memorabilia from the 1980s to the early 1990s, their Decade of Decadence. This blog is also, in part, a tribute to the vibrant print culture of the times; established and fly-by-night Rock and Metal publications in the years immediately before the Internet would drastically change how entertainment is consumed and packaged.
This blog is mostly a tribute to the best years of one of the great American Hard Rock bands. It is here for the many new Crue fans around the globe who weren't around in those days to experience the Crue in their first and best incarnation . . . how they were reviled and adored by the media, how they rose to the top of the Hard Rock heap throughout the 1980s and were the archetype that so many lesser bands copied. My main Crue ‘collecting’ days ended when Vince Neil left the band in the early 1990s and that is the scope of this blog. But, as the Crue are still somehow together (as I write) and are even touring (they ceased in 2016) and are seemingly always in the news, I will be commenting on the present Motley universe at times as well.
This is not so much a collection and I was not and am not a collector as it has become today with fans spending thousands of dollars at a time to get band memorabilia . . . I was just a big fan of Motley’s music and lived in an area where not a lot of Motley stuff was going to find its way . . . but the band was so popular and present in those days that there was still much to be had for someone who was looking for it. My youth and lack of money meant I had to make due with mostly magazines and posters and T-shirts and certainly vintage magazine content is the meat of this blog . . . as well as the most interesting aspect to me. The music industry has changed in many surprising ways since the Crue ruled the 1980s and there are elements of the media of those days that almost seem to have more in common with the world of the 1950s-60s than it does with our present time. Ephemera such as Rock mirrors from carnivals, pins or stickers from bags of chips are almost artifacts compared to the present-day move towards digital.
But more importantly . . . this stuff is here to enjoy, for the Crue fans old and new, the real shit from the dirty ‘80s and early 1990s. These pinups and posters were hung up in school lockers, bedrooms and garages (I got stuff from everywhere) and are older than many of the Crue’s new fans! And some of this stuff is pretty beat up:
!!!!THIS IS NOT A FANBOY SITE!!!!
Motley Crue have many faults as people and as a band, or at least that’s what they’ve been telling us for the past 30 years, and I will say unflattering things about them when it’s appropriate and when it is tied into my reminiscences of the band and what it was like to be a Cruehead in the 1980s. The Crue don’t need tasteless drones saying ‘Motley Crue Rules!!’ all the time and never telling shit like it is. The only way for the Crue to live on in people’s minds is if the crap is separated from the good. When it comes down to it the main reason anybody should even give a shit about this band is because of how great they were from 1981-1991. And they were great. They’re not Rolling Stones, Beatles or Led Zepplin great, but Motley is a classic, important and perfect-in-their-own way band much like T. Rex or the Misfits and should be more frequently discussed in those terms despite even their own selling-short of their brand and legacy. So this blog is a thank you and a fuck you to my Rock n’ Roll heroes.
Before the VH1 Behind The Music, their best-selling autobiography The Dirt, and their branding as THE most hedonistic Rock band in the land they were a true Rock n' Roll phenomenon. Much that has been said about the band in the last 20 years had already been been revealed and mythologized by a vital Hard Rock and Metal community of fans and critic-journalists of the day. So let’s go back to those days, thirty years and more ago now, when the Motleys tore through the landscape and established themselves as the Kings of Sleaze Rock n' Roll!!
***All articles and images are from my 1980s-‘90s teenage Motley Crue collection unless otherwise stated. Images are scanned or are my photographs and some video has been converted from my private VHS collection. ***
***If the articles still do not blow up to a size that makes the print easy to read, remember to use your computer’s own zoom options***
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