Dr. Feelgood Era Part 3

 

I’m a little all over the place with some of these posts, apologies. For part three of the Feelgood era we’re going to back track a few months before the tour started & there was nothing but excited talk in the Crue camp & the Hard Rock media about Motley’s fifth album.

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It is really quite astounding how much hype was generated for this album. The Crue were really quite beloved in their own way & if history has proved anything, WERE the Kings of Sleaze Glam Metal Rock or whatever they were. Their continued success is a result of their ability to generate hype & to highlight their 1980s heyday, which, despite being outsold by others, was never as surely defined or as fondly remembered, it seems.  

A magazine called Hot Rockers took the opportunity to do a retrospective article on the boys & I distinctly remember picking up this issue on a family trip & nestling into the back seat of the family car & reading the rather long article. I seem to have lost the accompanying pin-ups which were pretty rad if I remember: one centerfold from their gnarly Too Fast ‘Satanic’ session (see B&W Vince pic above). Michelle Avello & Amy Kinder weren’t the best writers but that opening paragraph had me hooked (click to read).

This was one of my favourite Crue articles & I recommend you read the last page (if not the whole thing) to see how beloved the Crue were & how much they meant to their fans (in those days & even today). You do not get this kind of writing for bands like Poison or even Bon Jovi. Crue fans knew the difference & I’d have to say the excellence & early presence of the Crue’s first two albums especially is what made them a different beast than their later 1980s contemporaries.

Above is some random stuff, an incomplete Nikki interview from Hit Parader which almost waxes philosophical at the end; a Girls tour shot of Vince with a Dr. era quote & an interview with Tommy when he was up in Canada in September 1989. Tommy discusses Moscow, the new record & another mention of a Ballads record the Crue were talking about at that time but never saw the light of day (thank God).

To round out today’s post I got a bunch of pages I ripped out of a friend’s Kerrang! from late 1989. Kerrang! is a UK publication (beginning in the same year as Motley) & you can read more about it HERE (& it’s still in operation!). Above, we see a not-so-flattering Ross Halfin photo of Tommy from a classic photo session taken just before the band’s sound check at Wembley Arena on November 2nd, 1989.

Kerrang! must’ve been in a retrospective mood, detailing Rock & Metal events from years past. We get a great Motley shot & mention for the year 1981 & then a big shot of Nikki in Moscow for the year 1989.

Above is an ad for the new Crue single & also a listing of some of the Crue’s UK dates. Next, we get a mention & a photo of Matthew Trippe, the man who claimed to have impersonated Nikki Sixx after Nikki’s 1984 car crash apparently left him incapable of performing his Motley duties for several years. Take a look at the dude: sorry bud, but you just don’t look like the Sixxster. You can’t impersonate those genes.

In the above left-hand page we have a fan writing into Kerrang! to defend our Mr. Mars. I seem to remember reading somewhere that Mick & the band got some bad reviews from a UK journalist when they performed in Europe in late 1989, something to the effect that Mick proved you could be a mediocre musician & still be in a major Rock act . . . must’ve been having a bad night. Finally we have a page of quotations, one from Nikki & notice the aggressive one from Bon Jovi concerning our Mr. Lee. I’m assuming this was a result of the Moscow madness from earlier in the year. Kerrang! was also kind enough to furnish us with a pic from the 1984 Motley tour with Ozzy . . . one that has gone down in the annals of decadent Rock tours. As a kid I did not know what to make of such photos as these: Ozzy dressed up like a woman & the Motley’s pawing at him & gesturing to stick bottles in his orifices . . . ah, 1980s backstage fun!

More SP Files to come . . .

Dr. Feelgood Era Part 2: The Crue Circus Hits the Road, 1989 + SPF TV

 

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Circus Magazine kept on top of all things Motley in late 1989 as Dr. Feelgood was released and the stripped-down European performances began in October. Our lead-off article, prosaically-titled ‘A cleaned up Crue rock the road, but is it the same old situation?,’ (by Anne Raso) has Vince & Nikki commenting on the nature of fame & how difficult it is too keep a close relationship with the fans. Motley fans will need no introduction to the character of Matthew Trippe [I can’t remember if he was mentioned in The Dirt] but newbies might want to read the article & maybe refer to more info HERE [third paragraph in from the top]. Vince also tells an amazing story about an impersonator in Las Vegas. Nikki ends the article complaining about the L. A. music scene in the late 1980s after the major bands found success & a copycat culture sprang up.

The first thing I noticed about (another) Anne Raso article, ‘Dr. Feelgood pumps new life into Motley Crue,’ are the mistakes. She states that the Crue would be celebrating their 5th anniversary as a band in 1989. Nope, that’d actually be #8. Then she says that the Crue completed their Girls, Girls, Girls tour in October of 1988 when it was almost a year before in December of 1987. Vince is the only Crue man present & he gives a brief re-cap of the band’s gigs leading up to the Dr. tour, including their infamous set at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in Hollywood [featured in the ‘Kickstart My Heart’ video].

Motley perform KICKSTART MY HEART at the Whiskey A-Go-Go 1989

The next article by Tony Goldstein announces the Crue’s first #1 Billboard album & is a generic Nikki/Tommy interview about the clean lifestyle & the nature of the tunes on the new record.

Every once in a while you’d get a journalist who could actually write & Dan Hedges’ review of Motley’s December 1st, 1989 performance in Detroit is the one example of real writing in this whole post. His review is fair & he ends it with a summation of Motley’s career to this point & where it may all lead. Click on it to enlarge & read.

We’ll leave with some Sleaze Patrol Files TV. Here’s part one of Crue media stuff I taped from Canadian TV from 1989-1992ish. Stay tuned for more Files celebrating the Crue’s 30th Anniversary in 2011.

Crue Canadian Media 1989-1990 part one

Motley Magazine Miscellany #1

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After you’d shred up your 1980s magazines, taking out the Crue stuff and maybe trading or giving away articles and pics of other bands to buddies, you’d have all this leftover stuff. You might have a mention of Crue in a news section or a Crue pic in the magazine title page/table of contents like above. Some of this stuff was cut out and became scrapbook fodder but I kept a bunch of other pages that contained Crue content and they really show the band in the context of the magazine and hard rock scene of the ‘80s-early ’90s. 

 

Some more vintage magazine table of contents. That’s a pic of Nikki with Jon Bon Jovi in a chokehold, above, and at the top right a cool little pic of Nikki throwing a towel into the audience during a Girls, Girls, Girls performance in 1987. These are all from 1986-1992.

. . . a few news items about Motley’s onstage guests during the Dr. Feelgood tour & a visit to a Planet Hollywood . . . 

. . . the social and recreational Crue . . . 

. . . Metal Edge’s Gerri Miller asked rockers ‘What was the strangest gift you’ve ever received?’ and you have to check out the second image to read Nikki’s one word, hilarious answer . . .

. . . Here are two incomplete articles from Blast! Magazine devoted to fan letters about censorship be it from their parents or the PMRC. Nikki is mentioned in one of the letters & check out the Motley logo X’d out in the border graphics. The Crue were obviously prime targets for censorship in the 1980s . . . 

. . . Vince reminisces about school, Motley are discussed in ‘Hard Rock Heroes’ (with Shout era photo of Vince and Nikki) and a couple DOD era photos with mention of the work on the 6th studio album that never saw the light of day . . . 

. . . ‘Looks That Kill’ is voted third best song in some magazine’s poll and Shout At the Devil is voted 25th in a Circus poll of most important or best Hard Rock/Metal albums . . .  

More Motley Magazine Miscellany to come at the Sleaze Patrol Files . . .