Motley Drawings-Part 1-Allister Fiend

 

Here’s a bunch of drawings done by various school friends from back in the day. Allister Fiend was a character invented by Nikki that was used as kind of a band mascot for a lot of Motley merchandise. He featured prominently on t-shirts, posters and almost made it to the cover of the Dr. Feelgood record. He was also credited in the Shout At the Devil liner notes for the ‘In the Beginning’ narration (although it was actually done by engineer Geoff Workman). Having talented friends meant I‘d get great, original Motley art for my walls.

(pc users, click images to enlarge)

. . . the last time anyone saw Mr. Fiend was during the Dr. Feelgood days, almost thirty years ago . . .

 

Nikki Sixx Part 5, 1987

 

We’ve got a candid Nikki article from 1987 in today’s post. Gary Graff from Faces Magazine has a brief chat with Mr. Crue as he lounges on a hotel bed strewn with porn mags and empty liquor bottles . . . a phone rings . . . 

 

Motley Magazine Covers II

 

Motley Back Patches

 

Wearing your Crue colors in school & public was part & parcel of being a 1980s Cruehead. A jean jacket with a back patch & pins on the front was the style of choice for me & my friends. Musical taste was war in school.

Whoever it was traded me the below back patch of the Girls, Girls, Girls album cover obviously had a problem with Nikki! (click image to ENLARGE)

As the Crue’s fame increased & they became a household name they also became susceptible to the attention of bootleggers & the black market. Besides the traveling summer carnivals I remember getting Crue stuff from vendors who would set-up at the local mall for a week or so. This was good & bad: Crue shirts & pins & other swag were hard to come by & could be pricey & these knock-off items were often affordable. Unfortunately, they were sometimes of noticeable poor quality:

You were more likely to see guys decked out in full-on metal Crue gear back in the Shout At the Devil days as the group had a more militant & powerful image in the years 1983-1984. The below back patch has photos from the Crue’s 1984 European tour. We’ll leave you with some very rare footage of the band performing in Germany & Sweden on the Monsters of Rock tour in September 1984 with a brief interview with Tommy & Nikki. Crue T-Shirts & Flags coming up at the Sleaze Patrol files!!!

Vintage Motley Posters #1

 

The days when you could walk into a record shop or even a retail store & purchase a variety of Motley posters are gone . . . but the evidence of those days remains. Full-length posters were one of the coolest collectibles to have & they made great wallpaper.

 

The above Dr. Feelgood poster portrays 1980s Crue mascot Allister Fiend as the title physician about to ‘operate’ on an unwilling patient (click on the image to enlarge & check out the scared-as-shit-face in the mirror). This was quite likely supposed to be the album’s artwork but someone, sensibly, probably saw it as a little too cartoonish & they ended up going with the far more iconic ‘evil’ medical staff (the Rod of  Asclepius). My memory is of winning this at a Bill Lynch Carnival booth in about 1990. For 50 cents to a dollar, all you had to do was throw a dart & hit one of the several posters they had displayed & you won yourself a shiny new rock poster.   

Above is a poster from the Shout At the Devil era that came with the rare ‘Helter Skelter’ picture disc released in 1985. I never owned the disc but I got the poster from a girlfriend . . . who got it from an old boyfriend . . .

Above are two rare posters from the 1983-1985 era. The red Shout poster shows the boys on the set of the ‘Looks That Kill’ video & the Theatre poster is from an almost aggressively glammed-out session in an early promo shoot for the record. Goodbye leather, hello polka dots.

Much more vintage Motley posters to come at the Sleaze Patrol Files!!!!

Vintage Crue, 1983-1986

 

I didn’t really start collecting Crue until about 1987 so I don’t have much from the years 1981-1986 & what I do have I mostly got from older kids who were getting rid of their Crue stuff. 

Motley spoke to kids who came from the overly safe & banal lower & middle classes of the Western world. For those of us not hip enough to hear or ‘get’ the music & message of bands like the Dead Kennedys or The Clash, Crue were the pop alternative. 

Shout At the Devil especially caught the ear & imagination of many kids & teens & young adults in 1983-4. Shout is almost a ‘concept’ record with its recurrent themes of sex & violence & empowerment. A song like ‘Bastard’ is so aggressive & violent that it reads like pure bloodlust & in no way conforms to a ‘Hair Metal’ formula. Shout is really a pop-punk-metal record & has nothing  to do with anything a Poison or Winger have produced.

Theatre of Pain is not the record Shout at the Devil is, it has almost none of its aggression & is less focused. Despite this & despite Nikki’s claim that it is a polished turd I think it’s a great hard rock record. Although many of us were holding our breath in the 1980s, hoping the Motley’s would release another Too Fast or Shout, it never happened. What we may have lost in excellence we have in variety & although the more mainstream hard rock the Crue wrote from 1985 –1989 was not as interesting as the punky pop metal they wrote in their beginning, they did the hard rock real well . . . 

Theatre suffers from a poor production that forever locks it in the year 1985. Still, ‘Home Sweet Home’ has proven to be an enduring Motley tune & in 2012 is a bonafide rock classic being covered by other major artists & a million aspiring stars.

Tommy Lee Part 4-The Girls, Girls, Girls Drum Solo Mystery

I wrote about Tommy’s famous Girls, Girls, Girls drum solo HERE and soon after found out a couple things that cast a lot of doubt on Tommy’s claim that he got the idea from a dream. First, check out this video of the solo from Des Moines, Iowa in 1987. Tommy goes through his regular spiel. 

Here and elsewhere, Tommy insists that he dreamt the idea to rotate in his drum set in front of an audience, and he very well may have had that dream, but it looks like Buddy Rich had the same dream and beat him to the execution!!

What?!! That is some funky classic video. The band looks pretty damned amazed! Or amused!

Tommy has seen the above video and has responded that he did not know of its existence and as far as he knew he was was the first to do this stunt . . . and I would say that this is not an impossible thing for two drummers to think of and execute . . . they’re a nutty breed to be sure. So I would normally leave it at that if this were the end of the mystery. But it ain’t. Watch this:

So yeah, 12 years before the above Tommy Lee video, Mick Mars (at this time he was still Bob Deal-he’s the red-headed guitarist to the right) was in a band in which a drummer went upside down as he played . . . ! Right. Did this never come up during the whole Girls, Girls, Girls tour?! And although that Buddy Rich vid is from the early ‘70s, pre-dating the above Whitehorse video, it is explained at the YouTube page that Mick’s former band mate Jack Valentine apparently did invent the contraption/conception and Buddy did the act on TV for him when he broke his leg and was unable to perform.

 

[EDIT] I have known about the following video for years, a 1984 home video of Mick Mars being interviewed and reminiscing about his days as Robert Deal with old band mate Jack Valentine. In the two following parts Mick talks about Motley’s upcoming tour of Europe and fields a lot of questions from Jack about memories of the old days, very personal and candid stuff. The drum trick is mentioned several times in the second part and there are even pictures. Also, we should remember, Jack and Mick (or, Bob) were in a band that was once called Motley Croo or some such spelling . . . so how much exactly did Motley get from Mick’s old band? You’ll notice that Mick seems to get uncomfortable when Jack reminds him of the old Motley Croo name . . . obviously there was no discussion of usage between them at that time. Mick himself is said to have acquired his name from another L. A. performer known as Mickey Mars. Jack mentions several times how completely different Mick looks as compared to his Bob Deal days and how his trademark faces are the one dead give-away. They call it the "Mars Face."

Probably, Mick brought the drum idea to the band or told Tommy about it several times and then Motley paid his old band mate for the idea and to shut up and let-on that it was Tommy’s invention . . . or . . . Tommy dreamt it, brought it to the band, Mick mentioned he was in a band where a guy did it and etc. However it came to be it was a huge asset to the Motley’s show and Tommy’s rep as a wild man. 

TOMMY LEE DRUM SOLOS FROM OTHER TOURS COMIN’ UP . . . . SOME DAY . . . AT THE SLEAZE PATROL FILES  . . . . 

Nikki Sixx Part 4-The Blast! Interviews, 1989

Blast! magazine had a series of interviews with all the Motley members as well as articles that were published from before the release of Dr. Feelgood (in September 1989) through into late 1989. There was a while there that Blast! was a Motley goldmine with each issue containing pages of interviews and lots of nice color pin-ups and centerfolds.
 

We’re going to start with a Nikki Sixx interview from early 1989, apparently just before he headed to Canada to record with Bob Rock. I may be missing a couple articles but the essence of the conversation is there. These are pretty relaxed and candid interviews and especially in this first one (actually a Part II of a longer article) we hear Nikki speak of the early stages of the Dr. Feelgood record, the artwork that didn’t come to fruition and why the Crue stopped working with producer Tom Werman.

Nikki seemed to have every intention to release his book of poetry, An Education In Rebellion, if the sheer amount of times he mentioned it in the press is any indication. Sylvie Simmons asks/states: ‘Nikki Turns Poet?' Besides discussing publication issues about the poetry book (that is to this day still unreleased), he mentions that he has kept a journal and tells a funny therapy anecdote.

More Nikki in BLAST! to come