Girls, Girls, Girls Part 3

The Crue had to prove themselves every time they released a new record in the ‘80s. So many people would write them off & say their time had come . . . & then the next record would be another huge success. This 1987 Faces article asks Crue fans what they expected of the boys after the almost drastic image & sound change on the previous record, Theatre Of Pain.

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Circus caught up with Nikki in early ‘87 to talk about the new record, the songs (‘Five Years Dead’ came from a novel), the upcoming tour, an early run-in with computers & a recent slag from hero Steven Tyler when he saw Nikki wearing one of his 1970s-styled suits onstage:

  

Sumthin’ For Nuthin’–Homemade Video

My family had a High-8 video camera in the early nineties & I would use it to make my own videos for Crue tunes. Here’s one I did in 1991 using the video from MTV’s Crue ‘Rockumentary’ & the audio from the Crue’s 1987 cassette release of Girls, Girls, Girls.

Girls, Girls, Girls . . . Part 2

 
The album was released in May 1987 & by December the band had fallen off the rails in Japan, cancelling a scheduled European tour. Especially with the publications of the autobios The Dirt & Nikki Sixx’s Heroin Diaries, this era has become heavily mythologized & romanticized. Fans of the day did not start to hear whisperings of the band’s excesses until late ‘87 & 1988, but the beginning of the year had the Crue talking excitedly about the new album & tour. Below, Vince tells Hit Parader writer Judy Wieder about an anti-drunk driving ad he did & his feelings on the new record. Set time machines back to 1987.

Here’s some odds & ends from magazines, incomplete interviews & articles from the period before Girls came out.

First is a Circus fragment talking about the Crue in 1986 (mentioning the new record), part of what looks like a centerfold of the Girls stage & a Rock Beat article discussing the Crue up to this point in 1987.

Goodbye to Girls, Girls, Girls Part 2 with this incomplete interview with Mr. Sixx just before the band headed to Japan in 1987 where the whole operation fell apart. Part three, you’ll see!

Theatre Of Pink

Crue fans of the 21st century may not know the feeling the average Motley fan had when they emerged with the gonzo glam style of Theatre Of Pain in early summer, 1985. Motley's previous Metal/Punk appearance & sound were a BIG part of their appeal to young guys & gals. There seemed a strange authenticity with these guys that even peaked through their sometimes outrageous & hilarious 'costumes'. Nonetheless, what can we say about these pin-ups from 1985-86? Those certainly were different times!

Girls, Girls, Girls, 1987 . . . Part 1

I really started collecting more Motley stuff around 1987 when Girls, Girls, Girls came out. It seemed the Crue were ever so much more mainstream and were getting tonnes of press. A lot of Circus articles came out in those years and always featured live photos of the band. This was as close as most of us got to seeing the Crue live back in those days. 

Since the 21st century, the Girls, Girls, Girls era has become the most notorious of the band's career. The album was released in May and the band toured until December. They had Whitesnake and Guns n' Roses as openers. Nikki would famously overdose and die, briefly, in December and the tour was cancelled. The videos for the three singles were iconic and controversial and Motley met the burgeoning PC culture with attitude and tongue-in-cheek humour.

Of course there were many other publications offering up many live shots of the Girls stage show. Tommy Lee’s drum solo was a thing of legend. I loved the cheap look of the big, red plain stage they used.

 

Here’s video of the band playing in Wilkes-Barre, PA on the Girls tour, opening the show with one of my Crue favs, "All In the Name of Rock n’ Roll."

Shout at the Centerfold

                

Classic Crue Magazine Covers, 1987

Here’s a Hit Parader from May 1987 & a Faces from April of the same year. Motley’s fourth album, Girls Girls Girls was released in May of 1987 & folks were wondering: do the boys still have it? Theatre Of Pain divided some fans, not only with almost drastic change in costume but also with the band adopting elements of more mainstream hard rock music like Aerosmith, especially in tunes as the album opener, ‘City Boy Blues’ & the ballad, ‘Home Sweet Home.’ Girls carried on this formula but maintained Motley’s own dark & violent touch.

HP has a Theatre era photo & Faces a Shout one from, I think, Crue’s European tour in 1984.

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Sleaze Patrol TV: Much Music ‘Decade Of Decadence’ Special, 1991

I recorded as much Crue video as I could with only Much Music, Musique Plus, basic cable &, once in a while, a friend’s satellite MTV. They was slim pickins but what I do have I’m going to try uploading to YouTube. Apparently I’m having international viewing problems with my first upload: Much Music’s 40 minute Decade Of Decadence special from 1991.

The Much Music special aired during the channel’s hard rock & heavy metal weekly program ‘The Pepsi Power Hour’ & gathered together most of whatever they & M Plus had for Motley footage in celebration of the Crue’s 10 year anniversary. The Shout era interview has become almost notorious on YouTube in the last 5 years . . . an early glimpse of Nikki Sixx spinning the sleaze philosophy (on what I think may have been from a Canadian music television show called ‘The New Music’). There’s stuff from the Motley boys passing through Canada on their Theatre, Girls & Dr. Feelgood tours (with some cool video from a Dr. Feelgood era show) & of course the obligatory music videos.

Much Music used to be the kind of channel where you were likely to hear everything from pop music to thrash, to adult contemporary, to everything under the sun. It was my radio. It has become a teeny-bopper channel with young, ‘hip’ hosts & there is less & less music video content . . . but of course music videos are not what they used to be. Part of Motley Crue’s legend is steeped in the video age they came out of. Those early vids from the the first 3 albums especially were essential to their fame.

You may get the impression that the interviewers at Much & et al. were not the biggest Crue fans & maybe even are humouring the boys in these interviews. They do seem to like the Crue as well tho’. One thing I’ve noticed about these so-called wild men of Rock: they’re pretty nice guys. Crue always seem real forthcoming & polite in all their interviews, rarely are they pissed, even when they’re asked the same stupid questions over & over.

Only Mr. Mars is not represented in an interview segment. Mick came around the Much studios soon after for a Decade Of Decadence (the official album & video releases) publicity junket with Nikki. I have various clips from that interview & I’ll leave this post with the last part of the Much Music special & the Nikki & Mick clip.

More sleaze files on the way . . .

EDITED TO ADD:

Some of these videos were blocked because I kept in too much music & they claimed copyright so I edited the whole thing down to just the talking & interviews.

Classic Motley Cassette Art

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I got all the original Crue records on vinyl but mostly for the artwork because cassettes were my main mode of listening to Motley music.[Click HERE to see my Motley vinyl collection]. One of my ‘80s Crue fan memories was finally seeing the LP of Shout At the Devil again after years of only having the cassette: it had a lyric sheet! Finding out what Vince was actually saying is maybe fodder for another post. And, oh yeah, this is sposeta be about the old ‘80s cassette liner notes & artwork!

Too Fast For Love. I didn’t actually own this album ‘till about 1987-88. But I had an uncle who had the early Canadian release of the Leathur version which is a different mix than the one Elektra put out after Crue signed with them. After years of asking for it & waiting, he finally gave me the cassette. That Canadian version of Too Fast has the Elektra track list on the cover but the Leathur mix on the cassette with ‘Stick To Your Guns’ & etc. I can’t remember where that red Too Fast with the ‘pentagram’ inside photo (above) came from but I would have shat my pants when I saw it. Crue stuff was rare in my neck of the woods & anything from this era to 1984 was like the Holy Grail.

Shout At the Devil was really butchered, art-wise, as a cassette. The sleek black-on-black pentagram cover replaced with 4 tiny cropped portraits from the LP’s amazing gatefold. The lyrics & the big red pentagram didn’t make it either. The liner notes were kept & were a source of wonder as a kid.

I found a serious Motley collector’s page that shows the different international versions of Crue cassettes & it looks like us Canadians fared well with our artwork extending across the full back of the panel. So our Shout has that extra photo on the back from the publicity shots for the album BUT the front photo was minimized by a stupid black border on the bottom with the title & the Elektra logo.

Theatre Of Pain had a lyric sheet which was cool because, believe it or not, some of us really dug Nikki’s lyrics.

It’s been the hard road, the edge of an overdose

Well no matter how high, well, you’re still too low

I’ve been the dancer, the wicked romancer

A never-ending nightmare, edge of disaster

Girls, Girls, Girls was a dark album for me as an 11-12 year old. It had the outer appearance of being a pop record that a lot of people bought & listened to but it had these sinister elements to it that made it different than other hard rock music of the day. I got in trouble when my aunt read the lyrics to ‘Wild Side’ & said I was perverting her kids. I’ve always liked the Girls album because it is so sleazy & heavy & bluesy. Nowadays I find tunes like ‘Dancin’ On Glass,’ ‘Five Years Dead’ & ‘Bad Boy Boogie’ to be examples of Crue at their best. Heavy, dirty, groovy & with a touch of Motley class.

Somewhere down the line I seem to have lost my Dr. Feelgood cassette but I still have a couple of cassette singles from the album. I really don’t know how many of these things would have sold or remember how much they cost. They may even be rare.

We’ll be dipping into the 1990s with my collection. If ‘Primal Scream’ wasn’t such a good song I might’ve disregarded the Decade of Decadence album of 1991 . . . actually, ‘Angela’ is a pretty great tune too. If the boys had made another record with songs as strong as these two, it would’ve been a monster. Alas, it was never to happen & DOD & ‘Primal Scream’ would be the last great gasp of the original incarnation of the Crue.

Checking out that crazy Motley collector’s cassette page again I see he does not have the Canadian version of the DOD cassette up there. It’s a nice 8-panel booklet that, upon purchase, I immediately separated from the cassette & threw in a plastic sleeve with my collectibles. She’s in great condition to this day. 

Check out these kids on Youtube giving reviews on Crue cassettes. Motley gets four stars for ‘not making that many mistakes’ on Shout, ha. Wait til you hear Vince live kid.