Early Dr. Feelgood Era 1988-1989 Part 2

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!!

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Stay tuned for Motley in the year 1989 & more lead-up articles to the release of Dr. Feelgood.

He’s the one they call . . . Monstrous?? Early Dr. Feelgood Era, 1988 & Happy 30th!

 

Motley Crue celebrated their 30 year anniversary this month. If you had told the 1980s me that they would still be around in the year 2011 (I guess they could be a thing of the past as I write . . . the Motley camp is quiet lately), I would have thought you crazy . . . but here we are. The Sleaze Patrol Files pretty much keeps to the first third of their career, their greatest era, but 30 years is really quite the accomplishment & so I say ‘Wow’ & ‘Holy Shit!’ & ‘Congrats boys.’

I know of no other way to celebrate than forge ahead with a series of posts of vintage Motley memories from the Rock magazines of the day.

By 1988 the Crue were an unstoppable force in the Rock world. Although they were being outsold by bands like Guns & Roses, Bon Jovi & Whitesnake, they were still considered by many to be the premier Hard Rock band of the 1980s. By the time the year 1988 rolled around, these four cats had been through hell & back & got scared straight, as the saying goes. 1988 saw the band preparing for their fifth record by quitting alcohol & drugs & focusing all their attentions on the record that would come to be called Dr. Feelgood. Here are some articles from those classic days in the months before the band went North to Vancouver, Canada to record with Mr. Bob Rock. What would the new Crue sound like? What were the names of some of the new tunes they were writing? What might they title their new album? Metal Edge got these answers and more from Mick & Nikki in a late 1988 interview. Below is a short piece about the state of the Crue in 1988 & early info on the new record. I actually bought this issue of Metal Edge for this article alone. I was pretty excited.

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Nikki sounds confident in the above interview & that’s kinda the vibe they were putting out to people at the time. Lots of references to a more mature Rock style a la Zeppelin & the idea that the new album was almost going to be experimental at times . . . which did not pan out. An interesting thing about these & many of the upcoming articles is the discussion of the art of songwriting, the quoting of lyrics, as if lyrics were anything of importance (they are!! . . . too bad they mostly stink on Dr. Feelgood) & the mention of songs that would eventually not make it to Dr. but have since seen the light of day on various Crue releases.

And as had been the case with the break between the Theatre & the Girls records, the magazines wanted to at least have some Crue content & were perhaps increasingly surprised & impressed with their longevity as a band & felt it was again time to take a trip down memory lane . . . Metal Edge did an awesome photo retrospective that contained some vintage (even in 1988) Crue shots I had not seen up to that point. I was in Motley heaven.

Here’s more Motley from mid 1988, probably when they were in pre-production in L. A. Nikki & Mick talk to Mike Greenblatt of Metalshop magazine. This is another article in which Nikki’s excitement with the new songs has him reciting lyrics for several tunes that didn’t even make the record. Some of these demoed songs are on YouTube. So here’s ‘Say Yeah’ & ‘Rodeo,’ a song Nikki can’t stop talking about in this interview but, to me, sounds like a pretty mediocre tune, almost a different feel than a Motley song. I dare say Bob Rock heard these tunes & said, ‘OK, but I really think you guys got some better songs in you.’

SAY YEAH–MOTLEY CRUE DEMO 1988-89

RODEO-MOTLEY CRUE DEMO

More early Dr. Feelgood era stuff to come as we take an almost chronological look at the making, release & tour of Motley’s best-selling album.

Motley Quotes, Facts & Pin-Ups

We’re entering Dr. Feelgood territory again with this post. 1980s teeny-bopper Metal & Hard Rock magazines loved to give fans all the information they ever needed about their Rock N’ Roll heroes. Crue were a perfect combination of image & legend. These short chronologies & collections of Crue quotations were little shots of information we would read more at length in their written biographies & many biographical video documentaries from the last 20 years. These are 2-sided pin-ups.

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There’s a lot of little mistakes in some of that information but you get the idea. The Crue were at the mercy of their own reputation & however inaccurately some of these fly-by-night publications reported, at least they spelled the band’s name correctly.
We leave you with a YouTube video of a Much More Music segment about Heavy Metal music from 1987. The Canadian interviewer Denise Donlon is pretty hard on them. Watch Vince squirm when she asks why the band isn’t ending their Girls, Girls Girls shows with a warning about the dangers of drunk driving!! That’d be a good show!

Tommy Lee Part 1–The Girls, Girls, Girls Drum Solo

On the Theatre Of Pain tour Tommy Lee’s drum set rotated & then raised him on a 90 degree angle. For the the 1987 Girls, Girls, Girls tour Tommy wanted to fulfill a dream he said he had where he did a complete 360 degree rotation in his drum kit in mid-air. Thanks to YouTube we can check out video of the solo from a show in Tacoma.

Girls Girls Girls Tour Drum Solo

When Crue went back on the road in 1989 they started in Europe to make up dates they had cancelled in late 1987 after the band descended into near destruction. In Sweden, at the beginning of the Dr. Feelgood tour, Tommy brought the rotating drum kit with him to show his Swedish friends what they missed.

Tommy Lee Drum Solo In 1989 In Sweden

There is video of  Tommy’s 1985-86 Theatre Of Pain drum solo presently on YouTube so we might as well add that to the post. This killer video was taken in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on October 19th, 1985 on the North American leg of the tour (the Crue then went to Europe in 1986) (see Paul Miles’ Chronological Crue Gigography HERE).

Besides the above photos from Circus, Metal Edge, Hit Parader & other metal mags of the day, the only other way us Crue fans could catch a glimpse of this amazing solo without going to a show was the second music video & single off of the Girls, Girls, Girls album, ‘Wild Side.’ I remember watching this with a little bit of awe back in 1987.
 

More Tommy Lee & Girls, Girls, Girls era Crue on the way . . . Also the first of many (probably too many) Dr. Feelgood era posts, Shout & Decade era, Motley drawings by friends, back patches, early 1990s Crue stuff from Much Music, 3-8 page magazine poster bonanzas & more . . .