Mr. Motley Crue sure does like to talk. You should check out his Twitter account, the man’s logging up to 20 posts a day (click HERE). He recently got in a fight with Facebook because they threatened to delete his account after they took down one of his racy photos . . . Nikki is a photographer & has a book of his work coming out soon. I don’t have to read these tweets, don’t need to keep up with the train wreck that is the Motleys but this blog has brought me back into their world & I’m fascinated with this crew again.
The 2011 tour with Poison & the New York Dolls propels the band, once again, into the spotlight. For the last 10 years these guys have found ways to make it back into the industry circles & in the new musical world are making things work for them. The book & then the big 2005 tour & a new record & infamous behaviour have kept them around, miraculously.
Saint’s Of Los Angeles had a lot of energy & even some strong music for a band who’s time & place could be argued to have passed almost twenty years prior. The Crue certainly ‘brought it’ with SOLA to a degree that most of their contemporaries could not equal. Despite the fact that Nikki has lost his original muse, he has at least grown ever so much so that when he writes music in the late 2000s it sounds at home & not too reaching or inappropriate.
To be a Crue fan in the ‘80s was to feel a part of something. It was all about the music, really. As much as they fostered their image, no true Crue fan got into the band simply for how they looked: the music was too good for that. But what is wrong with Motley’s new music is an element that is alien to the new fan who have been weaned on a later, watered-down Rock . . . it is not as real anymore.What you have now in a Motley lyric is more like fiction whereas all those 1980s tunes read like journal entries: honest, disturbing & immediate. Nikki was apologizing for the songs on Girls, Girls, Girls when Feelgood was coming out, saying that it was all he could give us as an addict. If sobriety equals " . . . Sassy little lassy walks right past me/Down in Tennessee/Always a lady, I love southern ladies/They just know how to please, yes indeed . . ." & heroin addiction offers " . . . I carry my crucifix under my death list/forward my mail to me in hell/Liars & the martyrs lost faith in the father/long lost is the wishing well . . .," then I'd have to say that Nikki's addiction was obviously beneficial to his craft as a lyricist (not to mention as an author, musician, photographer & all the other ways he's milked his brief fling with H :))
There was a feeling, for a long time, that the ‘80s were nothing but an embarrassment & that nothing good came out of the decade. For a while there it really seemed like Rock was about to hit a high again, kinda like the late ‘60s when it matured & turned into all these potent offshoots. By 1996ish I started realizing that Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Pearl Jam etc. etc. were almost anomalies. They weren’t the catalysts of a deep & varied scene so much as the latest originality that the phonies had to latch onto. AND because the teenage fan base focused too much on the image & made idols out of the artists, the artists crumbled, & the industry responded by focusing on the big shiny spectacle again. ANYTHING but that exaggerated angst & suicide solutions.
So, now, acts like the Crue are still around . . . why? Because they’re from the old west. They’re cowboys. They’re Rock n’ Roll artifacts! AND, they wrote some damn heavy Rock there for about 10 years . . . the kind of music that sounds too good to be true nowadays. Despite what I may think about Mr. Sixx today, he will always be the man behind the Crue, the architect of their Decade of Decadence.
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