Shout At The Fucking Devil

The above & below 3-page of Mick & Nikki from a Faces mag during the Shout At the Devil days is probably my favourite Crue poster. I have two copies. The first was hanging in an older bully’s locker at my junior high school. I would eye it enviously &, somehow, I don’t remember now, I got it from him. I think it was a matter of lunch money. The above copy is the one in better shape, the other I had for years before has food on it & is pretty beat up. Some of these old pin-ups & posters really got around.

Nikki just looks so cool & punky & Mick is gnarly & freakish . . . I think it was that element of punkiness I liked as a kid. Motley looked & sounded so much more convincing & intense than so many of their contemporaries. Although I do think Shout was an attempt to latch onto the Heavy Metal wave, they ended up doing it a whole new way & invented a style all their own (but often mimicked).

Here they are live in 1984 playing ‘Shout At the Devil’ in Quebec, Canada.

Shout at the Devil Live 1984

Anything from this era was THE coolest & most coveted thing for me to see or have in those days &, unfortunately, I do not have much Shout stuff at all . . . but here’s a little of what I do have.

That’s pretty cool right there man: an ad for the Shout record from a Hit Parader Magazine. It includes a tour schedule at the bottom. They certainly spent a good amount of money on the image of Shout. Motley were creating a post-modern pop Rock group that was part calculation & part organic garage band & it really gelled . . . I think, mainly, because of the strength of their songs AND their very powerful image. The logos & pentagrams & S&M-type costumes & face-paint conjured cultish & perverse sexual overtones that were alluring to teenage & young adult guys & gals.

 

Their music & Nikki Sixx’s perverse, sometimes poetic lyrics were considered pornographic so why not spend their off time with one of the era’s OTHER famous practitioners of Sleaze: adult film star Seka.

What they were able to do more successfully than most bands was look exactly the same as they sounded . . . & so you could really get into a group like this, everything fed off of everything else. To say they were marketable is to not really get what I’m talking about but it works out the same & the Crue have always lived in the shadow of this monumental album.

We’ll leave you with some more great Shout era YouTube. This is the infamous Donnington Festival post-set interview during their 1984 European tour. CLASSIC! More Shout At the Devil stuff down the road at the SP Files . . .

Motley in Donnington 1984