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 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!!!!
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