Great Motley Tunes #1 – ‘Starry Eyes’

When she laughs . . . she’s got the power of a child in her eyes

And when you cry now, she’ll hold you like a man’s supposed to be held

I can’t get into words how I feel, get it right in this song, no, no, no

Set her free, needed a friend to come back to me . . .

The starry eyes . . . who-oh

The starry eyes . . . who-oh

 

 Too Fast For Love is one of the moments in Motley’s career that puts them in a different place & category than the other Hard Rock bands of their generation. The album is almost a ‘missing link’ type document in itself . . . not an example of punk & metal turning into glam metal but THE iconic moment when something happened. I didn’t hear the record until the late ‘80s & it sure sounded immature & strange to my ears . . . but as I got to know it more I began appreciating the things present on this album that were almost subsequently lost as Motley forged ahead in the ‘80s.

That one thing that I couldn’t articulate at the time was the vulnerability & wistfulness of some of the tunes, especially ‘Merry-Go-Round,’ ‘On With The Show’ & ‘Starry Eyes.’ These tunes were like little 3 minute Hollywood dramas, street operas or stories of a time that had more to do with the ‘70s almost. That’s the difference between early Motley & many of the bands that came after: the Crue were still somewhat from an older scene or vibe than a Bon Jovi or a Poison or a Ratt. You really hear that on Too Fast.

Standing alone in the light you can see her cry

With a smile & a wink & a sparkle in her eyes

She calmly sighed, ‘I will be alright . . . ‘

OK child, you gotta take the pain of a man in the streets

You better let me in, you’re needing a friend even just for one night . . .

The starry eyes . . . who-oh

The starry eyes . . . who-oh

And then it’s time for Mr. Mars to play one of his strange, wailing, shredding solos that still somehow have all kind of heart & sentiment. The stuff he plays as the song ends is just great too . . . real dramatic & powerful.

The intro with the gong lends to that minor feel of the song, the kind of Chinatown, gangland thing that they hinted at again with the ‘Too Young To Fall In Love’ video & even the Shout At the Devil track ‘Danger.’ This is the kind of stuff that the macho caricatures of the Glam Metal scene could never duplicate. In fact, this type of Hollywood sleaze drama stuff would be done to much greater success about 5 years later when Guns N’ Roses released ‘Appetite For Destruction.’ Songs like ‘My Michelle',’ ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine,’ ‘I Think About You’ & several others sound like updated versions of these early Crue tunes.

The breakdown is one of the examples of kinda ‘rock band jazz’ that was in the Crue’s sound at that time. The breakdown to ‘Stick To Your Guns’ is very jazzy as well & I gotta think this is Tommy’s influence because he would have been playing jazz stuff with the school band(s) he was in up to the formation of the Crue. It’s another eclectic element to their sound that was lost even by Shout.

More Classic B-Side Motley COMING UP ON THE SLEAZE PATROL FILES . . . .

Nikki Sixx Part One & Ramblin’ On . . .

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.

Motley in Moscow, Pre Dr. Feelgood Era, Part 5

Having finished the Dr. Feelgood record the Motley boys were excited to play their first gig in a whole year & a half in Moscow for the ‘Make A Difference Foundation,’ an anti-drug festival apparently concocted by band manager Doc McGhee to bolster his rep in the wake of drug charges. Crue were sober during this period & so this concert at Lenin Stadium made sense to them & was a great opportunity to knock some of the rust off before their major world tour would begin in a couple months.

The drama behind the show began on the first day, August 12th, when the Crue learned they were being demoted in the set & then found out Bon Jovi was using pyro when it was agreed it was to be a stripped down & democratic affair for all the bands. Tommy punched McGhee & told him he was fired as the manager. The band was going to leave but then stuck around to play their set the next day.

This concert was aired on MTV. I had a bud with a satellite & so we hunkered down to watch the ‘Moscow Music Peace Festival.’

I’m having a difficult time finding out exactly what the sets were for both days & which videos available on YouTube are from the 12th & which are from the 13th. The first song I heard was ‘Shout At the Devil’ & I was underwhelmed: Vince sounded pretty bad. Luckily he got better as the show progressed. So here below are the weekend’s two versions of ‘Shout.’

Motley Crue-Moscow-Shout At the Devil

Motley-Moscow-Shout at the Devil

This was the first time many of us got to see Tommy & Nikki’s full tattoo sleeves. ‘Sleeves’ have become the norm for Rockers & tattoo culture has absolutely blown up in the last 20 yrs. Everyone & their grandmother has a tattoo nowadays but back in 1989 Tommy & Nikki’s sleeves were almost shocking. Although they didn’t perform any new tunes Tommy has the Dr. logo on his bass drum, I remember trying to glimpse it every time the camera came near it.

Motley Crue-Moscow in 1989-Wild Side

Mick Mars is probably my favourite member of Motley, always was. I liked that he didn’t say much, looked & played gnarly & just basically performed his duties without needing much attention. There won’t be a whole lot of Mick stuff here at the SP Files, simply because there just isn’t much Mick stuff out there from the 1980s. Mick played a pretty rad guitar solo in Moscow, fast & sleazy like only Mr. Mars can do.

Motley Crue-Moscow-Mick Mars Guitar Solo

Moscow wasn’t just another concert for this Crue fan, it was the first time I ever saw live video & audio of my favourite band & so I watched my abridged MTV version A LOT & have come to enjoy it much more than I originally did. I’ve had to face the fact that they are just not, as a whole, a really strong live act. Crue sound like a garage band, very ragged & punky. But powerful as shit & with moments of excellence.

Here’s two vids of Crue performing covers, ‘Jailhouse Rock’ & ‘Smokin’ In the Boys Room.’ ‘Smokin’ is a rare performance of the song that really catapulted the band into pop stardom in the mid-eighties & features a very rare (& just passable) harmonica solo by Vince.

Motley Crue-Moscow-Smokin’ In the Boys Room

‘Jailhouse Rock’ is a song Crue performed almost from their beginning & is a great example of how little time Vince Neil took in his life to remember lyrics. He is mostly just singing phonetically here. God bless you Vinnie.  Makes me think the ‘live’ version on the Girls record is actually not very live. Here are the festival’s two performances of this classic Elvis tune.

Motley Crue-Moscow-Jailhouse Rock #1

Motley Crue-Moscow-Jailhouse Rock #2

A friend owned the ‘Make A Difference’ cassette (‘Stairway To Heaven/Highway To Hell’) which had Crue’s studio cover of ‘Teaser’ & a live all-star jam recording with Vince & Sebastian Bach singing Zepplin’s ‘Rock n’ Roll'.’ I copied those tunes (before I could get ‘Teaser’ from the Decade Of Decadence release) & listened the shit out of them & have never seen the video of the all-star jam . . . and, voila!, there it is on YouTube. It’s a beautiful thing.

 

I even bought the festival T-shirt at a local music store simply because Motley’s name was listed on the back. I’ve since given it to Good-Will, damn, wish I had kept it!

I’ve embedded a lot of the Moscow performances in this post but there’s even more on YouTube if you want to take your time & find it all, including a great one of the band after one of the performances. Nikki is about to show the camera what his impression of the show is by pulling down his pants but the scene cuts before we learn too much. Here’s part II of the aforementioned series of Dr. Feelgood era vids which contains a bunch of Moscow stuff.

Motley Crue-Dr. Feelgood Era Part 2

So Moscow certainly wasn’t Motley’s greatest moment but as with all things with this band, it was an interesting one. The Crue would go on without Doc McGhee but would have a massively-successful tour & album with co-manager Doug Thaler taking over responsibilities. It also gave the Crue more fodder for hating & separating themselves from the Bon Jovi camp, a band that Nikki would say wrote songs that appealed to housewives. He didn’t know how correct that statement was, especially nowadays.

We’ll leave you with a Faces article about the festival & more Motley Moscow video of the boys performing ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ with the backing of the Nasty Habits. Donna McDaniel & Emi Canyn would be a part of the Crue camp for the Girls to Dr. era & they certainly gave us teenaged boys lots to fantasize about (as if the lyrics weren’t enough!).

(click images to enlarge & READ)

 

Motley Crue-Moscow-Girls, Girls, Girls

Early Dr. Feelgood Era Part 4 – Mid 1989

The straight-jacket photo session was done during the Dr. Feelgood recording sessions I think, probably wary that they needed some kind of new image to sell the new record to the fans.

The following Tommy interviews are from before the band made it to the Moscow Music Peace Festival in August. The Jodi Summers article has Tommy at home on the phone with interruptions from his then wife Heather Locklear. The subject of his sobriety comes up and he admits that he could fall off the wagon at any moment. The second is an interview with Metalshop’s Mike Greenblatt and is a curse-laden recap of Tommy and the band’s new lifestyle.

(click to enlarge images & READ)

 

 

A Crue fan has uploaded 8 parts of Dr. Feelgood era video on YouTube from MTV & other TV appearances & they are very interesting to see. Everything from bad TV commercials for the Motley Hotline to the making of videos & charity events, hosting MTV shows & etc. I’ll embed the first part below & probably the rest throughout other Dr. Feelgood posts. Moscow Music Peace Festival memories & Vince VS. Axl stuff coming up on the SP Files . . .