A User's Guide to Motley Crue
Motley Crue occupies a peculiar space in the media landscape: Despite selling over fifty million albums, at least three members of the band are more famous on their own than all of the songs they've recorded as a group. It's hard to imagine another band who could publish three bestselling books about themselves without really mentioning their music at all. The Dirt is a 448-page oral history, but — in one of the only passages where chief songwriter Nikki Sixx talks about the group's musical legacy — he dismisses two of their most well-known albums in virtual totality. The members of Motley Crue often seem vaguely uninterested in their own artistic achievements, which is unfortunate, because at least 30 percent of the material they've made over the past 30 years borders on exceptional. The key is accepting that Sixx exclusively writes pop music — he likes to filter it through a variety of idioms (gutter glam on Too Fast for Love, disco metal on Shout At the Devil, glitter blues on Theatre of Pain, etc.), but the foundation for everything is accessible, hook-driven power pop with stylized lyrics and torrential drumming. The Crue aspired to Aerosmith and competed against Metallica, but their best work is more like a harder version of T. Rex processed by Kelly Clarkson. It's for non-metalheads, really.
Though they seemed generally nonplussed by Elektra's decision to re-release it in 1982, Too Fast For Love has proven to be the band's greatest collection, particularly when you include the bonus tracks off the 1999 re-mastered re-re-release ("Toast of the Town," the b-side to an early single titled "Stick to Your Guns," might be the best song the band ever made). Composed during the height of the L.A. punk scene, the songs tend to be short, unpolished and repetitive. But the softer tracks are more nuanced and likeable than anything the band did after — "Come on and Dance," "Public Enemy #1" and "On with the Show" are the leathery equivalent of a West Coast Cheap Trick.
That trajectory significantly changed on Shout at the Devil, a record seemingly recorded on a Columbian coca farm (you could probably get seven years in prison for carrying Shout at the Devil into an airport). The Antichrist Superstar of its era, it's the defining artifact of Reagan-era glam metal, all the way down to liner notes which warn that the album "may contain backward messages" (even if you're listening to it on CD). Every song is based around a singular, ultra-compressed riff, and they are generally the coolest riffs Mick Mars was ever allowed to unleash: "Looks That Kill," "Ten Seconds to Love" and their cover of "Helter Skelter" are among the few authentically heavy songs Motley Crue ever made. Though the opening gambit "In the Beginning" has not aged well, Shout at the Devil is a theatrical, thematically complete record that will always be essential to pop historians — if you're remotely interested in this kind of music, you need to be specifically obsessed with this record.
Considering how little work they put into it, it's amazing that 1985's Theatre of Pain somehow remains retrospectively semi-decent: There's almost nothing on it that wasn't preexisting. The lead single ("Smokin 'in the Boys Room") was a cover of Brown Central Station. The third song ("Louder then Hell") was a leftover from Shout at the Devil. "Use it Or Lose It" is almost entirely vocals and drums. Two songs ("Save Our Souls" and "Fight for Your Rights") are indistinguishable; another ("Raise Your Hands to Rock") was evidently written in less than three minutes. But the ballad "Home Sweet Home" is iconic and emotive, and the opener "City Boy Blues" nicely embodies the Renaissance-era gypsy vibe they were pursuing at the time.
Girls, Girls, Girls marks the Crue's "dirtbag biker/public urination" phase, and — here again — drugs limited the effort directed toward songwriting (much of it was done on heroin and "zombie dust," a concoction of cocaine cut with Triazolam) But the results are still better than Theatre of Pain: It's their darkest album and the perhaps their most "real," whatever that might mean. Sixx writes about his dead grandma and killing his girlfriend. They close the record with a live Elvis cover. "Bad Boy Boogie" is terrible, but "All in the Name Of…" and "Sumthin 'for Nuthin'" are consciously depraved and incredibly fun. One assumes the title track will remain the band's greatest gift to mankind, at least in communities where exotic dancing plays a role in the local economy. The remastered '99 version also includes a discarded ballad titled "Rodeo" that will be of interest to completists.
By all critical and commercial accounts, 1989's Dr. Feelgood is easily the most important Motley Crue album, although this is less true for longtime fans of the group. Sober and professional, Motley Crue wrote and recorded the album they always dreamed of making; influenced in large part by producer Bob Rock, it's the only album that always sounds like radio fare. The top-shelf stuff is excellent — "Same Ol 'Situation," "Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)," and even "Kickstart My Heart" prove that Motley Crue's massive success was completely warranted. But there's a lot of filler on Feelgood, and it's hurt by the inevitable comparison with Appetite for Destruction (the other major L.A. hard rock album from the same period).
After releasing a greatest hits album that offered a surprisingly innovative single ("Primal Scream"), the group famously sacked Vince Neil — not the world's greatest singer, certainly, but the main reason Motley Crue sounded like themselves. Profoundly wounded by the explosion of grunge, the band hired Scream vocalist John Corabi and released the eponymous Motley Crue in 1994, a transparent failure at making music that resembled Soundgarden. Fifteen years later, Motley Crue now comes across as interesting ("Smoke the Sky" being a particular high point), but it still seems disconnected from the rest of the band's catalog. Vince Neil's first solo record Exposed from '93 (recorded with Billy Idol guitarist Steve Stevens) is less musical but a more logical Crue extension.
When the original line-up reformed in 1997 to make Generation Swine, the hope was that this would become their version of Pump. That goal was not achieved. An awkward, schizophrenic album that employs technology in the worst possible way, Generation Swine has exactly one non-bad song, "Afraid." A much better effort is the overlooked New Tattoo from the summer of 2000: Though the record lacks Tommy Lee's distinctive drumming (he was temporarily replaced by the now deceased Randy Castillo), the songs are far superior to everything on Swine, most notably "Hell on High Heels." Lee subsequently rejoined the band after his release from prison for several tours and the recording of 2008's Saints of Los Angeles. This ninth Crue record includes a rote re-writing of "Wild Side" (now titled "Saints of Los Angeles") and includes 12 other songs that sound as if they were recorded by a collection of other bands attempting to sound like Motley Crue.
