THE YARDBIRDS vs. MOTLEY CRUE: Yardbirds Forever, Motley Crue Never!

THE YARDBIRDS vs. MOTLEY CRUE: Yardbirds Forever, Motley Crue Never!

Anastasia Finn

I know how my younger boy would put it if he were asked to compare the Yardbirds to Motley Crue. He’d say that Motley Crue sucks. But I don’t think that’s nearly strong enough. In comparison to the Yardbirds, Motley" Crue eats the undergarments of persons of highly impeachable personal hygiene.

Actually, Motley Crue eats the undergarments of persons of highly impeachable personal hygiene in comparison to any group that’s about more than getting its procreative organs licked and fondled, its bank accounts enlarged, and its picture in teenybop magazines.

The only thing I’ve ever liked about Motley Crue was the English dominatrix boots Nikki Sixx wore on the back cover of their first album—and only because my son-in-law had just weeks before bought me a pair exactly like them as an anniversary gift. (My husband and I will have been married 28 years—28 wonderful years—in March.) About the Yardbirds, who between 1963 and 1968 virtually invented the style that’s come to be known as heavy metal, I loved nearly everything.

Great Britain produced virtually jillions of brilliant rock ’n’ roll groups in the ’60s, but only a handful—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, and the Kinks— were as consistently exciting as the Yardbirds. None was more consistently innovative. Motley Crue, on the other hand, is the second worst act in the history of rock ’n’ roll, right after Billy Idol, in the sense that they exist solely to exploit their People are forever going on and on about how influential the Beatles were, and certainly they were in their own time, but it’s been the Yardbirds’ whose influence has endured. Never mind heavy metal and groups like Ratt, who are exact copies of Aerosmith, who in turn were gigantically influenced by Keith Relf, Jim McCarty, Chris Dreja, Paul SamwellSmith, and their guitarists—there’s scarcely an AOR group extant that fails to betray at least a little of the influence of the ’birds. Consider the case of Huey Lewis & the News. Huey plays the harmonica, and so did Keith Relf of the Yardbirds!

audience’s ugliest impulses.

London residents tell us that even in the days of their greatest success, no member of that glorious fivesome, as members of which no fewer than three of rock ’n’ roll’s most exciting guitarists played some of their most epochal stuff, was ever observed to fail to help an elderly or disabled person across a busy intersection, or to contribute magnanimously—and anonymously—to local orphanages at Christmastime.

No, you’re right—that’s a patent fabrication. But at least the ’birds didn’t make a point in every interview of gloating, as the Crue-tons never fail to, about their own unbridled obnoxiousness, or, as they’d apparently prefer it, their rock-’n’-roll-bad-boy-ness. Nor did they ever announce from the stage that they really liked performing in a particular city because its girls had the tastiest “pussies,” as the Crue are notorious for doing. Nor, for that matter, did they have the colossal gall to suggest, as the Cruetons are forever suggesting, that, by being horiffic assholes themselves, they precluded their audiences having to commit sociopathic atrocities. (Having become a rock critic only after abandoning my career as a professor of sociology at a major Midwestern university, I can assure you that it simply doesn’t work that way!)

There’s more excitement in the last mintue of the Yardbirds’ exhilarating anarchic ‘I’m A Man,’ for instance, than there is in a warehouse of Motley Crue albums. Don’t believe me, though—believe your own ears.

Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page of the Yardbirds all played the guitar quite marvelously, while no less authoritative an authority than Robert Christgau has described the Crue's Mick Mars’ playing as “dork-fingered.” At that, Bob was being too kind. And Mick's very questionable technique’s only a third of the problem! If he ever played anything remotely original, his tuning pegs would surely fall out in amazement. And he’s funny-looking. His head’s too big for his body or something, and he has no neck.

Actually, if any of the Crue ever had an original thought, musical or otherwise, his pancake make-up would probably cake in astonishment. To the impressionable youngster, they might (because they look like the sort of girls I always hoped my boys wouldn’t go out with, for fear that they’d catch something) seem to embody rebelliousness and daring. There isn’t a single thing about them, though, that isn’t recycled. They got the idea for their sacrilegious/satanic image from the Stones, Black Sabbath and Zeppelin, their umlauts from Blue Oyster Cult, their gigantic psychoshag hairdos from the New York Dolls’ Johnny Thunders, their make-up and S&M accessories from Kiss, of whom they generally seem scaleddown, but somehow even more offensive clones. Why, I understand from my daughter-in-law who lives in California that “Nikki Sixx” stole even his name, for Pete’s sake—from the drummer in an obscure surf revival group called Jon & the Nightriders!

As far as their and the Yardbirds’ vocalists are concerned, the latter group’s Keith Relf probably wasn’t born with much more native ability than the Crue’s Vince Neil—which is to say, not a whole lot. But he was infinitely more listenable because he wasn’t forever shrieking at the very top of his range (and above it) as though he’d just discovered that, instead of the burger he’d ordered, he’d been eating the undergarments of persons of highly impeachable personal hygiene!

The archaic-sounding production of their records notwithstanding, there’s more excitement in the last minute of the Yardbirds’ exhilarating anarchic “I’m A Man,” for instance, than there is in a warehouseful of Motley Crue albums. Don’t believe me, though—believe your own ears.

Speaking of the Crue’s diabolical image, I might mention that I attended the 1983 US Festival, at which the Crue performed, and eavesdropped in the informal press conference Neil and “Sixx” gave afterward. To my immense surprise, Vince seemed a pleasant enough boy, if a little on the dim side, and it made one wonder if they’re really as monstrous as they pretend. I mean, at one point he admitted that his parents were pleased and excited by his success, and seemed pleased and excited to do so. Also, I gather that the Los Angeles group W.A.S.P. is even more dedicatedly perverse than the Crue-tons, to the tune of pretending to torture a young woman on stage, and enjoying beating up smaller persons than themselves off it.

Motley Crue is the second worst act in the history of rock ’n’ roll, right after Billy Idol, in the sense that they exist solely to exploit their audience’s ugliest impulses.

Such groups have absolutely nothing to express but how fearsomely wicked and perverse and sexually insatiable and contemputous of women they are. The fact that huge corporations subsidize them is nearly as devastating an indictment of capitalism as it’s possible to make.

The really tragic thing about such groups is that teenage boys imagine that they speak for them. I’ve raised two sons of my own, so I now full well what vicious tricks a boy’s hormones are apt to play on him during puberty. But listen—please listen, teens of America—they haven’t invented the hormonal imbalance sufficient to justify identification with assholes like Motley Crue, assholes who are interested only in getting head from girls you haven’t the nerve to ask out, in buying into shopping malls with their profits from shows you had to sweat over a hot Burger King grill for three days to be able to afford to see, in playing the rock ’n’ roll bad boy superstar by sneering at you contemptuously from the backs of their limousines and the pages of magazines like this one.

Mark a mother’s words—in 18 months there won’t be 20 teenagers left in America who’d be caught dead listening to Motley Crue. Which isn’t to hope that they won’t have found someone equally contemptible to replace them.