MÖTLEY CRÜE CALLING

The perfect world...little waterfalls tinkle cheerfully down the hillside and rabbits and chipmunks scamper playfully in the long grass of the sun-dappled meadow; bluebirds tweet their happy tweeting high in the linden trees, and all the men look like Mötley Crüe!! Art-wrecko cherubs squeezed into dead black cow, looking like life-size ads for Frederick’s of Hollywood’s fetish department, their heels stilettoed, their wrists studded, their chests chained, their crotches armored, and, topping the lot like a maraschino cherry on a chocolate gateau, the most unacceptably glorious brightly dyed shag cuts this side of the early ’70s!

Godz meets Sweet after extensive cosmetic surgery and a weekend at the Pleasure Chest. Loud and delinquent, glam and sleazy, heavy and arrogant and bad. Valerie Bertinelli’s mom would have never let her marry one of this lot! And yet L.A. girls have been known to squirm and sigh at the mere mention of their names. (For the sake of objective reporting, I have to add that not everybody has had quite the same reaction. A local mag continuously voted them “L.A.’s Worst Band.” Critics have dismissed them like lepers. Canadian hotel owners, customs men, and officials expressed a preference that they never set foot in the country again. Wishbone Ash apparently went into seclusion at mere rumors that the band would be touring Britain with them.) Others have been known to release anonymous (sometimes it’s better) press releases saying things like this about the band: “Like breaking over a mountain and seeing a sunset glisten through moisture-laden clouds; a rainbow of melody and power.” And even Kim Fowley’s noted that they’re “the best international image since Sweet; best European image since Japan.” So you’ve got no excuse not to go out and buy their record and make them the biggest American band around. Oh. I’ve just noticed. Several hundred thousand of you already have. So dismiss all that and join us up at Elektra’s Hollywood offices where, fresh from a night of Jack Daniels-drinking and poolplaying and yacht-crashing are Vince Neal and Nikki Sixx, vocalist and bassist of Motley Criie, respectively (Tommy Lee, drummer, and Mick Mars, lead guitarist, are the other half). Pros that we are, we get right down to business even before the bright rays of the Heineken bottle cast their green light over the plush office room.

“We take ourselves seriously.” That’s what they said. But do other people? All those heathens who are dismissing them as a bunch of posing, pouting, coked-up cutie bubblegum stars?

“Everybody can’t look like Motorhead, you know,” says Vince. “That,” nods Nikki, “takes a lot of doing.”

“The older people don’t take us seriously,” Vince continues. (Older, one assumes, than his 23, Nikki’s 25, Tommy’s 20, and Mick’s 26.) “They just look at us and think we’re like another fad, just a flash in the pan.”

“They think,” adds Nikki, “we put on our costumes and put on our makeup and it’s fake. But Motley Criie is really a way of life—for us it’s always been. We don’t fake anything. We always get in trouble, we’re known as the bad boys of rock, but we do have a lot to say in the music.”

“The same people who don’t like us,” says Vince, “these older executives and stuff, they go home and they whip their wife just like everybody else. They handcuff them, and they love the stuff.”

“Everybody’s kinky,” says Nikki. “We’re just admitting we’re sick.”

Oh. I thought you said you wanted serious reputations?

“We do,” chirps Nikki. “Seriously fucked up!” Hmm. Have they always been like this? “From day one,” Vince affirms. “We’ve always been serious alcoholics, no kidding around. It said on our baby bottles,” swears Nikki, ‘“SERIOUS FUCK-UP’” They always sat in the back of the school bus, they say in unison; always snuck into the back of the classroom. “So you could take drugs,” Vince informs me. "I used to smoke angel dust in school—in my math class. I’d sit in the back. I had this pipe that looked like a pen and no smoke ever came out of it...” Don’t say you don’t learn something reading CREEM. Don’t say you don’t learn something listening to Motley Criie.

“You could learn a lot listening to our album,” says Vince. Nikki: “It’s street music. You learn more on the street than you do in school. Though we don’t know—we never went to school...”

“You know,” says Vince, “your parents are meant to tell you things and you end up hearing them from your friends? Well, you’re hearing them from Motley Criie.”

“You might as well,” adds Nikki, “learn about sex from Motley Criie than your parents because it’s a Lot More Interesting. ”

An aside. Hey, I’m a clean-living girl. I don’t want hate mail from Nancy Reagan’s antidrug squad. I don’t want to stay on Orrin Hatch’s mailing list. They’re not really condoning drugs and stuff for American youth, are they?

Vince: “I don’t condone kids using drugs,” hand to heart. “I just condone them for myself and the band.”

Nikki: “This is a serious note. People should actually thank us for playing rock ’n’ roll the way we do, because kids come and see us and they take their aggressions out. If it wasn’t for us, they’d go out and rob liquor stores, they’d get crazy, they’d have fights, and they come and see us and they get all their energy out because of us doing this on stage. We can live it 24 hours a day. But for them it builds up and they’ve got to get it out, so they come and see us. We’re like a porno movie, man. Entertainment to the fullest.” He chuckles devilishly.

Ah, yes. Devilish. “We’ve got nothing to do with the Devil,” says Nikki indignantly. “We’re about as anti-Satan as a band can get.” Oh? “We’re not like into being Christians or Catholics; but we’re saying shout at the Devil.”

Vince: “At. Not with.”

Nikki: “Shout at your teachers, police, politicians, anybody that’s an authoritative figure that puts you down or doesn’t let you achieve what you want to do in life. Shout at the motherfucker, do what you want to do. That’s what it’s about. And everybody thinks we’re into the Devil. The pentagram has nothing to do with Satan. It’s the symbol of the werewolf. ”

Vince: “It wards off werewolves. If you wear a pentagram and a werewolf’s around, he won’t fuck with you.” Must make a note of that.

“It’s a very positive symbol,” says Nikki. “Our mascot’s a werewolf.”

“We’re contradicting ourselves,” nudges Vince. “Only a kind of werewolf,” Nikki corrects himself. “A Motley wolf,” says Vince.

The wolf’s at my door. I’m getting dangerously near the end of my allotted space without giving you the historic facts. Nikki stole his first guitar in Seattle, sold it when he ran away from home to seek fame and fortune in L.A. He was in a bunch of lousy bands that flopped like whole wheat pancakes until he met Athens, Greeceborn Tommy Lee. “Like, we opened the door and looked at each other and it was like, ‘Hey, what kind of hair dye do you use?’ ‘What kind do you use?”’ On such lines are dreams made. Nikki always dreamed of forming Motley Crue (not with that name though; Mick Mars contributed that), he says. They got Mick from an ad in the paper—“loud, rude, aggressive guitarist,” it said—“and he was the only person who looked like us.” Tommy, a Valley boy since the age of 4, took them to see bleach-haired Vince at the Starwood (“I used to go to the beach a lot and my hair would get pretty blond, so I thought, ‘Fuck it, dye it white.’ I always liked the old Rod Stewart look when his hair was like this”), who was singing at the time in a teenybop band, Rock Candy. He got the job, they formed the band, started playing in L.A. clubs a month later, struck out an independent single—something you'd expect more from new wave than from reactionary heavy metal—and an album on their own Leathtir Records, called Too Fast for Love, featuring Vince’s crotch on the cover. It sold out, Elektra signed them, the album was rereleased, management problems were weathered, and out comes album No. 2, which is leaping up the charts and brings us right back to the present.

“And on the next album we ll probably be even weirder. And sicker. The more records we sell, the more money we get,” says Vince. “And the more,” chortles Nikki, “drugs we get!” They were on drugs, they confess, when they designed their stage costumes; fine little outfits they are too. “We didn’t really get more glam. They just slowly evolved. We find the weirdest things to wear,” says Vince. “Anything. We still do that. Rags—we see something blowing down the middle of the street, we stop the car and reach out like, ‘Oh, this’ll look cool if I wear it.’ You know, old newspapers, a bag. We rob the bag ladies. Beat them up,” he chuckles. “Take all their shit, and their clothes...”

What about some more Motley Crue fashion tips? Do they do their own hair?

Vince: “Yeah, we do. We do all the colors ourselves. Nikki usually cuts it for us, though.” Who does Nikki’s? “He does it himself, which is kind of hard to do. Tommy cut his once, but that was the last time! Hey, I ain’t going to go and sit in no beauty salon!”

Do you still use Hex Net?

“Oh yeah,” in unison. “But there’s this new stuff, Pantene. Your hair’s like a tumbleweed after that. I bought a gallon of it.”

“I thought,” says Vince, “I was wearing a hat after I sprayed with that.”

How do they manage to live in L.A., with sunshine and veggie burgers and all, and still stay so pale and unhealthy-looking?

“I sleep till four in the afternoon,” is Nikki’s beauty secret. “It takes a few hours to get drunk, then back on the street again.”

Vince: “Pass out, wake up, go back out.”

How come so many other L.A. bands look just like you?

Nikki: “They come up to us and say, ‘Where do you guys get your clothes?’ or ‘How do you get your hair to go like that?’ You tell them, and the next thing you know they walk in looking just like you. ‘Wait a minute! It took us years to perfect this sleazy look!”’

Vince: “They see something that works, and they go out and get a bottle of Nice ’n Easy blue-black and some Hex hair spray and put on their mom’s dress and think it’s heavy metal.”

“There’s only one Motley Crue,” swears Nikki Sixx. And, they warn, they’ve got more staying power than Flex and Pantene combined.

“Because we’re the originals,” says Nikki. “We’re not faking. We’re honest to the kids. We’re rowdy 24 hours a day. We’re not phonies.

“I like to think that we’re a lot like the Rolling Stones of the ’80s. They would live their life to the fullest and their songs revolved around their lifestyles, and that’s what we do. I figure you go around only once and nobody gets out alive, so live it to its fullest. We’re a rare breed.”

“Every mother’s nightmare,” grins the nearperfect face of Vince Neil. And quite possibly every little heavy metal girl’s dream...

Originally appeared in CREEM, February 1984