THE DECADENT HISTORY OF MOTLEY CRUE
by Corey Levitan

Triumphing over internal strife, substance abuse, critical mauling, stiff competition and the law is unusual for a band. Doing it each year for a decade without breaking up, without a single member departing or dying, and without diminishing in popularity is unheard of, unless you're Motley Crue. Crue singer Vince Neil has spent many hours mulling over past triumphs since the October release of Decade Of Decadence, the retrospective disc tracing his band's career. "I can't believe it's been ten years already," he says, radiating the confidence of a king perched atop his L.A. metal throne.

Before the Crue's arrival, the Sunset Strip was littered with Styx cover bands and the doomed vestiges of punk. Now it reverberates from the Crue's influence, as Decadence battles nose-to-nose with Guns N' Roses at the crest of the charts. And the Motley boys are equally on top of their careers and personal lives. It is far from what had for years been the same ol' situation. Motley Crue's story began in London - not the city but the group with which founder Nikki Sixx had become bored by 1980. Hungry for new blood, he nabbed drummer Tommy Lee from competing band Suite 19. Mick Mars arrived days later thanks to a "loud, rude, aggressive guitarist available" ad in Recycler magazine. "They had this kid guitar player who was okay," Mick says, recalling his name was "Rob something. " Mars, the oldest Motley by five years, says Rob lacked discipline. "Every song was a solo all the way through. So I told Nikki and Tommy, 'He ain't gonna make it.' They said, 'Well good, you tell him.' So I did." Nikki, Tommy and Mick scouted the Starwood nightclub gig of a Top-40 band called Rock Candy. They'd heard raves about its rhythm guitarist, James Alverson, but were more taken by its David Lee Roth-looking singer. Vince Neil, whom Tommy remembered from high school, was cornered in the urine aromaed men's room and pressured into accepting an audition. "I said, 'Oh yeah, I'll be there,'" Vince remembers, "and I didn't go. I just blew them off. There was no name for the band, they'd never played a gig, and to me, man, playing the Starwood, that was it!"

The band hired another singer, O'Dean (his full name), whose tenure lasted all of two days. "Mick really hated his guts," laughs Neil, who reconsidered the offer to join the trio when Rock Candy splintered a week later. A band was born. The song "Live Wire" came to the boys during their first rehearsal, their name to Mick after a passerby on the street noted, "What a motley crew." The sound was Aerosmith, Sweet, Slade, Queen, and Led Zeppelin; the image a grease-painted mishmosh of the New York Dolls, Kiss, and bad horror flicks. They wore platform shoes, set fire to their pants and decapitated mannequins with chainsaws on stage. Early audiences watched in horror, standing at least 20 feet back from the stage. Their first manager was Mick's friend's brother-in-law, who paid them each $20 per week plus rent for an apartment in Hollywood, by the Whisky nightclub. If the decade of decadence began anywhere, it was within the walls of that two-bedroom, where all-night, all-morning and all night again B.Y.O.B. and krell (cocaine) parties ensued, drawing as many as 300 revelers at a time. To supplement their $20 salaries, the band relied on grocery offerings from female fans and larceny. Chicken pot pies were stolen for their freezer, black electrical tape for their disintegrating platform shoes, and equipment for their performances. (Nikki once nicked an amp belonging to Randy Rand of Autograph.) The Crue's early gigs included opening for Y &T at the Starwood and playing for a dollar a head at Pookie's, a Pasadena sandwich shop, where their first engagement drew 12 people. The band was asked back only because they had to pay off their $137 beer tab. To generate interest, a single was waxed and flung out to their club crowds. Occasionally the discs were flung right back, but "Toast Of The Town" perked enough ears to sell on its own, funding the three-day, $7,000 recording of an album, Too Fast For Love, at Hit City West studio. The independent Leathur records released it in June of 1981 and then went broke, leaving the band in career limbo.

Enter A&R man Tom Zutaut, then of Elektra records, whose credits would later include discovering Guns N' Roses for Geffen. "Zoot" signed the Crue and Elektra re-released Too Fast in August of 1982. Kiss were among the group's earliest fans, and invited their Maybellined progenies aboard the Creatures OJ The Night tour. Instead of cooling it down, success intensified the band's lock-your-daughter-up antics, especially off stage. On tour in France during 1984, Tommy and Nikki set fire to a hotel room with flare guns. In Nuremberg, West Germany during the 'Monsters Of Rock' festival, queen-sized beds were sawn in two and hurled out of closed windows onto car roofs, walls were shot up with bee-bee guns and guards with no sense of humor chased the band with Uzis and Rottweilers. The laughs subsided when Tommy's 280Z took seven rolls off a freeway at 90 miles per hour. He escaped injury, but when Nikki rammed his Porsche into a telephone poll going 70, major surgery was required to reconstruct his right shoulder. On December 8th, 1984, Vince was partying with members of Hanoi Rocks at his house in Redondo Beach. At 6:30 pm he lost control of his '72 Ford Pantera and swerved into oncoming traffic, killing his passenger, Hanoi drummer Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley, and injuring two others in a Volkswagen. Neil was sentenced to 30 days in jail - later reduced to 18 - $2.6 million in restitution, and 200 hours of community service. The band was stunned, yet only stepped up its chemical intake. Of the time "Smokin' in the Boys Room" dealt the band its first Top-20 single, Vince can only say, "I don't remember anything. That's when the drugs really started kicking in, in between Theatre Of Pain and Girls, Girls, Girls. Nobody was getting along and it was real rough." The Crue's early motto - "live fast, die fast" - became unfortunate reality on December 22,1987, when Sixx actually checked into that big bass clinic in the sky. He had technically died from a heroin overdose in his room at the Franklin Plaza Hotel in Hollywood. His heart stopped for more than two minutes, whereupon his band mates each received a call informing them their bassist was gone. Luckily, a quick-thinking paramedic filled a five-inch hypodermic with pure adrenaline and loaded it into Nikki's heart, kickstarting it.

When Nikki called his mourning Crue-mates from beyond the grave, it was the point upon which their lives turned 180 degrees. The men sobered up, recording 1989's Dr. Feelgood on nothing stronger than Perriers with a twist. They polished their look and their sound, too, which now included power ballads, slide guitar, acoustic bass and backup singers. Where other albums took a couple of months to write, Feelgood took a year. And the band took a new interest in production, auditioning numerous candidates - including r&b legend Quincy Jones - before hiring Bob Rock. Dr. Feelgood became the Crue's first number one album, registering double platinum after only two months out of the box. Yet Motley Crue didn't sell out. The decadence continued, only now it didn't cross that line between depraved and deadly anymore. For instance, Tommy showed his butt cheeks to a Cincinnati crowd on the Feelgood tour and in turn was shown the inside of a police station. As well as looking back, the Crue are taking this day to look ahead. This afternoon they will have their first band meeting concerning the next studio album. They say it will probably be tracked at L.A. 's A&M studios, with Rock repeating production duties. "The next album's going to have between 17 and 20 songs on it," Neil says. "I doubt if there'll be any ballads. We have lots of ideas."

Asked about the next ten years, Neil says he doesn't see why the Crue can't survive. "Our main goal is to be like the Stones," he says, "where you're still appreciated by your old fans and new fans alike. Hopefully we'll be able to do that and in another ten years we'll be able to put out another Decade Of Decadence album."