The band that fun forgot
Crüe confess their sins but get no absolution
REVIEW
MOTLEY CRUE: THE DIRT
by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx, with Neil Strauss
ReganBooks, 431 pp.
Hey, wanna see a car wreck? Sure! Who doesn’t enjoy gawking at the misfortune of others? And leave it to a band of notorious ne’er-do-wells like Mötley Crüe, by way of their biography, Mötley Crüe: The Dirt – Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, to provide us with the nefarious pleasure of observing a four-man wrecking ball in action.
And what misfortune! This litany of sin, this catalogue of depravity, this... this dictionary of decadence would make Caligula blush. Page after page after page, the band members confess – no, boast – about their rise to fame and all the stupid things they did en route to their very public and very inevitable end.
What is most striking about the "confessions" is the individual and collective stupidity of Mötley Crüe’s members. These guys are – or were – S-T-double-O-P-I-D. Not just regular stupid. Not just uneducated stupid, or consistently exercising poor judgment stupid, but fundamentally stupid in a way that is ugly and, as rendered by the pen of Neil Strauss, entertaining at the same time.
Evidence? Tommy Lee’s description of Pamela Anderson, the first time he set eyes on her: "On ecstasy, Joan Rivers looks like Pamela Anderson. So imagine what Pamela Anderson looked like!"
Singer Vince Neil’s description of a porn star he’d been dating: "I’d never seen anyone look so beautiful and innocent while lying overdosed in a stretcher."
On second thought, stupid is perhaps an inaccurate description: addiction and peer pressure turned a group of very driven, down-on-their-luck kids into a group of very dangerous people. With incredible wealth, things went from bad to worse. At least kids who become hockey-star millionaires have some smart coaches, trainers and teammates around to reel them back in; in Mötley Crüe, everyone in the group and on the crew was out of control.
The book also chronicles – although it never makes a point of placing blame – the utter failure of record company execs to protect their investment by telling these guys to sober up until it was much, much too late.
The Crüe admit to every bone-headed move they ever made and, in the process, they take everyone else down with them – by name (if you didn’t already think that Ozzy is nuts, wait until you read about an ant-snorting, pee-licking incident).
As a charming aside, our province gets a little ink here too. The Crüe used to play Edmonton from time to time during the early ’80s when they were a bar band. And as a non-unionized mover of heavy objects, I had the mixed pleasure of moving heavy objects for the boys when they played the taverns, and of participating in debauchery afterwards. Even in their early days, the lads were on a self-destructive path. At one after-gig bash, their road manager struggled with a local purveyor of banned substances, tossing the young entrepreneur out of the band’s party while declaring: "No one’s gonna fuck up my band!" It was much, much too late. The boys were already well-known in Edmonton for pulling such juvenile antics as urinating on prostitutes from hotel balconies.
Ugh.
Crazy as they are – or were – you can’t help but feel a degree of respect for the group, particularly founder Nikki Sixx. Given his upbringing, if this guy hadn’t made his way to the top (and he made it there on nothing but relentless hard work), he probably would have died under a bridge somewhere a long time ago.
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