Creem Jan. 1985

by Sylvie Simmons
I speak of the glory which is Motley Crue. How many double-platinum bands do you know who are anticipating the imminent Sweet reunion with joy? How many double-platinum bands do you know who sleep upside-down on their foreheads just to keep their shagdos looking great for you? How many double-platinum bands do you know who like to chew women's underthings? Okay, that's an easy one. But how many double-platinum bands do you know who have chewed David Lee Roth of Van Halen? There! And, I do not lie, this very thing- the squeal of leather pierced by gleaming canine, the sigh of thigh flesh rent by teeth, the grinding of molar on molar-happened just the other day at an end-of-tour party. We're not talking playful nibbles, flirtatious boyish nips either: major penicillin jobs. Along with drawing genitals on walls and drawing crowds to concerts and drawing great sums out of bank accounts to buy black Corvettes, Motley Crue like to draw blood.

"We bite the fuck out of people who come on the bus with us," says Nikki Sixx, matter- of-factly, as a god might in an offhand way mention zapping out a few murderous thunderbolts. What the hell, "we bite the fuck out of each other too. Tommy bites me and I bite him all the time. It's crazy." Also a little, er, suspect? "We bite our audiences too," Nikki comes back somewhat in- dignantly. "All the time! We get paid in flesh. Our audiences," he declares with affection, "are sluts."

"You've known the band since the beginning. We've always been seriously fucked up. We were always rowdy-we can't lie to you. We're not faking, we're just us. We drink and fuck and do drugs. Doesn't everybody? The only difference now is we can afford better drugs! People are going, 'Nikki, I've never seen you smile so much,' I'm happier right now than I've ever been in my whole life. I really didn't expect it to happen so quickly," a brief black cloud of pensiveness scuds across his eyes. "But it feels good," he perks up. "It feels good to walk into your record company offices and everybody's opening their doors and smiling and all the secretaries are going 'hi Nikki, how are you?,' all friendly, when it wasn't all that long ago they used to ignore us or run away screaming. Hey, you know us. We can't lie to you."

But the Top has its responsibilities, take heed my children. "We've got this image to live up to," he sighs. "Which is us. I mean most groups are faking the kids but we're not, it's not an image. But you can't be fucking girls 24 hours a day." No indeed, you've got to write a song and play a gig once in a while. But, in spite of these hardships, "We're having fun," beams Nikki. "Jesus, we're having fun."

I shan't go into details. Okay, you've twisted my arm, this is a sleazy rag if ever I've written for one, so I'll give you one or two. All females who wish to get on board the Motley Crue bus have, for some strange reason, to dishabille the upper portion of their torso; having been thus undignified, all those who wish to make it to the back of the bus have to present themselves as the Lord made them, and the stuff with bottles and the rest I won't touch with a 10-foot pole, some things being a bit too bizarre and boyish for even my tolerant tastes. What some people will do to meet Stars is and always has been incredible, when all they're getting to meet are people who throw up Jack Daniels and act like egocentric Mussolinis just like everybody else. But, to put an end to this aimless waffle:

I speak of the glory of the music which is Motley Crue! Glam and sleazy and loud and delinquent and catchy and arrogant with more hooks than an angling shop. "The reaction of the major labels," they recall, "was 'yeah, it's real good, but you'll have to change this and that. ' We decided we were not going to change nothing to fit into somebody else's concept, someone who sits in an office on the 17th floor and has never stood in an audience. We were always honest. Most of L.A. was fad- oriented, but we weren't intimidated, we just made the music we wanted to make: Motley Metal! Heavy with a hook. Noweverybody's doing it, especially in L.A. You can't believe the deals they're giving out. And these bands-1 don't mean it badly; OK, I do mean it badly!-two years ago they thought they were Van Halen, and now they're all trying to be Motley Crue. Make up your mind! Van Halen are Van Halen and we're us. We're not trying to be like anybody else. These bands get together and they can't make up their mind what they want to be like. They don't realize that being themselves is what's going to take them the farthest. God, if I see another band with stacked heels and black hair I'm going to throw up!"

Nikki's hair isn't all black these days. There's a fetching blood-red streak to one side, soon to be joined, he reckons, by a few more fetching hues. They still do their own hair-Nikki usually cuts it, they do the coloring themselves, and the rest is down to buckets of Pantene and Flex Net, blow- drying and boisterousness, and general all- round debauchery and dissipation. Oh yes, and sleeping on their foreheads.

"First you got to cut it real jaggedy. Then you need this stuff," a vicious-looking pump spray. "You can't use aerosol. Then you've got to dry you hair upside-down and pull it out while you do it. And of course," of I course! "You've got to sleep upside-down. You sleep on your forehead. When you wake up in the morning, your hair is all messed up. And you look at yourself and you say 'I look fine.' "

I speak of the glory of the look which is Motley Crue. Since I first met them, with that glorious cheap and tacky but oh-so-dear glitter-sleaze-look ratted hair, pale skin, killer leathers and stiletto heels and any garbage they managed to nick from bag ladies on the Hollywood streets-they've moved on to a more overblown, costume-and-made-up, air- brushed glam appearance.

"People say 'look at how much they've changed,' " says Nikki, "but it's been a gradual thing, not overnight. We were always developing, changing, It's just," he shrugs, "the money helps it change quicker I guess. But we didn't really get more glam. It took us years to perfect this sleazy look!

"We couldn't afford costumes like these before. Basically we were as outrageous as we are now two years ago. Nobody looked like us or dressed like us onstage. But now all these bands are starting to copy us, dressing like us, dyeing their hair black or white, so we have to go one step further, keep one step ahead of everybody. On the next album we'll probably be even weirder and stranger as it goes."

So where do they get their outfits? "K Mart. The 25-cent rack!" Honest? "We have a costume lady. The designs are given to her and she has them made up for us." Were they on drugs when they designed them? "We're on drugs now!"

Ah, the rewards of success. Wasn't that long ago Motley Crue couldn't even afford a case of Ripple. "That story about the turkey pies," Nikki reminds me-there they were, Christmas Eve, no food in the larder, no presents under the tree, hell, no tree! forced to disguise themselves as normal people and shoplift for frozen food in the supermarket-' 'That's true. People go 'yeah, right.' We stole a Christmas tree and put beer cans on it for decorations. And we had to play that day, so we woke up and looked at the Christmas tree, we took it out- side and we lit it on fire and left for the gig. "

It was, as Vince told me, "a really depressing time. It couldn't get any worse. Me and Nikki would go and sit under University Stereo, get drunk, sitting with the bums drinking, we'd buy some cheap wine and some vodka and we'd sit in the alleyway and drink, going, we're fairly good-Iooking guys, the band's alright, how come we're sitting , under here on the streets of Hollywood?"

"The Rainbow wouldn't let us in," recalls Nikki, "the Troubadour wouldn't let us in, the Whisky wouldn't let us in."

Because nobody loves you when you're down and out?

"No, because we started too many fights. I don't know why! We're normal-looking guys, aren't we? We look like football players? I don't know, trouble just seems to follow us." The difference is, being successful, the same trouble that got them kicked out of clubs now gets them amusing press and free drinks from club owners. The Whisky, I think it was, just recently gave them an open tab after a fistfight in the club for being "so amusing." Funny life, isn't it?

The turning-point, they reckon, was the tour they did with Ozzy Osbourn.e, that and getting good management after their original one-upped and left with all their money. ("Bastard" on Shout At The Devil, is dedicated to him.) "It was a rowdy tour! Still, a lot of people got to notice us and started taking us seriously. I think they realized that Motley Crue is for the kids, the songs are written for the kids, and we're genuine. And all the trouble we had with the management, we kind of had to stop and get everything organized around us, because we were so screwed up it was ridiculous. It looked inevitable that nothing was going to happen for us-we were going to break up at one point," shock, horror. "It was ridiculous. Then we got new management and we could do what we wanted to do. Everybody got their shit together and we just got on with doing what we do best, rock 'n' roll. We're honest to the kids. We go out there and kick ass and we want to do a great show. I always say, you're paying 20 bucks, I want to give you a $50 show. I think that's going to give us staying power.

"Plus," says Vince, "we're greedy."

So what it comes down to is Motley Crue are here, have no intention of going away ("the way things are going the sky's the limit! We're going to keep expanding, keep doing new things. Once you've tasted blood you don't want to give it up"; don't know what David Lee Roth will say about that!) and there's nothing you or lor anyone can do about it. In between the dissipation, as we said, they're writing the odd song- Nikki's been working on one about bloody crotches or some such thing and another about group sex, just to give you an idea (incidentally, he vehemently denies reports made by ex-Runaway Uta Ford that she wrote or co-wrote some of Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil" material during the year she spent living with the bass player). Mick Mars has been working on an instrumental and they're (if you don't know already the line-up's Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee) apparently doing an as yet unnamed cover song on the next LP. It'll be recorded at t:lome in L.A. with Tom Werman and Geoff Workman at the controls. And as for the new look to go along with it, "It should be more futuristic, more aggressive, hard-edged," says Nikki, "but cool."

The important thing in metal music, points out Nikki, is "the sleaze factor. There's some records that have got It, but not enough. I listen to the radio all the time, right-I listen to it before I go out for the night, and I listen to it when I get back and sometimes I listen to it in between" (cruising down the boulevard In his new Corvette, for example. They said on the news just the other day that L.A. has fewer traffic accidents than any other major U.S. city. They o obviously hadn't heard about Nikki's new purchase. Last Corvette he had, he turned into mashed metal on the way home from the Rainbow, ended up hitching a lift back to his apartment stark naked; should have seen the truck driver's face. Anyway, as I often do, I digress) "and what I listen for is a sleaze factor. Motley Crue has got the sleaze factor." Couldn't have said it better myself.