- This is not Thoughts on Mötley Crüe.
- I do not have many thoughts about Mötley Crüe, other than “How the fuck are all four of them still alive and Tom Petty is dead?”
- Nikki Sixx literally died a couple times, but God apparently did not want him and kept sending him back to Earth, maybe so Nikki could take bass lessons.
- Other of TotD’s TöMC include (but are not limited to):
- Every music writer that’s been forced to pump out 1,000 words about these fleabags would like to kick the shit out of them for those umlauts; there’s, like, 19 buttons I have to hit to get their name right, and they’re just not worth it.
- Motörhead?
- Worth the trouble.
- Not the fucking Crüe.
- Musically, they may have been the cream of Hair Metal’s crop tops, and that is not a compliment for them as much as it is an indictment against the entire genre.
- Am I defending Mötley?
- Yeah, kinda, in context.
- Who were their peers?
- Poison?
- Warrant?
- Jesse James Dupree and his brothers in Jackyl?
- Here is the proper analogy: imagine that tomorrow morning you wake to find that someone has broken into your house and shit on the floor.
- This is a terrible event.
- BUT there are levels of horror.
- Maybe it’s a tightly-compacted turd, tapered at each end, and curled up like a doodysnake.
- Traumatic, yes, but easily cleaned up.
- What if it’s goopier and evidenced of a weird and possibly foreign diet, and has spread out in a two-foot radius like cafeteria chili unrestrained by a tray?
- That’s worse than the neat turd, right?
- And then there’s diarrhea.
- We can all agree that–while of course our preference would be to have no strangers befouling our homes in the middle of the night–if the shit’s simply gotta be there, then you’d choose the polite log over the steamy, liquid, bright tan, corn-and-berry-speckled shit dripping from the walls and lamps and portraits of your family?
- That’s Mötley; they’re the manageable coil.
- And those were TotD’s Thoughts on Mötley Crüe.
- Now we come to The Dirt, and my primary thought is this one: I will commit violence to prevent this from happening to the Grateful Dead.
- Please, Lord, never make me watch a scene featuring some actor asshole in a bad Bobby wig looking up at a clearly CG Wall of Sound and saying to a fat actor asshole in a bad Garcia wig, “It’s, like, a whole wall of sound, man.”
- And then the fat asshole in the wig goes, “Say that again, man.”
- I can’t take that shit, and yet I know it’s coming.
- Amazon still owns the rights to Parish’s book, and him and Bobby are still producing a biopic over there.
- Last I heard of it was two years ago when they named a writer (who wasn’t me and therefore will fuck it up), but I guaranfuckingtee that there are emails and phone calls about “the Dead project” going on right now in Amazon’s LA offices.
- This is how I picture it:
- GUY WAVING BIG CIGAR AROUND NOISE
- “Get me Rock Stars! Netflix got Rock Stars! Where’s ours? They got those, whattyacallits, Molly Cruisers over there. They wear lipstick! Men wearing lipstick! It’s outrageous! What do we own?”
- …
- “The Grateful What? I don’t care, just make sure there’s tits and cocaine. PUT THE COCAINE ON THE TITS! Get it into production. Hire Felicity Huffman; we can get her for cheap.”
- That’s probably not how it’s happening, but I have fun imagining scenarios and sharing them with you.
- The Dirt: it’s better than Bohemian Rhapsody.
- Except for the soundtrack and the wigs.
- The hairpieces in The Dirt are so bad you start wondering if it’s a post-modern nod to the inherently artificial nature of such movies.
- Are they wigs, or are they “wigs?”
- Signifier or signified?
- Did you just work Saussure into your bullshit about Mötley Crüe?
- I did.
- Well done.
- This is what the movie said the band looked like:
- You are Fake Crües.
- (Though not evident in this photo, the Vince Guy looks exactly like Dana Carvey as Wayne; also, the Mick Guy looks just like Nathan Explosion from Metalocalypse. The Tommy Guy and the Nikki Guy just look like tall dudes in cheap wigs. I will give the film bonus points as it did find a Heather Locklear Girl who actually looked like Heather Locklear. For a second, I thought that perhaps the producers had hired the real Locklear and used that creepy de-aging technology from the Marvel movies.)
- Anyway, the film’s based on a book Mötley dictated to the guy who invented the Pickup Artist community; it came out in 2001, when their shenanigans were still cheeky fun.
- Nikki confesses to several rapes in the book.
- Tommy beats many women.
- Vince straight-up kills a guy.
- You know: wacky Rock Star behavior.
- (Mick, whom the movie portrays as a curmudgeonly, Fred Mertz-like character, was the only one of them who wasn’t a complete piece of shit. He was/is a mentally ill drunkard, but the man could behave in public like a human being.)
- While doing press for the film, Nikki disavowed the book.
- Which makes him and Charles Barkley the only people to call their own autobiographies lies.
- You also get all the Mötley Crüe you know and love.
- There’s:
- Ozzy and Nikki having a gross-out contest that ends in Ozzy licking up Nikki’s fresh piss.
- Nikki OD’ing being Uma Thurman’d back to life, only to immediately go home and OD again.
- A great deal of punching.
- Tommy throwing up on strange women while wearing a leather thing and Converse sneakers.
- Nikki passing out at Tommy’s wedding to Heather Locklear. (Which was a sad and tacky encore to Keith passing out at Mick’s wedding to Bianca. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
- And much, much more!
- They leave out the part where Tommy beats the shit out of Pamela Anderson on multiple occasions and gets chucked in county for six months, and all of Nikki’s marriages, and how fat Vince got.
- Wanna see something funny?
- Look at this:
- Now look at this:
- Jesus.
- Never get old, kids.
Musings on the Most Ridiculous Band I Can't Stop Listening To
© 2021 Thoughts On The Dead
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It was hard to watch, but i didn’t turn it off. I remember vividly the “Shout at the Devil” scare. As i have stated in the past, I live in ALABAMA
“Boy, you ought not listen to them devilworshiping homos”.
Thank god my Pops loved him some Beatles. When i became a young teen, i went for the Punk Rock, just like all the guys in the California skater magazines. Albeit, in a backwoods, uninformed kinda way. By i said nay to the hair metal. They lacked musical ability. They also lacked the authenticity that the movie would have you believe they were striving for. Wierd huh?
You know who appears to wear lipstick now? Buzz Bissinger, who wrote “Friday Night Lights.” I am not able to post a picture here, but you can find it easily.
Would Felicity Huffman play young Bobby or old Phil?
Both. She’s just that talented.
I feel like you are giving short shrift to Whitesnake.
Not for their music, Jesus on skis, it’s terrible, but for having the foresight to make their videos all about Tawny Kitaen vamping around Tawnishly in diaphanous garments.
I should write about the great Hair Metal videos.
“everyone involved with this project wants to have its cake and stick its cock in it, too.“
—David Fear, Rolling Stone
The parallels and congruence with the Grateful Dead story are indeed striking.
There is the mysterious and spooky origin-of-the-band-name story, where the band toss around silly and unsuitable names which, nonetheless, betray their prankster wit, until an epiphany occurs. There is the hard driving, avuncular manager, who demonstrated the ethics of show business to the band. Admittedly, they were not paying attention.
Of course, there are the fans. Fuck knows how many shows Mötley Crüe (thanks for the 19 keystokes) played. Deadheads, on the other hand, can count.