Mötley Crüe: between the music and the controversies of hard rock

since the band Mötley Crüe announced a tour in Latin America together with the group Def Leppard and one of the dates is in Bogotá, in February 2023, learn a little about the controversies of Mötley Crüe.

Punk was losing its force in the late seventies and early eighties, in the United States it was emerging from hard rock, heavy metal and glam rock, a genre known as glam metal or hair metal, where a similar sound was maintained. to classic heavy, with hints of pop, but with an aesthetic more towards glam, like David Bowie: makeup, almost androgynous tight clothing, leather, shiny accessories and a hairstyle with a lot of hairspray.

You may be interested in: Def Leppard and Mötley Crüe will perform in Bogotá, this would be the date and place

“They were the biggest hard rock band of the ’80s until Guns N’ Roses came along,” journalist and writer Chuck Klosterman commented on Motley Crue.

Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee, Vince Neil and Mick Mars who would be the band’s bassist, drummer, singer and guitarist, respectively, took the term “RockStar” to its fullest. Alcohol, sex, drugs and rock and roll are the four words that characterized this band.

The recognition between their music and their controversies is very diffuse, because although they had songs like “Home Sweet Home”, which talks about dreams, the feeling of nostalgia and how home is a comforting place, there are other songs like “Kickstart My Heart” that refers to how after going to the hospital after an overdose, Nikki Sixx runs away and comes home to continue injecting heroin.

The apartment that looked like a dump

At the beginning of their fame, the band lived in an apartment near Whiskey a Go-Go, a bar / nightclub in the city of Los Angeles.

Neighbors, frequent attendees at the parties they threw and even the gang itself stated that this apartment was a complete dump. Vince Neil once commented that all the glass in the house was broken and they had no intention of fixing it. “When the trash started piling up, we’d open the sliding kitchen door and dump the bags out onto the patio,” Neil also recalled.

Also read: The “Macondo” from the series “One Hundred Years of Solitude” begins to come to life

After nine months of living in that apartment, the Los Angeles Department of Health had to intervene after several lawsuits by neighbors.

Sexual deception, orgies and infidelities

The band had excellent songs, they experimented with the sounds of metal, punk and grunge. Every record they put out was an album that charted well on the charts. With each album they attracted more fans… and fans.

At most of the parties they threw or attended they had sexual encounters with women, known as groupies. Of course, they took advantage of the fame, power and drugs they had.

On one occasion, Nikki Sixx confessed that after having sex in a room “the size of a closet”, he called Tommy Lee and another man to be with the woman. By her position, between the circumstances, the woman kept thinking that whoever she was with was still Nikki Sixx and not two other subjects to whom she had not given her consent.

We recommend: Korean series, a growing trend in Colombia

After being signed to Elektra Records, Vince Neil couldn’t think of a better way to thank Tom Zutaut, Elektra’s A&R at the time and who signed them, than by sleeping with his girlfriend.

There is also Tommy’s anecdote when, at one of his parties, he asked “Honey”, a woman, who, after having performed oral sex on him in her jacuzzi, would do the same to the other people who were in the place.

Evidence of their sexual bacchanals are the photos found in the band’s Autobiographical Book, called The Dirt, where there are photos, with their censorship, of how they had sexual encounters with porn actresses. Sometimes with several women and other times with one.

Tommy Lee and his domestic violence

Tommy Lee, drummer of the band, had a reputation for being very infatuated, to the point that many times he met a woman, started a toxic relationship and within weeks he already thought about getting married.

In fact, he was married to Pamela Anderson. Their marriage was in Cancun, Mexico and later the couple’s discussions became known. Reconciliation after fight was the relationship of these two, until after so much violence and mistreatment, Anderson denounced Tommy.

Do not miss: Ezra Miller, actor of “Flash”, could be sentenced to 26 years in prison

Some time later, Tommy Lee’s version was known where he does acknowledge that he should have handled things differently and that, instead of solving them, he scared Pamela Anderson, making everything worse.

Drugs and alcohol

Not only did his sexual appetite stand out, but drugs and alcohol were present from the beginning.

On their tour of Japan they had problems with the law, because they entered the bullet train drugged and drunk, where they began to do their crazy things, throwing food and attacking some passengers with a bottle.

Anecdotes of how they arrived at the hotels and destroyed the rooms exist in abundance. The most iconic was when they disturbed the other guests, scaring them and throwing a television out the window.

Also read: References in “Monotonia” by Shakira would confirm that the song is for Piqué

Many of the gang’s friends were retail drug dealers. On one occasion, one of these friends injected Nikki Sixx with some sort of special heroin, prompting an ambulance to be called.

When the ambulance picked him up, he had been left for dead until one of the paramedics thought of injecting him with two doses of adrenaline.

After arriving at the hospital, Sixx escaped, returned home, and left a message on her answering machine that said “Hi, this is Nikki Sixx. Right now I can’t help you, I’m not at home because I’m dead. She subsequently drugged herself again until she fell unconscious in her bathroom.

Black Magic and Satanism: Two Fascinations of Nikki Sixx

Sixx has always had a fascination with the darker aspects of the world. In one of his crazy stages, he wanted to experiment with black magic in parallel to the band’s second album, Shout At The Devil.

On one occasion Tom Zutaut said that one day he went to visit Sixx at his house, to ask him to change the name of the title of the second album. At the time of arriving at his house was Lita Ford, a member of The Runaways band made up of only women.

She told him that strange things happened in the house, such as strange noises, doors that opened on their own, and objects that moved on their own.

Also: Taylor Swift, her fight against Apple and Spotify and how the music industry changed

Two nights later, Zutaut returned to Sixx’s house, noticing knives and forks nailed to the wall. “I had been in that house for ten minutes when a knife and fork floated up from the table and stuck into the ceiling,” Zutaut said.

Three years on his return

After leaving the stage as Mötley Crüe in 2015, four years later they announced their return. After their decadent fame, full of vices, excesses and lack of control, little by little they were rehabilitating themselves and becoming a better version of themselves. Although they do not fully regret the atrocities they committed in their glory years, they have recognized that many of their actions were not correct.