Mötley Crüe

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Daryna M. McKeand

Mötley Crüe, the Los Angeles-based heavy metal quartet whose quadruple-platinum album, Dr. Feelgood, hit Billboard's No. 1 spot in 1991 and paved the road to Billboard's Top 40 and MTV's top video charts for other big-haired, glam-rock bands of the mid-1980s. As well known for their offstage behavior as for their onstage pyrotechnics, Mötley Crüe sold over 20 million albums in their heyday, which lasted for more than a decade.

The foursome came together in early 1981. Drummer Tommy Lee (Thomas Lee Bass) and bassist Nikki Sixx (Frank Carlton Serafino Ferrano) were in a band called Christmas when they answered a classified ad placed by guitarist Mick Mars (Bob Deal), who was looking for some "lude" and crude band mates. In April, the three recruited front man Vince Neil (Vince Neil Wharton), who was then singing for a local band called Rock Candy. Seven months later, Mötley Crüe (as Mars christened the band) recorded their first LP, Too Fast for Love, for $7,000. The Crüe's pentagram-and-hellfire-saturated sophomore effort, Shout at the Devil, was released in 1983; one track, "Bastard," made it onto Tipper Gore's Parents' Music Resource Center's "Dirty Dozen" list of obscene songs, thereby sealing Mötley Crüe's reputation as The Band That Our Mothers Warned Us About.

In 1985, Theater of Pain was released to great fanfare. Shortly thereafter, Neil spent a surprisingly lenient 20-day sentence in a Los Angeles prison for vehicular manslaughter, after his drunk driving led to the death of Hanoi Rock's drummer, Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley. Meanwhile, Nikki Sixx battled a heroin addiction, but the Crüe's popularity never waned. That same year, their cover of Brownsville Station's "Smokin' in the Boys' Room" climbed up Billboard's Top 40, and their single "Home Sweet Home" became MTV's most requested music video of all time that November. Lee married Dynasty star Heather Locklear in 1986, and introduced his 360-degree revolving drum kit the following year on the "Girls, Girls, Girls" world tour. Only months after the Crüe's greatest hits album, Decade of Decadence, was released in 1991, Neil was fired from the band for allegedly prioritizing his car racing hobby over his music career. John Corabi, former vocalist of the Scream, replaced Neil, but the band's renown never again reached that of its earlier days.

The media attention the Crüe received after 1992 centered almost exclusively on Tommy Lee's personal life: an intimate home video of Lee and his second wife, Baywatch star Pamela Anderson, was mass-produced and sold over the Internet; and the couple's three-year marriage ended in 1998 with Lee serving a four month sentence in a Los Angeles prison for spousal abuse.

Mötley Crüe was a larger-than-life band both on and off-stage, and they were the first rock 'n' rollers to erase the line between heavy metal music and commercial success. Large-market radio stations stopped shying away from the rock that may have alienated some listeners when they saw that these listeners, in fact, were anything but alienated. But, by the early 1990s, Mötley Crüe's heavy-handed, over-stylized music gave way to Seattle grunge bands such as Nirvana and Pearl Jam, while MTV's all-metal video program, Headbanger's Ball, had faded into oblivion, and the grunge/alternative-rock 120 Minutes had all but been put on a permanent loop.