Academic Essays

Self-Invented Rebels: Little Richard, Alice Cooper, and the Road to Mötley Crüe

INTRODUCTION

With the help of journalist Neil Strauss, Mötley Crüe published their definitive memoir, The Dirt: Confessions of the World's most Notorious Rock Band, in 2001. The title seemed a bit self-aggrandizing, but the book lived up to its name. Reviewing it, Rolling Stone's Joe Levy had this to say: "Without a doubt, [The Dirt] is the most detailed account of the awesome pleasures and perils of rock & roll stardom I have ever read. It is completely compelling, and utterly revolting, full of blood, leather, eyeliner, heroin, and, oh yes, the glam metal that made the Eighties...the Eighties."

The book was filthy in every sense of the word, lending legitimacy to the title. It was far more than your typical account of sex, drugs, rocking and rolling. The off-stage antics, the on-stage theatrics, the utter destruction and havoc wreaked by the band, the immense global following they amassed, and the revolutionary spirit of Mötley Crüe are well documented in graphic and unflattering detail in The Dirt. To begin with, the band's meteoric rise was utterly improbable. Not a single member of the Crüe graduated from high school. They all, in fact, were thrown out before they could. Nikki Sixx (bassist) was a runaway teen who fled an abusive home. Tommy Lee (drummer) was barely eighteen when he joined the Crüe. Vince Neil (frontman) was a cover band singer. And Mick Mars (guitarist) was at least five to ten years older than the rest of the bandmates when he joined. Once their careers began in earnest, the antics got completely out of control. Sixx overdosed on heroin and was pronounced dead for two full minutes at one point. And of course, the first thing he did when he got home from the hospital was shoot up again. While Mick Mars suffered from a lifelong degenerative bone disease, he continued with Mötley's wild performances.. Vince Neil killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle (Nicholas Charles Dingley) and severely injured two others in a drunk-driving accident. And Tommy Lee had a number of high-profile breakups with actresses like Heather Locklear and Pamela Anderson. They never slowed down for anyone or anything.

Some two decades after the book was published, the film adaptation was released—produced by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment's Julie Yorn and directed by Jackass pioneer Jeff Tremaine. As the movie rapidly rose to popularity, a whole new generation of Crüe heads was born. The scale of their newly acquired fan base was enormous. Just one month after the film became available on Netflix, the streaming of Mötley Crüe songs increased by nearly 600 percent on Spotify and over 1000 percent on Apple Music.

The movie, and the book off which it was based are odes to the golden age of Mötley Crüe. They were celebratory embraces of the hedonistic debauchery and destruction of the Sunset Strip's most Mötley creation. They were, in this way, retrospective. The glory days of Mötley Crüe are gone. The 1980's are a relic of the past, and the social environment of today is so vastly different from that of Mötley's prime, that it is hard to imagine the band thriving in twenty-first century America. All of this raises the question: who are these guys? Who were they and who did they become? Who was their audience? Most importantly, was there any precedent for them?

The work of this piece is to begin answering some of these questions. Let us begin with an overview of the literature and outline of how we will position ourselves in the historiography. As has been mentioned, much has been written on the band retrospectively. Particularly in recent years with the newfound fame that Mötley Crüe garnered in part from the book and especially from the movie, newspapers, magazines, popular discourse has become chock full of Mötley Crüe reviews, features, and criticisms. Most of this has been relegated to the realm of tabloids and popular culture rather than academia. Moreover, the vast majority of the current discourse on Mötley Crüe is deeply rooted in presentism. Among other things, journalists, critics, and other writers lambast the band for their sexism and misogyny. The goal of this paper is not to defend Mötley Crüe, to prop them up as heroes, or to trivialize the complaints that have been lodged against them. It is not the work of the historian to pass moral judgement on subjects we examine. Rather, we seek to critically analyze and to understand the subjects we study in their own time, within their own social context. To that end, part of our angle into the conversation about Mötley Crüe is to start with artists that laid the foundation for Mötley Crüe and to look forwards. That is, rather than write about them now looking back—filled with all of our presentist values—we seek, in this paper, to understand Mötley Crüe as they were, in their own time. Part of how we will do this is methodological. To begin with, we will trace the origins of Mötley Crüe forwards instead of backward. That is to say, we will begin in the 1950's and lead up to the 1980's rather than beginning in 2020 and attempting to somehow understand the 1980's with presentist values.