Motley Crue may be the reigning champions of rock star debauchery, but at least they're
famously upfront about it.
Of course, Motley Crue has an image to uphold, and sometimes the stories need help to fit
the image.
But some of the most famous stories you thought you knew about the band are completely wrong,
or at least severely misrepresented.
Here are things people get wrong about Motley Crue.
Vince Neil sings, Mick Mars plays guitar, Tommy Lee drums, and Nikki Sixx handles bass
duty.
Those are the guys who played on Motley Crue's first album, and they're the fearsome foursome
that wreaked havoc throughout the band's golden years in the 1980s.
The same men wrapped up the last show of their Final Tour in 2015, so it's easy to think
that Crue is like U2 — a rare unicorn of a band that has somehow managed to navigate
through their career without losing a single member.
As Ultimate Classic Rock describes, this isn't exactly true.
In fact, Mars and Sixx are the only constant members throughout the band's existence.
Motley Crue briefly had a singer called O'Dean before Neil joined.
The most famous Crue member outside the main quartet is another singer, John Corabi.
He took over after Neil left in 1992, but was only featured on the band's self-titled
1994 album.
Eventually, Neil returned in 1997 and Crue phased Corabi out after an unsuccessful attempt
to keep him in as a fifth band member.
In 1999, Lee quit the band, and his replacement was Randy Castillo, a former Ozzy Osbourne
drummer.
Castillo appeared on 2000's New Tattoo album, but was diagnosed with cancer and ultimately
died in 2002.
While Castillo was struggling with the disease, Crue approached former Hole drummer Samantha
Maloney, who held the spot from 2000 to 2002.
Guitarist Mick Mars has always seemed the odd man out in Motley Crue.
"He shows up, he looks like something out of the Addams family, he's standing at the
front door, we're going, wow this is wild man, let's listen to this guy play."
He's the oldest and most reclusive Crue member, and is quite open about the disease that's
slowly fusing his spinal joints together.
Largely because of that, he was always somewhat different than the other guys.
"I really didn't go out and party that much, cuz you know I'm a bit older than the other
guys, I've done that."
This outsider image goes so far that in the movie version of The Dirt, Iwan Rheon plays
Mars as a borderline vampire-like deadpan snarker.
"Blah dee blah f---in blah."
This actually seems a little cruel because in reality, Mars is dealing with a lot more
than "just" debilitating spinal arthritis — he also has some significant mental health
issues that have played a role over the years.
AV Club notes Mars has been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and partly because of his painful
physical condition, he has also struggled with chronic depression — which the rest
of the band didn't get around to noticing at the time because they were too busy with
their own indulgent lifestyles.
If there were ever a band that embodied the unholy trinity of sex, drugs, and rock 'n'
roll, it's Motley Crue.
So it's easy to see them as a one-trick pony that only writes songs about girls and partying
— and sometimes shouting at the devil.
This isn't an entirely unfair assumption, by the way, given the fact that a huge chunk
of their discography is exactly that.
However, this doesn't mean they can't do anything else.
It's just that every time they try something other than their trademark sound, the public
refuses to give a hoot.
According to Ultimate Classic Rock, Vince Neil left the band in 1992 partially because
the other band members wanted to take Crue in a bluesier direction, which Neil was less
than happy about.
The rest of the band was reportedly excited to experiment with the new vocal sound and
guitar proficiency that Neil's replacement John Corabi brought in the mix, but the resulting
Motley Crue album in 1994 failed to reach sales expectations.
They still wanted to take their sound to new, different places, and Nikki Sixx vowed they'd
make their most extreme album while lamenting that no one wanted to allow them to grow as
a band.
However, the ensuing Generation Swine is regarded as one of their worst efforts… and according
to Neil, it's because of all the experimenting.
No one's saying the members of Motley Crue aren't hedonists — not even the band members
themselves.
Too many memoirs and interviews detail their assorted selfish actions for anyone to believe
they're saints.
Still, it's easy to see them as purely one-dimensional party machines who play rock 'n' roll and
then sink into a celebrity abyss until it's time to stagger back to the stage again.
This image is pretty much what The Dirt is about.
However, it's worth noting that the Crue guys do also make time for more positive acts.
Tommy Lee is an outspoken animal activist who speaks up for animal adoption for Rolling
Stone and works with the controversial animal rights organization PETA.
As Look to the Stars shows, the band supports Red Cross, United Way, and the Skylar Neil
Memorial Foundation, a charity Vince Neil set up after his young daughter died of cancer.
According to Ultimate Classic Rock, Neil has raised millions of dollars for children's
cancer research, and he gave his New Celebrity Apprentice haul of over $750,000 to a memory
disorder research program called Keep Memory Alive.
Of course, Crue likes to keep up the bad boy image even when doing good.
As Loudwire reports, they once partnered with Jack Daniels to sell limited special editions
of Motley Crue-themed Tennessee whiskey for charity.
According to Loudwire, Motley Crue's Shout at the Devil album in 1983 did a lot to cement
their position as the leather-wearing, cool-looking bad boys of the Sunset Strip hair metal scene,
but its controversial lyrics and the pentagram in the original album art drew accusations
of satanism.
Of course, Crue's use of satanic imagery was all about the look.
They didn't actually gather in black masses.
As Vince Neil says:
"They wanted to come see our concert once and their parents wouldn't let them because
they said we kill chickens on stage."
Their label decided to use this — along with their out-of-control party antics — to
play up the band's image as a ticking time bomb.
The now-familiar constant stream of Crue scandals started trickling to the press, as the record
company happily reported every insane thing happening to them – and they didn't have
to look very hard.
Still, despite their insistence that their satanic image was all in jest, the band actually
did its part to help the next generation keep the devil in rock music.
In an interview with Consequence of Sound, Tobias Forge of the current leading "satanic"
band Ghost names Motley Crue as one of the things that introduced him to the concept
of Satan.
Most bands would do anything to have their record sell gold, but as Ultimate Classic
Rock reports, Motley Crue is a different story.
The band spent the 1980s crafting albums that sold millions and routinely went platinum,
so when they released their self-titled album in 1994 with new singer John Corabi, going
"merely" gold was a rank disappointment.
But is the album really the sad, two-out-of-five-stars effort that Allmusic makes it seem?
The Motley Crue album came out during an extremely difficult time.
Crue had changed their singer and sound, and their label was going through executive turmoil
that took resources away from the album's promotion.
There was also the issue of grunge, a musical tsunami that was washing over bands with glam
metal roots.
Because it's the sole Crue album recorded without Vince Neil, it's pretty unlikely for
Motley Crue to ever break into the higher ranks of Crue discography, but fans have seemed
to warm up to it through the years.
While Allmusic rates Motley Crue as a flop that is second only to 1997's Generation Swine
in its awfulness, the album's user reviews are significantly more positive and rank the
album solidly in the middle of their discography.
Louder even considers it the band's best non-1980s album.
Songs from the album often feature on lists of the most underappreciated Crue songs, and
as Ultimate Classic Rock notes, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars have readily praised it, with
Lee calling it one of his favorite Crue albums.
In early 2019, Nikki Sixx found himself in hot water because of a story in the book version
of The Dirt in which he essentially admits to orchestrating an assault on a woman.
As Consequence of Sound reports, Sixx's explanation was that he doesn't remember the incident.
He also says he doesn't recall a lot of his interviews with author Neil Strauss — which
suggests there's no telling whether the stories in the book are actually true or are just
tall tales.
This is pretty big because The Dirt book and Nikki Sixx's own The Heroin Diaries present
themselves as warts-and-all memoirs that leave no stone unturned.
"You get to see how we got to these bad decisions and then how we got out of them, the band
has lots of regrets."
Perhaps not coincidentally, multiple people with inside knowledge of the Crue world say
many of the events described in these books are pretty different from reality.
Blabbermouth reports that one-time band member John Corabi and Crue producer Tom Werman have
called Sixx out about the authenticity of his Heroin Diaries stories.
The site also notes that an incident where Hanoi Rocks guitarist Andy McCoy and a drug
dealer supposedly beat up an overdosed Sixx and left him to die didn't go quite like that
— McCoy says he actually saved Sixx's life that night.
McCoy has also said that The Dirt's version of the famous car crash that killed Hanoi
Rocks drummer Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley is "pure lies."
In 2015, Motley Crue played their final concert.
As Global News reports, they made sure of this by signing a "cessation of touring" agreement
that legally forbids them to ever play together again… or does it?
In 2018, Crue announced they were recording several new songs for the movie version of
The Dirt, which didn't really seem like something such a famously broken-up band would do.
Vince Neil replied to the criticism by saying that the band never said they broke up or
that they would never make new music — just that they'd never tour under the name Motley
Crue again.
Even if you ignore the fact that they can completely undo the, quote, "binding agreement"
quite easily if they all agreed to hit the road again, there are some pretty handy loopholes
there, like minor name changes and collections of individual shows that aren't technically
labeled as tours.
Recent interviews with Loudwire and Rolling Stone also make it seem that the band doesn't
feel like they're done yet.
Although Nikki Sixx insists there will be no "one-offs," they gush about how much they
enjoy each others' company again, and how they look at all the other old bands still
tearing away, wondering whether they stopped too soon.
Maybe they're shuffling their feet, looking for an excuse to eat their words.
If they hadn't made such a big deal about it being the end back in 2015, no one would
even care!
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