Mötley Crüe: The Dirt

It seems like every two months I write a post about 80s hair metal. It’s funny, because I paid no attention to this stuff when it was going down in the 80s and still don’t find it particularly interesting from a musical perspective. Yet, it’s clearly fascinating from a cultural perspective. I just finished reading the Mötley Crüe bio, The Dirt. And it is awesome. I couldn’t put it down. It was consumed on a literary bender. Honestly, this is one of the best rock and roll bios I’ve read. It’s not as important from a musical perspective as Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me. Nor does it read like the great American novel like Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love by Peter Guralnik. But still, I’d rank it up there with those books. Mötley Crüe…who knew? Outside of Girls, Girls, Girls and Kickstart My Heart, I doubt I could hum any of their songs, but boy what a story. Egotistical, selfish, drug-addled, crybaby man boys on a 15-year bender. The book is debased, debauched, and filled with lots of fighting and a whole lot of fucking. Manslaughter, prison sentences, overdoses and lots of depraved sex with strippers, porn stars and cock-eyed groupies. Tommy Lee plays the over-eager romantic, Vince Neil the strutting peacock, Nikki Sixx stars as the tortured artist with the harrowing childhood and Mick Mars plays the weird, philosophical old guy in the band with the degenerative bone disease. Clearly Mick was my favorite. Will I pick up a Mötley Crüe greatest hit cd in the near future? Probably not. But I might spend a little time on YouTube seeing what all the fuss was about.