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One thing you can never accuse Mötley Crüe of is
being predictable. In 1989, Dr. Feelgood became the
band’s first No. 1 album and went on to sell more than
six million copies. Two years later, the Decade of Decadence
compilation charted at No. 2, spawned the Mötley classic
“Primal Scream” and eventually went double platinum.
So what they do next? Find a new singer, of course. The parties
disagree on how it happened, but in February 1992, Vince Neil
was out. Enter John Corabi, formerly of The Scream. They could
not have found someone more unlike Neil—Corabi with
his dark look and deep, bluesy, versatile voice, and Vince
with his sunny blonde looks, hard-partying image and limited
vocal range.
“Vince is the lighter side—the party, the chicks,
the ‘ultimate rock ‘n’ roll rock star lead
singer,’” Nikki Sixx said in the liner notes of
the 1999 rerelease of the Mötley Crüe album,
originally released in 1994. “When he was out, it allowed
the darker side to breathe.”
By the time Corabi joined the band, the pop-infused glam
metal the Crüe perfected in the 1980s was long gone,
replaced by the likes of more aggressive acts such as Pantera
and gloomy Seattle-based bands like Soundgarden and Alice
in Chains. These influences are all over the heavy, groove-oriented
sound of Mötley Crüe. Corabi was not a
Crüe fan before joining, which helps explain the dramatic
shift.
For the other three band members, it was more than a new
singer.
“Everyone was on new territory creatively …,”
Corabi wrote in The Dirt. “Mick [Mars] had
never worked with a second guitarist, Nikki had never worked
with a second lyricist, and the band had never written songs
through just jamming. We couldn’t wait for Mötley
fans to hear what we’d done.”
The ambition of the album is astounding; nothing else in
the Mötley catalog comes remotely close to it. There
are riff-driven slabs of metal like “Power to the Music”
and “Hammered”; the twisted “Uncle Jack,”
inspired by a relative of Corabi’s who molested his
brothers and sisters; “Smoke the Sky,” a song
heavy enough to be worthy of Pantera; and the acoustic rocker
“Loveshine.”
The high point is undoubtedly “Misunderstood.”
It begins with acoustic guitar and a soft Corabi vocal, adding
strings and other sounds as it grows into an angry rock song,
then decompressing with more acoustic guitar and strings,
and some beautiful vocal harmonies. Absolutely brilliant.
In a perfect world, it would have been a massive hit. But
the video showed an old man with a gun, and MTV refused to
air it.
Maybe if Mötley Crüe had played nice with MTV from
the start, instead of walking out on an interview because
they didn’t like a question, the album would have had
more of a chance. It hit the charts at No. 7, then quickly
faded. The concert halls got smaller and smaller before tours
were canceled altogether.
The problem: as great as it is, the album simply does not
sound like Mötley Crüe, something the band considered
a strength.
“We thought we had really made an intelligent Mötley
Crüe record,” Corabi wrote, “with a lot of
commentary on the kooky shit going on in the world, from the
Rodney King riots in L.A. to the latest fury over music censorship.”
But that isn’t what Mötley Crüe fans want.
They fell in love and many grew up with the ultimate sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll
band, and their heroes turned their backs on that.“In
retrospect, the smartest thing we could have done would have
been to change the name of the band,” Sixx said in the
rerelease liner notes. “That would have let us have
complete and utter acceptance or denial based on the music,
not based on the name.”
It would have been asking a lot for them to abandon the identity
they had spent more than a decade building. But certainly
calling the album Mötley Crüe was a mistake.
There is no way of knowing whether its fate would have been
different had it not borne the Mötley name. I’d
like to think it would have been the hit it deserved to be.
I have to believe there is a way for music this good to be
successful.
®2009 Live-Metal.net
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