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Too Fast for Love, self-released in 1981, remastered
and rereleased by Elektra Records in 1982, laid the foundation
for Mötley Crüe, introducing them to the masses
and, with no support from the mainstream media, managing to
sell 100,000 copies. It serves as a near-perfect time capsule,
but in what would become common for the band, hardly hinted
at what was to come next.
With band members, bassist/songwriter Nikki Sixx in particular,
dabbling in the occult, the music took on a dark, dangerous
tone on their sophomore album, 1983’s Shout at the
Devil. Sixx gives much of the credit to guitarist Mick
Mars. “A lot of the influence on that record came directly
from Mick Mars’ guitar tone. For me, that was the overview
of the whole next step for Mötley Crüe,” Sixx
said in the liner notes of the 1999 reissue. Visually, the
band founds its inspiration in the movies. “We were
starting to get bored with the glam-punk image because so
many other bands had copied it,” Sixx wrote in the band’s
memoir, The Dirt, “so our look evolved into
a cross between [Mad Max and Escape from New
York]
The album starts with the ominous narration of “Into
the Beginning,” setting the stage of a post-apocalyptic
future. The title track, one of the best fists-in-the-air
hard rock anthems ever written, immediately kicks the record
into high gear. From the get-go, through a combination of
higher production values and more refined playing, it is apparent
that the drumming of Tommy Lee is the music’s driving
force. Songs like “Looks That Kill,” “Bastard,”
“Red Hot” and “Too Young to Fall in Love”
have an undeniable forward momentum that comes from Lee’s
foundation. If Mars defines the sound of the band, Lee is
the engine that keeps it in motion.
The Crüe shows a greater sense of dynamics than on their
debut, inserting the haunting, near-instrumental “God
Bless the Children of the Beast” between “Bastard”
and a dark, dark cover of The Beatles’ “Helter
Skelter” (and you just know they chose that song for
its Charles Manson connection).
Shout at the Devil marks the band’s first
collaboration with producer Tom Werman, the start of a relationship
that remains contentious to this day. In his defense, it’s
hard to imagine a tougher assignment. In The Dirt,
Sixx described the band’s mindset at the time: “We
thought we were the baddest creatures on God’s great
earth. Nobody could do it as hard as us and as much as us,
and get away with it like us. There was no competition. The
more fucked up we got, the greater people thought we were
and the more they supplied us with what we needed to get even
more fucked up.” The Shout at the Devil liner
notes famously claim, “This album was recorded on Foster’s
Lager, Budweiser, Bombay Gin, lots of Jack Daniels, Kahlua
and Brandy, Quackers and Krell [the band’s code word
for cocaine], and Wild Women!”
Under the circumstances, it’s a minor miracle that
the album was recorded at all.
Werman’s production gives the recording a large, full
sound while retaining the raw, aggressive feel of Too
Fast for Love. Neil still has little vocal range, but
the vicious edge of the music does not require it from him—it
needs him to sound evil as he sings songs about sex, violence
and rebellion, and he does. They also use gang vocals to great
effect in most of the choruses.
Musically, Shout at the Devil is an incredibly focused
album, and its songs stand up even better when listened to
in one sitting than when taken individually. It was the band’s
first chance to make a record the way the big boys do it,
and they responded with a classic. A triumphant performance
in May 1983 at the US Festival, a three-day concert that also
featured Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest and Van Halen, told them
they were on the cusp of something huge. They needed a career-defining
album to put them over the top. Shout at the Devil
is that album.
The next big break came when Ozzy took them out as the opening
act on his 1984 Bark at the Moon tour, taking both
to new levels of rock star insanity.
In The Dirt, Sixx wrote: “If the performance
at the US Festival was a spark illuminating what we would
become, then the Ozzy tour was the match that set the whole
band ablaze.”
®2009 Live-Metal.net
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