A core memory I have involves me, age 10, sitting at my grandparents’ dining room table and drawing pictures of devils in the style of Ed Hardy’s tattoos. I’ve got my headphones on, a record in my Durabrand portable CD player. It’s Girls, Girls, Girls by Mötley Crüe, gifted to me by my parents on a birthday I no longer remember. But I do remember “Wild Side” flooding my ears and my seventy-something-year-old great aunt throwing a conniption fit about my “satanic art.” “Name dropping no-names, glamorize cocaine, puppets with strings of gold, East LA at midnight,” Vince Neil sang anthemically. “Papa won’t be home tonight, found dead with his best friend’s wife.” Of course, I think, who among us has not experienced the same? Around that time, too, a few family members went and saw Mötley Crüe play a gig at Blossom Music Center and brought me back a T-shirt. It had Neil, Nikki Six, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars on the front, all of them looking as gnarly and mangled as their music had been to me. I worshipped that shirt, wearing it thin after designating it a cornerstone piece in my pre-teen wardrobe—even though I’d never seen Mötley Crüe play live.
But that changed in August 2023, when Alice Cooper invited me to catch his opening set on the tour he was doing with them and Def Leppard. In the 15 years since giving my aunt a coronary through my cartoonish sketches of Lucifer himself, I found myself sitting maybe a dozen rows from the stage at Ohio Stadium in Columbus, eager to finally hear songs like “Kickstart My Heart,” “Too Fast For Love” and “Looks That Kill” live for the first time since I’d discovered them as a rock ‘n’ roll-pilled kid. All around me were Crueheads of every age, shape and creed—all of whom formed a living, breathing museum of fandom, with more than 40 years’ worth of concert memories, tour shirts and good buzzes radiating throughout the stadium. “Every time we’re on stage together, it’s magical,” Neil tells me. “I’m having a blast, and I think [the fans] are, too.”
“You look out there and you see the people that grew up with you and you see them with their kids and, now, you see their kids with their grandkids,” Neil continues. “You see a full family, an eight-year-old boy on dad’s shoulders doing the devil horns and singing the songs. That makes you feel good, because you’ve gone multi-generational. It keeps the crowds coming back. If you can see that, you’re doing good.” Lee, too, echoes a similar sense of joy: “We’re seeing our fans with their kids on their shoulders with the horns up, singing ‘Shout at the Devil.’ And we’re like, ‘Wait a minute, this kid is six years old? How does he know what this is?’ There’s this beautiful, generational thing that’s just transcending into the future mindblowingly—where we’re clearly not done yet.”
Though Mötley Crüe have been on the road pretty consistently since reforming in 2018—aside from the lull in touring during COVID—that headlining stadium tour with Def Leppard effectively rewrote the book on where the band could still even go in 2024, especially as hard rock music gets further and further away from the mainstream than it ever has been before. “We’ve been doing this for so many years and, to go and do this on a stadium level and look out there every night, we’d spend the first three songs just tripping out—going like, ‘Dude, this is fucking insane,’” Lee says. “We’re grateful, because that just doesn’t happen to everybody. If I ever took any of this for granted, forgive me—because what I’m seeing here, we still have work to do. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing for the three of us when we talk to the audience about how grateful we are for today. It happens to very, very few—if it does.”
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