’80s band Motley Crue continues farewell tour In the home stretch

By Josh Rottenberg

Los Angeles Times

EUGENE, Ore

There will be fire and explosions. There will bone-shaking guitar riffs, scantily clad dancers and an upside-down drum solo. Middle-aged men and women will pump their fists and bang their heads, remembering back to younger days when monsters of rock roamed the Earth.

Throw devil horns in the air, Eugene. Motley Crue has come to town.

On a July afternoon, the four founding members of one of rock’s most notorious bands – singer Vince Neil, guitarist Mick Mars, bassist Nikki Sixx and drummer Tommy Lee – stand onstage in the Matthew Knight Arena here, running through the set list.

Heavy-metal anthems such as “Shout at the Devil,” “Girls, Girls, Girls” and “Kickstart My Heart” that thrilled Reagan-era teenagers and horrified their parents echo through the empty venue as dozens of crew members move heavy equipment, tweak sound levels and prepare the show’s over-the-top pyrotechnics, which include a giant burning pentagram and a bass guitar that shoots flames. Their backstage passes read “The End Is Near.”

Thirty-four years after exploding out of the Sunset Strip in a blaze of hairspray, skintight leather and power chords, Motley Crue is in last stretch of the final tour of its career, an 18-month global farewell that will culminate at year’s end with shows in Los Angeles.

The band’s stage show is as theatrical as ever, its musical blueprint essentially unchanged since the early ’80s, but behind the scenes things have changed considerably. The legendary drug-and-alcohol-fueled debauchery has abated after a few trips to rehab. Once upon a time you could find all manner of intoxicants backstage at a Motley Crue show. Now the catering area is stocked with Centrum, Tums and various kinds of tea and protein powder to mix into smoothies.

Where there used to be a revolving door of groupies, now backstage you’ll find the rockers with their dogs.

That they made it this far is remarkable enough. With Motley Crue, everything has always been cranked to 11, including offstage decadence and drama. Over the years, the band has weathered drug and alcohol addiction, internal strife, arrests, jail time, public scandals (including an infamous leaked sex tape involving Lee and then-wife Pamela Anderson) and shifting music trends. All chronicled with unflinching candor in their bestselling 2001 tell-all “The Dirt.”

Yet through it all, even as other ’80s glam-metal acts have faded into oblivion, Crue has persevered. The band has released just one album of new music since 2000, but here it is, filling arenas from Anchorage to Abu Dhabi. Even the group can’t fully explain it.

“I can’t believe all four of us are still alive,” Lee says. Using the kind of language you’d expect from the drummer in Motley Crue, he theorizes that each band member must have a lucky horseshoe lodged in his anatomy.

With the hedonism stripped away, what remains is a much-loved (though not always critically lauded) body of musicto sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll that have propelled the band to more than 75 million records sold worldwide.

The rehearsal finished, Neil, 54, sits in his dressing room with his girlfriend, makeup artist Rain Hannah, and their Yorkie, Cali. “You see a lot of people crying when we’re doing ’Home Sweet Home,’” he says of the 1985 power ballad that closes the band’s show. “Then you start getting choked up and you try not to look at them. For a lot of the real fans, they know this is the last time they’re going to see us.”

More than that, it may be the last time they see anyone like them. “There are no more rock stars - we’re some of the last of them,” Neil says. “It’s sad. But we’ll see what happens. Hopefully there’s some kid in his garage somewhere, playing with his band and lighting himself on fire.”

Why now? With major preparations for the following night’s show mostly done, Sixx sits in his dressing room and puts his feet up. A few candles and a stick of incense burn on the coffee table next to a vase of red roses and collection of Charles Bukowski’s poetry titled “The Pleasures of the Damned” - inspiration as he works on new songs for his other band, Sixx A.M.

Motley Crue’s primary songwriter and lyricist and the rare rocker who is comfortable talking about business models, Sixx, 56, is explaining why the band decided to hang it up.

As he sees it, it’s simply a matter of common sense. “The frontal lobe doesn’t develop until you’re like 25 years old,” Sixx says. “In Motley Crue’s case, it probably never developed.” Underneath the band’s chaos has long been career-minded pragmatism.

“Let’s be real: Rock and roll is not meant to age,” Sixx says.

Last year Motley Crue publicly signed a “cessation of touring” contract that prevents any of them from performing under the Motley Crue name beyond 2015. The band members - who own their own masters and publishing rights, a rarity among major music acts – say they would rather burn out on their own terms than slowly fade away playing clubs and county fairs.

Motley Crue’s longtime manager, Allen Kovac, sees Led Zeppelin, which disbanded in 1980 after the death of drummer John Bonham, as the ideal precedent. “No one has left more money on the table than Zeppelin, and yet they have one of the highest-selling catalogs and merchandising lines in the world because they didn’t go out and diminish the brand like so many bands have,” Kovac says. “Motley Crue recognized that part of the puzzle.”

The oldest member of the band at 64, Mars suffers from arthritis that affects the spine. It limits his movement and produces chronic pain. But it hasn’t stopped him from doing what he loves most. Mars says he never expected Motley Crue to last as long as it did. “I come from a generation where bands would last a maximum of five years and no one wanted to live past 30,” he says.