Originally published by March Xness.
In the summer of 1985, when I was 14, my best friend Shauna gave me a mix tape. On one side was Love at First Sting, Scorpions’ just-released album of monster jams, and on the other side was a selection of songs from Mötley Crüe’s first two records, Too Fast for Love (1981) and Shout at the Devil (1983). Shauna had written out the song titles on the cassette’s cardstock insert in confident loops that expressed her joyful, bold personality.
The mix tape—unforgettable love token—was the first anyone ever made for me. It was also my first heavy metal, and I received this music as one receives a magic talisman from a helpful witch: with firm belief in its transformative powers. Heavy metal was grown-up music, and I was ready to grow up. To stop being the kid whose world was dominated by Little House books, Louisa May Alcott books, and Betsy-Tacy books: all children’s series that agonize and proselytize across their many volumes about what it means to be a good girl. But I had just seen my first teen movie, Footloose, and I wasn’t interested anymore in studying good-girlhood. Now I knew what our human existence offered to the bad and brave: CUTE BOYS and SEX and the freedom to choose your own values, which could include luxurious, visceral pleasures such as rock music, dancing, and cool clothes. But how to become the kind of person for whom life’s treasure chest spilled these riches?
My family had just acquired the latest audio entertainment toy, the first technology that made portable, private music-listening accessible to the general public: a Sony Walkman cassette player. We had only one for the four of us and were supposed to share it. I hogged it to listen to my mix tape in my darkened bedroom. Just as I had hoped, heavy metal was a growling, menacing, sexy siren song, but all metal was not same. I liked Scorpions well enough, but it was with Mötley Crüe that I fell in love. I couldn’t have told you what it was about the Crüe that captivated me. They just did.
*
After listening to my mix tape a bunch of times, I needed more Mötley Crüe. Armed with my allowance, I hit the mall. At the drugstore I found and purchased this issue of the heavy-metal fan mag Hit Parader:
And thus I fell prey to the spell of the Crüe’s famously powerful image. Here’s a photo from inside the issue:
These photos are Shout at the Devil-era, and although this was the Crüe at its most threatening, what drew me wasn’t just the leather and spikes—you could get that just as well from Judas Priest—but the unexpected contrast to this posed by the Crüe’s prettiness: their blush, lipstick, and eyeliner, and the pretty boys themselves. (OK, so Mick Mars wasn’t pretty, but he was scary-looking, and that was cool too.) Vince Neil was the ultimate surfer boy. Tommy Lee was tall, dark, and handsome. Nikki Sixx—he was harder to categorize. With jet-black haystack hair partially covering his feline face, he was mysterious, elusive. And so pretty.
I still think 1980s Nikki Sixx is one of the prettiest boys of time and space:
For each of their first three records, the Crüe crafted a distinct look, all incorporating some amount of genderbend. Check out the high heels from the back cover of their first record, Too Fast for Love:
And Vince in pink and white lingerie from the back cover of Theatre of Pain:
I was completely fascinated by this costume. I couldn’t understand why Vince was wearing girl’s clothing; neither could I look away. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the Crüe’s gender-bending self-presentation was a big reason why I loved them. As a matter of fact, when Girls, Girls, Girls was released in 1987, I lost interest in the Crüe partly because with this album they dropped their makeup and lace for good.
When I rediscovered the Crüe in my mid-forties, the first thing I wanted to understand about the band was what their early-era genderbend, which had meant to them. Sadly, I discovered that these experimentations were essentially content-less and opportunistic. I believe that the Crue played with genderbend in their self-presentation simply because it made them stand out and went over gangbusters with female fans such as myself. In no significant way did their look connect to an ideology that otherwise disrupted traditional masculinity. As Vince once said, “Just because we wear lipstick doesn’t mean we can’t kick your ass.” This quote is wildly popular with fans old and new who value the Crüe for the ways in which the band reinforces, even epitomizes, certain traditional and toxic masculinities.
But art lives and breathes in how it’s received as well as in how it’s intended. Early Crüe was my first encounter with a masculinity that also embraces and embodies femininity. I adored it, treasured it, desired it.
I still do.
Without intending to, the Crüe taught me something deeply important about myself.
*
Mötley Crüe’s music has always been inextricably entwined with their image. But let’s take look at the music, considered separately from the much-loved publicity photos, chart-smashing videos, and best-selling autobios.
Research reveals that the music we listen to as teens leaves literal love-bites on our brains. When we’re young, listening to music creates an electrical storm of neural activity that imprints on our grey matter. When we’re older the music we listen to still sparks a fire, but one that burns less bright because our brain is not as plastic anymore. It has finished the work of creating its pathways and passionate romances; it rests now. Because I fell in love with the Crüe when I was a teen, I can’t help but love the music. However, I believe there’s undeniable magic at work in Mötley Crüe’s early records: qualities that transcend circumstance and that earn them new young fans in every generation.
Probably the first thing you notice in the Crüe’s sound is Vince’s unique voice. High-pitched, lilting, and marked by idiosyncratic pronunciations, it’s slightly feminine, a little (or a lot) odd for the genre. Within his limited vocal range, he moves with utter confidence from purrs to growls to shrieks. Stolen by Nikki and Mick from another band for Mötley Crüe, Vince was inarguably a deeply charismatic front man.
If Vince’s voice is the heart of the Crüe, Mick’s guitar is its soul. Mick Mars is the poet laureate of hair-metal guitarists. His playing is never merely technical or show-off-y, but instead is emotional, eloquent, and erotic. “I’ve always been about melody and tone,” he has said. His first love was the blues, and he’s named Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, and Alvin Lee as some of his favorites. In interviews he sometimes expresses regret that he didn’t stick with the blues, but I’m glad that this soulful shredder stumbled his way into hair metal, the only place where he could have created the drop-dead sexy solos for “Home Sweet Home” and “Girls, Girls, Girls,” the killer licks in “Looks That Kill,” and more.
And then there are the songs, mostly composed by the Crüe’s mastermind, bassist Nikki Sixx. In his early days, some of Nikki’s most important influences were not KISS or Aerosmith, as you might expect, but glam rockers David Bowie and Mott the Hoople. (You can learn more about the genesis of Mötley Crüe in this great essay by A. E. Weisgerber.) A lot of early Crüe songs aren’t really metal at all. For every satanic spell like “Shout at the Devil” or dirty grind of “Ten Seconds to Love,” there’s the melancholy portrait of a despairing man in “Merry Go Round,” the flash of vulnerability in “Starry Eyes,” the jolly roll of “Come on and Dance,” or the bittersweet anthem of “On With the Show.” And although I loved and love the sheer might of heavy metal, even as a kid I could appreciate how the Crüe combined that might with melancholy. The space given to sadness in the Crüe’s songs allows one be and feel merely human in this genre that values intense power and raises superhuman energy. Mötley Crüe, masters of saudade: a Portugese word for which there is no equivalent in English but can mean melancholic longing for something that may not even exist.
For the Crüe, that spirit of saudade found its most successful expression in “Home Sweet Home.”
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Nikki Sixx has said that “Home Sweet Home” is about how, as a rock star, “all you ever want is to get in a band and go on the road, but then you’re on the road and you want to come home.” Saudade: a longing for something that may not even exist.
The song begins with a pretty piano solo by Tommy, the notes echoing as if played into a lonely void. Soon Vince’s voice, in a quiet mood, joins the sweet and melancholy melody. But when he snarls out
just one more night
which ushers in a crescendo of keyboards, drums, bass, and guitar, you know this song has something more than just pretty and sweet in store. From here the song alternates between quiet spaciousness and furious onslaught, culminating in an entirely devastating Mick Mars guitar solo that expresses desire, despair, ambition, and menace all at once. The song ends close where it began: with Vince’s becalmed voice and Tommy’s piano notes again echoing like bells in the void—but a void that now feels a little less lonely.
*
“Home Sweet Home” is an absolute killer of a song that had to fight to see the light. First the record company didn’t want it on the album, so Mötley Crüe found a new record company under which to release Theatre of Pain. Then the new record company didn’t want to promote the song as a single, so Mötley Crüe paid for the production of the music video themselves—and made music-video history. “Home Sweet Home” became a unstoppable giant hit on MTV. It famously held onto the top spot of MTV’s daily request chart for over three months, and it would have stayed there longer except that its stranglehold on the top of the chart caused MTV to create a new “Crüe rule” that legislated that videos at the top of the chart for more than 30 days were no longer eligible for voting.
Culturally, the power of “Home Sweet Home” the song is inseparable from the video, which is an ultimate vision of rock stardom. An incredibly skillfully shot and edited live performance, the video reveals and shares the holy/profane energy exchange between band and audience. The slo-mo shots are as gorgeous as they are expressive: A girl crawling across the stage to Nikki. A girl and Vince singing lyrics into his microphone together, their foreheads pressed together. Vince moving like a dancer, with uncommon rhythm and grace. Nikki seducing the audience:
The “Home Sweet Home” video is also a masterful self-mythologizing. You can really see its tight control when you compare it to some other hair-metal concert music videos: Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” Van Halen’s “Panama,” Ratt’s “You’re In Love.” These are all great videos, but they lack the total ambition of the “Home Sweet Home” video. These other videos have their goofy moments and goofy guys (Bobbie Blozter, I’m looking at you), and Def Leppard and Van Halen are even okay poking a little fun at themselves in their videos. Not Mötley Crüe. There is no goofiness or self-deprecation in the “Home Sweet Home” video. Their goal was to be fucking flawless, and they achieved it. In the “Home Sweet Home” video, they will live on forever as ultimate rock gods.
In 2015, 34 years after they began, the members of the band drew down the curtain on Mötley Crüe. They concluded a world tour with a final performance on December 31, 2015, at the Staples Center in their home city of Los Angeles. The last song they played was “Home Sweet Home.”
*
Back to 1985, and me. After a year or two of being a big fan of Mötley Crüe and other hair metal (Ratt and Twisted Sister were other faves of mine), I lost interest in the genre. The mid-eighties were a wildly exciting time in music, and so many other artists and styles were clamoring for my attention: Prince, Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, Duran Duran, Kate Bush, Phil Collins (don’t @ me), U2, INXS, and more. I stopped listening to hair metal and didn’t listen to it again for decades.
But when I was in my mid-forties, something inspired me to give the Crüe a careful listen again. And I discovered that the music made me feel just the same as it did when I was 14: spurred towards power, impatient for everything life has to offer, predatory for pleasure of all kinds. I discovered via Instagram that teens all over the world still love Mötley Crüe. I also noticed, really for the first time, the misogyny of the Crüe, and I wonder what it did to me to take in those messages when I was just a kid. Just because you love the Crüe doesn’t mean the Crüe will love you back.But the Crüe has permanently marked my brain with their love-bite, and their music will always sound to me like wanting to get as large and wild as possible. Like wanting to kiss and fuck and rebel. If you haven’t, give them a real listen. Check out all of their first and best record, Too Fast for Love. Be amazed by the accidentally feminist music video for “Looks That Kill.” Listen to “Home Sweet Home” and ache deliciously for something that maybe doesn’t even exist.