Available in the Motley Crue book - Vol. 1 The Eighties
26/1/83
Mötley Crüe’s Too Fast For Love album is released in Australia, as the
Live Wire video airs for the first time on U.S. TV. The first time Nikki
sees the Live Wire video on TV is on the new cable show HBO.
2/83
The Crüe flies to Las Vegas on Doc McGhee’s private plane to see how
he runs his organisation, McGhee Entertainment Inc. The meeting arises
after Doug Thaler and McGhee witnessed Mötley’s mind-blowing show on
New Year’s Eve and are keen to manage them. Impressed and eager to play
bigger shows, they soon agree that Doc and Doug will be Mötley’s new
management team and are pleased they come through when their chips are
down. Doc’s under-the-table gifts and masterly methods of manipulation
soon ensure Mötley becomes more of a priority with Elektra Records.
3/83
Mötley’s new management line up a string of dates as support act for
Kiss. Doug Thaler attends the band’s first pre-tour rehearsal, and feels
each guy is twenty pounds overweight and instructs them to get in better
shape before the shows commence in a few weeks. Returning from business
in New York ten days later, Thaler sees each member down ten to fifteen
pounds after rehearsing two sets every night. Barry Levine assists Mötley
with their image via a number of photo shoots. He also works with them
on video concepts and choreography, as well as marketing and merchandising
consulting. Nikki buys himself a new Porsche after landing a publishing
deal with Warner-Chappell.
26/3/83
Mötley opens their first support show for Kiss on the west coast leg
of their Creatures of the Night tour at the 5,700-capacity Irvine Meadows
Amphitheatre in California, playing a forty-minute set. The Moral Majority
tries to stop their Easter performance at the San Francisco Convention
Center by pushing bike racks in front of the stage doors, to keep the
Crüe from entering the venue. After five Kiss support shows, Gene Simmons
kicks Mötley off the tour for bad behaviour, although Doug Thaler believes
the decision is made because Mötley is upstaging Kiss’ performance.
The real reason is later revealed: Tommy and Nikki were caught having
sex with Eric Carr’s girlfriend behind the fox’s drum kit in Scottsdale,
Arizona as he played Rock ‘n’ Roll All Nite.
4/83
Bob Krasnow takes over the reigns at Elektra following Joe Smith’s termination
and he replaces Tom Werman with Roy Thomas Baker. Werman is still keen
to produce the new Mötley album, but just as they are about to go into
the studio, Krasnow decides he wants to drop Mötley, as he feels rock’n’roll
isn’t happening anymore. He also instructs MTV to take Mötley’s Live
Wire video off the air, thinking it’s an embarrassment to the record
company with a tradition of such talented acts like Linda Ronstadt,
The Doors and Jackson Browne. After negotiations, Krasnow tells Mötley’s
management that he will put the album out, but make it easy for them
to move on.
5/83
Mötley works on recording their new album at Cherokee Studios with Geoff
Workman engineering. The Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, records his
Carmina Burana album in the next room and regularly parties with the
Crüe and their cocaine. The sessions also have girls streaming in and
out of the studio constantly. The introduction of the unreleased song
Black Widow is re-worked into an instrumental titled God Bless The Children
Of The Beast. Nikki has a grand vision of the album and tour looking
like a cross between a Nazi rally and a black church service.
29/5/83
Mötley plays the huge three-day US Festival on the outskirts of Los
Angeles in San Bernardino, enduring scorching spring heat. Mötley arrives
at the festival by way of their first helicopter ride. Day two is Heavy
Metal Day and Mötley plays second on stage at 12:30pm after Quiet Riot,
in front of three hundred thousand people. Tommy Lee passes out just
before going on stage and requires oxygen to assist him. The band sees
the concert as a great chance to test some of the new material they
have just begun recording, and they get a huge response from the crowd.
After leaving the stage, they head back to their dressing room trailer
and Mick’s girlfriend Linda punches him in the face for no apparent
reason, without saying a word. Vince then makes out with Tom Zutaut’s
date, much to Nikki’s disapproval. Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Triumph,
Scorpions and Van Halen follow Mötley’s set on stage. The festival attracts
one hundred and thirty arrests, and one murder over a drug deal. Acts
including The Clash, Men at Work, David Bowie and The Pretenders play
on the other two days. In time, Mötley’s performance at this festival
goes down as one of the most important and influential of their career.
6/83
Tommy goes to a party at a house in Hollywood with his girlfriend Candice
Starrek. They go into the bathroom to do some drugs and leave the bathroom
the next morning.
Nikki takes heaps of drugs in the Jacuzzi at a party at Roy Thomas Baker’s
house, including lines of cocaine off his glass top grand piano. He
joins Tommy and his girlfriend Candice in the Jacuzzi, along with a
dozen or so naked others. When RTB locks-down the house so people can’t
leave in their intoxicated state, Nikki decides he wants to go and see
Lita, but he can’t find his clothes. He finds a way to scale the wall
of RTB’s house and drives off naked in his Porsche, as he had left the
keys in the ignition. Two girls who couldn’t get into the party chase
him down the street in their ‘68 Mustang. As his speedometer clocks
90mph, he looks back to see if he has lost the girls, before slamming
his Porsche into a telephone pole, which now sits next to him in the
passenger’s seat. Hitching a ride, the naked Nikki Sixx is picked up
by a couple and driven to hospital, where his dislocated shoulder sustained
in the accident is put back into place and into a sling, before he is
sent home with a bottle of Percodan painkillers. Lita talks him into
backing off from flirting with Satanism.
7/83
Nikki begins to smoke heroin with Vince to help numb the pain of his
shoulder. They then have access to higher grade smack by way of Gregory
Boaz aka Smog Vomit, the bassist from local punk band Tex and the Horseheads,
and their mutual friend, Robbin Crosby from Ratt. They show Nikki how
to use needles, and he is soon inventing his own speedball combinations,
realising that drugs are to be his vice for life.
8/83
Blackie Lawless approaches the Crüe with a song he has written called
Wild Child. Nikki feels the vocals are out of Vince’s range for Mötley
to use it, so Blackie retains it as a song for his band W.A.S.P. It
is later released in 1985 as the opening track on their sophomore album
The Last Command.
As work on the new Mötley album draws
to a close, Nikki’s shoulder is now fully healed. Seeing that other
bands have now copied their glam-punk Too Fast For Love image, Mötley
evolves their look into a cross between Mad Max and Escape From New
York, two movies they watched many times while they lived together in
The Mötley House. Nikki puts on a single studded shoulder pad to look
like a gas pirate from Mad Max, while he has thigh-high leather boots
made with a cage in the heel to eject smoke at the press of a button.
17/9/83
Mötley plays a huge show with Def Leppard, Uriah Heep and Eddie Money
in front of fifty thousand people at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium.
A video is shot for the band’s anticipated
first single Looks That Kill, from the soon-to-be-released album. Nikki
wrote the song with girlfriend Lita Ford in mind. Mick gets drunk on
the set by drinking vodka out of his Coke can. The video is produced
by Marcelo Epstein on a budget of seventy five thousand dollars, shot
over two very long days. It is designed to shock and make viewers feel
uncomfortable.
26/9/83
Mötley Crüe’s Shout At The Devil album is released, selling two hundred
thousand copies in its first two weeks and eventually reaching number
seventeen on the charts. With its cover designed by Bob Defrin, the
album contains the track Knock ‘Em Dead Kid, dedicated to the L.A. Police
Dept., and another song called Bastard, written about former manager
Allan Coffman. There’s also a cover version of The Beatles’ classic
Helter Skelter included. Mötley insists the album is not satanic, but
about shouting AT the devil, not WITH. The instrumental God Bless The
Children Of The Beast is inspired by the introduction on David Bowie’s
Diamond Dogs album. Sound Engineer Geoff Workman narrates the introductory
track In The Beginning, even though the album’s packaging says it’s
band mascot Allister Fiend who narrates Nikki’s lyrics. The album eventually
goes on to sell over three million copies.
Acclaimed session keyboardist Jai Winding
(who has worked on albums by Jackson Browne, Cheap Tick, Boz Scaggs,
Dusty Springfield, Donna Summer, George Benson, and Molly Hatchet) is
credited on the album, along with session synth player Paul Fox, formerly
of the Ruts. Tom Kelly and Richard Page, who have both worked on albums
by REO Speedwagon, Barry Manilow, Cher, Rick Springfield, America and
Survivor, receive backing vocal credits for their work.
29/10/83
Vince’s second child Elizabeth Ashley is born and named after her mother.
This is the first child with his girlfriend Beth Lynn with whom he now
lives. He has a five-year-old son Neil from a prior relationship with
a girl Tami.
Tommy is currently living in a condo
at 1734 North Fuller Street, Los Angeles with his girlfriend Candice.
The Crüe attends a personal in-store
appearance at Tower Records in West Covina, California.
31/10/83
Mötley appears live on MTV for the first time during their Halloween
Horror Show with live footage from the Crüe’s show at the Limelight
Club in New York being broadcast to millions of viewers. MTV also runs
a Crüe Halloween contest, where the winner and twenty five friends are
flown in for the show, taking up the entire front row.
11/11/83
Mötley commences a twenty-three-city Shout At The Devil headlining tour
with a sell-out show at the six-hundred-seat-capacity Orange Pavilion
in San Bernadino. Axe from Florida and Heaven from Australia play as
the support bands on the tour. The stage set represents a desolate debacle
of civilisation, with a painted backdrop of a city skyline, based on
the movie Escape from New York. Tommy’s drum riser is constructed to
look like rubble from an exploded freeway, while their amps are adorned
with spikes. At the start of Mötley’s set, one of the roadies enters
the smoke-filled stage with a horror mask and mimes to a tape of someone
reciting Edgar Allan Poe’s poem from 1843 called The Conqueror Worm,
where it says, “That Mötley drama – oh, be sure... it shall not be forgot.”
The video for Looks That Kill is aired
for the first time and the band flies between shows in Doc McGhee’s
eight-seat plane, with the plane nose diving to the ground after an
electrical malfunction one flight. The only real damage sustained is
the Crüe’s stage makeup and cleansers that explode in their luggage.
16/12/83
The final show of the Shout At The Devil headlining tour takes place
in Arizona. Vince and Tommy then head to the Cayman Islands for a two-week
holiday.
31/12/83
In the Cayman Islands on New Year’s Eve, Vince and Tommy jam with a
local reggae band on I Shot The Sheriff at the island’s Club Inferno.
They then fly out to meet Nikki and Mick at Long View Farm rehearsal
studio in upstate New York, to start preparing for a tour support slot
on Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon tour. At the farm, the band’s limo
drivers bring them copious amounts of drugs and hookers from Manhattan.
Choose the year:
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