(This was the cover story of last week's Regina Prairie Dog. I've never had so much fun researching an article.)
Crüe Vs. Roses
It's 40 below on the Sunset Strip
by Emily Zimmerman
Icons of 1980s Los Angeles hard rock, Mötley Crüe and Guns N’ Roses both wrote loud but melodic sing-alongs and nihilistic gutter anthems. Both had fan bases that extended well beyond the metal section of the record store. GN’R is still well thought of by serious music snobs and punk rockers, while the Crüe’s cute bad-boy image appealed to that rarely tapped hard rock audience, teenaged girls.
Despite their similarities, it must be just coincidence that brings both bands to Regina in the misery of January. Even though they’re playing the same venue in the same month, they’ve taken very different routes over the 20 years since their respective peaks.
And they’ll be bringing the crowds to the Brandt Centre for very different reasons.
To propose a thesis, let us assume that Guns N’ Roses are touring on the strength of Axl and his previous bandmates having put out about one-and-a-half truly great albums, once upon a time. Mötley Crüe are touring on the strength of the fact that every one of us, to one degree or another, would kind of like to be Tommy Lee in 1984.
Mötley Crüe were crazy, filthy, teenage-groupie-fucking louts. They were so impossibly straight that they could run around in makeup and heels and look even more masculine for it. Their best release of the past decade wasn’t an album; it was Mötley Crüe: The Dirt, an autobiography/oral history of the band in which the boys recounted, in often funny, sometimes excruciatingly squirm-inducing detail, their exploits, scandals and debaucheries.
Regardless of the individual antics, or even the joyously loud music, Mötley Crüe’s strength was and is as a collection of exaggerated characters. And “characters” is just the right word. Even in their heyday, the band often came off as being an inch away from a Mad magazine parody of themselves. They embraced any negative stereotype about glam metal/hair metal/Music Your Dad Can’t Stand.
In a moment that seemed right out of This is Spinal Tap, bassist and songwriter Nikki Sixx defended an album in an interview on The New Music, “Look, it’s called Shout AT the Devil, not Shout WITH the Devil.” The band’s success at being larger-than-life personae reached its peak (or possibly rock bottom) with the ’90s reinvention of drummer Tommy Lee as a rapper/porn star/capital-C Celebrity.
Tommy Lee has become less known as a musician than as a personality, the boy toy of a series of model/actresses and a reality show star. Still, Lee’s VH1 years can be forgiven as relatively minor famewhoring. His adventures in celebrity have been dwarfed by other musicians’, by the bland mugging and conspicuous consumption in the televised home lives of Jane’s Addiction’s Dave Navarro, Blink-182’s Travis Barker, and even squeaky-clean Jessica Simpson. And Lee was never guilty of anything as embarrassing as former Poison frontman Brett Michael’s Rock of Love franchise.*
It could have happened to any of the others. Lee certainly wasn’t the only band member to have a public second career (singer Vince Neil raced cars, Sixx published an autobiographical novel), marry a Baywatch star, or produce a less successful side project. Each of the band members is, in his own way, an over-the-top rock ’n’ roll cliché. But isn’t that the secret to their continued appeal? Their antics and distinct characters (nihilistic bassist, slutty and handsome lead singer, good-natured drummer, angsty guitarist Mick Mars) make them come off as a kind of X-rated Monkees.
Offended Crüe fans should bear with this analogy for just a moment. Most of the band members shared an apartment in their youth, and “zany” would be the kindest word for some of their antics. (Read The Dirt, and you will never, ever again look at an egg burrito as a mere cheap lunch.)
There are certainly legends of the bad behaviour of the members of Guns N’ Roses, but they tend not to star sole original member standing, Axl Rose. Rose’s band is now a group of accomplished but definitely background musicians, most of whom have some co-writing credit on his finally released follow-up to 1991’s Use Your Illusion double album, Chinese Democracy. In the works for some 15 years, Chinese Democracy is not a bad album. But it is neither a transcendent work of genius, nor a commercial success. It probably hasn’t garnered Rose any new listeners. But 1987’s Appetite For Destruction, and to a lesser extent, the rest of the old Roses catalogue, continues to impress new generations of hard rock fans.
Part of the reason that GN’R fans are willing to accept a new band lineup is that it’s been made abundantly clear that the original band is not getting back together. Ever. In former lead guitarist Slash’s autobiography and Rose’s blog, as well as numerous interviews, they’ve both displayed a cold dislike for each other that will probably last longer than any temperamental flare-up could. And as Slash, along with other former Guns Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, has experienced massive non-nostalgia-show success as a member of Velvet Revolver, there seems little incentive for him and the others to reunite with their former bandleader.
One thing’s for sure: if Guns N’ Roses did have even a few of the original instrumentalists on board, there’s no way they’d be playing the Brandt Centre, and certainly not in January. They’d be playing the Rider stadium in the middle of June, and that’s if they bothered to stop here at all. Axl Rose may be some kind of a genius, but his inability to work well with others has made him a curiosity and a nostalgia act, when he could have been a Rock God.
On the radio, you hear November Rain,
That solo’s awful long, but it’s a good refrain.
—Regina Spektor, “On The Radio”
Now, there will always be those who prefer the curiosity, those to whom the likes of, say, Alex Chilton is more interesting than Mick Jagger. (And this reporter confesses herself to be among that group.) But Axl’s not quite the auteur that could sustain or even thrive on that low-level cult musician status. The genius (and that word is not to be used lightly) of Appetite for Destruction was not his alone; it was Rose, and Slash, and the other three instrumentalists, in the right city, in the right year, with all the right angst and drugs and other bands on the radio.
Hard rock fan and pop culture critic Chuck Klosterman once wrote an article about a Guns N’ Roses tribute band called Paradise City. He concluded that the act succeeded because, for one thing, they gave the audience exactly what was expected of them. But they also succeeded because it was the lifestyle represented by GN’R, as much as the music, that they were paying tribute to.
Somehow, with only one band member from its first hit album onstage, the Guns N’ Roses show doesn’t seem like a tribute act. This may be because, though steeled for disappointment, GN’R fans are still interested to hear what the ever volatile, occasionally fascinating Axl Rose is going to do next. But everybody with tickets to the Mötley Crüe show knows exactly what’s going to happen. The show is going to rock, and all the singles will be played, and perhaps Misters Neil and Mars are a touch rounder than they once were but it won’t matter. A good time will be had by all. We will all squint our eyes and pretend it’s 1987, even if that was rather before our year of birth. In other words, Mötley Crüe has become a Mötley Crüe tribute band. Maybe that’s what they’ve always been.
* Members of GN’R have also been featured on reality television, but haven’t come off as silly as Lee. The search for Velvet Revolver’s lead singer was made into a series, and former drummer Steven Adler was a patient on VH1’s Celebrity Rehab. Addled and damaged from years of substance abuse and a cocaine-induced stroke, Adler is now as good an argument for moderation, if not abstention, as ever appeared on screen.
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