motley crue tour manager

On the Road With Motley Crue: All In the Name of Rock & Roll

By David Handelman

David Handelman

A ny moron can drive from Tucson to Phoenix in less than two hours, but the guys in Mötley Crüe are not just any morons. They’re rock stars with the current Number Two album and a new, customized Lear jet, and they want to travel between these first two gigs of their Girls, Girls, Girls tour by plane. Besides, explains the trollish guitarist Mick Mars, flying is less painful than driving when hung over – a state that most of the Crüe are proudly familiar with.

Unfortunately, the jet’s not ready: the CD player shorted out its electrical system, its black leather upholstery hasn’t been installed, and its nose has yet to be tattooed with the new Mötley insignia – a bentover blond stripper in garters. So after driving for an hour (in the opposite direction) to the Tucson airport, the Crüe – singer Vince Neil, 26, bassist Nikki Sixx , 28, drummer Tommy Lee , 24, and Mars, allegedly 31 – amble from their limos to a cramped, suffocatingly hot five-seat chartered plane. It sits on the runway for twenty minutes before the twenty-minute flight. Thus the band saves a grand total of about twenty minutes.

Once airborne, the band wolfs down some BLTs, and the ever-chipper, ultraskinny Lee uses the butt of his lighter to open a few bottles of Corona beer. During the trip the Crüe admires the many swimming pools speckling the landscape below. Sixx, who as chief songwriter is the acknowledged brains of the outfit, announces, “I want a pool the shape of a pussy!”

Album Review: Shout at the Devil (1984)

Bleached-blond Neil, toying absently with his hefty gold bracelet, looks out the window toward Phoenix and asks, “Is that smog?” Lee checks it out and replies, “It could be dust – it’s the desert.”

A loud beeping sound from the cockpit reminds the Crüe of flying high jinks from the band’s six-year past – like the time Neil took the pilot’s controls and nearly crashed into another plane, or the time the group’s plane lost power and the wheels had to be manually cranked down. “We were all going, ‘Oh, my fucking God, our career’s over,”‘ Sixx says.

Editor’s picks

The 100 best tv episodes of all time, the 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, 25 most influential creators of 2024.

But Mötley Crüe doesn’t die easily. Instead, in the spirit of living up to their intentionally misspelled, calculatingly umlauted name, the four highschool dropouts have continued to indulge in every conceivable rock & roll vice. Despite Sixx’s addiction to heroin, Lee’s marriage to Dynasty star Heather Locklear, various sexual round robins and altercations with the law, including Neil’s felony conviction for killing someone while driving drunk, their career has never seemed healthier.

T his summer millions of kids will buy the Band’s fourth paean to the wild life, Girls, Girls, Girls (“Our three favorite pastimes,” says Sixx). The Crüe’s first three albums (1982’s Too Fast for Love, 1983’s Shout at the Devil and 1985’s Theatre of Pain ) have sold in the millions, simply because of the sheer force of the band’s barnstorming, Vegas-like live extravaganzas. When its debut album (an independent release recorded in three days for under $20,000) was remixed and released by Elektra, only seven radio stations in the country would play it. Theatre of Pain did yield MTV hits with the ballad “Home Sweet Home” and the band’s lame version of “Smokin’ in the Boys Room,” but the true Crüe sound remained unmined.

These days the Crüe and many of its rude and loud heavy-metal colleagues have fully invaded MTV, radio and the Billboard charts. Even new bands like Poison and Cinderella can slap on some makeup, squeeze into some studded leather, spritz their hair, bang out some fistpumping choruses and go platinum. So a previously established, well-marketed band like the Crüe, with a radio-friendly album, can easily rise to the top of the sleazy heap.

When heavy metal’s practitioners discuss the appeal of their music, the phrase “the kids” is invoked almost constantly. “We play and write for the kids,” Sixx says. “We’ve never had peer acceptance. They couldn’t see past the costumes. . . . Kids don’t buy Whitney Houston . People that buy one record a year buy that. In the golden age of rock it was all kids playing for kids. Now it’s that again.”

Though heads bang all around the world, heavy metal, in many ways, seems a peculiarly middle-American-youth phenomenon. In England the punk rebellion was fueled by lower-class anger and social unrest, but in America the average middle-class Joe can afford some form of the good life. So instead of roaming the streets, alienated youths cruise the malls, more bored than angry.

See How Much Bret Michaels Loved the Decade of Decadence in Hair Metal Doc Trailer

Hear butch walker and ashley monroe's elegant cover of aerosmith's 'angel', watch aerosmith play 'dream on' and 'walk this way' at final concert in 2023.

And heavy metal has caught on as a sort of Lite punk: it smells and tastes like rebellion but without that political aftertaste. Its main selling points are that adults find it unlistenable, preachers call it blasphemous, and Tipper Gore blushes reading the lyrics. Fans at Crüe concerts say they like the group because the music is hard and fast, but they also like the band’s reckless hedonism, which they read about in the metal fanzines.

Steve Boles, 18, saved up his graduation money and flew with his mother and sister from Pendleton, Indiana (population 2000), all the way to Tucson just to see the first show of the Girls tour. A levelheaded, college-bound kid, he’s an anomaly among Crüe fans, but he sits in the parking lot for hours just to get Tommy Lee to sign his shirt. Boles says he likes the Crüe because “they do what they want” but admits the band’s image is probably just image. “I think a lot of it is showbiz. They have to act that way to make money . . . whatever it takes to be popular.”

For all the anthemic raunch, horror-show makeup and well-planted whispers of Satanism, heavy metal’s only discernible message is “Party hearty.” The music stirs the kids up only to dump them back in the malls, as exhausted and aimless as ever.

Back in 1981, Frank Carlton Serafino Ferranno, who had begun calling himself Nikki Sixx, dropped out of the L.A. group London to start a new band called Christmas. He recruited drummer Tommy Lee (bass) from Suite 19, another area band. Soon after, they came across an ad announcing, Loud, Rude, Aggressive Guitarist Available. Thus they found Bob Deal, then hit it off immediately upon discovering that they used the same blue-black Nice’N Easy hair dye. “We didn’t even have to hear him play,” says Lee in the band’s biography. “We went, ‘This is the guy – he’s disgusting.”‘ Deal changed his name to Mick Mars and suggested the group’s inspired moniker. After dismissing the first lead vocalist, they lured Vince Neil (Wharton) away from a Cheap Trick cover group called Rock Candy. No matter that Neil didn’t have the greatest voice in the world – he had all the right moves. Since then, the band has consumed more than 750 bottles of Jack Daniel’s in its quest for musical excellence.

Mötley Crüe: The Rolling Stone Album Guide

In 1983, Sixx told a reporter, “We could just fall apart tomorrow or go straight to the top, because we’re such extremists as personalities. It’s like riding a roller coaster twenty-four hours a day. Every time you turn around, somebody’s in jail or 100,000 kids are buying our album.”

True enough. For instance, last summer Vince Neil, after being allowed to finish the Theatre of Pain tour, spent twenty days in the clink for vehicular manslaughter for a December 1984 DUI accident that killed Nicholas Dingley, the drummer for the group Hanoi Rocks, and severely injured two others. Neil has paid $2.6 million in settlement to the injured parties, played benefit concerts and served 200 hours of community service. He is still on probation; the liner notes on the last Mötley album warned fans, “If and/or when you drink – don’t take the wheel. Live and learn – so we can all fuckin’ rock our asses off together for a long, long time to come.”

Asked what their new album is about, Neil says, “We don’t write songs to be messages . . . When I was younger, even now, I don’t listen to the words. If I like the melody, I like the song.” Sixx says, “I don’t understand U2 ‘s music. It’s too serious. They bum me out. I think music’s an escape . . . I’m not a parent. I don’t want to tell kids what to do.”

Occasionally, the Crüe does make a suggestion: the liner notes on Theatre of Pain asked fans to send in pictures – “you know what kind we like” – and the band received 4000 Polaroids of young body parts.

“I’ve always thought of us as the psychiatrists of rock & roll,” says Sixx, “because the kids come to see us, get all this anxiety and pent-up aggression out. That hour and a half is theirs. No one can take it away. No parent can tell them to turn it down.”

To fully appreciate what goes into that cathartic ninety minutes, just stand next to Paul Dexter at the back of the floor during a Mötley show. His leg thumping with the beat, the blond, bleary-eyed Dexter calls cues through a headset while he and two assistants finger computerized controls for 1600 lights, which are mounted on mobile grids, and smoke, fire and sparklers during the sixteensong set.

The playlist never varies – the $1.5 million production is too technically complex to allow for improvisation. Everything is planned, right down to Neil’s introductory raps, which Sixx has written in Magic Marker on sheets of legal paper taped to the stage. (For the song “Red Hot,” the rap goes like this: “You know, there’s nothing like a nice, cold . . . blonde! Or brunette! But what I really like are redheads . . .”)

When the Crüe was starting out at L.A. clubs like the Starwood, the members would light their pants on fire and chain-saw the heads off mannequins. But Sixx, like his audience, has a TV-bred attention span; last tour, after reading something somewhere about commedia dell’arte, he concocted a stage set that resembled a theater, and the band wore heavy makeup and glittery silks. This time out, the makeup is gone, and the high concept is concert hall as strip club. (The Top Twenty title song and its slick video depict the boys cruising on their Harleys from club to club, ogling and groping at the hot dancers.)

The Girls show kicks off with old stripper music. Ceiling-high red curtains drop to the floor like garments, revealing a bare, smoky red stage. Pneumatic lifts raise first one, then two, then three levels of amps. Lee begins his stick-shattering pounding as his drum set emerges out of the ground in a forklifted cage. Originally, the rest of the band had planned to emerge from between a giant woman’s legs. Instead, they hit the stage running. Neil grabs his cordless mike, mike stand and all, and tears around screeching “All in the Name of . . .,” which, like most Crüe tunes, has a catchy riff and a much-repeated refrain:

She’s only fifteen – she’s the reason, the reason I can’t sleep You say illegal – I say legal’s never been my scene I try like hell but I’m out of control All in the name of rock’n’ roll – for sex and sex I’d sell my soul.

Most of Mötley Crüe’s lyrics deal with the band, its milieu, desires and exploits. For Neil, the Girls album “is all based on going out with your buddies and having a good time, going to strip clubs and stuff.”

During each song in the concert, the dazzling light array swivels and shifts like Spielberg’s grandest special effects; flash pots explode in sync with the music, and lithe, blond Emi Canyn and Donna McDaniel (the Nasty Habits) rise out of the ground to shimmy and sing backup.

But the set’s truly awe-inspiring peak comes when Lee’s drum-set cage rises high above the stage. In the midst of a solo he stops and announces, “I had a fucking dream. I wanted to play the fucking drums upside down.” Then, while he plays, the cage tilts forty-five degrees to the left, then to the right, then face down ninety degrees, and finally it flips him head over heels in two complete circles. “See?” the barechested, strapped-in Lee cries when it finally rights itself. “Dreams do come true.”

“We try to go overboard with the stage show,” says Vince Neil, tanning by the pool at the Sheraton El Conquistador, near Tucson, “so the kids get their money’s worth. I’d be bummed if I went to a concert and they just stood there and played. That’s not my idea of show business.” Just to make sure his voice won’t give out, Neil gets a steroid shot before performances. One-fourth Mexican, he was born in Hollywood, California, and cut high school in suburban Covina to go surfing. He still calls everyone “dude” and skateboards backstage.

Of all the Crüe, he’s the one most caught up with living the image of a rock star. In the band’s home video Uncensored, released last year, he’s seen cruising L.A. in a tub in the back of a limo, drinking champagne with a set of breast-flashing women, explaining, “This is why I’m in this business.” Before every concert he kisses dressing-room posters of models like Paulina Porizkova and Carol Alt for good luck.

To be interviewed, he has to be pried from chatting up two leggy models who are staying in the room next door. He marvels that even though the models had spent the entire previous night hanging out in his room, they didn’t tear off his clothes. “It’s okay,” he says with a gleeful laugh. “Laying the foundation before you build the skyscraper!”

Neil, who says he’s currently dating a “beach bunny,” divorced his wife around the time he went to jail last year. The marriage had never been publicly acknowledged because Sixx had wanted the band to appear to have no attachments. In other words, to maintain their image, the members of the Crüe have the opposite of Gary Hart’s problem. “I think Hart would’ve made a great president,” Neil says. “I mean, we could’ve played at the White House!” But he adds that Hart “lied.” “A president, to me, is Abe Lincoln, George Washington – not some guy who’s boning some chick.”

Neil has had problems of his own since his Ford Pantera rammed into a Volkswagen on the way home from a beer run. “After the accident, I wouldn’t even leave the house. I was afraid to.” He entered a hospital and underwent therapy for a month. The terms of his probation include speaking to community groups and staying off booze. Neil does his best, asking for Evian when his cohorts chug Jack Daniel’s. But it’s obviously a strain, especially when, every show, he brings a bottle of Jack onstage so Sixx can take a chug. Neil still drinks beer and margaritas without too much peer pressure. A counselor will be popping in on various tour stops to help him.

“I fucked up,” Neil says of the accident. “I’ve always wanted to go out and have a good time, loved fast cars, loved to get drunk. I just fucked up. So ever since, I’ve tried to say, ‘Learn by my mistake. Don’t make the same mistake yourself.”‘ He claims that he doesn’t feel a twinge when belting out, “Have a drink on the boys, we’ll entertain you in style,” in the song “Bad Boy Boogie.” “I used to, but not anymore. You can’t dwell on things the rest of your life.” (Still, the band no longer performs “Knock ‘Em Dead, Kid.”)

If the Crüe hadn’t happened, Neil says, “I would be one of those guys in Hawaii that rents you jet skis.” When sixty, “I want to be like Jerry Buss, the guy that owns the Lakers. That guy’s happening. He’s like sixty-five, and he’s always got a beautiful nineteen-year-old on his arm. He sits in his mansion, has a good time.”

A kid comes up to Neil and asks him, “Will you sign an autograph for my friend Daniel?”

“Sure,” Neil says good-naturedly, taking the pen. “How do you spell Daniel?”

“Three, come in three, is seven up yet?” security chief Fred Saunders says into his walkie-talkie.

“That’s a suppository, over,” comes the reply.

Three is Mötley’s cheerful tour manager, Rich Fisher; Seven, Mick Mars. This is the tenor of the nearly constant walkie-talkie chatter of the Crüe’s road crew. Saunders (Four), who used to hang with Hell’s Angels, devised the number system partly so outsiders couldn’t eavesdrop and partly because it sounds cool.

Forty-one is the dressing room; 129, the gig location; 268, the bus; 101, the hotel; 100, “krell” (cocaine); 714, a bimbo; and 747, a “pig with lipstick” (fat girl). Saunders can also perfectly duplicate each Crüe member’s signature and often signs their eight-by-ten glossies. “I don’t like doing them, but there’s such a demand,” the muscular, bearded Saunders says apologetically. “At least they’re not hand stamped.”

It’s midday in the blazing Arizona heat, and Seven is nursing a hangover (“My brains are oatmeal,” he confesses) in his room, curtains drawn, watching an episode of Kung Fu on TV. Mick Mars, the least social of the Crüe, looks like Paul Williams wearing an Addams Family wig. Born in Indiana, the son of a factory foreman, Mick moved to California when he was eight. He changed his name, he says, because “the initials were B.A.D., and it was bad luck for me.” Twice divorced, he says he’s “real picky” about girls. “There’s too much disease going around.”

Mars is the band’s cutup, the one most likely to scream unexpectedly or talk about muffs and woodies. He calls Jack Daniel’s “mouthwash.” But he admits he drinks for confidence: “It’s weird to get out onstage and be real animated. I feel awkward.”

His hobbies are “fucking around” in his Corvette and dabbling in his eight-track home studio. Though he can quote extensively from Penthouse ‘s “Forum,” he admits, “I’m not too big on reading.”

Does he picture still being Mötley ten years from now? “Yeah, at least putting out albums, getting together, goofing around, if only for – what’s that word? – nostalgia’s sake.”

I t’s the afternoon before the first concert of the new tour, and Tommy Lee is taping public-service announcements for a local Tucson TV station. He seems uptight; whenever the camera’s off, he lights up another cigarette. He glances at a script for a drinking and driving spot. “I got a good one for this,” Lee says. “Can I mention that I’ve had a couple of 502s?” He’s told that Arizonans won’t know what that means.

“DUI,” he explains helpfully. On one take, he says, “Do me and yourself a favor, man. If you’re going to drink and drive . . . oh, shit.”

Lee later says he didn’t “dig” doing the P.S.A.: “I didn’t have an accident, and I didn’t check into a hospital. I know when to say, ‘No, that’s enough.’ I guess it’s a good thing for kids who are in trouble all the time, but if they don’t listen to their parents and friends, they’re gonna listen to me? I’m not a preacher, man. I just play drums.”

Tommy “T-Bone” Lee is the youngest, most gungho and instantly likable Crüe member. Born in Athens, Greece (his mother is Greek, and his father was in the armed services), he soon moved to California, where he went to Neil’s high school but only attended three classes: music, coed volleyball and graphic arts, in which he’d print up Aerosmith T-shirts. Since both parents worked, he’d go back home and whack his drums until three o’clock, then leave before his mother arrived and return as if he’d just got home from school. “The first president of the United States really didn’t matter to me. I don’t give a shit. I wasn’t around then. I don’t need that upstairs.” He was only seventeen when the band formed.

Lee has the most “tats” (tattoos) of anyone in the band – no small accomplishment – including a phoenix over his entire right thigh and a rose with the name Heather on his left forearm. He met Dynasty star Heather Locklear at an REO Speedwagon concert. He took her hand and said, “Hi, I’m Tommy, nice to touch you.” He got her phone number from his accountant’s brother, a dentist who knew Locklear’s dentist. But the first time he called her up, he almost blew it. He told her, “Hey, check it out, you’re on channel 2.” A minute later she was back saying that the person on channel 2 was Heather Thomas of The Fall Guy. “I was confused,” Tommy says, “as to which Heather I’d actually be going out with.” That obstacle was soon overcome, and they married May 10th, 1986.

Marriage is “great, it’s very cool,” says the man who admits he used to “fuck anything with a pulse.” “If I wasn’t married, I’d probably be dead, the partying and stuff.”

Even now that he’s a family man, Lee has no problems with the image of women that the band projects. “It never enters my mind. I really don’t think about anything, I just do it.”

N o one in Mötley Crüe is wearing underpants, so before sliding into his leather stage pants for a photo shoot, Nikki Sixx wipes his rear with a towel, which he then tosses at his band mates, who flee in all directions. “We’re on tour again!” cries Vince Neil.

The band members take turns pumping a twenty-pound barbell before doing a bare-armed pose. Sixx, who has been working out regularly, throws a minitantrum when he sees how chubby his arm photographs in the preliminary Polaroids. He sits while having ice packs applied to hide bags under his eyes and regards the bare-chested, six-foot-four-inch Lee and his pancake-flat tummy. “If I could just lose this shit here,” he says, tugging at his midriff. “I want to go onstage without a shirt on. I want to be in top form. When I’m thirty, I want to be like Jagger, at my peak. I don’t want to fade. I want to be getting better, like that Clairol commercial. Is that corny?”

Sixx, the most reflective member of the band, was born in San Jose, California. His mother left his Sicilian father for a musician in Frank Sinatra ‘s band, with which she sang backup, and young Sixx grew up, mostly with his grandparents, in Idaho, New Mexico and Seattle. A loner who read adventure books and dreamed of being a gunslinger, he stole car radios and listened to Deep Purple and T. Rex . He got his first guitar by bringing an empty case to a music store, asking for a job application and sticking a guitar in when the manager’s back was turned.

His grandmother’s death last July inspired the ninety-second orchestrated snippet on Girls, Girls, Girls called “Nona,” which repeats one line over and over: “I’m outta my head without you.” Her death, a source says, also helped snatch him from a severe heroin addiction that had started after the Theatre of Pain tour (which ended in March 1986). Sixx had grown so reclusive and dependent that he couldn’t bring himself to go to her funeral.

“I was strung out bad for over a year,” he says quietly. “I’d just bought a new house, and it turned into the Hollywood rock & roll headquarters. It was like ‘Here, snort this. Here, shoot this. Here, drink this. Hey, fuck her.’

“No one can pull me out of anything once I start, I do what I want. I was probably trying to see how close I could get. ‘Is Nikki Sixx human? Can I die?”‘ He spent seven days in a drug-rehabilitation clinic, alongside other sports and entertainment figures, and eventually quit. The same counselor checking up on Neil also keeps an eye on Sixx.

“Heroin is the most dangerous drug,” says Sixx. “It’s like heaven, you know? People wouldn’t do it if it weren’t. And quitting hurts. But I opted for pain and to have success as a songwriter – to achieve these goals, rather than being a drugged-out rock star. Half the kids in L.A. are on junk. It’s so fashionable, it scares the fuck out of me.”

Suddenly, he backs off. “I don’t want to sound like a parent.” One result of his addiction is the new album’s song “Dancing on Glass,” which declares, “I’ve been thru hell/And I’m never goin’ back/To Dancing on Glass.”

“I’m not mellowing out,” he says. “I’m just street smart about it.” Mellowing out would kill the Mötley image, but how long can it continue? Sixx now lives surrounded by antiques in a spotless house (“There’s something warm about old things”), and his impending marriage to Vanity seems to have dampened his self-destruct fuse. “We’ve kind of tamed each other,” says the sultry singer-actress backstage at the Tucson show. “At home, Nikki’s such a farm boy! He wears granny glasses. He doesn’t drink Jack at home at all. Just some wine. You don’t need booze and drugs when you’re in love.”

To prove her point, she grabs him from behind and grinds against him. “This is his favorite thing in the world,” she chirps.

Nikki had a crush on Vanity for four years and finally contacted her through her management. She fell for him in seven hours and asked him to marry her in three weeks. Why? “The way he looked at me. He looked like he’d been adoring me forever.” They plan to marry in December. Interestingly, Vanity’s name will then be Vanity Sixx, a misspelling of her former group’s name.

But Nikki’s not worried that marriage will end his sex appeal. “I have more to offer than being a bachelor. I’m a writer.” He has dreams of directing videos, writing screenplays and publishing a book of rock-lyric-like poetry. He wants to call it Shades, because he feels each of his songs expresses a certain color. He sees the new album as “golds, silvers, reds, greens, twinkling lights.” He hopes that by grouping together his more sensitive writings and labeling them with specific colors, “kids can get into it, it won’t be wimpy.”

Nobody could accuse him of wimpiness on his new song, “You’re All I Need,” written from the point of view of a kid who has just killed his girlfriend to keep her from dating anyone else. It’s the closest thing he’s ever written to a love song, and he defends it as simply “mirroring” society. It seems time to ask what he thinks of that society, the society that rewards Mötley Crüe’s vices while exiling Gary Hart for his. Sixx seems puzzled by the question. “Who’s Gary Hart?”

It’s 5:00 P.M. the day before the show in Phoenix, and Sixx is poolside, drinking a Bloody Mary and eating a platter of shrimp. A proud mother brings over her four-year-old son, Tommy, to meet him. “He knows all your music,” she says.

“Hi, Tommy!” says Nikki, shaking his tiny hand. “What do you wanna be when you grow up?” Tommy, shied into muteness, shrugs. “A rock star?” He nods.

Sixx is ecstatic. “You don’t want to be a fireman or the president?” Tommy shakes his head no. “Why’s that, so you can get all the girls?” Tommy Grins.

“You can do whatever you want,” says Sixx, clearly happy to be preaching his main message to such a ready convert. “Go jump in the pool with all your clothes on!”

Tommy hesitates, frowning slightly. He looks at the pool, then at his mother, then at Sixx. “Go for it!” Sixx urges.

Tommy’s mother’s smile tightens. “That’s too deep for you,” she says and grabs his arm, leading him off.

“I love kids,” Sixx says fondly, as he watches them walk away.

This story is from the August 13th, 1987 issue of Rolling Stone.

Trump Says People Who Criticize Supreme Court Justices Should Be Jailed

T.i., tiny win whopping $71 million award at omg girlz trial, halle berry says prince once asked her out on a piece of paper, sean combs' history of controversies and allegations, watch christina aguilera and sabrina carpenter revisit 'what a girl wants'.

• It Takes Two
• By Emily Zemler

Charli XCX Brings Out Lorde for Surprise MSG Performance

• Internet Goes Crazy
• By Charisma Madarang
• 'I mean, wow'
• By Nancy Dillon

Young Dolph Suspect Admits to Shooting Rapper

• Courts and Crime

PnB Rock Murder: Dad of Alleged Shooter Gets 31 Years to Life in Prison

• PnB Rock Trial

Most Popular

Hollywood can’t ditch its teslas fast enough: “they're destroying their leases and walking away” , 'monsters: the lyle and erik menendez story' cast guide: meet the actors portraying the menendez family, diddy scores major legal win following nyc arrest, donald trump jr. may have just confirmed the end of his engagement to kimberly guilfoyle, you might also like, isabella rossellini to receive lifetime achievement award from european film academy, céline dion adds ‘just a touch of glam’ to kick off l’oréal paris fashion show during paris fashion week, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, 2025 oscars: best supporting actress predictions, nba’s trail blazers latest to go with free tv, team streaming.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Working from home? Switch to the DIGITAL edition of Projection, Lights & Staging News. CLICK HERE to signup now!

• Submissions

Motley Crue: The Final tour

• By: PLSN Staff
• Production Profile
• September 11, 2014

Cleverly named The Final Tour , Mötley Crüe’s final tour began July 2 in Grand Rapids, MI. And final it is. In January, under a banner proclaiming “All Bad Things Must Come to an End,” the iconic band’s members held a press conference in Hollywood, complete with a New Orleans-style funeral marching band, at which they publicly signed a legally binding “cessation of touring” agreement. It prohibits them from going on the road together or individually under the Mötley moniker after their current 18-month worldwide victory lap ends. No biennial reunion tours, no country fair oldies circuit, no package cruises.

The final tour’s show has all the elements you’d expect from the band most likely to exceed: thundering power chords from guitarist Mick Mars and bassist Nikki Sixx, the tight-pants tenor of singer Vince Neil, exotic dancers dressed in the legal minimum, a metric ton of attitude, neuron-blasting special effects, lyrics as subtle as a steamroller, anthemic lighter-waving ballads, profanity by the pound, pyro, cryo, explosions, confetti, costumes, flames pulsing out of the bass guitar neck like…like…well, insert your own analogy here. Because it is the band’s last go-round, they were determined to push more envelopes than the post office. They wanted big and crazy. They got it.

The visual madness originated in the comparatively sane brains of production designers Robert Long and Sooner Routhier, operators of SRae Productions in Portsmouth, NH. “It’s been a whirlwind,” she says (they dove into the Crüe’s swan song project just after finishing work on the KISS tour that featured a giant, articulating spider marionette and already has assignments in the works for an electronic artist, a country tour, an off-Broadway show and a musical tribute called The Australian Bee Gees that will also be shown on PBS TV in the fall).

“We’ve worked with Mötley Crüe since 2009,” she points out. “Whenever there’s a new tour design to be done, we start working with the band to learn what concept they want, what themes to use and so forth. This one took about six months to get ready. Since it was to be their last tour, the general idea was about putting the band to rest, with RIP motifs. We began coming up with ways to portray that on stage. We wanted to take them through the ages, through the different looks and scenic elements they’ve had throughout their career, and bring it all together in one cohesive look. That led to sketches and image searches, followed by full-scale renderings, designs and meetings with the band for input and approvals. Every song is structured, and we stuck to color palettes that work with the song. We think music has color and shape, so we try to portray that with the lighting look. For instance, if they’re doing Shout at the Devil , which is all about the devil and fire, you don’t want to be using green. It’s very red and yellow and amber. On Dr. Feelgood , the album cover has a crazy green tile wall in the background with some red and white, so we tried to put that in somehow, even though it looks disgusting. It’s meant to be uncomfortable to look at.” She credits advances in console technology and software with making possible lighting looks that are original and unique.

The size of venues influences the design, too. “We knew they’d be playing arenas and amphitheaters,” Routhier explained, “so we tried our best to keep the shows within those confines. As it’s designed, this one is big, but we have trusses that can move or shrink according to the space. For a larger venue, they go on the sides to make the show wider; for a smaller space, they’re moved back toward center. We have elements that can shrink and grow as needed, but we typically draw our shows within a bounding box of the smallest space that we can.”

Next came meetings with the vendors, in which Long and Routhier planned the gear, scheduling, crew, transport, etc. “Robert is like a renaissance man of tours,” said Routhier. “He’s done it all, from guitar tech to stage manager to production managing. He is amazing at the tech side of things, of getting things in and out of buildings, keeping things on budget, knowing how many trucks, all the little details that go into putting a tour together and making it look good, as well as having an extremely creative mind. My strengths are more on the graphic side, like drafting, Photoshop, Illustrator and design art.”

And since bad boys like to play with fire, there’s pyro involved in every Mötley Crüe tour. “We bring over FFP from Germany,” Routhier explained. “They’re really good at experimenting with different effects, so when we have a crazy idea and send it to them, they’ll go into their labs and experiment with it and come up with something that has never been seen before. They do an amazing job with that.”

After all the materials were produced and ready to go, everything was shipped to a rehearsal space in Grand Rapids about ten days ahead of the first show and set up so the band could rehearse with it.

The literal high point of the program is the “Crüecifly” drum solo stunt. Drummer Tommy Lee, who in recent years has become as noted for his priapic prowess as for his percussion proficiency, is carried up over the audience with his entire drum kit on what is essentially a slow-moving rock-and-roller coaster to the back of the hall and returned to the stage, playing and chatting up the crowd while rotating end over end.

When a system weighing several thousand pounds is suspended above an audience, concerns ensue. “Obviously, safety was the first consideration when we started the project, trying to figure out how to create something that would be safe to have above people’s heads,” said Pearce. “Everything is double- or triple- secured. The drum kit is welded to plates on the rotating deck, with secondary attachments for the individual parts. It’s radio-controlled and miked, with a UPS unit supplying power.” The track is lined with Elation LED tape and Martin MAC 101s. Around the drum kit are LED rings called Bright Beats that Lee triggers from his drum pads.

And the stress on the drummer? “Tommy’s very acrobatic,” said Pearce, chuckling. “For the last one, he went upside down on a 30-foot circle that was on stage, so he’s pretty much used to these stress rides. I don’t believe he had more than a day or so of rehearsal before the first show. It’s much more difficult to ride on the unit than it looks. It’s not only a head rush, it’s a stomach rush, it’s an everything rush.”

The full Crüecifly package, which takes local stagehands under SGPS supervision about four hours to erect, is designed for major arenas. In venues where the roof is not strong enough or there is no roof, a modified segment of the system takes the drummer only a short distance out from the stage.

Lighting director/programmer Matt Mills describes the Crüe show as “definitely kicked up a notch from my previous work (Daughtry, Staind, Three Doors Down, Nelly Furtado, Disturbed, Linkin Park, etc.). They’re really going out with a big bang. There are definitely some pretty cool things being thrown around out here. The Tommy Lee drum solo belongs on a episode of Modern Marvels .”

Fresh off a tour with Avenged Sevenfold, Mills began programming for the Crüe gig ahead of time at home in Orlando with fellow lighting director Mike Cooper, who’d brought his family down for vacation. “I have a pretty nice programming suite set up in my house. I have a grandMA2 Command Wing linked up to a computer [with grandMA onPC software v3 for pre-viz work]. Mike and I would sit up late at night, load the show file up and figure out what worked and what didn’t, so we could be a bit farther ahead before we went into preproduction.”

Cooper had done the band’s 2013 Intimate Evening in Hell residency at the Hard Rock Casino’s The Joint venue in Las Vegas, so many elements from that transferred over to this show. The two kept any programming that worked from the Vegas set, adjusting for the different configurations, and added any new elements. “Each of the 19 songs and the drum solo and the guitar solo has its own cue stack, its own page on the console,” Mills explained. “The whole show is time-coded. We had the foundation of the programming in, then we got the new time-code tracks from their Pro Tools guy and were off and running. There are a few things I’ve adjusted since we’ve been out, like some of the transitions between songs, which can go very quickly. Coming out the drum solo, there’s a guitar solo. We give Mick his special spot, with the rest of the stage dark. We’ve got four ego risers that are really just a big LED brick. He steps up on that and I uplight him all in red so he looks real evil. He goes into an evil-sounding guitar solo that transitions into the song ‘Live Wire.’”

The band was on hand for some rehearsing with the lights. When they weren’t, “we did our own rehearsals. We fired up the iTunes and cranked through all the songs to see how it was looking, making sure the transitions were good, making sure we didn’t have a red and blue song followed by a red and blue song.”

Mills owns the two grandMA2 consoles he uses on the tour and operates them in full tracking mode, so they back each other up. “I’ve been a grandMA guy ever since they came out. With every new software release, they keep making it easier and more powerful, so it makes it a lot easier for me as a programmer to knock out some very intricate looks very quickly. I’ve progressed with them and couldn’t imagine doing a show without them. If someone asks if I speak a foreign language, I tell them ‘I speak MA command line.’” He estimates that the show, counting LEDs, has 16,000 light fixtures. It takes four or five hours to set up and about two-and-a-half hours to take down, depending on the venue and loading dock. “We’re in a really good groove now,” he says. “Christie Lites really went above and beyond to make this thing right. They have such great customer service, getting us things we needed at the last minute when things changed from what was on paper.”

Mills describes an effect that he’s especially proud of. “We have a lot of LED fixtures up in the rig, a bunch of Ayrton MagicPanels and Martin MAC 101s. Inside of Catalyst, I’ve pixel-mapped every LED fixture we have, so now I can play video on top of the entire rig and can get effects out of it that I’d never be able to get from a lighting console.”

Concludes the lighting director, “This is so cool, because as a teenager, I went and saw Mötley Crüe several times when they rolled through my town. It’s pretty wild to sit back and think that I’m actually taking them out for their last tour.”

And that’s final.

For more info on the design team and band, go to www.sraeproductions.com and www.motley.com.

The Mötley Crew

Production Design: Sooner Routhier, Robert Long/SRae Productions

Lighting Programmer/Operator: Matt Mills

Lighting Programmer: Mike Cooper

Production Manager: Robert Long

Stage Manager: Patrick Murphy

Production Coordinator: Eric “Shakes” Gryzbowski

Riggers: Chris Sorenson (head), Ben Erdreich

Carpenters: Casey Long, Dale Bryant, Scott Ramos

Lighting Co: Christie Lites

Lighting Crüe: Martin Kelley (rep), Mike Flynn (crew chief), Sean Flynn (dimmers/distros), Andy O’Toole, Tyler Pigeon, John Clark, Ian Saunders

Video Co: Chaos Visual Productions

Video Crüe: John Wiseman (rep), Robert McShane, Kenny Ackerman, Seth Sharpless, Chad McClymonds

Staging/Rigging/Automation: SGPS/ShowRig

Staging Crüe: Eric Pearce (owner), Chris Kunkle, Angel Aguirre, Mike Rock, Vince Gallegos, Jordan Matson

Pyro Crüe: Nicolai Sabottka (rep), Nick Tompsett (shooter), Marcin Okupnik, Christoph Buschor

2       MA Lighting grandMA2 full size consoles 1       MA2 on PC with Command Wing (for Pyro) 12     MA Lighting NPUs (4) and NSPs (8) 2       grandMA2 Lite consoles 1       City Theatrical SHoW DMX system 3       Additional SHoW DMX systems (Drums) 1       Catalyst Pro media server 20     Opto-Isolators (8-way DMX) 5       60 channel HD distro racks 1       ETC 96 channel dimmer 110  Martin MAC 101s 46     Ayrton MagicPanel 602s 38     Martin MAC Viper AirFX fixtures 18     Clay Paky Sharpys 16     Martin MAC 2000 Wash XBs 16     Martin MAC Auras 7       Martin MAC 2000 Performances (for Alice Cooper) 5       Martin MAC III Profiles 3       Altman Lighting Focusing Cyc lights 6       Jelly Jar Aircraft Beacons 8       Bars of 6 VNSPs (for Alice Cooper) 52     ETC Source Four PARs (for Crüe Pods) 6       4-Light linear DWE blinders 18     Showtec Sunstrips 40     Martin Atomic Strobes w/Atomic Colors 4       Apollo Design Technology Right Arms 9       Bright Beats LED Drum Heads 14     Chroma-Q Color Force 72s 4       ETC Source Fours (36°) 400’   Elation Flex Pixel LED Tape 4       JEM ZR 44 foggers 4       Radiance hazers 2       DF50 hazers 4       JEM ZR44 Hi-Mass foggers 39     7’10” sections of Christie Lites F Type track truss 24     End Gates for Christie F-type truss 6       Christie Lites dance towers (for Crüe Pods)

The PLSN Newsletter

The latest in industry news and products, delivered every Monday.  Sign Up Today.

" * " indicates required fields

Recommended for You:

Just Over Two Weeks Left to Nominate for the Parnelli and Indispensable Technology ‘IT’ Awards

Robe Shines with the Stars for ‘Toby Keith American Icon’

Elation FUZE Takes Rijswijkse Schouwburg Theater from Static to Dynamic

Unilumin Group Achieves Dual Carbon Footprint Certification

IWEISS Receives Patent for the Paragon Hoist

Who’s Hoosier: NAMM Interviews Production Pros with Indiana Roots

• Most popular artists worldwide
• Trending artists worldwide

• Tourbox for artists

Search for events or artists

• Sign up Log in

• Get the app
• Moscow concerts
• Change location
• Popular Artists
• Live streams
• Deutsch Português
• Popular artists

Mötley Crüe  

• On tour: yes
• Mötley Crüe is not playing near you. View all concerts
• Moscow, Russian Federation Change location

795,650 fans get concert alerts for this artist.

Join Songkick to track Mötley Crüe and get concert alerts when they play near you.

Nearest concert to you

Louder Than Life Festival

Touring outside your city

Be the first to know when they tour near Moscow, Russian Federation

Join 795,650 fans getting concert alerts for this artist

Upcoming concerts (3)

Hard Rock Live - Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood

Monster Energy Aftershock

Similar artists with upcoming concerts

Tours most with.

One of the most iconic American heavy metal bands, Mötley Crüe was born out of the beautiful Los Angeles, California in the United States.

Formed in 1981, bassist Nikki Six met drummer Tommy Lee through a mutual friend, and decided to form a band together. The two set out to find other members and met guitarist Mick Mars (real name Bob Deal) who was immediately auditioned and hired. Lee then recruited his high school mate Vince Neil, who was still a part of the band Rockandi, to be their lead vocalist. After a bit of apprehension, Neil gave in and joined the trio to form the band you know and love as Mötley Crüe today.

In November 1981 they released their first album “Too Fast For Love” which was entirely produced and released by their own record label Leathür Records and set out on a Canadian tour. Using this forward movement of cult popularity in Los Angeles, their manager at the time, Allan Coffman, helped them obtain a record deal with Elektra Records; which they signed in Spring 1982. The signing meant a re-mastered mix of the album “Too Fast For Love” as well as a new album entitled “Shout At The Devil” in the works, which was consequently released in 1983. A mere two years later, they released a third album, “Theatre of Pain.”

Their quick success was not without consequence however. Their party hard mentalities meant a few run-ins with the law, reaching their first breaking point when Vince Neil crashed his car, resulting in death and severe injury to other passengers. While “Theatre of Pain” was sitting atop the music charts, Neil was found guilty of vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence and served time in 1986. If that wasn’t enough, following the release of their fourth album “Girls Girls Girls,” their 1987 tour had to be canceled due to Sixx being found dead from heroin overdose; however, he was revived back to life. Eventually their new managers Doug Thaler and Doc McGhee convinced them to attend rehab and the band took a step out of the spotlight.

A clean and sober band, Mötley Crüe recorded and released “Dr. Feelgood” in 1989 and it shot straight to the charts and stayed for weeks. By October 1991, the band released their first compilation album “Decade of Decadence” which also shot straight to the Billboard charts; however, the 90s was generally not a strong decade for the band. Neil left, was shortly replaced by John Corabi for the release of “Motley Crue” which didn’t meet the commercial expectation as their previous albums. With contractual obligations lived out in 1998, the band took back their catalog, but tensions were still high resulting solo projects by Tommy Lee, Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil.

Luckily things picked back up in the 2000s resulting in a reunion, and release of the “New Tattoo” and “Saints of Los Angeles” (2008). However, this also meant the announcement of their retirement and final tour.

Live reviews

This is the fourth time I've seen the Crüe, and the second time at MSG. Even though I also saw them on tour with Aerosmith, and saw a show during one of their residencies at the Hard Rock in Las Vegas, this Final Tour show lives up to expectations. Vince even learned most of the words to the songs!! (Anyone who has seen Mötley Crüe live before will know that this is kind of a big deal. At previous shows I’ve attended, the audience sang nearly as much as Vince did.)

Nikki Sixx is my favorite member of Mötley Crüe, and he was in top form at this show, and even had a fire-shooting attachment on his bass for "Shout at the Devil." He also regaled the audience with the long story of how he moved to LA and pulled the band together. Even though I already knew the story from reading The Dirt, it was still great to hear Nikki tell it live, in his own words. While that little interlude brought the energy level down a bit, it did a nice job of bringing the night full circle and truly encapsulating all 33 years of the band's life.

Tommy Lee's drum roller coaster contraption was totally insane, spanning the length of the arena floor, and allowing Tommy’s drum kit to do 360 degree spins as it travelled along the track. The guys played a solid two hour set and definitely went out with a bang (literally - there was a ton of pyro during closing number "Kickstart My Heart," including Nikki’s afore mentioned fire-shooting bass).

The strongest testament to this show is that the next day I had to go online to check the rest of their tour dates to find out if I could possibly see another show on the tour (sadly, no other cities convenient to me remain), and a full 24 hours later I was still buzzing with energy.

However, to paraphrase Nikki, this show/tour isn't "goodbye" because the Crüe's music isn’t going anywhere – it’s going to be around to haunt us until the day that we die.

Report as inappropriate

Mötley Crüe is Mötley Crüe. Loud, aggressive, sometimes out of key and sometimes the lyrics are skipped or mumbled. But the show goes on, and the presentation is excellent. There is fire. There are dancers. There are lights and lasers and explosions, even Nikki's flame throwing bass guitar is back! About the only thing missing would be a giant video screen showing the band's MTV hits as they played them. If you have seen the Crüe at any point in the last decade, then you know what to expect; ten to twelve standard hits, a couple of newer wanna be hits, a few rotating 'deep cut' tracks that really are not that deep anymore. Oh, and then there is the drum solo. On this farewell tour the antics in the drum solo depend if the venue can support it. Sonically, maybe you're better without the drum solo - the antics are cool, the drumming is not. To me Mötley Crüe has always been a band of individuals that somehow fit together when they need to rock the stage. Tommy famous for his off stage antics as much as his drumming stunts - both overshadowing his ability a bit. Mick's quiet, methodical personality never seemed to fit his guitar playing, or the band - but it works. Vince - well has he let himself go a bit too much? Still a great front man - off stage. Nikki, you get a little bit of everything with him, but he has the talent still to back up most of what he says and does. Though I am curious why they have dumped the new song from their set lists after just a few dates on the tour. This 'may' be the last tour, and it will satisfy most fans. But it's not the last time you will hear these songs. Expect side projects to keep these songs alive until a reunion of some sorts down the road.

If you’ve read Keith Richards’ autobiography, Life - and I’d thoroughly recommend it if you haven’t - you’ll know all about his attitude to his legendary drug-taking; fairly blase, for the most part, although he also largely insists that he only did them for utilitarian purposes - for the sake of staying up long enough to get songs finished, or to knock him out when there were too many ideas bouncing around his brain. I don’t know if any of the members of Motley Crue have read his book, either, but they’ll likely have treated Richards’ admission that hedonism wasn’t his sole motivating factor as a show of weakness; indeed, hedonism is the very foundation on which the L.A. band were built. There are far more classic tales of rock and roll excess than I can list here - bass player Nikki Sixx once had to be effectively resurrected after a heroin overdose with two shots of adrenaline straight to the heart - and all indications are that the lifestyles that made the Crue one of the most notorious bands in rock and roll history back in the eighties have begun to catch up with them, decades later. They’re currently undertaking what will be their final ever tour, running through to 2015, before retirement; as un-Crue a concept as that seems, though, they’ll be bringing their larger than life personas to the stage with them for one last run through the hits; expect a serious shot of glamorous debauchery from a band that nobody expected to be old before they died.

I saw Motley Crue on the Theatre of Pain tour when I was in High School and was blown away. I have been hooked from that moment. This tour is AWESOME!!! They are tighter than ever and engage the crowd from the very beginning! Alice Cooper was great as always but Motley set the standard and showed why they are the Gods of Heavy Metal and Glam Rock. Nikki Sixx played a Bass that shot Fire while he was shredding center stage. On With The Show was amazing and was electrifying the crowd. No one sat down the entire show. Shoreline at Mountain View was a perfect intimate venue for them. Their encore was on a mini stage in the middle of the crowd next to me. Motley truly showed that they love their fans and playing music. Mick Mars is a virtuoso on the axe. Even if you have seen them before go. If you haven't you MUST SEE THIS BAND. I have seen them a couple of times and they are true artists and take you on a journey that only they can. They play everything on this tour. Dr. Feelgood, Shout at the Devil, Saints of Los Angeles and Smoking in the Boys Room. They use smoke, fire, lasers and female dancers throughout the show. Nikki gives a different talk every night about being in the band and what the fans mean to him. Mick Mars does a solo that you will not believe. I am looking to find them somewhere else on this tour. It is worth every penny and MORE!!

HELLO, I am here to share my testimony on how I finally joined the Illuminati brotherhood with the help of Mr. Olta I am now RICH, FAMOUS, AND POWERFUL, I tried my best to become a member of the brotherhood, but I was scammed several times before I found a testimony about Mr. Olta on the internet so I contacted him, I was so afraid that he would ask me for a lot of money before I could join the light, but to my greatest surprise he only asked me to buy the items I made and today I am very happy to tell the world that I am rich and have been able to build many businesses with all this I obtained an instant sum of 7 million dollars in my account and I am also known all over the world with the business. that the Illuminati brotherhood gave me and I also have the power to do what I want ... I know many people may be in my lane also looking for help here you are officially free to contact Mr. Olta Va Email: ([email protected]) OR WhatsApp or call +2349018100439 BEWARE OF SCAM.

HELLO, I am here to share my testimony on how I finally joined the Illuminati brotherhood with the help of Mr. Olta I am now RICH, FAMOUS, AND POWERFUL, I tried my best to become a member of the brotherhood, but I was scammed several times before I found a testimony about Mr. Olta on the internet so I contacted him, I was so afraid that he would ask me for a lot of money before I could join the light, but to my greatest surprise he only asked me to buy the items I made and today I am very happy to tell the world that I am rich and have been able to build many businesses with all this I obtained an instant sum of 7 million dollars in my account and I am also known all over the world with the business. that the Illuminati brotherhood gave me and I also have the power to do what I want ... I know many people may be in my lane also looking for help here you are officially free to contact Mr. Olta Va Email: ([email protected]) OR WhatsApp or call +2349018100439 BEWARE OF SCAM

Having seen Motley Crüe over 20 times since the mid 80's, this was bittersweet. The show was good, there were a few things that stood out. Vince's voice sounded a little tired and even more important, I really missed having the Tommy drum show at the Hollywood Bowl. Last time I saw them there they did have the roller coaster drums and this time with all the hype about his set up, he was not able to do it at the bowl. He also did not engage with the crowd nearly as much as usual, he just stayed back and played. I would have liked to hear more from him. All in all though, they played all the songs I wanted to hear and it was a fun evening. The end of an era and sad to see them go when they are still young and can clearly put on a great live show.

Motley Crue were my first concert. They were awesome then and were awesome in Greenville twenty four years later. A spectacle of sound, fire, explosions, and mayhem. Most of the crowd was on their feet and singing along for the whole concert.

Alice Cooper opened the show and brought all of his tricks: the snake, the guillotine, the Frankenstein monster, etc.

I've had a thought all week of how great it is to be able to see these guys on stage in 2014 and it might as well be 1990, 1975, etc. As a sports fan, I can't see Herschel Walker, Rickey Henderson, or Joe Montana perform like they did in their prime, but I can still see Alice Cooper and Motley Crue replicate their prime.

If you get the chance to see this show, go!

For one thing the first band (not Alice Cooper) was so loud and horrible we had to go outside to where the merchandise was sold just to get away. Alice Cooper was amazing as always... Mötley Crue was AMAZING! I've never seen them live! Their pyrotechnics was awesome, they covered alot of the years of music. Nikki spoke about how they ended up together. The only thing I was disappointed about was Tommy's drumset was small because people that have seen them live before absolutely raved about him and his drums: he didn't have one solo..and really didn't even get to see him excel through smoke. Overall I would definitely see them again. Seeing them perform live was great.

Seeing the boys one last time was great, Motley Crue did not disappoint. Having Alice Cooper start the concert was cool, it was my first time seeing him perform live and he sounds great. If they come to your town do yourself a huge favor and buy tickets to this show. All their top hits and a few from their latest albums made for one serious night of Heavy Metal!

Get there early, you'll definitely want the skull made out of band members' photos. I love my shirt!

Videos (16)

Photos (74)

Posters (194)

Past concerts

Mohegan Sun Arena

Minnesota State Fairgrounds

WinStar World Casino & Resort

View all past concerts

Mötley Crüe tour dates and tickets 2024-2025 near you

Want to see Mötley Crüe in concert? Find information on all of Mötley Crüe’s upcoming concerts, tour dates and ticket information for 2024-2025.

Mötley Crüe is not due to play near your location currently - but they are scheduled to play 3 concerts across 1 country in 2024-2025. View all concerts.

Next 3 concerts:

• Hollywood, FL, US
• Louisville, KY, US
• Sacramento, CA, US

Next concert:

Last concert near you:

Popularity ranking:

• Justice (471)
• Mötley Crüe (472)
• Thundercat (473)

Concerts played in 2024:

Touring history

Most played:

• Los Angeles (LA) (107)
• Las Vegas (47)
• Philadelphia (43)
• Detroit (33)
• New York (NYC) (33)

Appears most with:

• Alice Cooper (146)
• Ozzy Osbourne (106)
• Def Leppard (87)
• Poison (83)
• Theory of a Deadman (66)

Distance travelled:

Similar artists

• Most popular charts
• Campaigns for promoters
• API information
• Brand guidelines
• Community guidelines
• Terms of use
• Privacy policy
• Cookies settings
• Cookies policy

Get your tour dates seen everywhere.

How The Dirt Ignored Motley Crue's True Story

In the world of rock biopics that twist facts and gloss over the less PG-13 traits of their subjects ( Bohemian Rhapsody , anyone?), Motley Crue's The Dirt is fairly refreshing because it doesn't even bother to hide the fact that it's lying to the viewer. On multiple occasions, members of the band stop the movie to casually inform explain the viewer that a major real-life character has been omitted from the movie or that an event actually happened in a completely different way than the movie leads us to believe. What's more, the film is also based on the band's collective autobiography of the same name, which is notorious for its no-holds-barred look at rock star debauchery.

With a pedigree like this, it's easy to assume the movie is an honest look in the grimy, sticky lives of the self-professed "world's most notorious rock band." Unfortunately, this isn't quite the case. Let's take a look at how The Dirt ignored huge chunks of Motley Crue's true story.

Publishing rights issues

If there's one thing we learned from The Dirt, it's that it's shockingly easy for a rock band to negotiate the rights to their own music. The movie shows us that Tom Zutaut meets Nikki Sixx at a bar and pretty much just informs him that they're giving him back the rights to all of his publishing. While Elektra did hand over the rights in real life as well, it was actually a much more difficult and important event than the movie shows. Alternative Nation tells us that the negotiating parties were the band and Sylvia Rhone at Elektra. Motley Crue's popularity was rapidly dwindling, so Rhone didn't want to pay them the $12 million contractual advance the record company owed them. Manager Allen Kovac describes the deal the band brought to the negotiation table: "Give us $2 million, keep $10 million and Motley will own their masters and copyrights."

The record company agreed to the deal, saved $10 million and managed to offload what to them must have seemed like a dying talent. However, Motley Crue got the last laugh: According to 2019 figures, they have raked in roughly $150 million in royalties. They don't own the rights anymore, though — Nikki Sixx signed their catalog over to Downtown Music Publishing in 2016.

The violent impulses

The Dirt shows Motley Crue fighting during their first concert, and though this is played largely for laughs and depicted as a fair-ish "band vs. hostile crowd" fight, it lays some groundwork for the fact that the band doesn't hesitate to throw a punch — apart from Mick Mars, who remains onstage with his guitar. Later in the movie, drummer Tommy Lee punches a confrontational girlfriend in a tour bus, to which everyone, especially Lee, reacts with dazed shock. All of this makes it seem like The Dirt fearlessly shows the band members' most violent instincts, but in reality, the movie (perhaps wisely) pumps the brakes before showing just how comfortable every Crue crewman (save Mars) has historically been when it comes to hurting other people.

Vince Neil has assaulted women multiple times (allegedly and also definitely), to the point where Nicolas Cage once had to intervene. Tommy Lee was sued for assaulting a photographer in 2013, and as E Online notes, was sentenced to six months in jail for spousal battery in 1998 after a particularly nasty scuffle with Pamela Anderson. Rock Candy Magazine reports that even Nikki Sixx, whose destructive tendencies were mostly aimed at himself (see: The Heroin Diaries ), once managed to get himself and his manager arrested when he threw a bottle at a man's head in a bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo.

Pamela, Pamela, Pamela

The most glaring character omission from The Dirt is arguably Pamela Anderson , whose turbulent relationship with drummer Tommy Lee would probably have sparked a lawsuit or nine had it been featured in the movie. Still, while Anderson is noticeably absent from the film, in real life she certainly left her impression on more than one band member — as Vince Neil is happy to tell everyone in his autobiography Tattoos & Tequila , Anderson briefly dated him before she got together with Lee.

Of course, Neil's brief involvement with a pre-fame Anderson was merely an aperitif compared to the vast banquet of celebrity tabloid antics that was the Baywatch star's whirlwind romance with and marriage to Lee. As E Online reports, in just a handful of years they managed to become parents, cement their place as one of (if not the ) most followed couples in the world, make constant waves wherever they went, inadvertently become the stars of the most famous celebrity sex tape ever, and fall out so badly that Lee was sentenced to six months in prison for spousal battery. Okay, we totally understand why she wasn't included in The Dirt — these two would have totally hijacked the movie's runtime.

​Tommy Lee's weird hip-hop phase

According to MTV News , Tommy Lee found himself in a strange place in 1999. He had started thinking that his glam metal days (and subsequently his Motley Crue career) was over, and he wanted to do something else. That "something else" turned out to be a brand new career in ... uh, hip-hop? He put together a rap-metal act called Methods of Mayhem , and started hobnobbing and collaborating with artists such as Snoop Dogg, Busta Rhymes, Wu-Tang Clan member U-God, and even Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst.

This strange turn in Lee's life was likely omitted from the movie because a plotline where the hardest-rocking rock musician of the group suddenly veers toward hip-hop would have caused undue (though potentially hilarious) confusion. Also, there's the fact that the catalyst for this change was an "I must do something with my life" epiphany during his six-month prison sentence for assaulting Pamela Anderson, so ... yeah, sounds like something Lee might have vetoed from the script pretty early on.

​The early adventures of Mick and Nikki

According to The Dirt, guitarist Mick Mars met Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee for the first time during an audition where he proved to be the man for the job, but the movie ignores the fact that the real Mars and Sixx had met before. However, to be fair, even they didn't realize it at the time. In 1978, Sixx was working at a liquor store when Mars walked in. Loudwire tells us the guitar player had a gig with his band White Horse at a nearby venue called Stone Pony but had snuck away for a bottle of tequila because the Pony's $2 shots were too expensive for his taste. Mars immediately recognized Sixx as a fellow rocker and struck up a discussion, asking what bands the younger man liked. Unfortunately, Sixx's string of answers included KISS, which didn't impress Mars, but the guitarist still invited the kid to White Horse's concert after he clocked out.

After Sixx finished his shift, he got wasted and walked into the bar, only to be greeted by the magnificent sight of Mars grinding out a guitar solo by using a microphone stand as a slide. The highly impressed Sixx hung on until the end, and the two resumed talking. Mars even drunkenly gave Sixx his phone number. However, this chance encounter never led anywhere, though by sheer chance, the guitarist would later join his young drinking buddy's band.

The lost guitarist

The Dirt introduces Mick Mars when the guitarist shows up for an audition, outplays a blond guitarist playing with Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee, and promptly fires the poor guy when Sixx and Lee can't work up the nerve to do it. As Ultimate Classic Rock reports, there's no proof that this kind of incident ever happened, so it makes sense that the scene was likely included to immediately establish Mars as a detached, cynical veteran.

However, it just so happens that Motley Crue did originally flirt with another guitarist before Mars came along. Said guitar player was Greg Leon, and he was a far cry from the sad sack depicted in the movie. He was a well-known singer and multi-instrumentalist in the Los Angeles hard rock scene, and Lee was a giant fan of his, to the point where the drummer ended up joining his band Suite 19 for a year and a half. In 2017, Leon said that Lee had been courting him for the proto-Motley Crue, but the guitarist was uninterested because of the presence of Sixx — he thought Sixx was a terrible musician. Leon also disliked Nikki's insistence in recruiting a frontman because he was sick of sharing lead vocal duties.

Motley Crue and Leon went their separate ways, but the guitar player didn't exactly fade into obscurity. He became Randy Rhoads' replacement in Quiet Riot, played with Dokken, and has fronted a number of bands of his own.

​That time MTV banned them

The Dirt devotes some time to establishing Motley Crue as a group that thinks about their band image pretty carefully (if drunkenly). That's why it's not exactly a surprise the movie doesn't mention the time that they turned in such a miscalculated product it got them banned by MTV. Ultimate Classic Rock describes the sad tale of the band's music video for their 1987 single "You're All I Need." The song had particularly vicious lyrics, and Motley Crue decided to double down in the video, which depicted a doomed, destructive relationship that ends when the man thrashes their home and kills the woman. The video is shot in the matter-of-fact style of news clips, and it did not go over well with MTV executives, who banned it from the channel.

It didn't exactly improve the song's image that Nikki Sixx later admitted that the song's dark lyrics were inspired by his own failing relationship where he became convinced his girlfriend was cheating on him. Sixx says he dealt with the situation by writing this dark song, playing it to his ex-girlfriend, and walking out of the door after she started crying.

Those blinding stage lights

The Dirt presents Motley Crue as a pretty amazing live act, which is why it's hardly surprising the movie ignores the time that their stage show took a nasty turn for one particular fan. As AL.com tells us, in 1985 a 13-year-old fan was partially blinded during a concert in Alabama when something — possibly a chunk of dry ice from malfunctioning equipment — flew into his eye.

Tragic as the accident was, the trial of the case in 1988 was something completely different. As president of the band's business affairs, Nikki Sixx was in town for the duration of the proceedings. His stay was something right out of a "fish out of water" movie: Sixx was fresh off his near-fatal 1987 overdose and had evidently straightened himself out somewhat. Instead of a demonic, outlandish rock star, the locals found a friendly, super-famous, nice guy who hung out at local music joints chatting with small-time cover band musicians and casually offering Lifesaver candies to fans. He even struck up an oddball friendship with a local legal liaison; the Sixx gave the lawyer guitar pointers, and the lawyer taught Sixx how to tie a necktie.

The trial itself was a less casual affair. Though Sixx and the blinded fan were both quite amiable, the proceedings were pretty heated and difficult, and the case ultimately ended in a mistrial. Motley Crue later settled out of court.

John Corabi's role

John Corabi's fate in Motley Crue is that of the classic "new guy" — fans never really warmed up to the new singer, and when Vince Neil returned to the fold Corabi was quietly phased out. The Dirt deems him such an unimportant, forgettable filler piece in Motley Crue lore that we only briefly glimpse him onscreen and he never utters a single word.

As Raw Music TV notes, Corabi's real influence was more than a goofy grin and a commercially failed album — in fact, they argue that the new singer outright saved Motley Crue. When Neil left/was fired in 1992, Motley Crue was trying to follow their most commercially successful album Dr. Feelgood at an impossible hour. Grunge music was rapidly showing hair metal the door, and artists such as Poison and Ratt were quickly finding out that their niche didn't have legs anymore. Corabi ushered in a different style of songwriting and musicianship and forced the band out of their dying comfort zone. While the other band members undermined this new injection of creativity with a bunch of hilariously awful mistakes (like firing their manager, lawyers, and accountants while attempting to produce the record themselves), Corabi was never an issue for them, and they liked him so much they wanted to keep him around despite the 1994 album's lack of success. That is, until Neil returned.

​The really, really stupid lawsuits

Netflix's The Dirt doesn't hesitate to show us some of Motley Crue's more ... inspired rock star behavior. Where 1980s action movies have training montages, this film has one that's dedicated entirely to destroying hotel rooms and terrorizing people. The movie has a tendency to treat the motley crew's activities as "boys will be boys" escapades that see little consequence beyond the massive hangover next morning. Really, cop cars only seem to turn up for the real life-and-death stuff — namely, when Vince Neil crashes his car and kills the Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle.

The thing is, in the real world it's incredibly easy to get in deep trouble for the kind of things the band members have gotten up to. Apart from all the more serious stuff that has landed them in hot water, they have been involved in some absolutely ridiculous lawsuits over their equally ridiculous behavior that has nevertheless hurt people. In 1999, MTV reports they started harassing a security guard so much they almost started a riot. In 2016, Metal Sucks says a supporting band sued them for assorted shenanigans that included members of the Crue entourage spraying urine at them. Yet, when someone actually tries to hit them with some consequences, they can be pretty thin-skinned: In 2005, MTV tells us Motley Crue sued NBC because the network had banned them ... because they had dropped an F-bomb during an NBC Christmas special.

​A lot of their memoir might be completely fabricated

The movie The Dirt is, of course, based on the book by the same name, and this dual attack of filthy hard rock stories is arguably the most important reason the world is still interested in Motley Crue instead of, say, Poison or Ratt. Wouldn't it be pretty weird if all that were built on a lie? Not that we're saying it was. In fact, we're not even saying that some of it was. We don't need to, because as Loudwire reports, Nikki Sixx has said it himself.

In 2019, Sixx was in hot water over a story in The Dirt (the book) where he described a party that culminated in him and Tommy Lee committing sexual assault on an unwary woman by fooling her into switching partners mid-act. The bass player defended himself by saying he "does not recall" the story beyond reading it, and also admits that he doesn't remember a lot of his interviews for the book. Sixx says this is because the interviews were conducted in 2000, a year before he went into rehab, and incidentally a year when he was going through a particularly rough patch with his drug and alcohol intake.

Will we ever know? It's one of those times where you kind of hope the person was actually lying, you know?

The disappearing Doug Thaler

To be fair, Motley Crue manager Doug Thaler is technically seen in The Dirt. However, his appearance lasts for a blink of an eye, and while the band admits he's a great guy, they then remove him from the movie so they're both represented by Thaler's co-manager, Doc McGhee. This is actually kind of strange. It's true that McGhee is the more colorful character of the two — just ask Ultimate Classic Rock about that one time he tried to smuggle 40,000 pounds of marijuana into the U.S. However, Classic Bands makes it pretty clear that Thaler was much better suited for the guardian/handler duty the McGhee character served in the movie than the real-life McGhee, who Thaler thinks was a bit too much of a rock star wannabe himself.

Thaler was a successful agent, an award-winning personal manager, and a former musician who played alongside Ronnie James Dio for five years. He crafted his managerial identity to be the kind of manager he felt he would have needed during his musician years, and as a result, he was the guy who was fully prepared to get in the faces of record company executives to get Motley Crue the best possible deals. When McGhee and the band fell out, they even asked Thaler to take over, which he agreed to do for a while.

• Ticket Info
• Private Events
• ADA Inquiries

Thanks for joining our mailing list!

Mötley Crüe

Troubadour Presents:

7:00PM / 7:00PM

at Troubadour

Share Event

Mötley Crüe Announce Retirement And Farewell Tour After A 33 Year Career

Motley Crue

Mötley Crüe are embarking on a 72-date world tour to finish off their illustrious career as one of heavy metal's greatest bands of all time.

American rock band Mötley Crüe have finally called it a day on their legendary career that spans over three decades. The four-piece will be saying goodbye in style as they are set to embark on a 72 date world tour which starts later this year (2014).

Singer Vince Neil, guitarists Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars, and drummer Tommy Lee, famous for hits like 'Girls, Girls, Girls' and 'Kickstart My Heart', made the announcement at a press conference in Hollywood inside Beacher's Madhouse Theater.

The stage displayed headstones for each band member as they told the world that this is the end, and the four rockers are dead set on this been the final tour as they have each signed a contract to never use the name Mötley Crüe again, according to TMZ .

This definitely rules out a reunion tour ever happening in the future then!

This is not a joke as Tommy Lee took to twitter to confirm that this is the very last time they will be on stage together, "This ain't no farewell tour! Those are for bands that lie to their fans and come back in 5-10 years! This is the FINAL tour! It's over!" he posted.

This ain't no farewell tour! Those are for bands that lie to their fans and come back in 5-10 years! This is the FINAL tour! It's over! — T O M M Y L E E (@MrTommyLand) rel="nofollow" January 28, 2014

To make this tour even more special, they have acquired the help of another rock icon. Alice Cooper, who is known for hit songs 'School's Out' and 'Poison', will be their opening act.

Tickets for select forthcoming shows go on sale this Friday (Jan 31st) and the rest are expected to be available for purchase on Saturday. Mötley Crüe want to give all their legions of fans the chance to see them perform for one last time, so tickets for the shows will be as low as $15 each.

The band, who were formed in 1981 by bassist Nikki Sixx in Los Angeles, have left a legacy of one of the most notorious heavy metal groups of the 80s, who embodied the rock 'n' roll lifestyle and sold over 75 million albums in their illustrious 33 year career.

Tommy Lee says Motley Crue have 'a new energy' after dropping music with new guitarist John 5

Motley Crue's new music is sounding mega, according to guitarist John 5

Motley Crue rocker Nikki Sixx thanks judge for having 'deranged' stalker arrested

Mötley Crüe record 'super heavy' new music with new guitarist John 5

Motley Crue and Def Leppard announce joint UK tour 2023

Motley Crue are '100 per cent planning' to hit the road for The Stadium Tour in 2022

Motley Crue sell entire catalog to BMG for reported $150m

Motley Crue's stadium tour postponed to 2022

Tommy Lee laid down drums on Post Malone's new song named after him

Motley Crue, Def Leppard and Poison postpone summer tour

Nikki Sixx: 'I'll Probably Never See Motley Crue Bandmates Again'

Tommy Lee Skips Fifth Farewell Gig Due To Tendonitis

Nikki Sixx Lashes Out At 'Selfie'-Taking Fans

Motley Crue Concert Delayed For Hours Due To Technical Fault

Bands Index: 0 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Help Contact Us About Us Advertise Business Write For Us T&Cs Privacy Cookie Policy Site Map Consent Settings

Copyright © 2024 Contactmusic.com Ltd, all rights reserved

• Editors Recommended Editors Recommended
• News Headlines News Headlines Trending Headlines
• Music / Festival News Music / Festival News Musicians & bands in the news
• Movie / TV / Theatre News Movie / TV / Theatre News Actors & filmmakers in the news
• Lifestyle / Showbiz News Lifestyle / Showbiz News Celebrities in the news
• News Archive News Archive
• Music Reviews Music Reviews Best Rated Music Reviews
• Music Video Music Video Top Music Videos
• Most Mentioned Most Mentioned Bands and Musicians in Music
• Movie Trailers Movie Trailers
• Movie Reviews Movie Reviews Best Rated Movies
• Most Mentioned Most Mentioned Actors and Filmmakers in Film
• Latest Photos
• Popular Photos Latest Photos Updated Galleries
• Most Mentioned Most Mentioned People in Photos
• Photo Archive Photo Archive
• Trending Artists Trending Artists
• Actors and Filmmakers Actors Filmmakers
• Celebrities Celebrities
• Bands and Musicians Bands Musicians
• Interviews Interviews
• Movie Trailers Movie Trailers Top Movie Trailers
• Video Chart Video Chart
• Most Mentioned Most Menioned Artists in Video
• Music Video
• Movie Trailers
• Video Chart
• Most Mentioned
• Trending Artists
• Actors and Filmmakers
• Bands and Musicians
• Celebrities
• Popular Photos
• Photo Archive

Go Back in Time using our Photos archive to see what happened on a particular day in the past.

• Movie Reviews
• Music Reviews
• News Headlines
• Music / Festival News
• Movie / TV / Theatre News
• Lifestyle / Showbiz News
• News Archive

Go Back in Time using our News archive to see what happened on a particular day in the past.

• Editors Recommended

Unpacking Motley Crue’s Mess: Manager Slams Mick Mars’ ‘Smear Campaign’; Guitarist’s Lawyer Says He Is ‘Tired of Being Bullied’ (EXCLUSIVE)

The band manager says Mars has only alleged miming on their part because he's being led along by reps engaging in 'elder abuse.' Mars' camp says the group's alleged 'gaslighting' continues

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

• Blake Shelton Announces BMG/BBR Music Group as New Label Home 15 hours ago
• Hozier’s Hero’s Welcome in L.A. Isn’t ‘Too Sweet’ — It’s Just Right for One of Rock’s Most Deserving Talents: Concert Review 1 day ago
• For Leonard Cohen’s 90th Birthday, He Gets the Salute He Deserves: A Tribute Album From Cherished Singing Partner Perla Batalla 2 days ago

It may take a greater elixir than anything Dr. Feelgood has to offer to elicit positive vibes in the war of words — and writs — between Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars and the other three members of the group. Following a headline-making lawsuit filed by Mars against the band last week, lawyers or managers for both sides have spoken with Variety at length about the positions they are doubling down on. If you had to sum it up in a hard-rock song, it might be: “Grievances Grievances Grievances.”

Related Stories

The Postwar Streaming Market: A Special Report

Popular on variety.

Kovac says Mars is coming out with a list of allegations “to gain leverage in a smear campaign on Motley. He’s attacked the band, and he’s done it in a slanderous way, with false accusations and misrepresenting the facts to the fans. Mick is not the victim. The victims are Motley Crue and the brand, which Mick is so prideful of.” But, adds the manager, who says he has always liked and gotten along well with Mars over the last three decades: “What’s upsetting to me is not Mick, but his representatives, who have guided Mick to say and do harmful things to the brand he cares about so much, Motley Crue. He has a degenerative disease and people are taking advantage of him. It’s called elder abuse.”

Kovac mentions that Sixx once famously got a tattoo of Mars, to show his loyalty to him. To McPherson, though, that doesn’t count for much now. Says the guitarist’s attorney: “Just because you get a tattoo of someone does not mean you get to oust them from your band’s corporations and LLCs 41 years after they start with you.”

The filing by Mars’ lawyer Thursday had at its core a simple request:  The musician is asking the court to compel Crue’s team to produce records and documents they’ve been unduly sluggish about turning over, in Mars’ view, prior to arbitration that is likely to settle their core disputes. But the main legal purpose of that writ was of far less interest to the band’s millions of fans than supporting documentation that included a long accounting of Mars’ disputes with the other three members and their management.

Three essential questions have captured the curiosity of Motley Crue fans, and the merely curious, since last week’s lawsuit and Mars’ followup interview: Did he quit the band, as the others would have it, or is he being ousted? Does retiring from touring constitute resigning altogether? And, as a dishy side plate: Who really can’t cut it on stage anymore — the other three members, whose tour performances Mars contended were largely pre-taped, or Mars himself, who the other members say was unable to properly remember or execute his parts on his final stadium tour with them in 2022?

Last week, the Crue camp made available to Variety seven signed declarations from key crew members who worked on the 2022 tour, all alleging that Mars’ performances in rehearsals and the 30 tour dates were little short of disastrous, throwing the other band members off their game or forcing personnel to switch to pre-recorded parts to cover the guitarist’s frequent mistakes.

McPherson, Mars’ attorney, was infuriated by the release of the documents citing Mars as the egregious weak link on stage. “It is interesting that these declarations about Mick’s playing are from employees of Motley Crue, who rely on the band for their livelihood,” the lawyer says. “I noticed that there are no declarations from anyone about the other members’ playing – or not playing.” 

Crue’s attorneys gathered the signed declarations from production team members on Feb. 9, clearly anticipating a need for evidence of Mars’ allegedly poor playing.

The depositions include touring production manager Robert Long, who says he has worked with Mars and the band for 16 years, writing: “He would consistently miss notes; play out of tune; play the wrong chords during a song; stay within a chorus of a song and never come out of it; forget the song that he was playing and start a different one; and would get lost in songs. This happened at every show. Our sound technician would have to carefully monitor Mick and play tracks when Mick would go off course. Otherwise, the whole performance would be a disaster. … Our playback engineer put in cues for Mick so that he would stay on course but he would miss the cues.” Long further says that he had to convince Mars’ guitar tech not to quit the tour.

Others from the Crue production team who signed declarations included production coordinator/show designer Ashley Zapar (“From the 36 shows that the band performed during the tour, 34 had issues because of Mick’s errors”); tour manager Thomas Reitz (“Mick’s mistakes were very frustrating and problematic for the band and the entire crew”); front-of-house engineer Brent Carpenter (“At one point, Mick complained that we were using tracks when he was playing, which though true, was directly because of his lack of consistency”); monitor engineer Scott McGrath (“In my years of experience, I have never seen mistakes like this by a guitarist on stage”); bass tech Fred Kowalo (“I have never seen mistakes like this by a lead guitarist on stage and it really surprised me”); and drum tech Steve Morrison (“This was very different from Mick’s prior performance on tours [where] Mick played well and remembered the songs”).

But if Crue had these statements already in hand two months ago, it was Mars who was first to go public this past week with an accusation that others were not up to snuff. The suit he filed last week goes far into how other band members accused him as the 2022 tour went along of not being able to remember or flubbing parts, and that they had communicated a belief this was evidence of cognitive decline. In his Variety interview, he admitted to the occasional “brain fart” he says every so often, blaming any greater problems on bad monitor mixes that included distorted pre-recordings. But Mars was mostly on the offense — saying that “100%” of Nikki Sixx’s bass parts were on tape, and that substantial parts of Vince Neil’s singing and Tommy Lee’s drumming were pre-recorded, in contrast to his own (he says) 100% live playing.

Kovac now offers what he says is a transparent view of what’s happening on stage in the band’s shows… which he says involves the barest amount possible of pre-recording.

“But Nikki played his bass and always has,” Kovac continues. “Vince was singing better than he was before (on the latest tour). That was in reviews. Now, John 5 is playing like who John 5 is. I’ve heard John 5 perform and I heard Mick perform. Both are great guitar players. Unfortunately, Mick is not the same. He hasn’t been the same for a long time. Which was in reviews! You see that the professionals knew. Def Leppard (which alternated headlining spots on tour) knew. And (Mars) caused a train wreck up there, because he would play the wrong songs and the wrong parts, even with the guide tracks. When he played the wrong song, it wasn’t Nikki Sixx that had a tape; it was the soundman bringing it into the mix so the audience could hear a song, even though the guitar player was playing a different song.” He says audiences “would hear it at first, but (sound engineers) would fix it so that we could keep the song going. I heard it. I’d go to the sound board.”

The manager says that, despite what he alleges was a pattern of terrible performances, the band never thought of firing Mars — until he announced that he would be coming off the road due to the difficult of touring with the debilitating AS [Ankylosing spondylitis] condition he’d been dealing with since age 27, which causes vertebrae to fuse over time. “They honored their commitment and propped him up,” Kovac says. “Now there’s a new guitar player. I want people to hear the difference. They’re gonna play the U.S. again in a bunch of markets, and people will be able to use their own ears, just like they can use their own judgment about third-party declarations and contracts instead of spin.”

Nonetheless, in the past, concertgoers have posted video clips of moments where they think members are not performing live, a sometimes hot topic of discussion for any band that’s seen in a stadium setting, with fans interpreting what they believe is really happening in those moments. Mars’ team says it is collecting some of those video clips, as backup for what he has contended — even while saying it’s ultimately not a big part of their core legal issues.

Says McPherson, “We have already started the process of checking multiple fan accounts and other videos, as I’m sure others are doing right now, to see if their movements match the sound. However, once again, whether the rest of the band played live or not — and whether Mick had playing issues or not — the most important fact here is that he is a shareholder of the band’s corporate and LLC entities. You don’t lose your shares just because you play the wrong note, after 41 years.”

Here is his attorney’s take: “No, resigning from touring  — or even from the band entirely — is not resigning from the band’s corporations and LLCs,” McPherson says. “Corporate law doesn’t work that way. If Jeff Bezos stops working at Amazon someday, he still gets to own the company! So does Mick.”

Kovac counters that if you take touring out of the equation for Motley Crue, “there’s nothing left. What is left?” Sixx has made it clear that he doesn’t believe the band will record new albums in the future. As far as other conceivable benefits of remaining in the band, apart from touring splits: “There are no record royalties,” he points out, since the group made a deal in 2021 to sell its master recordings (which they acquired for themselves in the ‘90s) to BMG. Additionally Kovac says, “there are no publishing royalties or income from performance or neighboring rights,” since all the members have sold or are selling their publishing. (The manager says the other three have already made deals for offloading their publishing — Variety reported in 2020 that Sixx sold his 70% share to Hipgnosis — and that Mars in in the process of selling his 10%. McPherson did not comment on the status of Mars’ publishing.) “What is left?” Kovac reiterates. “What does he want to do?”

Merch would seem to be an issue that could be affected by a partial or total severance. The band agrees that Mars is entitled to a fair share of anything that bears his likeness, but not necessarily anything that doesn’t. (It probably goes without saying that the band won’t be selling any T-shirts that still have Mars’ face on them, though, right? Actually, Kovac says they do still sell such an item.)

In any case, Kovac said the band made a good-faith offer to Mars to give him a percentage of the 2023 touring that is going on without him, as a sort of exit package because the other band members “have empathy for Mick” — even though the band’s belief is that he’s owed nothing more going forward that isn’t directly related to his name and likeness. Mars, in his suit, called this proposal a “severance package” that he was asked to sign that would have headed off the scheduled arbitration and left him with no claims to make on future band activity.

“He was offered a terrific opportunity,” says Kovac. “An offer was made to him at 5%, and then up to seven and a half percent, to avoid this. What Mick’s asking for is an equal share, 25% — but there’s a guy named John 5 in the band. Mick resigned from touring, and John 5’s getting paid. So who’s gonna pay John 5? None of this makes sense.” He can’t see why Mars didn’t take the deal. “They’ve got (a 2023 tour) they’re about halfway through, so let’s (estimate) $150 million (in gross), and then you take off for production and commissions, and let’s call it 100 or 110 million. What’s seven and a half percent of that? He says it’s an insult. And you’ve got me quoting that the other two guys got zero when they were out of the band” — meaning Vince Neil and Tommy Lee, during the periods they left the group. “So where’s the insult?”

He reiterates the math: “I think Mick is part of the 1%. Please put that on the record. … Let’s say it was seven and a half percent of $110 million. Could you live on that, even if you have tens of millions already?”

Whether any future payments to Mars are an obligation or just a favor may come down to an arbitration judge’s reading of a 2008 amendment to the group’s original operating agreement. That amendment was drafted when there was a lack of clarity over whether Neil or Lee were entitled to any money in the years during the ‘90s and 2000s when they took turns quitting the band. Kovac points out that Mars was one of those arguing, and signing off on, the idea that neither resigning member was entitled to anything during their time away, and that this should be their practice going forward.

Variety obtained the 2008 amendment, and it’s clear on some points, possibly more ambiguous on others, despite the signees’ intention to set things straight once and for all at the time. It reads in part: “In the event that any Shareholder no longer renders services in MC then no amount of purported value shall be attributable to the Trademarks at the time of resignation, but all such Trademarks shall continue to be the exclusive property of the Corporation. In the event that any Shareholder resigns from performing and/or rendering services in MC… he shall not be permitted to continue to use the Trademarks for any purpose whateover… Notwithstanding anything contained herein to the contrary, in no event shall any Resigning Shareholder be entitled to receive any monies attributable to live performances (i.e., tours).”

That would seem to make it clear that anyone who quits the band altogether shouldn’t get any money from tour receipts. But Mars’ camp doesn’t consider him a “resigning shareholder” but someone who very vocally continues to believe he’s a non -resigning shareholder.  

“They haven’t made an album since 2008, so what does it mean to participate, beyond touring?” he wondered. “The language is a little flimsy. One of the things that would likely get tested is, what was the intent? If the other members were not getting paid during their temporary resignations, and that was really the motivation for putting this together — if you’re not touring, you’re not getting paid,” then that will carry weight with a judge, “if the evidence backs that up. On the other hand, he thought it was curious that the document does not have any discussion of how an exiting shareholder’s shares would be redistributed — something that might have been covered in the original, 20 th century operating agreement. ( Variety has not seen that original contract, and neither side offered comment on what it contains in that regard.)

McPherson says that what happened when the other two members were out of the band has no bearing on what’s happening now with Mars. “Vince was thrown out of the band, and Tommy left for other endeavors,” says the attorney. “This was a long time ago. They did not leave after 41 years, and they did not simply retire  from touring , particularly because of a debilitating disease,” but from the group entirely. “This scenario that you discuss would allow Sixx to get rid of everyone, and he would be the last man standing, owning everything. That is not how corporate law works, and that is not even how normal bands work, especially (regarding) a band founder.”

As it stands with Mars’ suit, though, it’s the seemingly most mundane matter — compelling Motley Crue to turn over documents — that is the sole one to be decided in the moment. The Crue team believes the suit has no foundation in any obstacles Mars has faced in getting the documents that he needs, and that it really was put together as a delivery system for the guitar to get publicity for all his beefs.

McPherson provided a letter he wrote to Motley Crue’s legal team on Feb. 8, demanding materials by Feb. 16, and a response he got from that latter date, attaching some records but saying, “We are still locating records and anticipate producing additional documents on a rolling basis.” He says the attachments were so few as to be meaningless, and he got nothing further from the Crue reps in the eight weeks since — hence, their filing the suit to get far more paperwork than they say has been forthcoming.

He adds, “The lawsuit that Mick filed is a petition for writ of mandate to obtain certain records. It’s a perfunctory request that usually consists of nothing more than a couple of pages. There was absolutely no need for Mick to tell a 41-year history of the band, bad mouth Nikki by claiming that ‘100% of his bass parts’ were recorded, or any of the other flurry of lies that he made. These allegations have nothing to do with his request for corporate records. It is completely irrelevant and superfluous; and no code or case law requires such allegations to be made to get documents. 

“The only reason these bogus allegations appeared in this legal filing is so that Mick and his lawyer would be protected by the ‘litigation privilege’ — which protects parties from statements made in legal filings. Mick and his lawyer filed this bogus lawsuit because if these statements were made in the press, the band would sue them for defamation and slander. This lawsuit is nothing more than a malicious attempt to badmouth the band. It’s not surprising that they made no attempt to serve us with it or ask me if I would accept service. They don’t want these documents — they just used this as an opportunity to mislead the public to create leverage.”

McPherson says he didn’t even know that Mars’ camp was demanding documents until the lawsuit was filed and he read about in the press. He wonders why no one called him directly, especially blaming the guitarist’s manager, saying he would have personally acted to expedite Mars’ request, with no need for a lawsuit over it. “He’s a manager who used to be a third-rate publicist, out there trying to spin leverage because he wants to make money on a settlement. And all he’s done is ruin any possibility of that.”

But Mars’ team says the manager in question, Steve Karas, is only assigned to a specific project and isn’t involved in this at all. “Mick doesn’t have a manager for anything other than his solo record!” says McPherson. (Ironically, the deal Mars has for a solo album is with the label owned by… Kovac.) “This is all Mick,” adds the lawyer, disavowing any manipulation. “He is tired of being bullied. There is nobody driving the train here but Mick.”

(McPherson also cast skeptical aspersions on Kovac’s statement that he never heard of the records request until the lawsuit. “There is no way in the world that neither law firm happened to mention this to the band or its manager,” says Mars’ lawyer.)

In the end, so much of this comes down to: It’s personal, with issues primarily between Mars and Sixx that the arbitration judge may not even want to look at. Both members feel betrayed, or at the very least, deeply hurt by the other, while Neil’s or Lee’s name hardly come up a fraction as often as the tales of old wounds unfold.

Kovac takes substantial responsibility for helping Mars get clean two decades ago, and says of that time: “I said, ‘OK, Nikki, something’s wrong. If you guys haven’t heard from him for two and a half years, let’s go to his house and find out if he’s even alive.’ And when we knocked the door down, because Mick couldn’t walk, he could only crawl. He needed a hip operation. Nikki had him sleep at his house and go to some doctors where I had different people from my company taking him. He weighed all of 89 pounds. There was a documentary called ‘The Resurrection’ and it shows the debate of whether to bring Mick back. When Mick wasn’t capable, the band waited a long time while he healed. And even after healing, he was never the same, though he’s been on the road ever since. I call that support.

“I hope you print that, because that’s true, and ask Mick: How’d you get to those doctors? Did you stay at Nikki Sixx’s house when people were debating about you being in the band or not? Did you end up in the band, despite you disappearing for two and a half years and having to rehab for two years after that? I think that’s important. Did Nikki get a tattoo to show you he would never do anything to harm you? Did you try to harm him by throwing him out of the band because you thought he stole your publishing? Did you prevail?” (The answer, Kovac says, is no.) “Did he forgive you? Which he did, because we all knew he was being taken advantage of. Everyone kept him in the band, but Mick never apologized. And Nikki’s still loyal.”

(The apparently bitter publishing dispute, which happened about eight years ago, had Mars saying he had contributed more substantially to the songwriting than the 10% share he was originally given, according to Kovac, who says Sixx has always come in with all the lyrics and melodies. The fight eventually went away, but there are clearly residual feelings on all fronts. Even now, Mars’ lawyer says the other side is “gaslighting” when it contends the guitarist didn’t contribute as a writer, though Kovac says he even interviewed the band’s former producers to get to the heart of the matter.)

The manager says he blames Mars’ supposedly faulty memory, as well as his reps. “He is in pain, and he does have a hard time remembering. Just like he doesn’t remember trying to kick Nikki Sixx out of his band.” As proof that Mars has memory lapses, Kovac pulls up an email that he says the guitarist sent production manager Robert Long on Oct. 6, asking, “I was just wondering when the second leg of this stadium thing starts, and where. Europe? Let me know.” Although there could be other explanations, Kovac says that’s proof Mars didn’t recall he’d already played his final gig with Crue: “As you can see, he forgot he resigned.” 

“Loyalty,” obviously, is not the buzzword that will be foremost in fans’ minds for any time to come, even though Kovac says Sixx still feels it, in his fashion, toward Mars. Many fans find themselves in the awkward position of feeling like they have to choose a side. Is it with Sixx, whose lone tweet about the imbroglio said: “Sad day for us and we don’t deserve this considering how many years we’ve been propping him up — we still wish him the best…”? Or with Mars, who told Variety , “I can’t believe they’re pulling this crap… I carried those bastards for years”? Are your emotions carried more by the thought of the Sixx who took in Mars as housemate and helped in his recovery… or by Mars’ picture of his bandmate who supposedly belittled him during his final months on tour? You could sympathize with the band that says they were loyal through mounting recent on-stage mishaps  — or with the guitarist who cites a veritable lifetime of antagonism, “Those guys have been hammering on me since ’87, trying to replace me.”

The arbitration judge likely won’t be much guided by sentiment. The fans? They may just want to cry at the devil.

More from Variety

David Schwimmer ‘Surprised’ to Hear Matthew Perry Once Praised His ‘Friends’ Comedy Skills: He ‘Was Reserved With Me. He Would Not Say That to Me’

Can Today’s Tech Touchstones Solve Hollywood’s Loneliness Epidemic?

‘Friends’ Game Show Set at Max to Celebrate Show’s 30th Anniversary

Cloud Adoption Key to Media Business Exploiting AI

More from our brands, charli xcx brings out lorde for surprise msg performance.

This New 223-Foot Superyacht Packs a Fun Surprise on Every Deck

NBA’s Trail Blazers Latest to Go With Free TV, Team Streaming

The Best Loofahs and Body Scrubbers, According to Dermatologists

Tyler Perry’s First Netflix Series, Beauty in Black, Releases Official Trailer — WATCH

10 Unforgettable Highlights Of Motley Crue's The End

We pick our highlights of the movie of Motley Crue's last ever show

It was rumoured that Alice Cooper was going to “execute” Motley Crue at the climax of their final tour, providing a full-stop to the band’s chaotic 35-year career. In the end they departed in a storm of pyro and confetti, as fans wept and nervous roadies put away their fire extinguishers for the last time. 

Here are the highlights from the film of that night, Motley Crue: The End.

There’s so much pyro in this movie you can almost feel the heat from the screen. Fire launches with thrilling regularity from every conceivable part of the stage, and at one point Nikki Sixx’s bass guitar is turned into a flame thrower. It’s so intense Red Adair is probably on standby in the wings.

2. Mick Mars

Despite moving like a slow motion crab and looking like the oldest man to have ever walked the earth, Mick Mars’s bony, tattooed fingers are as fluid as those of a skilled youngster. Musically, he’s the best part of the film.

3. The interviews

When you sign a legal agreement to never perform onstage together ever again, you’re given carte blanche to say what you like about the other members of the band, knowing full well that you won’t have to spend another six months together on a tour bus. And so they all reveal how much they don’t get on, the ultimate dysfunctional family.

4. Tour Manager Tim Krieg

The ‘say whatever the hell you like’ memo obviously reached the band’s tour manager, who provides several laugh-out-loud moments explaining the band members’ relationships with each other. “Some days they like each other, some days they don’t,” he says. “Most days they don’t.”

Did we mention the pyro yet?

Classic Rock Newsletter

Sign up below to get the latest from Classic Rock, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!

• The Top 10 Best Motley Crue Songs
• Motley Crue release Girls, Girls, Girls clip from The End movie
• The Top 10 Best Big Screen Concert Movies
• Motley Crue begin countdown to UK screening of The End

6. Tommy Lee’s hoverboard

Tommy Lee has a hoverboard, which he uses to gleefully roam the backstage corridors like a spoilt nine-year-old with ADHD. It’s exactly the kind of toy you’d expect him to own.

7. Tommy Lee’s rollercoaster drum solo surprise

Tommy Lee’s drumkit gymnastics have evolved over the years, and film of Lee’s current “Cruecify” extravaganza has been shared on social media to the point where there are no surprises left. But on their final night on earth, there’s one unexpected twist.

8. The fans

It’s possible we’ll never tire of Heavy Metal Parking Lot -style interviews with excited fans baring breasts and showing off tattoos and screaming “Motley fuckin’ Crue!” at anyone with a camera. And this film has plenty.

9. The climax

At the end of the show the band step onto a small stage in the centre of the arena, Tommy Lee at a battered grand piano, and play Home Sweet Home . The intimate setting is at odds with the vast scale of everything else, and at odds with the way they talk about each other. 

But as the confetti tumbles and the band play their last few notes together, you get a real sense of that us-against-the-world, fuck-the-critics, one-for-all-and-all-for-one mentality that’s driven them to such vast success. And as the camera lingers on sobbing, distressed fans, there’s no denying the strength of the bond they share with their audience.

Yep, it’s pyro again. Watching The End is like getting a front row seat for the burning of the Kuwaiti oil wells at the end of the Persian Gulf War. It’s like living through the apocalypse. It’s like an indoor version of Mad Max: Fury Road . It’s insane, and it’s really worth being confronted by on the big screen.

Online Editor at Louder/Classic Rock magazine since 2014. 38 years in music industry, online for 25. Also bylines for: Metal Hammer, Prog Magazine, The Word Magazine, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Saga, Music365. Former Head of Music at Xfm Radio, A&R at Fiction Records, early blogger, ex-roadie, published author. Once appeared in a Cure video dressed as a cowboy, and thinks any situation can be improved by the introduction of cats. Favourite Serbian trumpeter: Dejan Petrović.  

“I had become Musical Director, which I always hate. But I took the money and took the title and did the job!”: The Cure’s Reeves Gabrels on the time he became David Bowie’s touring MD

“The aim was to be ‘the best group in the world’… this easily becomes confused with ‘the most successful group in the world,’ at which point the music may get lost”: Robert Fripp’s observation of King Crimson

“We were torn between trying to make it big and making our music more crossover, but failing… that happened because we became conscious of what we were doing”: The Power And The Glory signalled the beginning of the end for Gentle Giant

Most Popular

MÖTLEY CRÜE Announces 'The Final Tour' Details

After more than three decades together, MÖTLEY CRÜE announced today their Final Tour and the band's ultimate retirement. The announcement was solidified when the band signed a formal Cessation Of Touring Agreement, effective at the end of 2015, in front of global media in Los Angeles today. Celebrating the announcement of this Final Tour , the band will perform on ABC 's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" tonight and will appear on "CBS This Morning" tomorrow, January 29.

With over 80 million albums sold, MÖTLEY CRÜE has sold out countless tours across the globe and spawned more than 2,500 MÖTLEY CRÜE branded items sold in over 30 countries. MÖTLEY CRÜE has proven they know how to make a lasting impression and this tour will be no different; Fans can expect to hear all the band's hits and look forward to mind-blowing, unparalleled live production.

"When it comes to putting together a new show we always push the envelope and that's part of MÖTLEY CRÜE 's legacy," explains Nikki Sixx (bass). "As far as letting on to what we're doing, that would be like finding out what you're getting for Christmas before you open the presents. We think in an age of too much information, we'd like to keep some surprises close to our chest until we launch The Final Tour ."

The Final Tour presented by Dodge and produced by Live Nation will kick off in North America on July 2 in Grand Rapids, Michigan and reach 72 markets before hitting international territories in 2015. To Live Nation , MÖTLEY CRÜE tours are not only box office successes but artistically their shows have set the bar for production and entertainment value.

"There's no arguing that MÖTLEY CRÜE have been and always will be the definitive bad boys of rock and roll," says Rick Franks , Live Nation 's regional president of North America Concerts. "But behind all those notorious stories is a legendary rock band that has revolutionized heavy metal and created some of the biggest hits in music history. They are a hugely successful global brand and a touring powerhouse. Everyone at Live Nation has a tremendous amount of respect for these hard-working and extremely talented gentlemen. The music industry will never have another MÖTLEY CRÜE ."

The Dodge brothers were a notorious duo, so it seemed only natural to partner with the World's Most Notorious Rock Band.

"Whenever I talk to people about MÖTLEY CRÜE , the common thread is how cool and relevant the band remains even after 33 years," said Tim Kuniskis , president and CEO, Dodge brand, Chrysler Group LLC . "This irreverent 'staying power' resonates deeply with the Dodge brand as we turn the corner on our 100 year anniversary. What better way to celebrate the band's final tour and the 25th anniversary of 'Kickstart My Heart' than to do it together?"

Fans can look forward to very special guest ALICE COOPER joining MÖTLEY CRÜE for an incredible package — Alice invented the genre and MÖTLEY CRÜE put steroids in it!

"Real hard rock bands are hard to find these days," said Alice , " MÖTLEY has always gone on stage with one attitude and that's to blow the audience away. That's exactly how we do it. Putting MÖTLEY CRÜE and Alice Cooper together is going to be just what this summer really NEEDS. We're going to go out there and tear it up, and I can't wait to see MÖTLEY on stage. MÖTLEY CRÜE and Alice Cooper — A match made in... Armageddon?"

As documented in the Cessation Of Touring Agreement the band signed at the press conference today, the band will not tour after this Final Tour . Band attorney Doug Mark of Mark Music & Media Law explains: "Other bands have split up over rancor or the inability of people to get along, but this is mutual among all four original members and a peaceful decision to move on to other endeavors and to confirm it with a binding agreement."

Vince Neil , Nikki Sixx , Tommy Lee , and Mick Mars will go their separate ways after the lengthy two-year touring cycle. Tommy Lee (drums) explains: "Everything must come to an end!! We always had a vision of going out with a big fucking bang and not playing county fairs and clubs with 1 or 2 original band members! Our job here is done!!!" Of the band's tumultuous history, Mick Mars (guitar) adds: "(It has been) more drama than 'General Hospital' — it keeps 'em watchin' and they keep comin' back." Vocalist Vince Neil says of the finality of the tour: "I'll miss playing with the guys but I won't quit playing rock and roll!! I feel there are a lot of great opportunities and exciting projects after MÖTLEY ."

The Final Tour will coincide with the film made from MÖTLEY CRÜE 's New York Times best-selling book "The Dirt" . Jeff Tremaine ( "Bad Grandpa" ) has signed on to direct the opus that is set to debut in theaters globally in 2015, coinciding with The Final Tour . "The Dirt" is not only one of the best selling rock books of all time but also one of the greatest rock books of all time because of its brutal honesty, its unique voice, its multiple perspectives on the same events and its first-person inclusion of all members of the same band. Most rock memoirs are salacious mud-slinging accounts of a single person and MÖTLEY CRÜE was adamant to include the perspectives of all four of its members. Tremaine's intention is to make, not just a great movie about a band, but a great movie about four misfits who, despite themselves and everyone else, band together to overcome the odds and change the history of rock and roll.

" 'The Dirt' is a movie I've wanted to make ever since I read the book in 2002," says Tremaine . "I relate to the story on so many levels; my whole professional career has been about boys behaving badly, so I have a real connection to the material. It's awesome to be working with the band at such an exciting time in MÖTLEY CRÜE 's history." The film will be produced by the members of MÖTLEY CRÜE , Rick Yorn , Julie Yorn , Erik Olsen and 10th Street Entertainment .

Big Machine Records , home to country superstars such as Taylor Swift and Tim McGraw has teamed up in a joint venture with Mötley Records and Eleven Seven Music for the summer 2014 release of a country music tribute to MÖTLEY CRÜE . Big Machine founder and CEO, Scott Borchetta , is among the legion of country music fans who love MÖTLEY CRÜE . The country tribute album will show off the band's quality songwriting with these fresh takes on their classic hit songs. Among the artists already confirmed to be featured on the country tribute album is Florida Georgia Line . Borchetta says of the collaboration, "I have been a not-so-secret CRÜE fan from the beginning. When manager Chris Nilsson called with the idea for a tribute album on Big Machine Records , it was an immediate 'yes' from me! Our album will highlight just how great the MÖTLEY CRÜE song catalog is. At the end of the day, that's what will stand the test of time."

MÖTLEY CRÜE Fan Club members will get the exclusive first crack at tickets and VIP Packages, via a unique code, beginning on Wednesday, January 29 starting at 10 a.m. local time. VIP ticket packages will be made available to the general public on Thursday, January 30 at 10 a.m. local time. The general public ticket on-sale for most shows is Friday, January 31. All tickets and packages can be obtained via Ticketmaster.com .

The Final Tour dates (with more to be announced):

July 02 - Grand Rapids, MI - Van Andel Arena July 04 - Milwaukee, WI - Summerfest July 05 - Noblesville, IN - Klipsch Music Center July 06 - Cincinnati, OH - Riverbend Music Center July 08 - Columbus, OH - Schottenstein Center July 09 - Maryland Heights, MO - Verizon Wireless Amphitheater July 11 - Des Moines, IA - Wells Fargo Arena July 12 - Wichita, KS - INTRUST Bank Arena July 13 - Tulsa, OK - BOK Center July 15 - Cedar Park, TX - Cedar Park Center July 16 - Dallas, TX - Gexa Energy Pavilion July 18 - Albuquerque, NM - Isleta Amphitheater July 19 - Phoenix, AZ - AK-Chin Pavilion July 21 - Los Angeles, CA - Hollywood Bowl July 22 - Irvine, CA - Verizon Wireless Amp July 23 - Mountain View, CA - Shoreline Amphitheatre July 25 - Reno, NV - Reno Events Center July 26 - Ridgefield, WA - Sleep County Amphitheater July 27 - Auburn, WA - White River Amphitheater July 29 - Wheatland, CA - Sleep Train Amphitheater July 30 - Chula Vista, CA - Sleep Train Amphitheater Aug. 01 - Salt Lake City, UT - USANA Amp Aug. 02 - Denver, CO - Pepsi Center Aug. 03 - Kansas City, MO - Sprint Center Aug. 05 - Sturgis, SD - Sturgis Buffalo Chip Aug. 06 - Sioux City, IA - Tyson Events Center Aug. 08 - Tinley Park, IL - First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre Aug. 09 - Clarkston, MI - DTE Energy Music Theatre Aug. 10 - Toronto, ON - Molson Canadian Amp Aug. 12 - Cuyahoga Falls, OH - Blossom Music Center Aug. 13 - Burgettstown, PA - First Niagara Pavilion Aug. 15 - Pelham, AL - Oak Mountain Amp Aug. 16 - Alpharetta, GA - Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre @ Encore Park Aug. 17 - Tampa, FL - MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amp Aug. 19 - Charlotte, NC - PNC Music Pavilion Aug. 20 - Virginia Beach, VA - Farm Bureau Live at Virginia Beach Aug. 22 - Bristow, VA - Jiffy Lube Live Aug. 23 - Camden, NJ - Susquehanna Bank Center Aug. 24 - Mansfield, MA - Xfinity Center Aug. 26 - Saratoga Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing. Arts Center Aug. 27 - Allentown, PA - Great Allentown Fair Aug. 29 - Wantagh, NY - Nikon at Jones Beach Theater Aug. 30 - Holmdel, NJ - PNC Bank Arts Center Aug. 31 - Darien Center, NY - Darien Lake Performing. Arts Center Oct. 10 - Oklahoma City, OK - Chesapeake Arena Oct. 11 - The Woodlands, TX - Cynthia W. Mitchell Pavilion Oct. 12 - Bossier City, LA - CenturyLink Center Oct. 14 - Louisville, KY - KFC Yum! Center Oct. 15 - Nashville, TN - Bridgestone Arena Oct. 17 - Hollywood, FL - Seminole Hard Rock Live Oct. 19 - Jacksonville, FL - Veterans Memorial Arena Oct. 21 - Greenville, SC - Bon Secours Wellness Arena Oct. 22 - Greensboro, NC - Greensboro Coliseum Oct. 25 - Atlantic City, NJ - Borgata Events Center Phoenix - AK-Chin Pavilion Oct. 26 - Montville, CT - Mohegan Sun Oct. 29 - Syracuse, NY - The OnCenter Complex Nov. 05 - Biloxi, MS - Mississippi Coast College Nov. 06 - Southaven, MS - Landers Center Nov. 09 - Moline, IL - iWireless Center Nov. 11 - Green Bay, WI - Resch Center Nov. 12 - Madison, WI - Alliant Energy Center Nov. 13 - Omaha, NE - CenturyLink Center Nov. 15 - St. Paul, MN - Xcel Energy Center Nov. 16 - Fargo, ND - FargoDome Nov. 18 - Edmonton, AB - Rexall Place Nov. 19 - Calgary, AB - Scotiabank Saddledome Nov. 21 - Vancouver, BC - Rogers Arena

Video footage of today's press conference announcing The Final Tour can be seen below.

Comments Disclaimer And Information

BLABBERMOUTH.NET uses the Facebook Comments plugin to let people comment on content on the site using their Facebook account. The comments reside on Facebook servers and are not stored on BLABBERMOUTH.NET. To comment on a BLABBERMOUTH.NET story or review, you must be logged in to an active personal account on Facebook. Once you're logged in, you will be able to comment. User comments or postings do not reflect the viewpoint of BLABBERMOUTH.NET and BLABBERMOUTH.NET does not endorse, or guarantee the accuracy of, any user comment. To report spam or any abusive, obscene, defamatory, racist, homophobic or threatening comments, or anything that may violate any applicable laws, use the "Report to Facebook" and "Mark as spam" links that appear next to the comments themselves. To do so, click the downward arrow on the top-right corner of the Facebook comment (the arrow is invisible until you roll over it) and select the appropriate action. You can also send an e-mail to blabbermouthinbox(@)gmail.com with pertinent details. BLABBERMOUTH.NET reserves the right to "hide" comments that may be considered offensive, illegal or inappropriate and to "ban" users that violate the site's Terms Of Service. Hidden comments will still appear to the user and to the user's Facebook friends. If a new comment is published from a "banned" user or contains a blacklisted word, this comment will automatically have limited visibility (the "banned" user's comments will only be visible to the user and the user's Facebook friends).

Your browser is out-of-date!

Update your browser to view this website correctly. Update my browser now

Home › Live Sound › Tours

Cover Story: Inside The Stadium Tour, Part 1—Mötley Crüe

Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard co-headlined The Stadium Tour this summer, playing to 1.1 million fans with the help of Clair Global and an army of audio pros.

By Clive Young ⋅

Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard are not known for their subtlety, so it’s only fitting that the rock titans’ co-headlining jaunt this summer was called simply The Stadium Tour. While it was first announced in 2019—with the Mötley clan tearing up its famous Cessation of Touring contract, no less—COVID put the kibosh on the metal mission until this year, which may be just as well. After a two-year drought of live music, audiences were starved for a good time, and the solid bill, which also featured veteran rockers Poison, the iconic Joan Jett & the Blackhearts and fresh-faced Classless Act, served up a satisfying seven hours of the hard stuff.

Careening across the U.S. through mid-September, the production sold an astounding 1.1 million tickets, making it one of the biggest tours of the year. Ensuring every note was heard in every seat at every stadium was audio provider Clair Global and a seasoned team of pros that had the production down to a science—by necessity.

“There were five back-to-backs early on and with that size stage and setup, it can be a little hectic,” said Scott Flaws, monitor engineer for Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil. “Luckily, the audio team Clair put together has been killing it with us. Everyone understands the idea of teamwork and we have gotten to the point where production days are no longer needed. We’re getting in and out in one day: Do the show, load out, go take a day off in the hotel, get on site at 6 A.M., fly P.A., start dumping backline. Linecheck, linecheck, linecheck, linecheck, okay, first band go!”

The various audio teams shared more than a ‘can-do’ mindset, however, as crew chief/ RF coordinator Kenneth “Cubby” McDowell could attest. For one thing, they shared frequencies for the headliners’ in-ear monitor systems. “I have a spreadsheet to keep track of who has what,” said McDowell. “For instance, [Mötley Crüe guitarist] Mick Mars and Joe [Elliott, singer] from Def Leppard are on the same frequencies, so one has to turn off so the other can turn on. That’s the only way we can do the tour outside with the RF environment the way it is now; in some places, there’s really one open TV station—we’re putting frequencies in between other TV stations just to make it work. The tour has 70 active channels, and that’s no spares.”

Rage Against the Machine Returns to the Road

McDowell kept it all in check with a 17-space Clair rack with pocket screen, a Shure AXT600 Axient Spectrum Manager, Intermodulation Analysis System (IAS) software by Professional Wireless Systems to coordinate, and Shure’s Wireless Workbench for control. All the coheadliners’ wireless mics and IEM packs were Shure Axient Digital and PSM 1000 IEM systems. Providing RF and internet to the various camps, McDowell set up at stage left near the amp racks. “That way, I can keep an eye on everything and I’m accessible to my crew,” he said. “We put our P.A. up, and then work the rest of the day with all these bands. I wouldn’t ask my crew to do that and then go sit in an air-conditioned office.”

Getting that massive P.A. in the air was no small task either, as the tour required four semis’ worth of L-Acoustics loudspeakers to cover 270 degrees across the MBL and NFL stadiums it visited. The typical speaker arrangement found the stage adorned with left and right main hangs of 20 K1s over four K2s, each supplemented by eight K1-SBs; the same arrangement was used for outfills as well. Further afield, delay hangs were comprised of 16 K2s each, and low end for the whole system was fortified by 48 KS28s across the front of the stage; powering everything was a phalanx of LA12x amplifiers. While Classless Act kicked off the proceedings with a 20-minute set, and Joan Jett and Poison followed with an hour of solid rock each, the headliners alternated in the last two spots, each laying down the loud for 90 minutes.

MIXING MÖTLEY

“With Mötley Crüe, there’s no stopping; the only time there’s a break is when Tommy [Lee, drummer] comes downstage and talks to the audience for a minute before he sits down to play piano on ‘Home Sweet Home,’” said the band’s FOH engineer, Brent Carpenter. “Everything else segues or Vince or Nikki [Sixx, bassist] announces the next song. We run right up to 89, 90 minutes every night—right on the number.”

Mixing the band on an Avid S6L-32D surface controlling an E6L-192 engine, Carpenter tended to lean on the onboard effects, noting, “If I can keep it in-the-box, I do; I want less stuff to go bad on the outside.” That said, a trio of outboard Eventide 3500 Ultra-Harmonizers was on-hand to help represent all eras of the band. “You have to be aware of their legacy sound as well as their modern sounds, and represent them both,” he explained. “On the early records, there’s a lot of processing on the vocal as an effect, and the same happened in the more recent albums— The Dirt era—whereas in the middle section of their career, there didn’t seem to be as much processing, maybe just like a little chorus and a delay and that was it. So I have the Eventides to find that classic and recent Vince Neil vocal sound, just to do the spread, because nothing sounds like an Eventide.”

Mick Mars’ distinctive sound came solely from his three-cabinet guitar rig, with stereo effected cabinets each miked with an AKG C214 and a Shure KSM353 ribbon mic, while a “dry” cabinet between them was captured with a Shure SM57. “He’s also got what we call the Blues Cabinet, which has a Beta 56 on it, and I take a direct—a low end that he calls the Sub Guitar that’s just a Palmer PDI-09 direct box,” said Carpenter.

Meanwhile, Sixx’s bass came directly off his wireless into a pair of Ampeg tube DIs; one stayed clean while the other was effected with a McDSP Futzbox plug-in at FOH. “That’s been my staple for bass guitar since I worked with Rush,” said Carpenter. “It’s literally a noise plug-in, a heavy grind sound, so [between the two channels], you still get the nice warm, low end, round sound of the clean bass, but you get more of a top end and something to cut through the guitars.”

Dead & Company: Keeping It Live

Neil’s vocals were captured with a Shure SM58 capsule on an Axient Digital transmitter, while all backing vocals were nabbed with Telefunken M81s. Behind the drum kit, Lee’s headset mic changed a few times throughout the tour, as the first headset was deemed too bulky and another sounded great but “couldn’t take the rigors of Tommy’s playing,” said Carpenter. “Now we’re on a Shure TwinPlex and that’s working very well.” The rest of the drum area was captured with both a Telefunken M82 and a Shure Beta 91A in the kick drum, Audio-Technica AE3000s on toms as well as the snare bottom, and an SM57 on the snare top. For cymbals, an Audio-Technica ATM450 got the hi-hat, while a Neumann KM 184 grabs the ride, and the overheads were Audio-Technica AT4060s.

Over at stageside, a pair of DiGiCo SD7 consoles were used to mix the Mötley Crüe monitors, with Scott Flaws handling Neil’s mix on one, and Scott Megrath tackling the rest of the band’s mixes on the other. All of the bandmembers used JH Audio Sharona in-ear monitors, but each in his own way. While Sixx stuck to his IEMs, Mars and Lee wanted a little more feel; Mars got that from his guitar cabinets, but Lee had plenty of firepower, too, with three Clair Cohesion CP-218 subs plus a number of Cohesion CM-22 wedges for good measure. “It’s pretty incredible—and it sounds great,” said Megrath.

Neil, on the other hand, wore a single Sharona in his left ear, leaving the right open to take in sound from the house, a number of Clair SRM wedges, and sidefills comprised of CP-218s with Cohesion CO-10s on top. “They’re not set to Stun, but their presence up there is felt,” Flaws confirmed.

Tightening up the band’s IEMs was the Pearl, an upcoming personal DSP processor from JH Audio. “Basically, it’s a little DSP active processor that sits on the PSM 1000 belt pack, and we’re able to go in and time-align each earpiece,” said Megrath. “Say we’re making boosts at 3 or 4k; we’re able to make sure each driver is in time, phase aligned, all that kind of stuff. The band uses that and they love it.”

The band’s monitor mixes were essentially variations on the house-mix-with-me-louder paradigm, but when it came to getting Neil’s monitor mix right, Flaws had the added challenge of having joined the tour four shows in. While he had a history with the singer, having mixed Neil’s monitors on solo tours before the pandemic, coming into the production late in the game piled on the pressure. “The techs on stage are the guys that are setting me up for success,” he said. “Suddenly you’re on one of the largest stadium tours ever, you’re in the hot seat, and to come in with no rehearsals, it’s ‘Okay, guys, what am I jumping into?’ Scotty Megrath, Cubby and the guys in my Stage Left world said, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this’ and laid out such a plan—and it’s been very successful at this point. We did a couple of really good shows, it’s not broke, now let’s not fix it!”

Continue on to Part 2 , diving into mixing co-headliners Def Leppard, surviving the oppressive summer heat of 2022 and more!

Cover Story: Inside The Stadium Tour, Part 2 — Def Leppard

Paul Massey Builds His Ultimate 9.1.6 Mixing Studio, Part 1

Cover Story: Kenny Chesney—Taking Here and Now to Another Level, Part 1

Inside InfoComm’s Audio Demo Rooms, Part 1

Cover Story: Kenny Chesney—Taking Here and Now to Another Level, Part 2

Cover Story: Peter D’Antonio—Doctor of Diffusion, Part 1

Cover Story: Jack Antonoff — The Mix Interview, Part 1

Luke Combs is Gettin’ Global on His World Tour, Part 1

• Latest News

‘La Novia de la Juventud’: Angélica María’s Spanish Covers of Sixties Classics

‘michel plays petrucciani’: a small gem from the french pianist, ‘pinkerton’: rivers cuomo embraced his dark side and made weezer’s masterpiece, ‘bad reputation’: why thin lizzy were playing catch-up in the us, ‘beauty is only skin deep’: more than a surface thrill for the temptations, ‘milestones’: reassessing roy orbison’s landmark take on country-rock, how nirvana redefined teen spirit and rewrote rock with ‘nevermind’, glorilla announces debut album ‘glorious’, chris lake and disclosure share collaboration ‘in2minds’, the creation of john lennon’s 1973 record ‘mind games’ explored in new book, bill anderson releases new ep, ‘forevermore’, sabrina carpenter lands netflix christmas special, saturday night live announces first musical guests for 50th season, stevie wonder is going on tour ahead of the presidential election, def leppard & mötley crüe win pollstar’s ‘rock tour of the year’ award.

Also at the ceremony, the Eagles took home the Pollstar Milestone Award and Dave Grohl honored his manager.

Published on

Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard’s joint 2022 “Stadium Tour” won ‘Rock Tour of the Year’ at the 2023 Pollstar Awards this week (Feb. 22). Also at the ceremony, the Eagles took home the Pollstar Milestone Award and Dave Grohl honored his manager.

The annual Pollstar Awards, organized by the live music trade publication Pollstar, have recognized and celebrated the live entertainment businesses’ most innovative artists, venues, tours, companies and executives over the last 34 years.

Shop Def Leppard’s discography on vinyl and more .

Look At Them Yo-Yos: Dire Straits Rule Hot 100 With ‘Money For Nothing’

The Stadium Tour — Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard’s twice-postponed North American trek together — was also one of the highest-grossing tours of 2022 and earned over $173 million on the road .

“The World Tour,” another joint tour from Crue and Leppard, is now traversing the globe with Motley Crue’s replacement guitarist John 5 in for a retired Mick Mars. It continues through Europe this summer.

Part from scooping ‘Rock Tour Of The Year’, ‘The Stadium Tour’ won at Pollstar in more ways than one — Joan Jett received Support/Special Guest Act of the Year for her support on the tour alongside fellow opening acts Poison and Classless Act.

Rock and Roll Hall of Famers the Eagles received the Milestone Award in recognition of more than 50 years as a band. Accepting it the Eagles’ Don Henley said, “I just want to say how grateful I am for the fact that we’ve been able to do this for over 50 years now.”

Grohl was at Pollstar to give the Personal Manager of the Year award to his longtime manager, John Silva of Silva Artist Management. During the show, Grohl came to the stage calling it “the one f_king awards ceremony that’s actually fun,” according to a press release.

The Foo Fighter added, “I’m here to honor a person that I’ve known for 33 years, the only manager I’ve ever had, Mr. John Silva…We’ve had some incredible triumphs, and some devastating crises, but the one thing that has kept us together over the years has been love.”

The Pollstar Awards are the only “peer-voted” live entertainment industry awards, Pollstar says, meaning winners are decided by other industry professionals. See the full list of 2023 winners here. Other winners included Harry Styles (Major Tour of the Year), Post Malone (Hip-Hop Tour of the Year), Lizzo (R&B Tour of the Year) and Billie Eilish (Pop Tour of the Year).

Listen to the best of Def Leppard on Apple Music and Spotify .

' . esc_html__( 'Leave a Reply', 'zox-news' ) . '