Mötley Crüe: The rock band Slash called “America’s Sex Pistols”
Good rock and roll has always relied on a little bit of chaos. As much as the early trailblazers of the genre were known for their outlandish tendencies, it was nothing compared to what the next generations had in store, from the punk movement tearing down the status quo to the grunge movement removing all hair metal bands from existence. Although Sex Pistols may have been one of the clearest examples of rock and roll chaos, Slash thought that one American act had the potential to rival them.
For the first few years of Guns N’ Roses’ development, though, it looked like the Los Angeles hard rock act would be one of the few to usurp John Lydon’s punk vision. As opposed to the shocking vernacular present across Nevermind the Bollocks, Axl Rose seethed with rage about everything he could get his hands on, going so far as to use different slurs when putting together songs like ‘One In a Million’.
While Guns may have been drawing inspiration from punk and hard rock, the music scene they were born into was much more glamorous than they intended. In response to acts like Van Halen crawling up the charts, every other rock band across the Sunset Strip were making songs that had to do with partying all night long and smothering on as much lipstick as they could to get the attention of MTV.
Although many bands took the lessons of early glam rockers like Sweet and T Rex very seriously, Nikki Sixx had a different plan in mind when putting together Mötley Crüe. When forming the band, Sixx had the vision of making a group that took the theatricality of glam rock and combined it with the energy of punk, making for glam rock anthems like ‘Live Wire’ and ‘Shout at the Devil’.
While Slash made it his mission to rebel against the music coming out of Los Angeles, he did have a certain respect for what Mötley Crüe was doing on the scene. Aside from their penchant for writing great hooks, the band was responsible for infusing a bluesy element into their sound, courtesy of the chops from original guitarist Mick Mars.
For all of the pretty boys on the scene, Slash thought that Sixx had put together the ideal American answer to the first generation of punk rockers, recalling in Sixx’s book The Heroin Diaries, “Mötley Crüe were America’s Sex Pistols. On a musical level, they had catchy songs and cool lyrics, but they were all about attitude and the image. They were the only band, apart from maybe Van Halen, who had any sincerity and took what they did seriously”.
While Mötley Crüe were able to throw together some of the most celebrated songs of the hair metal movement, they also held up to the same bad habits as the Pistols as well. Living out his rock star fantasies, Sixx would eventually be pronounced dead after a fatal overdose of heroin, after which he was revived by paramedics with two adrenaline needles through his heart.
Even though it would take the band years to clean up their act, their run throughout the 1980s remains the closest answer Los Angeles ever got to the punk movement. Some may have been in the business for the big checks and the girls, but Sixx was looking at the big picture and the message he was spreading whenever he got up onstage.
