Mötley Crüe with Mel Ottenberg

We love Mötley Crüe. Mötley Crüe loves partying (so so much). In this episode you’ll hear how Nikki, Tommy, Vince, and Mick put on their make-up and pioneered a genre, how they turned their pain, trauma, talent, and ambition into an unstoppable chart-topping force, leaving a trail of sleaze and destruction in their wake. Cruise down the Sunset Strip with Yasi and her iconic guest Mel Ottenberg, next stop the Cathouse (followed by rehab)! Episode Playlist: Listen to the best of the Crüe ⁠here⁠ CREDITS: Host: Yasi Salek @yasisalek Guest: Mel Ottenberg Producer: Rob Sundermann Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm Sean Fennessy.

• 0:00Speaker 01

  I'm Amanda Dobbins.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  And we host The Big Picture, a podcast about movies, the Oscars, and everything in contemporary film culture.

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• 1:22Speaker 04

  What's with this band anyway? I don't get it, can you please explain? Wait, like, Bandplain? Never heard this band in my life. Oh, you haven't? I'd love that. Really? Why? Yeah, I love this song. Oh, I don't know that one. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. I really hate this band! Whatever, I'm their biggest fan. Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain, Bandplain. Bandplain!

• 2:02Yasi Salek?

  Hello and welcome to Bandsplain. I am your host, Yasi Salek. This is a show where I invite an expert guest on to help me explain a cult band or iconic artist. Today's episode is about Motley Crue. If you've never heard Motley Crue, I guess you've never been to a strip club, babe.

• 2:25Yasi Salek?

  You guys, my guest today, my guest today, is the editor in chief of Interview Magazine, maybe you've heard of it, and repeat Bandsplain guest, Mr. Mel Ottenberg. Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the show, Mel.

• 2:39Speaker 06

  Yasi, thanks for having me back for Motley Crue. It's an honor and a privilege.

• 2:43Yasi Salek?

  I couldn't be happier. There's not a single person on earth I'd rather be talking to besides actually Mr. Nicky Six himself.

• 2:49Speaker 06

  I'm fucking pumped. Thanks.

• 2:51Yasi Salek?

  Can you, before we like dive in, before we dive into The Dirt, if you, if you'll allow me, can you just tell me briefly about your personal history with the crew?

• 3:00Speaker 06

  Absolutely, Yasi. So like, my love affair with Motley Crue probably started when I read The Dirt, which is the best fucking book. But like, as a Gen X MTV obsessed kid, I saw the videos because they were on non-fucking-stop. Motley Crue was the biggest band in the world. It wasn't like my rock thing per se as like an 11-year-old. That would have been Guns N' Roses. But then later, I read The Dirt, and that book's so fucking good that I reconsidered Motley Crue. I bought like the records. I got really into them, and now I'm just a fan. I fucking love them.

• 3:42Yasi Salek?

  Now you're just a fan.

• 3:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I love, I love, I love the mess. I love the disaster. We'll get into it. Yeah.

• 3:49Yasi Salek?

  Oh, there's a lot of mess and disaster. Shockingly. You know, as, as you know, I'm a professor of rock music history. I had never read The Dirt or even seen The Cursed Film. We'll get into that later until this prepping for this thing. I don't know why. I guess much like yourself, or not that much like yourself. Molly Crew videos were a little before my MTV time. So I didn't know much about them or care or have any interest. And it never occurred to me to read the book. Even when the movie came out and everyone was talking about it again, I was like, I guess I'll probably do an episode. Eventually I'll save it for that. And this is a fucking insane text.

• 4:29Speaker 06

  It's incredible. Oh God, where do we begin?

• 4:33Yasi Salek?

  We're gonna like parse it throughout. Like, I mean, that's my source text for this, although obviously I'm a completist. So I did read both of Nikki Sixx's memoirs as well as Tommy Lee's book. Yeah, I was out here in London trying to catch a man sitting in cafes casually reading Tommy Lee's autobiography, which you know is really giving, let me go talk to that woman. Then no one, no, not one single man approached me. They were like,

• 4:58Speaker 06

  It's giving my dick's not big enough to go talk to that lady over there.

• 5:03Yasi Salek?

  It was, I did it to myself. It was absolutely chastity belt. I don't have it in front of me, but there's a porn star playmate wrote a book that heavily mentions Tommy Lee. I read that, those excerpts of that too. There's a lot of texts, but The Dirt is the main one. I just want to say before we begin, like Molly Crew is so pivotal to what we now call, I guess glam metal. Right? Was that what you call hair metal glam metal? Ostensibly not the first glam metal band. I think you could, you would have to say that's Twisted Sister because they were a bit earlier. That's like a seventies band, but they minted it like they made it a thing.

• 5:48Yasi Salek?

  I did not realize until, until reading these books that Dude Looks Like a Lady by Aerosmith apparently is about Vince Neil. Did you know that?

• 5:57Speaker 06

  I didn't know that. It makes a lot of sense.

• 6:00Yasi Salek?

  It makes a lot of sense. And then also Money for Nothing and Chicks for Free by Dire Straits. It's also apparently about Motley Crue.

• 6:07Speaker 06

  Distracts.

• 6:09Yasi Salek?

  Distracts. Part of the cultural landscape. All right. We're gonna start with, I'll say it up top, my favorite member of Motley Crue, Nikki Sixx. He was born Frank Carlton Serafino Farana Jr. on December 11th, 1958. He's a Sagittarius in San Jose, California at 7:11 a.m. As he says in The Dirt, "I was as early as I could be, and even back then, probably still up from the night before." Nikki Sixx was partying in the womb. His mother, Deanna, was an Idaho farm girl who was a gorgeous supermodel, but according to Nikki, she quote, "had an untamable wild streak, completely capricious,

• 6:51Yasi Salek?

  prone to random adventure, and constitutionally unable to create any pattern of stability." I want to talk a bit about Nikki's upbringing, because I think it's really important. Nikki is like the fulcrum of this band. Nikki is like the spring of creativity of this band. Like, he is the center of the universe as far as Motley Crue is concerned. And he said in his book, The First Twenty-One, that he had asked his aunt, Harlene, about his birth story. And she was like, "Oh yeah, well, I had to come take care of you for the first two weeks of your life, because your mom didn't want to."

• 7:24Yasi Salek?

  Which is like, so, you know, like, it already like, kind of sets up like, where all this, what we get from the story of Motley Crue and all the disastrous self-destruction from Nikki, it kind of has its root from the very beginning. His father, who he got his name from, Frank Carlton Farana, left the family like, a year after Nikki was born. He also had one full biological sister named Lisa, who, we don't have to get super into it, but he kind of didn't know about because she was born with Down Syndrome and went to live away. Away from the family very early. He had a super chaotic childhood, bounced from place to place, back and forth between his like, single mother, who, according to Nikki, every time she would get a boyfriend,

• 8:09Yasi Salek?

  she would sort of bounce him back to his grandparents. So he lived in LA, lived in Idaho, New Mexico, Lake Tahoe, actual Mexico. He says in his book that in Mexico, he smoked pot and drank whiskey for the first time at age seven years old, with his mom and her boyfriend Bernie. Yeah. And he, this is what he said. He said, "Once that pot and whiskey hit my system, my mind went kaboom and my whole world changed. The static in my head and my body that I felt all day, every day, just went away, like turning the channel on a TV from only seeing snow and then getting the clearest picture you've ever seen. Everything made perfect sense and I no longer had any fear or sadness or doubt or anger about anything in the world. At that point, everything in my life became about chasing that feeling. To this day, it has never stopped,

• 8:53Yasi Salek?

  no matter how much work I do on myself."

• 8:57Yasi Salek?

  He lived on a hog farm with his grandparents. After that, maybe like eight or nine, he had to kill rabbits as his job. That probably does a number on a child's head. He became a bitter, in his words, a bitter and destructive kid, and also a violent one. He was beating up kids that were trying to bully him. The first song that spoke to him, according to him in several testimonials, is the song "Big Bad John" by Jimmy Dean. He said, "He heard it on the radio and I lost my mind. It cut through the boredom like a scythe. The song had style and attitude. It was cool. I found it, I thought. This is what I've been looking for. I phoned the station so much to request "Big Bad John," the DJ told me to stop calling."

• 9:43Yasi Salek?

  We don't really have to get into the fact that "Big Bad John" came out like way before he would have been a child listening to the radio. There's, this is a myth, the Dirt and the Motley Crue story. It's, we don't have to root in fact. But anyways, he gets super into music. He said he would listen to the radio 10 hours a day, Deep Purple, Bachman-Turner, Overdrive, Pink Floyd, gets into Sabbath, also Bread. This is interesting because I, we're gonna get into it when we get to the first Motley Crue album, but like, Motley Crue is like low-key a 70s band spiritually. Do you not feel that in the beginning?

• 10:18Speaker 06

  Yes, because they love the dolls, like, they love Iggy Pop.

• 10:22Yasi Salek?

  They love Cheap Trick.

• 10:24Speaker 06

  They love Cheap Trick. I think they love Bowie, too.

• 10:27Yasi Salek?

  They love Bowie. Yeah, definitely Bowie was a, I mean, New York Dolls was like.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  Their thing.

• 10:31Yasi Salek?

  Their thing, like the rip. I mean, we're gonna get into the New York Dolls of it all because that's so important. It's so important that I went back and also read like two New York Dolls books because I was like, oh, now I need to like, I need to get to the source material. Before New York Dolls, though, Nicky starts playing football. Nicky's a jock, okay? Nicky is a corn-fed, tall, broad-shouldered, salt-of-the-earth, American boy who plays football. And he said of the sport, "Football gave me the same feeling I get when the band breaks into Shout at the Devil. I was as proud of wearing that uniform as I was on the day I got my first base." And still, oh, this is very interesting. I never got this.

• 11:14Yasi Salek?

  The black stripes that Nicky Six famously wore in his glam makeup are his football stripes. That's what they are. It's so cool. I never knew that. And he said, no one got it, but he's like, they were a callback to my days playing football.

• 11:29Speaker 06

  Nicky Six was authentic, people. I don't know what else to say. It's like a real thing.

• 11:35Yasi Salek?

  In 1972-ish, I have a bunch of question marks on the dates, not that it really matters, but he goes to live back with his mother and who had moved at this point to like a suburb of Seattle. This is where he sees Led Zeppelin for the first time, plus tons of other bands. Led Zeppelin concert, $5. He said they had a sign with their name out on the stage. When they played their last song, "Black Dog," the sign burst into flames. It made a lasting impression. I saw Deep Purple, whose album Burn had just come out. Okay, Burn came out in 1974. I'm not gonna get into the years, but there's a few, there's some inconsistencies.

• 12:12Speaker 06

  We're talking about feelings. They, a lot's happened to that brain, you know what I mean?

• 12:19Yasi Salek?

  You know, that's so true.

• 12:22Yasi Salek?

  He sees T-Rex, he sees Kiss. We forgot Kiss. Kiss is also very important. Then his mother's boyfriend at that time, Ramon, gives him his first acoustic guitar. And he said, "For that, I am forever grateful. That guitar was the first instrument I'd ever possessed. It turned my whole life upside down." So Ramon taught him a little about guitar, and then he taught himself the rest by playing along to Deep Purple. "Me falling in love with Nikki Sixx in real time was a true journey." He said, "But I got excited for real when I tried to read words I had written along with the music. Right away, the poems I'd been writing firmed up. They snapped into shape. I'd always felt compelled to write notes and stories. If I'd seen a fight in the park,

• 13:03Yasi Salek?

  or driven past two crashed cars, or a jackknife tractor trailer, I would have gone home, locked myself in my room, and written about it. But now I felt I would be able to tell my stories. Set to music, they made much more sense and had five times the force." Nikki Sixx is a poet, babe.

• 13:19Speaker 06

  Without a doubt.

• 13:20Yasi Salek?

  Without a doubt. So he joins a band, and this is why he plays bass, because they needed bass. And he said, "Every day, I tried to learn The Stooges, Sparks, especially the song, 'This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us,' and Aerosmith. Great fucking song."

• 13:41Yasi Salek?

  This is also where you forget that Sparks has been around for 170 years.

• 13:46Speaker 06

  So, sir.

• 13:47Yasi Salek?

  Truly one of the most enduring bands of all time. He wasn't good enough for that band that he tried to be in, but then he met a guy named Gaylord outside a show who had a punk band called The Vidit. So fucking cool. He said, "Every day after school, I'd go to his house, Gaylord's house, and drink till I passed out, listening to The New York Dolls, MC5, and Blue Cheer." You forget about Blue Cheer. Ain't no cure for the summertime blues. Blue Cheer.

• 14:19Yasi Salek?

  There'd always be a dozen glammed out New York Dolls looking chicks and dudes there wearing fingernail polish and eye makeup. They called us the Whiz Kids, not because we took a lot of speed, which we did, but because we were flashy dressers like David Bowie, whose Young Americans album had just come out. Like the mods in England, we'd sell drugs to buy clothes. Young Americans came out in 1975. Again, we don't really have to get into it. So it wouldn't have been when Nicki was 14, which was 1972. Again, this is fine. He's, he's selling drugs, babe. He's stealing. He's getting in fights. He's frying on acid.

• 14:52Speaker 06

  He's like a huffer, bad kid with like, he's just like the ultimate bad kid from a, from a broken home.

• 15:00Yasi Salek?

  A hundred percent.

• 15:01Speaker 06

  That's beating you up after school.

• 15:03Yasi Salek?

  Drawn to, but also like a freak, like drawn to the freak shit of like, wearing nail polish and makeup, which was like, again, this is 1972 slash five. You know, like it's, this is very uncommon. Like you're going to get picked on. He said the black kids at school called him Alice Bowie and tried to beat him up. Alice Bowie is very funny, actually.

• 15:23Speaker 06

  Alice Bowie is a great name.

• 15:25Yasi Salek?

  So he starts hanging out with these other kids that are in a band called Cold Days. They start buying long, cool scarves to like, get their Keith Richards on. They're buying women's vests. You know, they're super skinny, so they can wear all that stuff. They're really into it. Around age 14, this is, I'm sure you'll remember this, he tries to have his mother arrested.

• 15:48Speaker 06

  Tell us more. Sounds bad.

• 15:50Yasi Salek?

  Thing about Nicki Six is he's nothing if not a planner. Okay. This man, he's a man with a plan. He has been since he, the beginning. He does not want to be policed anymore by his mother. He does not want rules. So he takes a blade and cuts his arm open and then calls the police and says his mom did it. And they come and Nicki said, I wanted them to lock her away so I could live alone, but my plan backfired. The police said that if I, as a minor living in her custody, pressed charges, they'd have to put me in a juvenile home till I was 18. That meant I wouldn't be able to play guitar for four years. And that meant that I'd never make it. And I was going to make it. There was

• 16:31Yasi Salek?

  no doubt about that. So I struck a plea bargain with my mother. I told her I wouldn't press assault charges if she'd back off, leave me alone, and let me be. You haven't been there for me, I told her. So just let me go. And she did.

• 16:46Speaker 06

  Good for you.

• 16:47Yasi Salek?

  Good for you, Nikki.

• 16:48Speaker 06

  She was a dick. He was, he's mad. I'm on team Nikki here.

• 16:52Yasi Salek?

  I'm on team Nikki. I'm sure she had some terrible upbringing as well. You know, like this is a hurt people, hurt people situation, but we're focusing on Nikki Sixx here. Okay. I want to talk about the New York Dolls thing, but I also like really want to already start to talk about how like these guys are getting these women's clothing, makeup, feminine. And I'm, I just like, it really launched me into thinking about how like, almost from the beginning of not even just white rock and roll, all rock and roll. Cause was it, it was Little Richard who first wore eyeliner, right? Which is even what the Dolls like, which set off this like thing of men in rock and roll, wearing makeup. It started, I want to say it's Little Richard. Does that sound right to you, Mo?

• 17:35Speaker 06

  Without a doubt. Cause Little Richard was always like, I'm the first. I am rock and roll. All of you copied me. Where's my award? It's me. I'm, I'm the fucking one. All y'all copied me.

• 17:48Yasi Salek?

  And he's literally correct. Like he like, but I was just thinking like how from the beginning, how interesting it is that like these male rockers, rock stars would incorporate these aspects of femininity to attract women, right? To put them at ease, to telegraph vulnerability. But also it kind of like, it kind of creates this sense of like wholeness because they have like these overtly masculine qualities, right? Rock stars like, I mean, you think of fucking, that's like, you're literally putting your dick on parade on the stage, but then also by softening it with some feminine elements, it's like a wholeness. I don't know. I got really in my Andrea Dworkin bag or whatever when I was thinking about all this.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  But also this is, in my mind, this is a cock rock band. Like this band is leading with their big fucking dicks. And so they're also sort of like, we're so straight and we love pussy so much and our cocks are so big and strong that we'll wear lipstick and eyeliner and platform shoes, like same as Paul Stanley, Ace Frehley, like. His tongue, our big dicks. It's just like a posturing thing, but they really fucking loved it and they really stayed with it. They're really organized in their brains, right? Like, they're like.

• 19:04Yasi Salek?

  It was, it was, it was a strategy.

• 19:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:07Yasi Salek?

  It was a creative direction.

• 19:08Speaker 06

  Exactly. It was a creative direction. It was a strategy. It worked. Like, I don't know if it's, if they're trying to be like, soft and friendly for women. But maybe that was a part of that, yeah.

• 19:21Yasi Salek?

  I think they were being subversive first and foremost. I think that's like, because they were, they, I mean, this is where we get into the New York Dolls of it all, right? Like, nineteen seventy-three is the year the first New York Dolls album comes out. I have no understanding of how Nicki found this album. It didn't come up in any of, because it's not like it was popular, you know? It's not like it was like, on the charts, on the radio, in every radio store. But to Nicki, this was a huge band. He said, their clothes, their attitude, a lot of that stuff shaped Molly Crew. And the thing about the New York Dolls, here's what he said. They were iconic, the flamboyance of their fuck you. I modeled myself after Johnny Thunders, trying to split the difference between him and Mad Max. That's why I teased my hair out. I was trying to look like Johnny Thunders.

• 20:05Yasi Salek?

  And with the New York Dolls, that dress and that makeup and those platforms, that was, that was punk, right? That was them being punk. That was them trying to, to like, stir the fucking pot, to upset the waters.

• 20:20Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I mean, it was deranged.

• 20:23Yasi Salek?

  It was deranged, at the time, especially. So New York Dolls kind of radicalizes Nicki. He drops out of school. He leaves home. He's kind of homeless for a bit. He's like shoplifting fucking Burrows and Bukowski, because he is, again, the soul of a poet. And then he finally calls his mom and he's like, listen, I just need you to give me enough money to go back to my grandparents. Like, I can't be here anymore. I'm, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to jail. I'm selling drugs outside the fucking Deep Purple show, like, I gotta get out of here. So she's like, fine.

• 20:55Speaker 06

  How old is he right now?

• 20:56Yasi Salek?

  He's probably seventeen, I wanna say. 16, 17?

• 21:01Speaker 06

  Back to the pig farm he goes, Yasi.

• 21:03Yasi Salek?

  Yes, back to Jerome, Idaho, honey. And he said, "All I had by way of music for the ride was an Aerosmith tape, a Lynyrd Skynyrd tape and a boombox. I listened to those cassettes over and over till I arrived in Jerome. I walked off the bus in six inch platforms, a gray tweed double-breasted suit, a shag haircut and fingernail polish." I'm sorry, have you ever heard of anything fucking cooler than that image?

• 21:27Speaker 06

  A real rebel, a real freak show rebel.

• 21:30Yasi Salek?

  With a boombox on his shoulder. A real freak show, he's his grandma turned white. Now, what happens is nepo alert. I'm just kidding, but kind of. His Aunt Sharon, his mom's sister, his grandparents' daughter, had married Don Zimmerman, the then president of Capitol Records, and they were visiting Jerome, Idaho. And so he reconnects and he's like, "Okay, the master plan is getting notched up, you guys." Because turns out Uncle Don is the president of Capitol Records. Doesn't actually, I mean, it's funny because he does a little bit help him, but not in the ways that you would think. But he, he does send him all these packages of like cassettes and rock magazines and like, you know, this is what's going on in LA, babe.

• 22:14Yasi Salek?

  And Nikki's like, "I gotta move to LA." So at 17 years old, this is 1975, he packs up, he fucking moves in with his aunt and uncle in La Canyada, shout out La Canyada, beautiful neighborhood in Glendale, northern Glendale. And he says in The Dirt, it's funny because there's like differing stories. The Dirt is obviously like where they're being kind of like, The Dirt was, I want to say what, it's like early 2000s when it was written, right? 2002 or something? So they're like still a little fresh of like, you know, fuck you or rock stars. And then when Nikki writes his like more reflective, middle-aged memoirs, it's a little softer. So like in The Dirt, he's like, "I got kicked out for being a punk." But then in his other book, he's like, "Actually, Don took me under his wing musically.

• 22:56Yasi Salek?

  He helped me get a job at Music Plus Records in Glendale, which is where he learned about Devo, the Ramones." Real kind of punk. Because like we, we'll talk about New York Dolls being punk spiritually and aesthetically, but like the music of the New York Dolls, besides being extremely terribly recorded and slightly poorly played, is not punk music, really, you know?

• 23:16Speaker 06

  And their, their music doesn't sound anything like it.

• 23:18Yasi Salek?

  Who, Molly Cruz?

• 23:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:20Yasi Salek?

  Interesting. I'm gonna poke a hole in that when we get into the first album because I have some, I have some thoughts.

• 23:25Speaker 06

  I feel you.

• 23:26Yasi Salek?

  So they also have a little son named Little Ricky and you know, Nicky's out here just smoking pot and being a terrible influence. And they're finally like, you know what? It would be so great if you didn't live here anymore. And so Don cosigns a little apartment for him and he moves out. He loses his job at the record store because he is in fact stealing from the register, gets a new job at a carpet cleaning place, which he also loses because he's doing some insane grifting where he keeps telling people that he knows how to get cat and dog pee stains out of the carpet with this very special treatment. That's going to cost an extra whatever money, but then he just brings like a fake like vinegar or something and takes their money and ends up getting fined. He's, this is a businessman.

• 24:09Yasi Salek?

  I want to paint a quick picture of what's happening just like across the 210 freeway from La Cuenca at this time. There's a little band called Van Halen who are becoming very popular in Pasadena. They were recording with Gene Simmons. I think this is an important thing to point out because Van Halen is a, in many ways, also the blueprint of what goes on to happen with Sunset Strip glam rock metal, right? You know, like they're very much pioneers.

• 24:37Speaker 06

  What year are we right now? Y'all see in your picture?

• 24:40Yasi Salek?

  We're 76 probably.

• 24:42Speaker 06

  So like Van Halen is like a real local band, right?

• 24:46Yasi Salek?

  Van Halen is like killing it in the like backyard parties, like Gazaries, which was like a alternative to the whiskey and Roxy. Like they're, they're the, the hot local band of Los Angeles.

• 25:01Speaker 06

  Hot.

• 25:02Yasi Salek?

  And they're about to probably get signed to their major label, whatever. But this is, he starts to catch wind of Van Halen through like friends of friends or whatever. Okay, now it's 1977. It's time for Mick Mars to enter the picture for the first time. Nicky's working at a liquor store and he is there, in his own words, strung out on speed and alcohol.

• 25:26Yasi Salek?

  And one night, a rocker with black hair walks in. He said he looked like a creepy version of Johnny Thunders. So I asked if he played music. He nodded that he did. And Nikki was like, okay, well, what are you into? And Mick said, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Jeff Beck. And Nikki was like, ugh. And he was like, well, I'm into the Dolls Aerosmith, MC5, Nugent, Kiss. And Mick looked at him contemptuously, according to Nikki and said, oh, I'm into real players. And in one version of the story, Nikki was like, well, fuck off dick and kicked him out of the liquor store. But the other version of the story, Mick was like, listen, if you ever want to hear a real guitar player, babe, come on down to the Stone Pony. My band, Spiders and Cowboys is playing.

• 26:12Yasi Salek?

  Mick Mars is one of the most interesting people alive. And Nikki apparently did go. He went down, he was underage, and he said, it changed me profoundly because Mick did a guitar solo using the mic stand as a slide. And he was like blown away. Then they don't talk for a while. That's just like, they have this fateful interaction.

• 26:33Speaker 02

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• 26:59Speaker 03

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• 27:30Yasi Salek?

  All right. Nicky's like, it's time for me to fucking, it's time for world domination. So he starts auditioning for bands that are listed in the recycler. You guys, anyone who's listening to this, who is, I guess, a little below the age of, what, 35, probably does not remember the recycler. So it was a local rag, free paper you got around town. You want to buy a used car? It's in the recycler. You want to join a band? It's in the recycler. We don't have Craigslist. He said he auditioned for a band called, quote, Garden, or Soul Garden, or Hanging Garden, or Hanging Soul. And he said they looked like him, but they played terrible Doors-like psych jam rock. But he kept running into the band's guitar player, Lizzie Gray, at the Starwood,

• 28:13Yasi Salek?

  very cool iconic club venue. And they connected over loving Cheap Trick and Slade and the Dolls. And Lizzie had been asked by a guy called Blacky Lawless, which I could actually do a separate, like, three hours on Blacky Lawless, because don't even get me, one of the most interesting musical figures alive would later go on to be the lead singer of Wasp. But Blacky Lawless at this time has a band called Sister. Nicky was like, Blacky was an amazing songwriter. And despite the fact that he was cold and shut down, he was inspirational to talk to because he was making an impression, not just with music, but with his appearance. He was into eating worms and drawing pentagrams onstage, anything to get a reaction from the audience. Also, no big deal, he had literally been in the New York Dolls.

• 28:57Yasi Salek?

  Blacky Lawless joined the New York Dolls after Johnny Thunders left and went on one tour with them in 1975. And then he was in Killer Kane, which is Arthur Kane's band, which, by the way, Killer Kane, I don't know if you guys have ever listened to, really fucking good. Have you listened to Killer Kane?

• 29:14Speaker 06

  I have not.

• 29:15Yasi Salek?

  Surprisingly, really good. The song, Mr. Cool, goes really hard.

• 29:25Yasi Salek?

  Anyways, he joins the band, everything's going great, but then they butt heads and Blackie's like, you gotta go. I'm the boss of this band, not you. But Blackie was an enduring influence on Nicki because the pentagrams, the shock value, even Nicki said, he was like, later on, when I did shout out the devil, I think he got pissed. How could he not have been? I had taken stuff from him. I had taken Motley Crue's pentagram from Blackie. He wasn't using it anymore. And I had asked his permission, but I did take it. Lighting myself on fire was a Blackie move too. I'd never seen him do it, but he'd talk about throwing worms into the audience. He'd talk about pouring lighter fluid all over himself. Blackie was always trying to come up with a new way to shock. So that's the pentagram backstory. Nicki is,

• 30:07Yasi Salek?

  he's a, he's a sponge. He's absorbing and putting it all into his master plan. Now he's, he's bandless, he's broke, he's lonely. He's still going by Frank Verona Jr. By the way, at this time, this is still Frank ours. He had a girlfriend named Angie at the time. And he said, I remember she was always talking about her old boyfriend from Indiana, a guy named Nicki Six, S Y X X, who used to play in a top 40 cover band. By the way, the guy that was first called Nicki Six had actually gotten it off of a license plate on a car that he saw in Newport Beach that said Nicki Six, N I K I, the number six. It's the etymology of Nicki Six. But anyways, Nicki was like, well, I loved his name, but I couldn't just

• 30:51Yasi Salek?

  steal it. So I decided to call myself Nicki Nine. But everyone said that was too punk rock and punk was now too mainstream. Not very interesting because once again, we're only in 1977. Punk happened in 76. But within a year, it's over. Yeah, they were like, it's, it's too, it's too lame. So he was just like, well, I decided anyone who thinks surf, because the guy was in a surf punk outfit or surf punk band. He was like, so I decided that anyone who thinks surfing has anything to do with punk rock doesn't deserve such a cool name. So he went ahead and took the name Nicky Six. Thank God for that car that had the Nicky Six license plate.

• 31:30Speaker 06

  Thank God, yeah.

• 31:32Yasi Salek?

  So Nicky starts his own band, 1978. He puts Lizzie Gray in it. They put an ad out. The ad says, "Band looking for a bass player must have chops, equipment, and into Aerosmith." The band is called London. We decided to call ourselves London because London was where all the best bands were from.

• 31:46Speaker 06

  Terrible name, guys. So cheesy. Who answers the ad, Yasi?

• 31:52Yasi Salek?

  I'm so glad you asked. A guy named Dane Rage, who was like actually really gorgeous, like totally like 80s hunk, like Chad jawline guy. A keyboard player named John St. John, and they had a singer named Michael White. So they start playing, then it's 19, you know, they're, they're getting some following. Nicky said, "It's 1979. As far as we're concerned, rock and roll is dead. We were Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols. We were everything that no one else was into." Also, as a fun fact about London, this band goes on for a long time and Slash and Izzy Stradlin were at some point in this band later.

• 32:26Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 32:27Yasi Salek?

  Okay, they fire Michael White, they hire a guy named Nigel Benjamin. Nigel Benjamin had literally been in Mott the Hoople. He was Ian Hunter, the singer's replacement. They are managed by a guy named David Forrest, who ran the Starwood. He gives Nicky a job at the Starwood cleaning up after, this is so wild. I just want to read this quote because imagine Mel being around at this time. Nicky said, "Booking at the Starwood was totally schizophrenic. You'd have fear playing one night, followed by the Plimsouls, followed by the Germs, followed by Gang of Four, followed by Black Flag, followed by the Go-Go's."

• 33:02Speaker 06

  Insane.

• 33:03Yasi Salek?

  Fucking insane.

• 33:05Speaker 06

  Are we, were we born too late or are we right on time?

• 33:08Yasi Salek?

  No, I think I was born too late. I don't know about you. You were born kind of in a good sweet spot, but like me for sure, I needed to be born 10 years, exactly 10 years earlier. Or maybe 20 if I wanted to be around here. I should have been, I should have been like 20 years old in the 90s. What can you do? So he's cleaning up after fucking Fear shows at the Starwood. Slash and Steven Adler, our guys, babe. They're local teens, they're riding their skateboards past the Starwood and they would sneak in the back door to hear London play. They were like big London fans. The Slash said, "My first memory of Nicki was seeing him playing with his band London at the Starwood. I was about 14 at the time and he was just this charismatic glam punk bass player who made a real big impression on me. Then I remember him coming to my high school and

• 33:51Yasi Salek?

  giving out flyers to a Motley Crue show at the Whiskey Agogo to all the hot chicks. Motley Crue was America's Sex Pistols."

• 33:58Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 33:59Yasi Salek?

  It's a bold statement. Tommy Lee was also a teenager who had a big London obsession and had a big poster of London in his bedroom.

• 34:09Speaker 06

  Beautiful.

• 34:10Yasi Salek?

  Beautiful. So Van Halen at this time, it's 1979, they are now the biggest band in LA, basically, alongside another band called Quiet Riot, Randy Rhoads's band. You know, Rhoads famously one of like the greatest, after Eddie Van Halen, probably the great, one of the greatest guitar players from this scene of all time. And Nicki was like, oh, we were watching Quiet Riot. Quiet Riot was very early, right? They had already made two albums. They had only come out in Japan. Van Halen kind of made it like eked in the door, but no one is signing rock, any, straight up rock anymore because new wave has happened. And I think this is kind of what Nicki meant by punk sold out. What

• 34:51Yasi Salek?

  he meant was new wave. Because what happened is punk gave way to more radio friendly, adult friendly, record label friendly, like Elvis Costello, the Go-Go's, and that is what's fucking happening. And they're not interested in signing anything that's like a real guitar rock heavy band anymore. Lizzie Gray from London said that Van Halen would actually come check out London shows because they were dressed like the New York Dolls and people were talking about them. I cannot verify this, but according to Lizzie Gray, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards also came to the Starwood to see London.

• 35:24Speaker 06

  Great.

• 35:24Yasi Salek?

  Great. So Nicki tries to get Capitol Records to sign the band. He's like, "Ung."

• 35:29Speaker 06

  Let's go.

• 35:30Yasi Salek?

  Let's go. And you know what Ung says? "No." He says, no heart. I can't sell this. And when Nicky comes back and he's like, okay, guys, sorry, we're not getting signed, but we're gonna go hard. Nigel is like, I'm out, bitch. No, no deal. I'm out. Fuck you. So Nicky's like, well, I'm not giving up. I'm gonna try to get the guy from Sweet to like, you know, help us do something. Brian Connolly. So his uncle puts him in touch. He sends Brian Connolly from Sweet photos of London, a tape. He gets on the phone with him. And this is what Brian Connolly says. "I got your photos and music, and I see what you're trying to do, but I can't help you. My advice would be to keep your day job. This kind of music is never gonna make

• 36:12Yasi Salek?

  it. I'm sure you're a very nice kid, but rock and roll is over. It's dead and gone now. It's not coming back. I'm making my country album."

• 36:22Speaker 06

  Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Is this like Eagles? What's, what's peak? I get it. I get it that it's like whip it and whatever, like Blondie, whatever, new wave. But what else? What's rock? What is rock right now?

• 36:34Yasi Salek?

  Bee Gees, babe. Michael Jackson, Supertramp. Yes, Eagles, The Long Run, Dire Straits, Famous Haters of Molly Crew, Christopher Cross?

• 36:44Speaker 06

  Okay, got it, got it, got it.

• 36:46Yasi Salek?

  Foreigner, The Knack, Back to New Wave, ELO, The Cars, Tusk, is 1979, Fleetwood Mac, The Heartbreakers. Listen, I don't know what was going on behind closed doors. I mean, those are kind of legacy bands, right? At that point, like Pink Floyd is like, has made their mark, but it's more like harder rock that they were like, we're not doing this.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is corny. No one wants this. No one's gonna buy this. It's not a thing. Yeah.

• 37:12Yasi Salek?

  So Nicky's just gets more determined. He's like, fuck you, Brian Connolly. And he didn't actually say that. I'm paraphrasing. They get another singer, doesn't last long. Nicky's like, this is, fuck, it's not working. The shady managers from the Starwood are keeping all their money. The new singer is like, I need to get paid bitch. Nikki's at RockBots for his first RockBots and he's like, I'm gonna call my dad. There's two versions of this story. One is that he finds his father's number through information and calls him up. And he says, he picked up on the first ring and when I told him it was me, his voice turned gruff. I don't have a son, he told me. I do not have a son. I don't know who you are.

• 37:55Yasi Salek?

  Go fuck yourself, I yelled into the receiver. Don't ever call here again. I cried for hours. Alternatively, in another book, he says that when he called, a woman answered and told him Frank Ferrana was dead as of two years ago. And then Nikki said, well, I'm Frankie, Frank's son. And the woman also said, don't call here again. I don't know which one happened. Either way, the outcome was bad and painful. This is 1980. Nikki's like, I'm done with this fucking name. I'm not having this man's name anymore. He doesn't want me. He doesn't, he doesn't want to know me. I don't want to know him. And that's the day, December 9th, 1980, he legally changed his name to Nikki Sixx. I want to point out, he's only 21 years old. He's about to turn 22. Nikki Sixx is born.

• 38:39Speaker 06

  All right. So he's on his way to the top, but he doesn't know it yet.

• 38:42Yasi Salek?

  I think spiritually babe, I mean, you know, I'm a bit of a fucking woo woo bitch. The, the energy that was moved the day that Nikki Sixx unsaddled himself of his like Frank Ferrana name of, of this baggage. And like really was reborn like a phoenix from the ashes into his real true form of Nikki Sixx. Got the ball really rolling down the hill.

• 39:04Speaker 06

  Do you know from all of your research, how big Nikki Sixx's cock is?

• 39:10Yasi Salek?

  You know what? That's such a great question. I wonder if it was ever documented. Remember there was that website where people would contribute their information about the size of rock star penises?

• 39:25Speaker 06

  Guys, I'm not, I'm not saying this because I'm like, oh cocks are everything, but this is a cock fucking band. And this man leads with his dick, as he tells us on every single page of The Dirt, a book I highly recommend.

• 39:36Yasi Salek?

  Here we go. The metalsludge.tv. I remembered it. If you guys want to find it, metalsludge.tv. It says Nikki Sixx, the leader of Molly Crew, is about six inches in length, gives great oral sex and is a great French kisser.

• 39:48Speaker 06

  Anyway, these guys lead with their cocks and they're cool. Frank is dead.

• 39:53Yasi Salek?

  Yes. Nikki Sixx, regardless, he has the energy of a 15 inch cock.

• 40:00Yasi Salek?

  And I'm just saying, not long after he changes his name, guess who comes back into the picture? Mick Mars.

• 40:08Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, we're they they met up by chance again?

• 40:11Yasi Salek?

  No, because Nikki puts an ad in the recycler. Before I mention the ad, I'm just gonna do a little back tiny bit because you you just did point out I'm I'm highly favoring Nikki, but as only because Nikki is the start of the story. We're gonna get into all of them. Mick Mars was born Robert Allen Deal on May 4, 1951. So just I need it to be very clear to you guys. Mick Mars is seven years older than Nikki and about 10 years older than Tommy and Vince. So he is borderline a different generation. He's from the greatest generation. He was born in Indiana. He had scarlet fever when he was three years old. That's how old this man is. Do you remember scarlet fever? No, you don't because it's a fucking horse

• 40:55Yasi Salek?

  and carriage ass disease. We don't have that anymore. Okay, RFK Jr. That's why we need vaccines. Anyways, he grew up in Garden Grove, California. We took this trip to Garden Grove, smelled like Blue Dog inside the van. You know, that place. And he starts playing guitar at 12. And at 14, he's already performing in a Beatles cover band, because this is 1965, when the Beatles are still active. He drops out of high school and starts playing guitar in a bunch of like blues bass rock bands throughout the 70s. He's in a band called White Horse. People start to know him as like a really accomplished guitar player. He leaves White Horse because the band's like, oh, actually, we're gonna do disco music now. And he was like, absolutely not. It's worth mentioning here, although it doesn't

• 41:39Yasi Salek?

  come out publicly until much later, that in his 20s, he's diagnosed with a disease that I'm gonna absolutely butcher the pronunciation of. Onchi losing spondylitis. It's a degenerative bone disease that is meant to stop in people's mid 30s, but for him, it never did. And actually, over time, it made him shorter, which he was already kind of short to begin with. So in 1980, April, now we're back. He places, he places the ad in the recycler to form his own new original band after his other band goes disco. He also, according to his chapters in the dirt, already had the name Molly Crew. This is what the ad said. Extraterrestrial

• 42:21Yasi Salek?

  guitarist available for any other aliens that want to come conquer the earth. He was going by the name Zorky Charlemagne at the time. This ad got him too many weird messages, so he went ahead and changed it to loud, rude, and aggressive guitarist available. He said, "The guy with the Hitler mustache from Sparks responded, but I told him that I didn't like his music and I'd be wasting his time and mine if I tried out for him, and I think he respected me for that."

• 42:50Speaker 06

  Incredible. I love the Sparks.

• 42:52Yasi Salek?

  I know. Some cheesy band in Redondo Beach that went on to become Poison or Warrant, or some other name that wrecked the eighties called because they'd seen me play at Pier 52. I didn't call them back. To quote Andy Warhol, "Everyone has their 15 minutes of fame." To quote myself, "I wish they didn't." I think that this band, if it was either of them, it was probably Warrant because Poison's from Pennsylvania. So that's Mick Mars coming back in the picture. Now we're gonna talk about Tommy Lee. Born Thomas Lee Base. October 3rd, 1962. He's a Libra, of course he is, because he's a fucking hopeless romantic. He was born in Athens, Greece. Tommy Lee's mother, Vasiliki Papa Dimitru, it was a Greek beauty queen. She was Miss Greece in the

• 43:36Yasi Salek?

  50s, and she met his father, David Lee Thomas, who was in the army, and met her, fell in love with her, and proposed on the spot, even though she did not speak one word of English and he spoke no Greek. So he gets that streak of beautiful, deep romanticism from his father, clearly. They moved to Covina, right after Tommy's born. Covina is, you know, sort of east of LA. And Tommy just gets right into drums. He starts playing pots and pans as a little kid. His parents get him a little kiddie drum set, which then he abandoned to do accordion lessons?

• 44:11Speaker 06

  Incredible.

• 44:11Yasi Salek?

  After he saw the milkman playing an accordion?

• 44:14Speaker 06

  Born for music.

• 44:15Yasi Salek?

  Born for music. There's a very funny quote from Motley Crue's former management that was like, Tommy Lee would have drank the Kool-Aid given by, what's the cult leader?

• 44:25Speaker 06

  Kid Jones.

• 44:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, like, and it kind of like, it sounded kind of mean, but then you're like, he started playing accordion because he saw the milkman do it, and then you're like, oh, actually, that probably is like one of the tenants of his personality. Like, he's kind of just like, oh, okay. He also took tap and ballet lessons with his sister because he just wanted to be around girls and he took piano and then guitar. He said, "My accordion was an electric DaVinci and I'd turn it up until the distortion was nasty and play Smoke on the Water until my mother cracked and bought me a pawn shop guitar." He was playing accordion till the distortion was nasty. "I'd take it out to the yard and rock out so everyone could see me. I don't know why, I always wanted people to notice. I'm still that way. I do things because I love them,

• 45:10Yasi Salek?

  but I also want the recognition. It's brought me a lot of happiness and gotten me into a lot of trouble. Fortunately, no Jehovah's Witnesses stopped by the house when I was a kid because I probably would be selling bibles today."

• 45:22Yasi Salek?

  He joins the high school marching band instead because he sees these dudes and he thinks they look cool. It's very different than Nikki, right? Tommy's parents are really supportive. Like, he wants to play drums, like, his dad gets him professional snare, but also is like a good dad where like, makes sure that he pays him back, makes him get a job. It's like, he has a lot of structure. He's playing in the fucking South Hills High drum corps marching band. He's learning tricks, twirling, all this shit that he ends up obviously doing in Molly Crew. And then he moves high schools to go to Royal Oak High in Covina, I think maybe San Dimas area, Bill and Ted. He forms his first band, US 101, with a surfer called Tom, who was obsessed with the Beach

• 46:07Yasi Salek?

  Boys. Two of the guys in US 101 went on to form the band Autograph, sort of a forgettable 80s band. They're playing school dances and backyard shows. This is only important because this is where Tommy Lee first sees, in his words, "the coolest fucking kid in the world." "He was a surfer dude with long blonde hair, fluffed up high on his head, just like David Lee Roth. He dressed in sharp, all-white clothes and he was in a band, a much better band than mine. But he was kicked out during sophomore year and started coming to my high school. As soon as he walked through the double doors, wearing badass, low, hip-hugging bell bottoms and a white muscle t-shirt, you would have thought the rapture had occurred. All the girls were speechless and puppy-loved with this long-haired surfing rocker. His name was Vince Wharton."

• 46:52Yasi Salek?

  That is Vince Neil. I know. Can you just really picture it? Just like his hair flowing in the breeze, those white bell bottoms.

• 47:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, the white muscles he and all the grand, I can see all the girls. I can see that visual is clear and the energy.

• 47:08Yasi Salek?

  The energy, totally. Tommy, of course, because Tommy is like a golden retriever puppy dog who just walks right up to him. And he's like, hey, man, what's up? My name's Tommy and I play drums. I hear you're in a band. Vince's band was called Rock Candy. It was spelled really stupid. Tommy said Vince had an amazing voice. Just a quick, did Vince have an amazing voice?

• 47:28Speaker 06

  Okay, I have, should we talk about this now? Now I sort of think he did have an amazing voice, actually. I've a person like myself who is on Instagram all the time and also loves metal. Definitely gets a lot of, let's make fun of Axl and Vince Neil. Videos of them on their current tours and how they can't sing anymore. And you see Vince Neil videos that are not very flattering. And you can't understand any of the words to shout at the devil and all that stuff. But then I've been listening to all these albums and I'm like, Vince Neil does have an amazing voice. That video that you just sent me earlier today of Take Me To The Top.

• 48:08Yasi Salek?

  Nineteen eighty one.

• 48:09Speaker 06

  That's in nineteen eighty one and we're about to get there. That's not auto tuned. It's fucking awesome. And he lost it through drugs and alcohol, I guess, and maybe smoking. But I do think that he did have an amazing voice. I'm not a great lover of Vince Neil, but I believe this visual of him being the hottest guy in the rapture. And I do think that Vince Neil had a good voice in the early eighties. I really do.

• 48:33Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I'm here to listen to your take. I have spent a lot of time with the first album because that's my favorite. And I will say, I think he had the perfect voice for what they were doing.

• 48:44Speaker 06

  Okay, you're right. Maybe I just wish that I could do that. Take you to the top.

• 48:49Yasi Salek?

  Totally. I mean, it's an incredible, he has this like, almost like girlish, childlike quality to his voice. Especially in that early sort of, it is a little punk in a cool way. Like Axl, I think ostensibly had a really good singing voice. I don't, it was impossible to maintain because of probably the range of it. I don't know much about the science of singing voices, but like Vince Neil just had something.

• 49:14Speaker 06

  Special.

• 49:15Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 49:22Yasi Salek?

  Tommy thinks he's the coolest guy alive. He's like, he was, the girls fainted with lust when he walked by. There was a rumor going around that he fathered a boy before he was even in high school. I love that that made him cool, that he had like a teen pregnancy. Okay, here's, now we're gonna get into the Vince Neil of it all. Vince Neil Wharton, born February 8th, 1961, an Aquarius in Hollywood. His family moved around Southern California, so Inglewood, Watts, and then finally settled down in Glendora, which is near Covina. I don't have this totally right, but he is like a quarter Mexican, I believe?

• 49:56Speaker 06

  I believe that's right. The mom is half Mexican.

• 49:58Yasi Salek?

  Yes, exactly. He leaves home in high school, like gets kicked out, I'm not really sure, after he met Tommy, and Tommy lets him sleep in a, in his van in his parents driveway. And then his parents find out, and they're like, you bring the poor boy inside, because Tommy's parents are nice and cool. And so Vince sleeps on Tommy's bedroom floor till he finds a place to live. We're gonna get back to Vince in a second, but Tommy's in a band now called Sweet 19 with this guy named Greg, I think it's Leon, Greg Leon, and another high school dropout. Tommy's about 17, so this is like 1979. They play their first Starwood show, and that's where Tommy, you know, gets into the London of it all. He sees them play with Greg, and Greg was like, we went to the Starwood one

• 50:42Yasi Salek?

  time to see London, and Tommy just fell in love with them. He goes, man, there's something about that guy, talking about Nicky. Now Sweet 19 falls apart. Greg starts jamming with Nicky, who was trying to put his new band together after he leaves London. And Nicky was like, I like Tommy's drumming style, can you put us in touch? So Greg puts them in touch. In the dirt, it's a totally different scene that I think was falsified about him coming up to him at the diner or whatever. Tommy is hired by Nicky, throws Greg out because he was too normal. Tommy said he didn't have the edge that the New York Dolls had. He wanted everyone to look and think exactly as he did. Nicky's ex-man, he had a man with a plan. They find another guitar player, his name is Robin, but quote, "He

• 51:27Yasi Salek?

  was a pansy and everyone knew it."

• 51:30Yasi Salek?

  This is the guy that they make Mick Mars kick out. So Mick, neither Nikki or Tommy had called about Mick's rude, aggressive guitar player ad. Tommy said, "We opened the door and there was this little troll standing outside with black hair down to his ass and high stacked platforms with practically a whole roll of duct tape around them to hold them together. He looked like a flat broke, painfully shy, freaky looking relative of Cousin It. I was laughing so hard. I called to Nikki, 'Come here, you gotta check this dude out.'" When Nikki and him were standing there face to face, it was like The Addams Family meets Scooby Doo. Nikki said that he didn't remember, or they didn't remember each other from the liquor store. And Mick was like, "Yeah, he had changed his name and his hair was all blown out, jet black and hanging over his face. I wouldn't have

• 52:13Yasi Salek?

  been able to recognize him if he was my own father." So Tommy said, "After Robin took his shit home, Nikki dyed my hair black so that it would match his and Mick's. And they encouraged me to get my first tattoo, Mighty Mouse, my all time favorite cartoon hero. He reminded me of myself. He's little and I'm skinny and we're both always trying to save the day and we both always get the girl in the end. I had the artist design the tattoo of Mighty Mouse crashing through a bass drum with his sticks in his hands."

• 52:42Speaker 06

  Wow, that's so cute.

• 52:45Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so they get another singer in the beginning before Vince Neil. His name is Odine and he always wore white gloves. And they go to the studio. They somehow scam into the studio to record some of Nikki's songs. He already had Stick to Your Guns, Toast to the Town, and they did this Raspberries cover tonight. Tommy said, "They only gave us two hours, so when we ran out of time, Nikki made me go fuck the engineer. Her teeth stuck out of the side of her head like the air spout on a beach ball, but she was nice and had a decent body."

• 53:13Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 53:15Yasi Salek?

  Apparently during this recording, Odine would not remove his gloves to do the clapping part on Toast to the Town because Nikki wanted it to be like Sweets Ballroom Blitz. And so now Nikki's pissed. He's like, "No, you gotta clap. Take your fucking gloves off." And Tommy said, "Mick hated him anyway because he thought he was a fat fuck, a shitty singer, and a closet spiritualist. I don't like that guy. He's a hippie and I hate hippies. I want that skinny blonde fucker I saw at Starwood the other night in that band, Rock Candy." And Tommy was like, "Oh, I know him." And then he starts to set on the quest to get Vince to join their band.

• 53:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's three guys now with this lead singer with white gloves that they don't like.

• 53:53Yasi Salek?

  Yes, exactly. Tommy, Mick and Nikki, and then this, this Odine. So Vince said, I was singing with Rock Candy at the Starwood and life didn't get any better than that. Then Tommy showed up at one of our shows and tried to fuck everything up. I hadn't seen him in a year since I'd left continuation school and he was sporting bright leather pants, stiletto heels, dyed black hair and a ribbon around his neck. He was actually starting to look cool.

• 54:17Speaker 06

  I love it.

• 54:18Yasi Salek?

  I love it so much.

• 54:19Speaker 06

  I really love it.

• 54:20Yasi Salek?

  So Tommy brings Nikki and Mick to a Rock Candy show and Vince is like, I recognize one of them as the drug-addled loser basis in London. That would be Nikki. Tommy asked me to audition with his band. I was happy in Rock Candy, but I agreed anyway, so I wouldn't hurt his feelings. I guess he was gonna keep blowing them off because he really didn't want to join, but then Rock Candy also was like, we're gonna become a new wave band so we can like make it. And he was like, I want to be in a fucking new wave.

• 54:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 54:45Yasi Salek?

  So that's it. January 17th, 1981 is the official day that Molly Crew forms because Vince finally comes to a rehearsal, starts singing. Happy, happy Molly Crew day.

• 54:59Speaker 06

  Wow. And then what day does their first album come out?

• 55:04Yasi Salek?

  It's that May. It's quite fast, like within five months. Yeah. So according to Tommy, it just like, it went off. Like Nikki gave Vince lyrics. It was like, we could tell that it was just like perfect. Nikki had to rewrite some of the songs for Vince's voice because he didn't have quite the range that, you know, were whatever. And the first result was Live Wire, the first fucking day.

• 55:28Speaker 06

  Which I've gotta say.

• 55:29Yasi Salek?

  Fucking banger. All time.

• 55:30Speaker 06

  It is my favorite song. It's my favorite Molly Crew song.

• 55:33Yasi Salek?

  Me too. I think it's also, you know what? I'm gonna say it. It's my favorite Molly Crew song too.

• 55:45Speaker 06

  It's just really interesting because we talk about this whole thing. None of it's in fashion. They find each other and then five months later, they make this fucking album.

• 55:57Yasi Salek?

  Isn't it wild? Okay, so they play their first ever show, April 24th at the Starwood. Nicky gets them this gig through his day job of cleaning the floors at the Starwood. They open for this band called Y and T. David Lee Roth becomes one of their early fans. Now, they are insane, okay? Vince says, immediately they're insane. Vince is like, when Molly Crew came on the scene, it was less as a band and more as a gang. We'd get drunk, do crazy amounts of cocaine and then walk the circuit in stiletto heels, stumbling all over the place. The Sunset Strip was a cesspool of depravity. Prostitutes in spandex and needle thin heels walked up and down the streets. Punk sat in clusters all over the sidewalk and huge lines of new waivers wearing black,

• 56:40Yasi Salek?

  red and white stood in the block long lines outside of each club. Kim Fowley walked up and down Sunset, grabbing girls and throwing them in bands, while Rodney Bingenheimer strutted into clubs, able to make or break bands with a single spin on his radio show. Every weekend, huge gangs of kids from North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks and Sun Valley, where I was originally born and lived, flooded onto the scene, leaving a thick cloud of Aquanut hairspray hanging over the strip. Fucking injected into my veins.

• 57:09Speaker 06

  I love it so much.

• 57:10Yasi Salek?

  You want to drive down the Sunset Strip now, babe? It's a mall. It is a high-class mall full of terrible boutiques and bad restaurants and billboards for Netflix television programs.

• 57:25Speaker 06

  Yes, and the thing that's crazy about the Strip is, I'd say 12 years ago, it looked like 1981-ish. You know what I'm saying? All this, it all happened since like, okay, maybe the last 15, no, less than 15 years.

• 57:43Yasi Salek?

  Can I say why? Can I say why? What happened 15 years ago? Instagram. I really, I would really would pin it on Instagram because Instagram created influencer culture and influencer culture descended like locusts and it changed everything.

• 58:02Speaker 06

  Moment of silence for the Sunset Strip.

• 58:04Yasi Salek?

  Moment. Even when I was growing up, dude, it used to be so cool. We used to go to shows there. It was sketchy. It was fun. You would see fucking Rodney. You would see these crazy figures like, it was cool. You would see old like leftover glam rockers.

• 58:20Speaker 06

  Sorry, 15 years ago, it was not cool. It just looked like that because they hadn't, it hadn't, sorry. What I mean is like, it hadn't gotten built up to what it is now.

• 58:28Yasi Salek?

  It hadn't gotten mollified.

• 58:30Speaker 06

  Still really quiet and sort of seedy and there were some nice hotels. And then there was a lot of like empty, empty lots. Now it's exactly the way Yossi described it and I'm upset about it.

• 58:43Yasi Salek?

  I don't feel good about it myself personally, which is why LA is over. All right. This band would not happen without Nikki. I need to reiterate this a thousand times. Everyone played their part, obviously, and everyone is crucial. But Nikki is forcing every member of the band in all their off time to be fucking putting up posters all day long. He's like, if every other band had one poster on the wall, we'd have four. That was Nikki's rule. Nikki said, when we went out together, four male degenerates dressed like female sluts. People were drawn to our energy. If we walked into the Troubadour, everybody came with us. If we split, the club emptied. So cool. Mind you, Tommy and Vince are 18 years old. 18.

• 59:24Yasi Salek?

  Okay. They sign early on with this random man who is a construction company owner. They met through a guy who was quote, mix chauffeur and burrito getter, whose name was Stick. This man was from Grass Valley in Northern California. His name was Alan Kaufman. He was 38 years old, which, you know, at the time was ancient to them. And he would give them 50 bucks and they bought coke with it and they were like, we have a manager now.

• 59:54Speaker 06

  Beautiful.

• 59:54Yasi Salek?

  Beautiful. He wrote the first big press release for them. I say big in quotes. Here's what it said. Motley Crue is what the youth of the eighties have been waiting for. The sound to move to, the words that speak and the looks that heroes are made of. Motley Crue is not a rebellion, but a revolution in rock. A return to the hard driving sound of the Beatles. Okay. Re-energized for the eighties.

• 1:00:19Yasi Salek?

  Gorge. They play their first show at the Whiskey because Nikki goes in there all the time and harasses slash charms slash begs Dee Dee Keel, who is an extremely interesting figure. And if you're interested in more lore about the Sunset Strip in the 70s and 80s, you need to go listen to the podcast Groupies by Jessica Hopper and Dylan Tupper Rupert. Anyways, Dee Dee Keel is heavily interviewed in that. She's very interesting, but she basically turned her groupiedom into becoming the right-hand woman of the Whiskey. She is like, okay, fine. You guys can play. And she puts them on like some like off night or whatever, but they fucking sell it out. And Slash said, I saw Motley play for the first time at the

• 1:01:01Yasi Salek?

  Whiskey. The thing I remember most was the band's impact. They had the audience in the palm of their hands and they had a production going that was as professional as you can get at the Whiskey. They had flash pots, the lights, the drum riser, all the blood, the outfits and everything. Back then Van Halen was the band that really defined the LA scene, but there was an element to them that was so glitzy and I couldn't stand it. That spread across LA when they took off. When Motley came out, it was something that was different. They were a little more hardcore and that appealed to me. I thought that was an interesting distinction. Like Motley was kind of bridging this gap, not even a gap, but bridging this like thing between, we talked about the fear and the germs of it,

• 1:01:45Yasi Salek?

  all the like, you know, sort of like gutter punk thing that's going on in LA, right?

• 1:01:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:51Yasi Salek?

  And then you have this glitzy Van Halen thing. And then you have Motley Crue, who is like the secret third thing that is bringing in elements of both. Like they want to be huge. They want to be famous. They want to have a fucking production, a theater show, but they also are fucking grimy and gnarly like a punk band. That was a new thing.

• 1:02:12Speaker 06

  Didn't exist.

• 1:02:14Yasi Salek?

  Didn't exist. We wouldn't have a Guns N' Roses.

• 1:02:16Speaker 06

  Also, they wanted to take it to the top. They want, you said that really early, like, like, like Nikki wanted to be a big star. He didn't want to be a punk, you know?

• 1:02:26Yasi Salek?

  No.

• 1:02:26Speaker 06

  He also didn't want to be the New York Dolls. He wanted to be this huge, huge mega thing, right?

• 1:02:31Yasi Salek?

  Totally, totally. I mean, the New York Dolls didn't want to be the New York Dolls. The New York Dolls also wanted to be a huge, huge mega thing. All the, that's the thing that people kind of forget about the original punk thing. They all wanted to be, they all wanted to be big and make money.

• 1:02:45Speaker 06

  The Ramones wanted to be a big star.

• 1:02:46Yasi Salek?

  Totally. It didn't become a thing until like a little bit later that it was like uncool to have ambition or whatever.

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

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• 1:03:23Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so they're, they're doing good. They're playing shows at the Whiskey, they're selling out, people are knowing them. And then Nikki said, I remember back then, somebody in my band saying to me, "Bro, we're doing three nights at the Whiskey. We made it." And I said, "Made what? I want to sell out the Forum. I don't care about the Whiskey at GoGo." Everything Motley did in those days was at least to my eyes, a stepping stone to something bigger. We approached everything from the perspective of, "Don't just tackle the quarterback. Break his arms and legs too."

• 1:03:50Speaker 06

  Ooh.

• 1:03:52Yasi Salek?

  Football metaphor. So, they're doing great. But guess what? No one is going to sign them still. Because it was still all about New Wave. It was the Knack, it was the GoGo's. Nikki said, "We didn't know about charts or radio program directors or New Wave. All we knew about was raw fucking Marshall stacks of rock and roll blasting in our crotches and how much fucking blow, Percodan, Quaaludes and alcohol we could get for free."

• 1:04:19Yasi Salek?

  I don't even know what Percodan is. Like Percocet is a precursor to Percocet. So they make their own label. They're like, we're gonna put out our album ourself. It's called Leather Records with a U, where the E would be at the end.

• 1:04:32Speaker 06

  Leather.

• 1:04:33Yasi Salek?

  This is very interesting because it ties into something I want to say about the first album right now. Just before they decide to put out their own album, Brian Slagel of Metal Blade Records had asked them to be on this now very iconic compilation he did called Metal Massacre. They, I think said no, or it just didn't work out. But you know who's first piece of recorded music is on Metal Massacre?

• 1:05:00Speaker 06

  Axl Rose?

• 1:05:01Yasi Salek?

  Metallica.

• 1:05:02Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:03Yasi Salek?

  Hit the Lights.

• 1:05:04Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:05:04Yasi Salek?

  So it's, it could, very interesting, right? And I say that because I do, now we're gonna talk about, it's now, it's, you know, we're putting out, in May, they put out their first single, Stick to Your Guns, Toast to the Town. And then they put out Too Fast for Love in November, November 10th, 1981. The first song is Live Wire. To my ears, Live Wire has a bit of a thrash metal element to it. It's that, that fast guitar, you know? Like a Hit the Lights and a Live Wire are not that spiritually dissimilar, except for Live Wire has the cheese of, in a beautiful way, the like corniness, a little bit of glam metal, and has a bridge, which like, it wouldn't really have a bridge on it.

• 1:05:44Speaker 06

  I a million percent agree with you.

• 1:05:47Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I mean, I love that. I love when you a million percent agree with me.

• 1:05:49Speaker 06

  I, I, I, I think that those songs work beautifully together.

• 1:06:05Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so Too Fast for Love, they make 900 copies. They recorded it in three drunken days. The cover is an homage, is an homage to Sticky Fingers. That's Vince on the cover, by the way.

• 1:06:17Speaker 06

  Nice.

• 1:06:17Yasi Salek?

  The close up of the crotch.

• 1:06:19Speaker 06

  It's a great cover.

• 1:06:20Yasi Salek?

  Live Wire, again, we said it before, we'll say it again, this song goes crazy, I fear. I'm sorry.

• 1:06:25Speaker 06

  Good. It's so good.

• 1:06:27Yasi Salek?

  So good. I was not aware of your game, Molly Crew. I came into this really like knowing three Molly Crew songs.

• 1:06:35Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, that's one. If there's three Molly Crew songs, that's definitely one of them.

• 1:06:39Yasi Salek?

  No, I didn't know that one. I know, again, I'm a newbie. I knew Girls, Girls, Girls, Doctor Feelgood, and Shower the Devil. So imagine my surprise. I will say something very funny because before I got into this, I asked, I was just kind of polling a few people and I was like, what's your vibe on Molly Crew? And I asked Patty Schimmel, the iconic former drummer of the band Hole and one of the coolest women alive. And she was like, oh yeah, yeah, great band. Tommy Lee loves the cowbell. And it's so fucking true. When you listen to Molly Crew, especially this album, there is an egregious amount of cowbell in Live Wire. There's a ton of cowbell, like showcased cowbell.

• 1:07:26Speaker 06

  I first heard this album, I'm gonna say it was like 15 years ago, and I was on a photo shoot with Terry Richardson. We were in his studio and he played the record and then he and like some other people were like, oh man, when this came out, it was the end all fucking be all of the Sunset Strip and LA, Piece of Your Action, Live Wire, Too Fast for Love. And I just remembered, I don't know, it just like hit me. I was like, what the fuck is this? It's so good.

• 1:07:56Yasi Salek?

  I was very curious, like what the vibe was. And I finally found like one or two lines about it. Cause I was like, what is, again, we just talked about this, right? The Starwood has fear, the germs, like Black Flag. Like what the fuck is the vibe of a Black Flag show? When Nikki Sixx walks in with high heels and a fucking hair up to the ceiling? And they, they didn't like it. They, they tried to beat them up and called them F word.

• 1:08:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wouldn't, I'm not surprised. Yeah.

• 1:08:26Yasi Salek?

  Public Enemy number one. This album has grown on me so much. Like when I first heard some of the songs, I was like, this song's a bit of an LOL, but now I love it.

• 1:08:35Speaker 06

  The best ones were Live Wire and Too Fast for Love, right?

• 1:08:39Yasi Salek?

  And Merry Go Round. I think Merry Go Round is like low key my favorite.

• 1:08:43Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:08:44Yasi Salek?

  It's kind of New York Dolls. Okay, here's what I wanted to get into. I do feel like this album is like, almost like, damn, it's almost like if the New York Dolls could have gotten it together. To like, it's better than the New York Dolls album. And I know I'm going to get crucified every six ways from Sunday for saying that. But like, the New York Dolls had so many strengths, but making a good albums was not one of them. They did not make good albums. They made two pretty mediocre to bad albums. They were blueprint for so much that came forward. Major, iconic, important. I don't put that New York Dolls album on, do you?

• 1:09:21Speaker 06

  No.

• 1:09:22Yasi Salek?

  No, nobody does. But this, because here's what I want to say. On with the Show, which I think is an underrated track, to be honest. This is like, very much what the New York Dolls were doing, which is like, it's like kind of one of those like teen, what are they called? Teen Angel, Teen Suicide? You know that was like a big thing in doo-wop girl group days? Was these songs about teenagers dying?

• 1:09:54Yasi Salek?

  That's kind of the vibe of On with the Show, right? That's Frankie died just the other night. Some say it was suicide, but we know how the story goes. Like, this, the thematic concerns and the, even the like chorus of this is kind of like a girl group doo-wop song, which is exactly what the New York Dolls were super inspired by. That's what Johnny Thunders was like obsessed with. So I'm like, oh, that's, you can follow that through line really back to the New York Dolls.

• 1:10:27Yasi Salek?

  I mean, Starry Eyes has like, weirdly little tender lyric, if she'll hold you like a man's supposed to be held. Okay, Nikki. Nikki writes all the words, too. Nikki writes everything. These are Nikki's songs. I think Mick gets credited also because he writes the guitar parts, like the solos and stuff, but. These Nikki writes the songs and the words and then Vince sings them. Too Fast for Love is crazy good. What do, what do you love about it?

• 1:10:51Speaker 06

  Listen, I love doing drugs. I love like hot guys and I love being like an animal. So all those three things plus drums and guitar. That's why I fucking love this song, Yasi. That's why.

• 1:11:04Yasi Salek?

  It's.

• 1:11:06Speaker 06

  I'm a fuck it, cause I love like Animal House glam Muppets. On drugs.

• 1:11:13Yasi Salek?

  It really is animal.

• 1:11:14Speaker 06

  Like upside down.

• 1:11:16Yasi Salek?

  Oversexed Muppets. I love living on a jet, making love to someone else's dreams. Woo.

• 1:11:29Speaker 06

  I'm, I just fucking love it.

• 1:11:31Yasi Salek?

  It's so good. I think it's also because again, it's, it's still, it's kind, it's, it's a bit punk. It's a bit.

• 1:11:38Speaker 06

  Garage. I like the garage.

• 1:11:40Yasi Salek?

  Totally garage.

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  Garage part of it. I, I love the production value of this album.

• 1:11:46Yasi Salek?

  Me too, me too. I think that's what, part of what makes it really cool is how it sounds.

• 1:11:50Speaker 06

  Like, like I wish that they had, I actually do really wish that they had stayed more garag-y.

• 1:11:58Yasi Salek?

  That was not a stylistic choice. That was a limitation, that was a limitation, obviously.

• 1:12:02Speaker 06

  It actually is remarkably good to me. Like what I really do, in the end, I love, I love the Animal House Muppet Show, drugs, naked, sex, freak out, garage rock, badly, badly recorded thing about it. Like, oh my God, the Vince's vocals, but also the sort of like, kind of crooked sideways backup vocals. It's just.

• 1:12:29Yasi Salek?

  Oh my God, that's Tommy and Mick.

• 1:12:30Speaker 06

  It just, it really feels like they did it in a garage in five minutes and they probably did. And it's 44 years later and I just think it sounds so good.

• 1:12:46Yasi Salek?

  The one we hear is Remixed, right? By Roy Thomas Baker. And it's, it's like, you could only do so much with it. Like, I love it. I can't stop listening to Mary Go Round. Mary Go Round. It's kind of mournful. It's like this weird mourn. There's a great live version of it on the, like, re-release of, of it. Oh, it's just, you hear Vince doing his, like, stage banter. And like, he's like, it's just, it's just wonderful.

• 1:13:19Yasi Salek?

  The cover art, you guys, go look at it. It's, first of all, their fucking stylizing of their name. The, the like, the leather pants that like lace up the front with the one glove and all the jewelry in the, oh, it's so cool.

• 1:13:33Speaker 06

  I love it. It's just, the energy is so, it's just, and it's funny to me, too. I just, everything about it, I like.

• 1:13:42Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. God, we also, I mean, we, it kind of goes without saying, but we haven't said it. Nikki is so gorgeous. Tommy is so gorgeous. Vince, you know, has the chicks going crazy. Mick is there also.

• 1:13:58Speaker 06

  Mick also does look cool.

• 1:14:01Yasi Salek?

  He looks super cool.

• 1:14:02Speaker 06

  He looks like.

• 1:14:04Yasi Salek?

  He looks menacing. He has like, he has like this, like, sort of like, the, he looks like the satanic, the scary part of the band, the Blacky Lawless.

• 1:14:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, it's almost grandpa, but it's also working.

• 1:14:17Yasi Salek?

  Honey, it works for me. So, again, they only made 900 copies. This guy named Bill Hine of Green World Distribution bought it to distribute. And he says they eventually sold 30,000 copies. That's not like of all time, I'm sure it's way more than that, but like, it like popped off. Like, they sold out the 900 really fast. That month after this album comes out at its album release party at the Troubadour, Nikki meets and starts dating Lita Ford.

• 1:14:47Speaker 06

  So cool.

• 1:14:49Yasi Salek?

  Motley Crue in December gets a write-up in the LA Times, first big piece of press by a guy named Don Waller, who attended their show at a place called The Country Club in Reseda. That actually went on for a long time and I think used to have hardcore shows too, like in the 90s, it doesn't exist anymore. But Don Waller, he is not a fan. He says, "In just eight months, Motley Crue has risen to headline status on the local heavy metal scene. Based on the quartet's Friday night performance at The Country Club, it appears this meteoric ascent is more a result of the attention generated by the group's extremely exaggerated image than by anything remotely resembling musical innovation." Um, and that's fine, Don Waller.

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  Also, you know what? I just think they were like, minor threat or blah blah, like, fuck all these dumb losers that are dressed like bums. We're a different kind. Call us a faggot if you want, you dumb pieces of shit. Like, that's why they're not changing, you know what I'm saying? Like, they're like, "We're okay. We're good. You're ugly."

• 1:15:48Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:15:48Speaker 06

  "We're fucking hot."

• 1:15:49Yasi Salek?

  I mean-

• 1:15:50Speaker 06

  "You don't get the chicks. You're literally ugly. Sorry, bye."

• 1:15:54Yasi Salek?

  Henry Rollins was an attractive man, but yeah.

• 1:15:56Speaker 06

  Henry Rollins is hotter than any of them, sure. Okay, fine. But, but, but the rest of them are ugly.

• 1:16:01Yasi Salek?

  They play a New Year's Eve show at Santa Monica Civic Center, I want to say, sells out immediately. David Lee Roth introduces them on stage. I guess they had already written "Shout at the Devil" and they played it at this show. So, I didn't mention this, but they all live together in Motley House, which is an apartment, like, right around the corner from the Whiskey, that is an absolute detritus-filled devastation house. Like, they never threw their trash out, they just kept putting it on the balcony, so the balcony was just sky high. You couldn't even open the door to the balcony room, because it was just like rotting trash.

• 1:16:36Speaker 06

  Describes beautifully in the dirt.

• 1:16:38Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, describes beautifully in the dirt. They're just partying, they're lighting shit on fire, they're bringing chicks there, they're doing cocaine. They had a huge after-party after this New Year's Eve thing and David Lee Roth comes, that's also memorialized the dirt film. Alright, so now it's 1982.

• 1:16:54Yasi Salek?

  Enter Tom Zutat. He was an A and R at Elektra. Fun fact, Tom Zutat went to high school with Kim Thale of Soundgarden in Chicago. He's a baby A and R at Elektra. He is, actually, I saw in this documentary that I just started watching that he was not even an A and R. He was like something else at first and he had lunch with the president's son. And the president's son was like, what do you think of all the bands that my dad is signing? And he was like, I think they fucking suck. And I guess the son went and told the dad and the dad called him into his office and was like, I heard you, heard you talking about me. And he was like, well, what do you think? And he's like, well, you could have signed this, you could have signed this, you could have signed. He brings up all these like hits. And he's like, well, do you have proof of that?

• 1:17:36Yasi Salek?

  And he was like, yeah, here's what the, here's like, it wasn't emails, they didn't have emails, but like, here's like, whatever. The memos I sent to your A and R guys about these bands who later on went to be really successful and they ignored them. And he was like, okay, you know what? The next band you find, I'll sign them. So he turns into a little A and R. Now he's driving down Sunset Boulevard and he pulls over to get a little bite to eat. And he sees hundreds of kids trying to get into a concert at the Whiskey. And he's like, what's going on here? Looks up at the marquee and what does it say? Motley Crue, sold out. Exactly. He said, for a band that didn't even have a record deal to be creating that kind of hysteria at the Whiskey was pretty rare. I had to see them. They looked amazing. Nicky was so intense and seemed like he would be in the streets killing somebody if he wasn't playing bass.

• 1:18:19Yasi Salek?

  He hit the strings so hard that he kept splitting the skin between his fingers. Watching him throttle that thing with blood flying off his fingers, the strings seemed like razor blades. Vince was one of the best looking and most charismatic singers I had ever seen. Women's legs spread open just watching him sing. He was the exact opposite of the guitarist. Looking at him was like seeing Satan reincarnated, though he turned out to be the nicest of the bunch when he wasn't drinking. Tommy looked like an overexcited kid, but at the same time, he seemed like the only natural born musician in the band. He was a high quality drummer, a good showman and constantly in motion. He seemed like the linchpin that held the whole thing together. So Tom Zutat is like, we have to sign them. And still Elektra kind of laughs in their face.

• 1:19:03Yasi Salek?

  But then Joe's like, okay, Joe Smith, he was the chairman, he's like, okay, fine. Go sign them. You, you say you can do this, let's do it. Tom Zutat said, "I was the laughingstock of Hollywood recording these guys. The music that was popular at the time was British new wave, Haircut 100, A Flock of Seagulls, Dexys Midnight Runners. Hipper kids were into Elvis Costello, The Clash, and other bands riding the tail end of the punk movement. Everyone kept laughing at me for trying to sign a metal band." That's what's going on.

• 1:19:31Speaker 06

  Really interesting.

• 1:19:32Yasi Salek?

  Really interesting. So he signs them. They want a re-release, Too Fast for Love. They get a remix going with Roy Thomas Baker, who had produced Hawkwind, Queen, The Cars, Alice Cooper. It was a big deal. Now, before it comes out again on Elektra, they're put on tour in Canada. Very random. It's called Cruising Through Canada.

• 1:19:54Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:19:55Yasi Salek?

  Here's what happened. It was set up by their manager's assistant, Eric Greif, who honestly, low-key, ended up being some sort of PR Svengali because the band gets arrested and released at Edmonton International Airport for wearing their spiked stage wardrobe that was considered dangerous weapons through customs. And then also, they got arrested another time for Neil having a, Vince Neil having a carry-on of porn magazines. But both of these things were staged PR stunts that Eric Greif set up so they would get press.

• 1:20:27Speaker 06

  Love.

• 1:20:28Yasi Salek?

  Also, a bomb threat. That was also fake. Anyways, that's a little bit crazy to do a bomb threat to get press, but you know, they were, they were getting on the front page of the Edmonton Journal, babe. So the tour is like a financial disaster, but they get all this press. And then later, Tom Zutat is like, "We never understood why Kaufman made the band tour Canada until the truth came out in a lawsuit later. He had sold a portion of his stake in the band to a kid in Michigan named Bill Larson, who had pooled his parents' life savings, about $25,000, so that he could own 5% of Molly Crew. And in order for Kaufman to collect the money, he had to send the band up north to tour." So wow. It's right after that that Molly Crew get new management.

• 1:21:14Yasi Salek?

  This is when Doug Thaler and Doc McGee come into the picture.

• 1:21:18Speaker 06

  Their manager right now was like the one that can get them the good coke, right?

• 1:21:22Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it was just the construction guy, Alan Kaufman, I think was his name. They had also met with Cliff Bernstein, which is really interesting. Cliff Bernstein, famously of Q Prime, who managed Metallica forever. But Cliff Bernstein, again, management of forever was like, nope, these people are unmanageable. I, nobody can do that. That is not possible and I will not do that. Good luck to you.

• 1:21:45Speaker 06

  Doc McGee and what's the other guy's name?

• 1:21:47Yasi Salek?

  Doug Thaler.

• 1:21:48Speaker 06

  And they were the managers like through the album Motley Crue or something like into the 90s.

• 1:21:54Yasi Salek?

  Until when we'll get into it, until an ill fated Russian charity concert with Bon Jovi. Okay, so they put out the electro version in August. According to Zutat, the promotions department, electro was like not even trying to promote it, kind of sabotaging it. But then a new guy came on as head of A and R at electro named Tom Warman. He had produced Ted Nugent and Cheap Trick, so he was really into Molly Crew. So he kind of changed that. Too Fast for Love ends up selling 100,000 copies. So everything's going good until a new guy comes in to run electro, Bob Krasnow. He fires Tom Warman. He decides rock music is dead. Doesn't want any rock bands on the label.

• 1:22:38Yasi Salek?

  Has the Motley Crue video taken off MTV for being embarrassing? The one you sent me that you were like, you have to watch this, this is crazy.

• 1:22:45Speaker 06

  It's wait, wait, wait, hold on, it's take me to the top, right?

• 1:22:49Yasi Salek?

  Take me to the top.

• 1:22:50Speaker 06

  It's really bad, yeah.

• 1:22:52Yasi Salek?

  He was like, this is embarrassing, remove this from MTV.

• 1:22:54Speaker 06

  It is embarrassing.

• 1:22:55Yasi Salek?

  Then the managers come to Bob Krasnow, like, listen, obviously you don't want this band. What will it take for you to release them from their contract? And Bob Krasnow is like, listen, I'll tell you what, you make the best record that you can make. Don't worry about money. Keep the budget reasonable, though. I won't promise you that I'll put it out, but I'll promise that I'll make it easy for you if you want to take it someplace else. So that's the kind of like the energy they have going into the next making the album. Now it's 1983.

• 1:23:22Speaker 06

  That's not the worst energy, right?

• 1:23:23Yasi Salek?

  No, it's pretty great. It's kind of unheard of.

• 1:23:25Speaker 06

  Kind of sick. Yeah. It's like would never happen today. It's like.

• 1:23:29Yasi Salek?

  They would absolutely be like, I own you. You can't put out anything ever again. You can't go anywhere else. You're just dead.

• 1:23:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Yasi Salek?

  They play this thing called the US Festival in May. Do you know about this? This is this like insane festival that was put on by Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple and Bill Graham, famous promoter. Basically Steve Wozniak, who is by all accounts very cool, played by Seth Rogen in the film about, uh,

• 1:23:59Yasi Salek?

  what's his name, Apple guy? He thought the 1970s were the me generation and he wanted his festivals to encourage the eighties to be more community oriented and combine technology with rock music. Quite ahead of his time, honestly. So four day festival. He basically like had this new venue built, which still exists and they have mostly from what I understand raves there. It's called the Glen Helen Regional Park outside of LA. Four days, New Wave Day. Here's who played on New Wave Day.

• 1:24:29Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:24:30Yasi Salek?

  Divinels, Inexcess, Block of Seagulls and the fucking Clash, babe. This is why I know about this because I know about it from the Clash research. It's their last ever show with Mick Jones is this festival. Rock Day with Los Lobos, U2, The Pretenders and David Bowie. Country Day with Hank Williams Jr., Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings. And Heavy Metal Day, Motley, Quiet Riot, Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Van Halen. Coachella who babe? This was.

• 1:24:58Speaker 06

  Yeah. What a, what a, what a four day spectacle.

• 1:25:00Yasi Salek?

  What a four day spectacle. This is when Bob Krasnow is like, actually never mind. Molly Crew is fucking amazing. Like he's, he's in attendance and he's like, I changed my mind. They're amazing. I'm.

• 1:25:10Speaker 06

  Cause the energy, the stage energy.

• 1:25:12Yasi Salek?

  They're so good live, seeing the fans, seeing the response to like the metal.

• 1:25:17Speaker 06

  Something's happening. Something's happening. The eighties are, hey, you know what's happening? The eighties.

• 1:25:22Yasi Salek?

  The eighties are eightizing in 1983. Shout at the Devil is the album while they're making it that they get extremely super into cocaine. Very much into cocaine.

• 1:25:34Speaker 06

  They love to party.

• 1:25:36Yasi Salek?

  They love to party and they have all of a sudden a lot of money. Nikki buys a Porsche with his publishing deal money, crashes it pretty much right away after a party, hurts his shoulder super badly. The story is actually, I can't get into every single one of their crazy stories because we'll be here all day, but that's the story of where he like, wasn't supposed to leave the party. It's like the guy, it was at the producer's house where he would like lock the doors so that no one could drive home drunk, but Nikki like snuck out, drove his fucking Porsche into like a pole or a palm tree or something, got out and like walked home, but his shoulder was so fucked up that he got on pain pills.

• 1:26:12Speaker 06

  The way these guys were partying is not.

• 1:26:17Yasi Salek?

  It's not human.

• 1:26:18Speaker 06

  People don't party the way these motherfuckers were partying.

• 1:26:21Yasi Salek?

  Well, also it's like, we'll get into it. The consequences.

• 1:26:25Speaker 06

  Are extreme.

• 1:26:26Yasi Salek?

  Well, but also not as extreme as they would be now. Like the consequences are actually quite fucking light. Like, you couldn't crash your Porsche into a fucking telephone pole, then walk home and not go to jail. Nikki didn't go to jail. Nothing happened to him. Like he just got, he just got addicted to pain pills and then heroin because he fucked up his shoulder. This anyways, I bring that up to say that's how I got into heroin. Him and Vince start kind of doing some heroin.

• 1:26:49Speaker 06

  They just love rock and roll. They love rock and roll.

• 1:26:52Yasi Salek?

  They love rock and roll. They go on tour with Kiss around this time. They're kicked off the tour. This is the Creatures of the Night tour because Gene Simmons thinks they're too, they party too much. They have bad behavior.

• 1:27:05Speaker 06

  Do they hate Kiss at this point?

• 1:27:06Yasi Salek?

  They do now because they think Kiss is a bunch of pussy bitches for kicking them off the tour for being too cool and fun. Oh, we're too cool and fun.

• 1:27:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, I got it. Fuck you.

• 1:27:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. All right. Let's talk about Shout Out the Devil. Produced by Tom Mormon. Nikki said, "It was the beginning of the end as far as fun was concerned. Unlimited cocaine. Tommy knew these shady characters from Seamy Valley who would stop by the studio and bring ounces of coke. We would stay up for three days straight making music and not even think we were working hard. Girls were streaming in and out of the studio, getting fucked with microphones in the control room, bottles in the kitchen and broom handles in the closet because we were running out of ideas of what to do with them." See, there's parts of the dirt where I was like gun in my mouth. I would not admit these things that you guys admitted in print.

• 1:27:53Speaker 06

  All I'm saying is, this is a great book and it is an amazing.

• 1:28:00Speaker 06

  Yasi and I are not condoning this behavior, but we're saying what a fucking time capsule and how well it's put together. I just have to say that for y'all that are blah, blah, blahing, but these guys did it. I mean, I don't think, I can't imagine some of this shit. I do appreciate how candid they are. I also like, listen, I am a, I love drugs, people. I'm a drug addict. I'm sober. Sometimes you just gotta look at, you know, the wreckage of your past and be like, eh, I don't do that anymore. I did that. I've like, worked hard at being a better person.

• 1:28:31Yasi Salek?

  Right.

• 1:28:31Speaker 06

  But like, I like that they're not like faking that they weren't like the ultimate party gods, I guess.

• 1:28:37Yasi Salek?

  One thing that jumped out at me from reading the dirt, and again, is why I'm like team Nikki Sixx, is like, the only person that talks about it with any level of self-awareness and like remorse and like understanding that, oh, hey, this was fucked up, is Nikki Sixx.

• 1:28:58Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:28:58Yasi Salek?

  Because even by that point, yeah, I think he had already started 12-step. You can tell, you know, you can totally tell when someone's done 12-step. And that is such a compliment. I'm a 12-step stan. I think, I think it's, if you, people use it right, it's amazing. It's fucking free. Like, get with it if you need it. Like, but like, you really like sense that. Whereas like, and then Tommy just like, really seems like a nice person who just is like, you know, he's doing the best he can. Mick didn't participate in any of this, from what I can tell. That just wasn't his vibe.

• 1:29:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:29Yasi Salek?

  He just got wasted by himself. And then we just, Vince?

• 1:29:32Speaker 06

  We'll get to it. We'll get to it.

• 1:29:33Yasi Salek?

  We'll get to it. Different, bit of a different energy.

• 1:29:38Yasi Salek?

  So the inspiration and vibe of Shout at the Devil is like, now you can see, like, look, Too Fast for Love, which we love up and down, we love long time, is Like many of the most magical moments in rock and roll music, a product of limitations. This was not Nicki Six's ultimate vision realized. This was just, we need to make an album. We have three days. We have no money. We're wasted. Let's get it out there and we love it. But that is not what Nicki Six would have made if he had his master plan.

• 1:30:09Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:30:09Yasi Salek?

  Now we're getting into the master plan, which is, we talked about the Blacky Lalas of it all, right? This pentagram stuff, shout out the devil. Nicki said, I had ideas for the album, the tour that had to do with the mass psychology of evil behind Nazism and the Anton LaVey books on Satanism. I had grand ideas of creating a tour that looked like a cross between a Nazi rally and a black church service with Motley Crue symbols instead of swastikas everywhere. One thing you can't say about Nicki Six is that the man is not a thinker. The man is reading books. The man is having philosophies. He was genuinely on some like theatrical performance, make you think level of creative direction here. It might not have landed properly and perhaps the heavy metal audience with all love and

• 1:30:54Yasi Salek?

  tenderness and respect in my heart is maybe not, you know, picking up what you're putting down on that four dimensional level, but Nicki was thinking that.

• 1:31:04Speaker 06

  Okay, yes, but also he as the leader is seeing this whole world and creating this crazy like pop metal thing for the kids to freak out over.

• 1:31:18Yasi Salek?

  He's a genius. Nicki said, I will go on record and say Nicki Six is a genius.

• 1:31:22Speaker 06

  And also he gets pop. Like he's not trying to like push the Anton LaVey and the, and the Nazi propaganda down the kid's throat. And he's also not like a Nazi. He's just saying like, I'm, I'm looking at this.

• 1:31:37Yasi Salek?

  It's a commentary. He just said the psychology of evil. He's trying to make a commentary of it, but of course, you know, that sort of gets flattened down and it's just shock, shockery or whatever.

• 1:31:46Speaker 06

  Did I ever tell you that I love in the beginning?

• 1:31:50Yasi Salek?

  No, why? Tell me why.

• 1:31:52Speaker 06

  I love the propaganda spoken like newscaster thing up in the beginning because it's giving like Total Recall meets MAGA. I'm not a fan of MAGA. MAGA should pick up in the beginning and just, but they can't because it's also not, it's also about going shout at the devil. It's like, it sounds like Donald Trump. It's from 1983. It sounds like propaganda that you're hearing now as they're like closing down the ability of press or blah, blah, blah, whatever. Like it, like it or not, it sounds like 2025. Let me, let me put it that way.

• 1:32:28Yasi Salek?

  I'll read some of it. It's really smart. "In the beginning, good always overpowered the evils of all man's sins. But in time, the nations grew weak and our cities fell to slums while evil stood strong, and the dusts of hell lurked the blackest of hates. For he who you fear awaits you. Now many, many lifetimes later, lay destroyed, beaten down only the corpses of rebels, ashes of dreams and bloodstained sheets. It has been written that those who have the youth have the future. So come now, children of the beast, be strong and shout at the devil."

• 1:32:54Speaker 06

  And then shout at the devil starts. I love it.

• 1:32:56Yasi Salek?

  It's wonderful. I mean, I got the chills just reading that. Like that is, that's beautiful. Like Nicky Six is a, is a really good writer of, you know, he's a, he's a wordsmith.

• 1:33:16Speaker 06

  I like it and I like the fact that this is so old and that it speaks to now. I think it's cool.

• 1:33:24Yasi Salek?

  The theater of it, right? It, it, it's a gravitas. The guy who's speaking and his name is Jeff Workman. He was a English producer. But yeah, then it goes into shout at the devil. And I think they use it live all the time, like, right? To like introduce shows or even just before they play shout at the devil. What do you make of shout at the devil?

• 1:33:41Speaker 06

  I love it. It's like, they're totally ridiculous and it's totally, like if you and I were, were like 28 year old metalheads in 1983, I do not think that we would have been in the shout at the devil. I know you.

• 1:33:56Yasi Salek?

  You think it was too, like too gothy, too, too like?

• 1:34:00Speaker 06

  Like I love Christian death only. Theater of Pain and I love Shout at the Devil, but if I was there at the time, would I have loved only Theater of Pain? Yes, but would I have loved Shout at the Devil? I don't know, maybe I would have loved them both. I, this moment of theirs is great. The look is crazy. They really pull the look in.

• 1:34:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:18Speaker 06

  They're doing the football thing, like you said, and I forgot that that came from Nikki being a quarterback. I like Shout at the Devil, man. I like it. It's a world. They're world building.

• 1:34:29Yasi Salek?

  They're world building, totally.

• 1:34:30Speaker 06

  I kinda motherfucking love this song.

• 1:34:33Yasi Salek?

  I think it's pretty great, honestly. The chorus of the way that they're all chanting is like very cool. Also, I, I know this is gonna sound so crazy, but I have to speak my truth. I feel like He'll Be the Love in Your Eyes, He'll Be the Blood Between Your Thighs is such a fucking god tier lyric. Like, it's so cool.

• 1:34:53Speaker 06

  I was about to say that.

• 1:35:01Speaker 06

  Looks That Kills is ridiculous. The video is ridiculous. I highly recommend watching it, but you'll be like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 1:35:08Yasi Salek?

  It's so eighties.

• 1:35:10Speaker 06

  It's.

• 1:35:10Yasi Salek?

  Like everything, the cover of this album, like the like four squares of like, they're like, this is when they get, this is, you mentioned the look change. This is when they get a little more, they like, they stray a little away from the punky New York Dolls thing into like Mad Max. Like they have these like spiky shoulder things, like it's more of like, it's something different, you know, like baby, like, like sexy Guar or something. Like, I don't know. I don't know how to describe it, but.

• 1:35:41Speaker 06

  The kids seem to love it, no?

• 1:35:43Yasi Salek?

  I think the kids loved it. It sold 200,000 copies in the first two weeks. It hit number 17 on the Billboard 200. It eventually went four times platinum. I will say, when it went platinum, Nikki, I guess. Like had gone to pick up the platinum award, there's parties or something and he meets Demi Moore at the party. Do you remember this story?

• 1:36:04Speaker 06

  It's in the dirt.

• 1:36:06Yasi Salek?

  It's in the dirt. So then he flies to Nantucket to meet some girls and I guess it's like a tiny airport and Demi Moore is like at the airstrip with Bobcat Goldthwait. I just have a bunch of question marks here. And then Nikki's like getting off the plane wasted, holding his platinum award thing and a bottle of Jack Daniels with a big bag of cocaine in his pocket and he trips and falls, eats shit down the fucking stairs and the bottle smashes and the award hits him in the head. And then Demi Moore pulls him aside later and is like, hey babe, there's this thing called AA.

• 1:36:40Yasi Salek?

  It did not, he didn't listen at that time, but I just did think that was a cool story.

• 1:36:44Speaker 06

  Keep coming back Nikki.

• 1:36:45Yasi Salek?

  Keep coming back. It works if you work it. The song Bastard on here, which is really not my favorite, but I'll just mention that it was targeted by Tipper Gore. You guys, you guys, what a time it was when, again, I was barely, I was one years old here, so I don't remember it, but I do remember growing up in the shadow of the parental advisory stickers, because these didn't really exist before then, the PMRC. And they were like, fuck this song.

• 1:37:14Speaker 06

  This song is crazy lyrics.

• 1:37:16Yasi Salek?

  I know. It's the one that repeatedly says, please don't rape me or don't try to rape me.

• 1:37:21Speaker 06

  I got nothing to lose. We're really gonna screw you. Consider that bastard dead.

• 1:37:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Speaker 06

  You can't beat the dark. Don't try to rape me. Ah, yes, it's.

• 1:37:39Yasi Salek?

  Mick Mars said that it wasn't a call to violence, but actually about a certain person that we used to work with, that we felt we were stabbed in the back by. So there's the lore behind that.

• 1:37:48Speaker 06

  You're the king of the sleaze, Yasi.

• 1:37:50Yasi Salek?

  I'm king of the sleaze, babe. Again, the album as a whole, I think has like a pretty great, like you said, world building through line. There are not very many memorable songs in my, I mean, there's the cover of Helter Skelter.

• 1:38:06Speaker 06

  I don't care about that. I care about Too Young to Fall in Love and I care about In the Beginning and Shout at the Devil. I don't really care about it. Looks to Kill is funny and so I love it, but it's so stupid. But I really love Too Young to Fall in Love.

• 1:38:20Yasi Salek?

  What do you like about Too Young to Fall in Love?

• 1:38:23Speaker 06

  Well, you're killing me. Your love's a guillotine. Why don't you just set me free?

• 1:38:36Speaker 06

  Oh, man. Run for the hills. We're both sinners and saints. Not a woman, but a whore. I can just taste the hate. Well, now I'm killing you. Watch your face turnin' blue.

• 1:38:53Speaker 06

  I mean, come on.

• 1:38:54Yasi Salek?

  I know, it's really great. It's really great.

• 1:38:56Speaker 06

  I got a sense of humor. Do you?

• 1:38:58Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, but it's really great. I will also point out, we mentioned it lightly, but Nicky Six is also obsessed with Aerosmith. Obsessed. They're Not Yet a Man, Just a Punk in the Street, or maybe it's Just Just a Punk in the Street. That is a line from the song Last Child by Aerosmith. Also, we were talking about Shout at the Devil earlier, and I didn't mention this, but there's lyrics that say, "My head's spinning round and round, but in the seasons of wither." Those are Round and Round and Seasons of Wither are two Aerosmith song titles. This is a lot of homage going on here to Aerosmith.

• 1:39:39Speaker 06

  There's a definite pattern that where there's like two or three songs on an album that are just so fire that we're talking about them 40 years later, but it's not like a 12 for 12 kind of situation.

• 1:39:51Yasi Salek?

  No, it's really not. I'll just mention Knock 'Em Dead Kid, which I don't think is a great song, but it was written on a night that Nicky was arrested for getting into a brawl, I think outside the whiskey, that ended up including several cops. And he, Lita Ford, had to hawk her Firebird.

• 1:40:07Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 1:40:08Yasi Salek?

  Trans Am to bail him out. And then he got out and went and played a show and then wrote the lyrics to the song.

• 1:40:20Yasi Salek?

  First of all, two things that we will continue to say on this program. We don't condone this behavior and also we love and respect Robert Criscow for all time, but he does not understand heavy metal. He never has. He never liked it. When he reviews it, it's always negative. And he gave a review of Shout at the Devil and The Village Voice, and this is what it said. "It's hardly news that this platinum product is utter dogshit, even by heavy metal standards. Under direct orders from editors who don't know Iron Maiden from Wynton Marsalis, my beleaguered colleagues on The Daily has been saying so all year, and every insult goes into the press kit. Still, I must mention Mick Mars's dork-fingered guitar before getting into the only truly remarkable thing about the record, a track called "Ten Seconds to Love," in which Vince

• 1:41:05Yasi Salek?

  Neil actually seems to boast about how fast he can ejaculate, or as the lyric sheet puts it, "come." And therein, I believe, lies the secret of their commercial appeal: if you don't got it, flaunt it." He gave it a D.

• 1:41:18Speaker 06

  Listen, I get what he's saying.

• 1:41:20Yasi Salek?

  Sure.

• 1:41:21Speaker 06

  I still love it. Like, literally, this is one of these kind of albums where I'm like, I get that review and it's not wrong. I don't give a fuck. I love it.

• 1:41:28Yasi Salek?

  This is a taste thing.

• 1:41:29Speaker 06

  The energy and taste and concept and, in a way, for me, humor. Because I wouldn't like this album without my sense of humor. I mean, if I just liked this album.

• 1:41:42Yasi Salek?

  I do find it interesting, and I'm sure people listening maybe will be like, that's very funny that this conversation is between a gay man and a woman. Because like, I am really interested in what about this, like, how this band appealed? Because their fanbase was largely, I mean, obviously, women who thought they were hot, but it was largely heavy metal bros, right? And I'm just so, like, I'm trying to wrap my mind around, like, what appealed to, like, bro, straight men in 1983 about this band? Was it the danger? Was it the, like... You know, the glam of like these, you know, when you see other men who are like, obviously when

• 1:42:27Yasi Salek?

  men are like, those, those guys get chicks, they're cool, you know, like, like I'm, I'm just, I, I can't know because A, I'm too young and also I'm not a man. So I, I don't know. Producer Rob like loves them. He found them later in, because he's only a couple of years older than me. He found them, he said later in high school and I think he just thought they were great and like loved the music. I talked to a friend of the pod, Chris Habib, a wonderful artist and a cool, very cool, uh, great taste. And he said he loved Motley Crue. He said it showed him a different way to be a man. I think, I don't want to like misquote him, but it was something to that effect, which I thought was interesting.

• 1:43:09Speaker 06

  It is interesting.

• 1:43:10Yasi Salek?

  And that they were fun. He was like, it was like, kind of, again, what we are also, you know, like, he's like, they were fun. They didn't take themselves too seriously. And it was like joyful, you know, and like, that was really appealing.

• 1:43:23Speaker 06

  That's what I, I think, okay, to, why do I love them so much? I think it's that. I mean, I think it's the history, it's the bad behavior paralleling what the music is, and it's the energy. And those things I love.

• 1:43:37Yasi Salek?

  This is what Chris Habib said. You know what it is? I think boys in the eighties were very sensitive to being marketed to. And when they outgrew WWF, all of a sudden, Motley Crue was right there. That's actually so genius because WWF is also exactly like, right? Theater, the dress, the makeup. And they were so much messier than entrepreneurs like Dee Snider and Gene Simmons, but something there felt smart and playful, like when Alice Cooper did the Muppet Show. And it didn't feel like Motley Crue wanted to sell us anything. They were very much just inhabiting everything wild and unhinged about that moment and taking us along for the ride. It was like watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, like it presaged cribs or something.

• 1:44:18Speaker 06

  Yeah. And it also, I will say definitely that as a

• 1:44:24Speaker 06

  Young person, a very young person at this time, I was obsessed with WWF, you know? And so like when I, when I, I just like, oh my God, we would go to WF things all the time. Like the first time I walked into a WWF match, we were late and it was the Iron Sheik against Andre the Giant. And I just remember, I remember that so much. And I also remember like a crazy drunk man being kicked out. And I was like, with a giant beard, like a crazy fan that's on and saying getting kicked out. And I was like, this is it. Like this is so fun, you know? And the variety and like the chaos was so cool.

• 1:45:02Yasi Salek?

  And also like, I'm just having a thought. He didn't say this, but it is making me think of like, I mean, think about how boys in the eighties were raised on comic books and superheroes. That's also very, you know, like kind of a similar, over the top experience of a different kind of masculinity. That's like, I keep coming back to the word theater, but it is theater, right? What's WWF? Theater? What's Molly Crew? Theater? You know?

• 1:45:26Speaker 06

  But it's also like really messy theater that's like drugged out to the max. And I like this idea of it's, it's not this like marketed.

• 1:45:35Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's not contrived or like.

• 1:45:38Speaker 06

  It's real.

• 1:45:39Yasi Salek?

  It's funny because I think the argument would, could be made, and it was made by the nineties, that it was contrived and it was marketed and it was like, but then it's like you, when you recontextualize it to think about it through the lens of like, like a Kiss or even like a Fleetwood Mac, which is, was sort of like dominating prior. It was so fucked up and chaotic and messy that it couldn't have possibly been structured to sell records in that way. Am I making sense?

• 1:46:11Speaker 06

  You're making sense. I mean, like, at, at, at the very least, it was real danger, real sex. They were walking the walk and talking the talk, but it was like so deranged. And yeah, they were making so much money off of it, but it felt authentic.

• 1:46:30Yasi Salek?

  Isn't it ironic though, that they made their best music in the first album and then continued to like have a big cultural impact in my humble opinion, but the music just kind of gets worse and worse? Respectfully, with all the respect in my heart.

• 1:46:43Speaker 06

  I still think LiveWire is the best.

• 1:46:46Yasi Salek?

  I know. That's what I'm saying. Just like track, album one, track one. Like, if you watch, and I, I highly recommend it, if you're having trouble understanding what, what Motley Crue is and what we're talking about, watch early live videos of them, because like, it's undeniable how much energy and power and like, electricity is happening on that stage, regardless of whether the songs appeal to you, like, they definitely had it, you know?

• 1:47:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:14Yasi Salek?

  Rolling Stone also only gave it two stars. They said, "Like most self-styled bad boy bands, Motley Crue look meaner than they sound. With their layers of leather and carefully applied makeup, their looks suggest all the implied violence required of teeny bopper anti-heroes. But the music the crew used to back up that image is surprisingly mild-mannered. It's loud, sure, but that's about as close as to dangerous as it gets. Motley Crue's version of rock and roll is such a careful distillation of Black Sabbath, Kiss, and other arena giants, that you'd almost think it was developed by MTV's marketing staff. In short, originality is not this group's long suit, but then, who expected it to be? The whole point of bands like Motley Crue is to provide cheap thrills to jaded teens, and that's where the album ultimately disappoints."

• 1:47:58Yasi Salek?

  I read that, not because I agree with it, but to just point out that critically, Motley Crue is pretty much never supported. The critics never like them. They never say positive things about them. They keep growing in popularity and money and, and success commercially, but they're never critically given any respect.

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

  It's so funny, because when you read these bad reviews of this album, I really understand them, and I, but I do not care. I don't care if it's schlock. I love bad taste. I love bad, the right bad stuff. That's like, I mean, we all do, you know?

• 1:48:35Yasi Salek?

  I think you've nailed the appeal of Motley Crue. I think if you polled the people that were at the Shout! at the Devil tour, and they were, you asked them, they weren't, they'd be like, "I don't care, I like it." That's like, all, it's like, I don't care what, I don't care that it's fundamentally, or like, technically not great. I like it.

• 1:48:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, and also, you guys are fucking losers. You don't get it. Pentagram, sex, devil.

• 1:49:00Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:02Speaker 06

  Blah, blah, blah, like-

• 1:49:03Yasi Salek?

  Chicks.

• 1:49:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is not, this is not-

• 1:49:06Yasi Salek?

  Makeup.

• 1:49:07Speaker 06

  Well, this is not about like-

• 1:49:08Yasi Salek?

  Big hair.

• 1:49:08Speaker 06

  Talent, like musical talent. Okay, dorks, you know? This is about some other shit.

• 1:49:15Yasi Salek?

  Okay, dorks. It's not about good song structure. It's not, it's not about writing good songs. This is, this is about the whole experience, which it kinda was.

• 1:49:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

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• 1:50:27Yasi Salek?

  At some point after the release of Shout! at the Devil, Nikki's mother is institutionalized for a mental breakdown.

• 1:50:34Speaker 06

  Damn.

• 1:50:35Yasi Salek?

  I know. And when Nikki visits her, the first thing she asks him is, "Did you write Looks That Kill About Me?"

• 1:50:44Speaker 06

  Aww.

• 1:50:46Yasi Salek?

  And Nikki was like, "I was floored. There were so many things I wanted to say to her, so many things I wanted her to say to me, but that wasn't one of them. We hardly spoke. We were both too proud or stubborn to apologize for anything." So after this, he goes home and gets more into drugs.

• 1:51:00Speaker 06

  He wants to dull the pain now.

• 1:51:02Yasi Salek?

  That's exactly what it was. He said, "After my reunion with my mother, I didn't want a home anymore. I became crazier and more reckless, subconsciously putting myself on the same self-destructive path my mother had been on. My rock and roll fantasy wasn't just about success and decadence and rebellion anymore. It was also about pain and death. I was sure I was gonna die before I was 25." Dark. Molly goes on tour opening for Ozzy Osbourne on the Bark at the Moon Tour. Nikki said that they were like, oh, we're kind of, you know, he's gonna be like Kiss. He's gonna think, you know, we're too crazy.

• 1:51:39Speaker 06

  He's the craziest, yeah.

• 1:51:40Yasi Salek?

  Oh, no, honey. He is the craziest. He was like, you will never out crazy me, bitch. Okay, don't even fucking try. As this is memorialized in the dirt film by the amazing, and I'm gonna say, one of the only well cast people in that film, Tony Cavallaro. He's amazing. Tony Cavallaro is so fucking funny. He's incredible as Ozzy. I'll say it. You know what? You've never seen it. I'm just gonna say horribly cast.

• 1:52:04Speaker 06

  Read the book. Just read the book.

• 1:52:06Yasi Salek?

  Book is great. I'm like, why are half the actors British? Why am I watching like, a man who has the most luscious lips and honestly, a gorgeous man, play Nikki Sixx and a British man? It's just like, I'm like, what am I looking at here? And also, the story is so good with so many details and it's flattened into like, a 90 minute Netflix film. It just like-

• 1:52:26Speaker 06

  Oh god, it sounds terrible.

• 1:52:27Yasi Salek?

  It's brutal, babe. It is brutal. The guy who plays Mick Mars is actually really good, but also British randomly, or Irish maybe? Okay, back to this. So Ozzy's insane. They have the best time. Apparently on this tour, though, the band starts discussing the possibility of replacing Mick Mars, because he's old and maybe also not the most insanely technically proficient guitarist, which again, none of them work except for Tommy.

• 1:52:52Speaker 06

  They're in a band, there's some friction, it doesn't go anywhere.

• 1:52:56Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Ozzy Osbourne's bass at the time, Bob Daisley, was, he heard them talking about it and he was like, do not try to fix something that isn't broken. Like, don't do it. Then they're invited to take part in the 1984 Monsters of Rock Festival, supporting Van Halen and ACDC. This is really just for me to mention that Molly Cruz is so insane, that they're like getting so fucked up out of their minds. Nikki bit Eddie Van Halen on his stomach and-

• 1:53:31Yasi Salek?

  Vince bit him on his hand and got screamed at by his wife for saying, "Don't touch my husband's hand," Valerie Bertinelli. And Tommy Lee bit Malcolm Young from AC/DC. They're just biting people like hard, like breaking the skin.

• 1:53:47Speaker 06

  Damn.

• 1:53:48Yasi Salek?

  Van Halen and AC/DC did not think this was funny. They basically tried to get them kicked off the tour, but they couldn't because the band was so popular. So the promoter basically came up with this solution. Molly Crew would go into their trailer right when they got to the venue. And then, I mean, this is what I read. I really hope it's true. He had a crane come and lift the trailer up off the ground so that they were not able to leave their trailer until it was time for them to play. So they couldn't bite anybody.

• 1:54:18Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:54:19Yasi Salek?

  So good.

• 1:54:21Speaker 06

  Boys Gone Wild.

• 1:54:22Yasi Salek?

  Boys Gone Wild. Doc McGee said, "We had to apologize every single day of this tour to everybody, and we had to pay a $15,000 deposit to each hotel before they would allow the band to stay there."

• 1:54:34Speaker 06

  I've never trashed a hotel room, Yasi. I don't quite see what the fuss is about because I'm like, I just like a beautiful hotel room.

• 1:54:41Yasi Salek?

  Me too. I don't totally get that either. I've definitely done self-destructive things when I was in my personal Molly Crew phase, but I don't remember ever trashing any hotel rooms.

• 1:54:55Speaker 06

  Drugs, alcohol, and sex, I understand and have experienced firsthand.

• 1:55:00Yasi Salek?

  Of course.

• 1:55:00Speaker 06

  Just the trashing of the hotel room to the level of disgusting these guys did. But also, it's just an observation. I don't have anything against it.

• 1:55:09Yasi Salek?

  No, I think, I think why rock stars do this is they're like testing the boundaries of their fame. They're testing the boundaries of their importance. You know, like they're like, how much can I get away with? I'm only speaking from the outside, but it does kind of feel like that, you know? In June, there's this like really insane article about the band published in Hit Parade or magazine, and that is the biggest issue of Hit Parade or magazine that's ever existed. I couldn't find the actual article, but I found an interview about the article. And the person was like, oh, that was your biggest issue. Why? And the editor guy was like, controversy. Motley Crue is hot as hell, and it's also word of mouth. I first met Motley Crue back in December in Mexico. Vince grabs me by the arm and says, come with me. So I go into the room, and the other three guys have this young woman spread eagle

• 1:55:54Yasi Salek?

  on the bed naked, and they're going at her with a wine bottle. And I printed it. I tried not to make it quite that raunchy, but I did run it. And the word of mouth got around, just like you talk about a band who is into the devil. The band will sell more copies. This thing happened to get out there and caused a bit of a stir. 7-Eleven was going to take us off the shelves. And it just happened to be the right issue at the right time.

• 1:56:16Speaker 06

  There you go. Testing the limits of their popularity.

• 1:56:19Yasi Salek?

  Yes, exactly. Now it's December 8, 1984. This is a bad day. Arguably, the worst day in Motley Crue history.

• 1:56:28Speaker 06

  Oh, no.

• 1:56:29Yasi Salek?

  This is the day that there's a big party. I believe the party was several days long at Vince's house, where Mick, Tommy, Vince, and the guys from Hanoi Rocks, who were in town, were all raging together. It was like a four day barbecue and booze bender. And they ran out of beer. Vince said, it had started out as a barbecue to celebrate the kickoff of our third album, but nobody wanted to go home. Mick was there, I guess, which was unusual. But so that's like also another crazy part of the story where like Mick gets super wasted and then wanders off into the ocean, like maybe trying to die, but he doesn't really say that. But then he doesn't die. He's just like passes out and is like washed up on the beach, like a beach dwells, like passed out and misses all of this. So

• 1:57:12Yasi Salek?

  Tommy said Vince wanted to show off his new Pantera car. So he asked who wanted to make a beer run. Razzle, Nicholas Razzle Dingly of Hanoi Rocks, volunteered first, and the two of them disappeared out the door. The liquor store was only a few blocks away, but they were gone for a long ass time. Then Vince said, "That night, the booze ran out. I had just bought a 72 Ford Pantera, which is a fast, beautiful car. Razzle wanted to see what it was like to ride in. It was bright red on the outside with a sleek, black interior. We were both fucked up and shouldn't have driven, especially since the store was only a couple of blocks away and we could have easily walked. But we just didn't give it a second thought." Razzle wore high tops, leather pants, and a frilly shirt. A 24/7 rock and roll god,

• 1:57:54Yasi Salek?

  he wouldn't ever be caught in the jeans and a Hawaiian shirt I was wearing. We screeched into the parking lot, picked up a couple hundred dollars in beer and liquor to keep the party going. The car had no backseat, so Razzle held the bags of booze in his lap in the passenger seat. On the way home, we were driving along a hilly road that wound up the coast. It was full of little dips and hills. And as I was heading up on a slight incline, there was a small bend ahead just before the top of the hill. It was dark, and for some reason, the streets were wet. Since I hadn't been outside that night, I wasn't sure if it had been raining lightly or if the streets had just been washed. As I approached the bend, I noticed the gutter on the side of the road was full and was draining water and sewage. As the car rounded

• 1:58:37Yasi Salek?

  the curve, I shifted into second gear for the final stretch home. But as I did so, the wheels chirped and the car suddenly slid sideways into the water to the left, into the lane for oncoming traffic. I tried to maneuver out of the skid, but as I struggled with the steering wheel, a pair of lights bore down on me. Something was coming over the top of the hill and heading straight for us. That was the last thing I saw before I was knocked unconscious. When my head cleared, Razzle was lying in my lap. I forced my mouth to smile for him, as if to say, "Thank God, we're all right." But he didn't respond. Oh, it like, really like, breaks my heart. Like, it makes me wanna cry right now. Like, it's so awful. It's so awful. I hate also that this, it just, I feel so much for-

• 1:59:26Yasi Salek?

  Razzle and for his family that like because it's Motley Crue like this was a real person with a full life and like a band and like everything and he's sort of been reduced to a footnote in the Motley Crue story and I hate that you know like it really it really upsets me thinking about that because that's kind of like what how he's spoken about.

• 1:59:48Speaker 06

  Yes, I mean, that's the tragedy of like early death and the two people in the car coming down that died.

• 1:59:55Yasi Salek?

  Oh, my God, yeah. One was in a coma and yeah, two young people.

• 2:00:00Speaker 06

  You know, their lives were ruined.

• 2:00:02Yasi Salek?

  Apparently Vince Neil had been going sixty five in a twenty five.

• 2:00:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's bad.

• 2:00:07Yasi Salek?

  His breathalyzer read point one seven, quite high, point oh eight, as you know, is the legal limit. At the police station, I guess he kept asking for Razzle and an officer finally just told him, your friend's dead. He is at home and Tommy and Vince was married at this time. His wife tried to comfort him and people keep calling and then his managers are like, the police are going to arrest you for vehicular manslaughter. So he went to the station and turned himself in. The people in the car that he had hit that you just mentioned, they also were real people with real lives and names. Daniel Smithers and Lisa Hogan, they were a young couple. Hogan suffered brain damage and went into a coma. Daniel Smithers was

• 2:00:51Yasi Salek?

  in traction. Apparently producer Rob just told me that Lisa Hogan at the time was a recovering addict and she had gotten clean. And then this happened. Their parents were at the preliminary hearing. Vince Neil said, as I stood there, I knew I should be in jail for what happened, even if it was technically an accident. I mean, well, yeah, it was technically an accident, but because.

• 2:01:15Speaker 06

  You were wasted going sixty five.

• 2:01:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. If I had been just an ordinary guy without fame or money, I probably would have been locked up on the spot. Instead, I was released on a twenty five hundred dollar bail until the trial. So their manager, his managers are like, you need to go to rehab. And Vince Neil, even in this, even after this, he's like, I'm not an alcoholic. I told him I'm not alcoholic. There's no way I was going to be treated like I had a problem. I wasn't a wino lying in a gutter, but the court required it. So he goes to a thirty day. Rehab detox intense therapy thing. And he said, I had gotten maybe one phone call from Tommy or Nikki when I first checked in, but that was it. No one in the band called or visited after that. They either weren't being supportive or were being told to keep their distance. I was alone and they were probably moving on without me.

• 2:02:02Yasi Salek?

  So Nikki wasn't in town when this happened. He was in Martinique. When he came back to America, he's, he came to Miami and a man at the airport ran up to him and was like, Nikki, Nikki, your singer is dead. And he was like, what the fuck? And he called Doc McGee and was like, is Vince dead? And Doc McGee is like, no, here's what happened. And he explains what happens. And Nikki is like, I took the next plane to Los Angeles and went to the shit shack I shared with Robin Crosby. I called Michael Monroe and Andy McCoy from Hanoi Rocks and we all disappeared into a strange intense friendship bonded in death, drugs and self destruction. Vince was on the news every day and I was so junked out. I'd asked, why is Vince on the news? And someone would say, that's for the manslaughter charge.

• 2:02:45Yasi Salek?

  And I'd just say, oh yeah, and shoot up again. Nikki is not on earth at this point, obviously. And I'm sure like, this is just one more thing that makes him want to check out. He said, Vince was my bandmate, my best friend, my brother. We had just finished the most successful tour that a young band could possibly have that early in its career. We had experienced some of the best times together. We had shared everything from my girlfriends to Tommy's wife, to the room service groupies. And I didn't call him. I didn't visit him. I didn't support him in any way whatsoever. I was, as usual, only interested in indulging myself. Why wasn't I there for him? What was the reason? Were the drugs that powerful? When I thought about Vince, it wasn't with pity.

• 2:03:28Yasi Salek?

  It was with anger, as if he was the bad guy and the rest of the band were innocent victims of his wrongdoing. But we all did drugs and drove drunk. It could have happened to any of us. I thought that was like an incredibly generous and true and like valuable thing to say. You know, like, I didn't see anyone else really say that. And like, it's completely 1 million percent true. Like, while it did happen to Vince, they were all behaving this way. And it was just the luck of the draw that it happened to Vince and not to any of the others.

• 2:04:02Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 2:04:03Yasi Salek?

  And they all kept doing it, which is, that's the part where I started, I was like, this happened and you all kept doing fuck shit like that. Like, Whew.

• 2:04:11Speaker 06

  Ooh.

• 2:04:12Yasi Salek?

  Oh, it's just.

• 2:04:14Speaker 06

  And now it's a very before and after this moment, you know?

• 2:04:18Yasi Salek?

  It's very before and after this moment.

• 2:04:19Speaker 06

  The rest of the, the rest of the story is like everything after this moment.

• 2:04:24Yasi Salek?

  The party is.

• 2:04:26Speaker 06

  Paradise is lost.

• 2:04:27Yasi Salek?

  Paradise is lost for sure. I mean, Paris kind of probably left the building when Nikki started doing heroin, but also like this, this is like the real nail, nail in it. I want to say that like, again, I know I'll keep big upping Nikki. I just think this is so important because like he, fine. Okay. He said that it could have happened to any of us later, right? But also at the, at the time, 1986, he did an interview with Kerrang magazine and he said the same thing. He said, the funny thing about the accident, it's kind of ironic. Tommy got in a really bad car accident, 90 miles per hour, rolled over nine times off the freeway. He was fucked up, really bad drunk. I smashed a portion to a telephone pole and did this shit. And he shows his scar on the shoulder and I was really drunk.

• 2:05:10Yasi Salek?

  And Vince, he's going up the street and there's a wet spot with moss growing on the water and he's got a powerful car. He's giving a bit of gas and the car hits it and someone dies. And Vince was not as drunk as me or Tommy, but no one dies in our cars.

• 2:05:24Speaker 06

  Hold on, he's going 65. You know what he's not doing? Going into second gear. He's going into fourth gear wasted. Let's say you're going 35 up this hill, you're going in third gear. And then you're like hitting the brakes a little to go a little more responsibly around the curve. Then you would turn into second gear.

• 2:05:47Yasi Salek?

  Got it, but he didn't.

• 2:05:49Speaker 06

  You're not, you're not in second gear at 65. That's for sure. This part of the book is a bit like, Jesus fucking Christ, but you know what?

• 2:05:56Yasi Salek?

  It's rough.

• 2:05:57Speaker 06

  It's, it's, it's, uh, yeah, cause it's also like, it's just bad, dude. Cause it just doesn't stop, man. I'm like, the party's not over, even if it's no longer a response.

• 2:06:09Yasi Salek?

  And then he also says like, you know what? I love to drink. I love to be fucked up, but I'm not going to drive anymore. I think we should tell our fans, don't drink and drive. Not don't drink, do whatever you want to do, man. Shoot up heroin. I don't care. Do it. Have fun. It's your life, but don't get in a car when you do it. I think they do continue to drive drunk, but you know, good for you for trying to hold the, hold the line in the press. Meanwhile, through all this.

• 2:06:33Yasi Salek?

  Nicki's still writing songs for the next album. How? I don't know. I don't know how you could be so productive junkie like that, but.

• 2:06:40Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. He's like immobile, heroin addict, writing the next album.

• 2:06:45Yasi Salek?

  Literally like reading Animal Farm by George Orwell and like writing songs and like nodding out. I don't know. But yeah, then that the next year is when they start 1985. So all of that happened in, I said, December, right? And then they start making that album in January, which is again, really crazy because it's like, this should happen a month ago. Like Vince Neil is like, probably, I think, still in detox when they start going to the studio. It's just like you could, this is a, this is another motley crew through line. They never take a break. Like this would have been an ideal time to like, take six months off.

• 2:07:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:07:28Yasi Salek?

  But they don't. They go straight into the studio to make Theater of Pain. I know. I have emerged as the world's foremost Nicki Six fan, but I'm just obsessed with him. He said, every time I came home from the studio, I'd open the door and there would be people everywhere in the front room of his house, listening to music, shooting up and fucking. I'd walk past them because I didn't know who any of them were and collapse into bed. My room was littered with needles and books. I was reading about the relationship between theater, politics and culture from the olden days when entertainers who failed to make a king laugh would be put to death. To newer ideas like Antonin Arnault's essay, The Theater of Cruelty.

• 2:08:10Yasi Salek?

  Nicki Six is getting home from the studio. People are fucking in his living room. He's brush, gently brushing aside the used needles off his bed. So he could page through Antonin Arnault's essay about the theater of cruelty, which is basically what he named this album after. And it's also very hilarious that they were going to call it Entertainment or Death. And Doug Thaler, their manager, tattooed that name on his arm. And then a week later, they were like, sorry, actually now it's Theater of Pain.

• 2:08:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, Theater of Pain is such a good name.

• 2:08:42Yasi Salek?

  He stole the title, he said, either from the essay or a girl he dated a couple of times named Dinah Cancer, who was in the band Forty Five Grave. Real heads know who Forty Five Grave is. Forty Five Grave was like an OG Sunset Strip, like punky, metal-y, rockabilly band. Just as a quick sidebar, Antonin Arnaud, he was a French actor, playwright, and essayist. He's part of the Surrealist movement, but he was actually kicked out by André Breton because he was too individualist. And his whole thing was about that theater should be a primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to himself. It was about shock, seeing the baseness in the world.

• 2:09:26Yasi Salek?

  This is where our friend Nikki Sixx took his influences for the Theater of Cruelty.

• 2:09:33Speaker 06

  Well, let's look at the cover.

• 2:09:34Yasi Salek?

  It's a good cover.

• 2:09:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a good cover.

• 2:09:37Yasi Salek?

  I'm sorry, I'm a sucker for the, the masks of, uh, the theater of the laughing sad masks. I mean, is it super eighties and a bitch is? Yeah.

• 2:09:48Speaker 06

  I love it also because they're talking about themselves. They're in a world of pain.

• 2:09:52Yasi Salek?

  They're in a world of pain, Annie, but they have to entertain.

• 2:09:54Speaker 06

  They're chasing pleasure, born to entertain, living in pain, chasing the dragon, all the powders, all the, all the babes. People are dead.

• 2:10:05Yasi Salek?

  Yes, R.I.P. Razzle. I'm gonna tell you something, the vibe of making this album was very bad. Nikki said in the studio, "No one liked the sounds they were getting out of their microphones, bass or guitars, but we were too loaded to do anything about it. I had only written about five songs and we recorded every one. Then we had to plunder past demos just to scrape together a full album. Home Sweet Home was one of the first songs we put to tape." And am I correct? Mel in That Home Sweet Home came from like Tommy playing around on the piano, like a little piano riff.

• 2:10:41Speaker 06

  Yes, so I interviewed Tommy Lee and Nikki Sixx, I think a year ago in LA. Amazing experience, just a fun moment. It was exactly a year ago. I don't think I get that starstruck that often. I was, I was like, keep it together, dude. Just like, keep, keep the questions coming and like chill with the compliments and get out of here. But anyway.

• 2:11:05Yasi Salek?

  Did Vince Neil say, um, he was too busy?

• 2:11:08Speaker 06

  I don't know. Vince Neil was not part of the program that day. And, um, but I do remember Nikki telling me that it started with Tommy like tinkering on the thing. And then it all came from that. And I think it came fast and they just were really miserable and missed home. Cause they'd been on tour, crushing, you know, arenas around the world and life sucks.

• 2:11:41Yasi Salek?

  Okay. So basically they're in this studio, they're fucked up, they can barely get it together. Yeah. He's, Nikki said that too. We were stranded and alone and desperate and confused vagabonds yearning for some sense of security. But we recorded it so poorly. And also basically Vince is like persona non grata at this studio at this point. Like they are very much like icing him due to the terrible misfortune that has befallen prior to this.

• 2:12:12Speaker 06

  Yeah. They don't know how to really, they, I think they all have guilt. They all have survivor's guilt. And they don't really have the skills to heal together or separately, you know? So they're all sort of like breaking up and they're splintering off to try to self-medicate, self-heal, find fun. It's rough. And Vince, it's ironic because I think the, the vocals on Home Sweet Home. Well, first of all, this is a one, this is a one song album, Home Sweet Home. And, uh, his vocals are great on it. And I feel like these are the vocals that Motley Crue is most famous for as a vocally, right? And, but he can barely keep it together in the studio.

• 2:13:02Yasi Salek?

  Here's the thing. From what I understood from the press at the time, this is seen as their like shift towards glam metal. And people kind of like pushed against this. Like, okay, this is what Kerrang! said. This is 1986. "Some say Motley Crue's albums are progressively wimping out. What do you say to them?" And Nicki said, "Fuck you, man. What do you want us to do? Do like Ted Nugent and record Cat Scratch Fever 8,000 times? We played the piano on heavy metal cuts like Knock 'Em Dead. People say they don't hear it because they don't know it's there. There's fucking grand piano all the way through it and fucking horns, synthesizers, harmonicas. So we take a song like Home Sweet Home, we put a piano at the beginning of it, and it's like, oh, they're not heavy metal anymore.

• 2:13:46Yasi Salek?

  This is what I wanted to ask you about, though." Then he goes, "But we were never heavy metal. We were always like sleazy. The difference is we could barely play in the beginning, and now we've become a pretty good band." What do you think this means? The distinction between "we were never heavy metal", "we were actually sleazy"? Because I feel like that sounds really on point.

• 2:14:09Speaker 06

  I am not a historian of rock like you are, but I like what they're saying here, and I think that I agree.

• 2:14:20Yasi Salek?

  I think that's kind of right. I mean, they weren't heavy metal. That first album is kind of punky with like a little few too many guitar solos to be total punk. And then the sleaze thing is really makes, sounds more apt than anything that heavy metal would apply.

• 2:14:35Speaker 06

  Heavy metal is Metallica and Slayer and Megan F and shit. They're not doing any of that.

• 2:14:43Yasi Salek?

  He says, "We've got some heavy metal like Live Wire, but 10 Seconds to Love is just kind of trash. You've got to do everything, or it gets boring."

• 2:14:51Speaker 06

  Wait, I feel like they said to me, or that I read in the dirt, but I forgot, they really want, oh, they really wanted this to be like an Aerosmith song.

• 2:14:59Yasi Salek?

  They wanted a lot of things.

• 2:15:01Speaker 06

  Is Aerosmith sleaze? Aerosmith is rock.

• 2:15:03Yasi Salek?

  Aerosmith is really good. I gotta say, those older Aerosmith albums, they fucking go.

• 2:15:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're good.

• 2:15:09Yasi Salek?

  The band hate this album. Vince has referred to it as his least favorite crew album. He said, outside of Home Sweet Home, which MTV aired so much, they had to establish an expiration date for new videos. The rest of the album was pure shit. Every night when I ran around stage in my pink leather pants that laced up the sides, I felt like the only one sober enough to realize how bad some of these songs were. I was shocked that the record went double platinum. Maybe it just reinforced the idea that we were so great that we could even get away with putting out a terrible album. Too big to fail, babe. They're too big to fail now. Even though this album is bad and has one song, it goes. Double platinum. They're so popular.

• 2:15:48Speaker 06

  I do remember Smoking in the Boys Room being on MTV all the time and was always like, oh, God.

• 2:15:54Yasi Salek?

  You hated it, the cover?

• 2:15:55Speaker 06

  I didn't like it. I actually think, one thing, when I was, when I was re-listening to this album in advance of doing this podcast, Yasi, I thought that the Smoking in the Boys' Room alternative guitar solo.

• 2:16:10Yasi Salek?

  We discussed that.

• 2:16:10Speaker 06

  Uh, whatever, like the alternative, like that sounds, I liked it.

• 2:16:15Yasi Salek?

  Much better, yeah.

• 2:16:24Speaker 06

  And I'm almost like, oh, it's a bummer that they weren't more garage. I get it, they don't want to be garage. I just don't like the production. The whole album's forgettable.

• 2:16:31Yasi Salek?

  I agree.

• 2:16:32Speaker 06

  But, but, Home Sweet Home is an incredible anthem and it's one of my faves.

• 2:16:37Yasi Salek?

  Why are you too scared now to say what you said off mic where you said you changed your mind and this is actually your favorite Molly Crew song?

• 2:16:43Speaker 06

  I'm not scared. I do, I will say, at the end of the day, Home Sweet Home is my favorite beyond live wire. I just fucking love Home Sweet Home.

• 2:16:54Yasi Salek?

  Do you prefer this version or the Dolly Parton version that came out this year?

• 2:16:58Speaker 06

  I am going to tell you that I prefer the original version, Yasi.

• 2:17:03Yasi Salek?

  However, we have to admit that the Dolly Parton version is pretty good. It's pretty major that they got Dolly Parton to sing on it.

• 2:17:17Yasi Salek?

  Love and respect to everyone. I mean, even Nikki Sixx called this album a pile of rubbish. They blamed Tom Warman, the producer, who said it was that they said he didn't know how to produce them. But then also, it's like, you guys were really fucked up and you had no songs. So like, I'm not taking sides. I'm just saying like, like, how much could he possibly do? He did his best, probably. I'm not, I'm not on team Tom Warman. I'm just saying like, it's likely both sides are correct. But like, it was a cursed album to begin with.

• 2:17:51Speaker 06

  It's funny how I still can't really see this as a flop because they're really becoming bigger and bigger. And that song was so big that they're still going up.

• 2:18:01Yasi Salek?

  It's not a flop. They're, they're on their ascent. When we're going to get into cog theory, which I know you're really excited about. That's right. But they have, this has, in the cog theory outlined in the dirt, this definitely has thrown the cog up another whatever into the other part of the machinery. Cog theory is a little confusing, to be honest. Rolling Stone said this about it. Punk seemed to offer the kids an alternative in terms of grunge, incompetence and snotty, nose thumbing attitudes. This is not grunge because that grunge hasn't happened yet. It's just the word grunge.

• 2:18:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:18:37Yasi Salek?

  After all, what was punk rock but a revved up morass of heavy metal chords? But punk remains a cult taste. What went wrong? This is not a positive thing about heavy metal. So the guy says, heavy metal is boys' music. Using the electric guitar is a desperate and obvious symbol of adolescent hormonal hysteria. What do you think about that?

• 2:18:59Speaker 06

  I agree.

• 2:19:02Yasi Salek?

  And what's so wrong with that? And what's the problem?

• 2:19:04Speaker 06

  Well, the problem is that it's not a good-

• 2:19:06Yasi Salek?

  And that's bad because-

• 2:19:06Speaker 06

  The problem is that it's not a good album. So like, it's one thing when they're reading them saying the same kind of thing about Shout at the Devil, which, which we like. But then here, I'm like, no notes. I don't think they would even disagree with this. It's just like, it's just not hitting for me.

• 2:19:23Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:24Speaker 06

  Or them, or anybody.

• 2:19:25Yasi Salek?

  Or anybody, yeah. Except for Sandy Robertson from Sounds Magazine in the UK, who basically said this was better than Shout at the Devil, which is like an insane take.

• 2:19:34Speaker 06

  It's a one-song album.

• 2:19:35Yasi Salek?

  It's a one-song album. And then Kerrang was like, this is worse than Shout, but it's basically good, which is also lightly, lightly incorrect.

• 2:19:42Speaker 06

  Fake news.

• 2:19:43Yasi Salek?

  Fake news. Okay, now they go on the Theater of Pain tour. Vince is really pushed away. Nikki said, "Since Vince's accident, the four of us had detached and started leading separate lives, especially Vince. When we went out on the Theater of Pain tour, he was left on the outside. For some reason, we continued to see him as the bad guy and ostracize him. He was in trouble, but we weren't. So if I caught him with a beer after the show, I'd chew him out. On one hand, he deserved it, because if he was caught, the judge would crucify him at his trial. But on the other hand, there I was lecturing him about drinking a beer when I had a bottle of Jack in my hands and a syringe in my right boot. So while everyone was busy keeping Vince from drinking beer, no one realized that I was progressively growing worse." Boo.

• 2:20:26Yasi Salek?

  The cracks are showing, honey. This is so po- Nikki is just, he goes, "Without realizing it, Tommy, Mick, and I drew a line and pushed Vince to the other side. The longer we kept parting while enforcing sobriety on him, the thicker that line became, until the earth beneath it cracked and Vince was left alone on a small sliver of rock, separated from the rest of us by a chasm that all the pills, girls, and therapists in the world couldn't cross." Gorgeous.

• 2:20:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, truly.

• 2:20:56Yasi Salek?

  He's such a wordsmith. Vince said, "I never really thought I was an alcoholic until I completed rehab successfully. Then I became an alcoholic. Before, I just drank to have a good time. But after the accident, I drank to forget about what happened. On the plane, the guys would turn to me and ask, as they chugged Jack and Coke, 'Vince, could you pass the plate of Coke over here?' They'd smoke pot and blow it in my face. They acted like that the whole tour, and then if I ever broke down and took a drink, they'd chew me out and tell me I was hurting the band." Okay, we haven't even talked about the plane. Should we just do a quick sidebar about how the Motley Crue jet, where they, didn't they, sorry, am I, am I correct? They painted it black, which at first they were told they were not allowed to do, but then they just paid enough money that they could have a black private jet, and they

• 2:21:40Yasi Salek?

  also painted a cock and balls on the side. Is this correct?

• 2:21:43Speaker 06

  I believe so, with the black leather interior.

• 2:21:45Yasi Salek?

  Yes. The Motley Crue jet. So crazy. They do have a second security guard that they hire for this tour who literally just walked around watching Vince to make sure he didn't drink and like knocking beers out of his hand. And then Vince would fly home between legs of the tour to go to court and like meet with the DA and stuff. And he said, in order to avoid a trial, the DA advised me to plead guilty, or I think his lawyer advised him to plead guilty to vehicular manslaughter and strike a compromise. He figured since the people drinking at my house were mostly in Motley Crue and Hanoi Rocks, the party could be explained as a business meeting

• 2:22:27Yasi Salek?

  and we could pay damages to the families through the band's liability insurance because there was no way I could afford them on my own. This is why the families agreed to what everyone saw as such a light sentence. 30 days in jail, 2.6 million in restitution to them, and 200 hours of community service. In addition, my lawyer told the DA I could do more lecturing in school and on the road than I could on my ass in prison, where I wouldn't be a benefit to anyone. Could you see this happening now? I don't think this would happen now. Like, I don't think if a very public rock star, pop star figure, like, it just seems so crazy that you could like, do this and then they're like, you get 30 days in jail. It's vehicular

• 2:23:11Yasi Salek?

  manslaughter. You killed somebody.

• 2:23:13Speaker 06

  I think when there's a lot of money to be made in America now and then, people find a way, you know?

• 2:23:20Yasi Salek?

  No, I think you're right. Nikki said, the day Vince's sentence was handed down, I was at home with my girlfriend Nicole, answered the phone with a needle in my arm. We were scheduled to tour Europe with Cheap Trick in a couple of months and I had become so shut off to Vince that I didn't care how many years he was about to be sentenced, as long as it didn't fuck up the tour, because Cheap Trick had always been such a big influence and now they're gonna be our opening act. When I heard it was only 30 days, my heart thawed and my eyes watered despite myself. He was gonna be okay and the band was gonna continue unscathed, even though we didn't really deserve to. Then I shot up and nodded out.

• 2:23:57Yasi Salek?

  An absolutely gnarly junkie at this point.

• 2:24:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24:01Yasi Salek?

  He is full on shooting heroin, shooting cocaine. He is an absolute full time, round the clock, 24/7 drug addict. He said, "I didn't even care about getting laid anymore. Vince could keep all the girls, just leave me the drugs. I'd always thought age and success had allowed me to overcome the shyness and low self-esteem I had developed from constantly switching homes and schools as a kid. But in reality, I hadn't changed at all. I had just drowned those feelings in heroin and alcohol. As a human being, I never really learned how to act or behave. I only put myself in situations where I was the one running the show. I wasn't interested in hanging out with other people in their environments where I had no control." So basically him and his girlfriend would just sit at their house and have round the clock parties with Izzy Stradlin, Britt Eklund, porn stars.

• 2:24:46Yasi Salek?

  He never left the house, just never.

• 2:24:48Speaker 06

  Damn, where is this house, do you think?

• 2:24:50Yasi Salek?

  I think it's in the valley.

• 2:24:52Speaker 06

  Oh my God, Nikki Sixx at home, Google image search, really?

• 2:24:57Yasi Salek?

  It's giving.

• 2:24:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:25:04Speaker 06

  Damn.

• 2:25:07Yasi Salek?

  It is worth pointing out that Nikki Sixx is extremely wealthy and which we'll get into due to the fact that he was such a genius to re-attain the catalog, the rights to his catalog, pretty early on, so good for him. All right, so Nikki and Nicole are having round the clock parties at home. Vince goes to jail for 19 days in Torrance, my hometown, gets out for good behavior. While he's in jail, his wife Beth leaves him and takes their daughter and everything he owns, like he comes home and there's literally not one single thing in his home, except this really expensive Rolex his managers had got him after he went to jail, which is a like crazy thing to gift someone after that, and his car.

• 2:25:50Yasi Salek?

  Tommy said, "It wasn't the same anymore after Vince's accident. Something had changed. Sure, we still partied, went crazy, got fucked up and stuck our dicks in anything, but it wasn't the same. Partying led to addiction, addiction led to paranoia, and paranoia led to all sorts of stupid mistakes with huge repercussions. Even fucking wasn't the same. Fucking led to marriage, marriage led to divorce, divorce led to alimony, alimony led to poverty." That's a little dramatic. "Everything was different after the accident. We became conscious of our own mortality as human beings and as a band."

• 2:26:24Speaker 06

  Damn.

• 2:26:25Yasi Salek?

  They're growing up before our very eyes. This was very funny. Nicky was talking about like also how much they changed and he said, "A band's strength is in the solidarity of its members. When they split off into different worlds, that's when the problems begin." What was cool about us initially was that Vince and Tommy were kids from Covina, I was from Idaho, and Mick was from Indiana. We were all small-town dysfunctional losers who somehow became rock stars. We made our dreams into reality, but we got so caught up that we forgot who we were. Vince was trying to be Hugh Hefner. Tommy thought he was Princess Diana with his high-class marriage and new friends.

• 2:27:00Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 2:27:00Yasi Salek?

  It should be pointed out, this is just around where, I mean, I'm gonna talk about it, Tommy meets and marries Heather Locklear. And I thought I was some kind of glamorous bohemian junkie like William Burroughs or Jim Carroll. I guess Mick always wanted to be Robert Johnson or Jimi Hendrix, though he was drinking so much, he was beginning to look more like Meatloaf.

• 2:27:17Speaker 06

  I can see it now.

• 2:27:18Yasi Salek?

  He was gaining some weight. So yeah, in 1985, Tommy meets Heather Locklear at the Forum Club after an REO Speedwagon concert. Apparently, Molly Crew's accountant Chuck Shapiro was also REO Speedwagon's accountant, but his brother, Dr. Shapiro, was Heather Locklear's dentist. So Tommy Lee had him call up his dentist brother to please introduce him to Heather, which does seem like a thing that your dentist shouldn't do, but I don't know what the rules were in 1985. Mel, if somebody, if some guy thought you were like super hot and had an in with your dentist and asked your dentist for your information,

• 2:28:01Yasi Salek?

  would you be okay with your dentist passing that information along?

• 2:28:05Speaker 06

  It's very my dentist. Like, my dentist, my dentist would love that and also give me, it would be easier to make an appointment. So yes, in my, in my personal case, that's very my personal dentist.

• 2:28:19Yasi Salek?

  Got it. Okay, amazing. So if you guys are trying to get it, Mel, I feel like one avenue would be to figure out who his dentist is.

• 2:28:25Speaker 06

  Sorry, what I mean by that is that my dentist is a dentist to the rich and famous who loves being a dentist to the rich and famous. So maybe, maybe that's literally still how it works. I would also say, I think it's a good idea.

• 2:28:37Yasi Salek?

  To, to go through someone's dentist?

• 2:28:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it could work. You know what I mean? Like, hey Heather, if you think, if you'd be interested, he's interested in you and he's playing Hollywood, you know, next week. Like, maybe, maybe we should get some tickets and some backstage passes. You know what I'm saying?

• 2:28:54Yasi Salek?

  One of my most enduring theories and math equations is that the scale of how creepy or uncomfortable weird a behavior is, is relative to someone's attractiveness and fame. If you're like really attractive and famous, it's less creepy if you try to get at me through my dentist. But if you're not, then it's more creepy. And I don't make the rules. That's just math.

• 2:29:17Speaker 06

  I think you're right.

• 2:29:18Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 2:29:19Speaker 06

  It adds up.

• 2:29:20Yasi Salek?

  It adds up. Okay. So it's 1986 now, top of February. They do an interview with Kerrang. It's really crazy because, once again, Nicki is just flat out honest with everyone about the fact that all he does is drink and do drugs. I mean, says it in interviews. Like, he tells Kerrang, now we can afford to buy pounds of this drug and pounds of that drug and fucking bottles and bottles of this and just sit in your house. I have a recording studio in my house and I just sit there and get high and write music and whatever's inside of me comes out.

• 2:29:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:29:53Yasi Salek?

  Just sitting at home.

• 2:29:54Speaker 06

  Not, not the best way to make great art, right? Like, that's, that's when you're like, you're really rich and you're really isolated and like, it just might not sound like albums one and two.

• 2:30:06Yasi Salek?

  Right. You need input. You need life experience. I mean, I think he has, has life experience. He's plumbing the inner depths of pain, but it's not, it needs a little more input. I thought this is, once again, Nicki is just like so profound. The interviewer was like, you used to write Molly Crew songs from the street, lying in your back in the gutter, looking up. Now you gotta write from the top, looking down, just like what you were saying. And he said, yeah, but I still think I am in the gutter because once you've soiled what's inside of you, you can never lose it. That's why I have a hard time ever having a girlfriend because I'm a tramp. It's pretty self-aware. Once, once you've soiled what's inside of you, you can never lose it.

• 2:30:47Speaker 06

  But there's this like Tracy Jordan, there's a Tracy Morgan thing on, on 30 Rock when he's Tracy Jordan and Tracy's doing stand-up, but he can't like, he has nothing to talk about except being rich and isolated. I always go back to that because it's like, the material's so off because Tracy Jordan only knows like being at home and being insanely rich and like courtside seats.

• 2:31:10Yasi Salek?

  It's a classic thing, especially with music and especially with rock music. I mean, it kind of ties into my thing about how most rock music that is really amazing is made by, in earlier parts of career by younger people because there's just like so much more interesting material to write from and also so much less. They go so over the top when they have anything at their disposal, when, when they have limitations, it comes out amazing.

• 2:31:36Speaker 06

  Sometimes it's funny to talk to like gays in their 60s that I know and really respect and think are so cool, that they're like, yeah, I liked Madonna in 1982 and after that I was over it. Or one recently was saying to me, when Madonna was Madonna, it was really cool, but by the time she started reinventing the wheel, which is also when young Mel Ottenberg's life was changed. Like, when she started reinventing the wheel, because everyone had caught up with her, I wasn't as into it anymore. When, when it was just like raw energy and style that she had just been, that was like real and authentic, I dug it. Once it was like arena tours and, and like cone bras, I didn't give a fuck. And that, you know, that's, that's rock and roll.

• 2:32:19Yasi Salek?

  That's rock and roll. Not usually pop, but that's rock and roll. They basically, the guy is like, are you guys homophobes? And he's like, what? What's that? And the guy is like, that's people who are afraid of homosexuals because they fear their own homosexual tendencies. And Nikki says, hey, man, if that's what people want to do, that's fine with me. I don't really care what people do. And the guy's like, well, what about your effeminate clothes? And Nikki says, hey, man, I like to look good. I wear makeup. Shit, President George Washington used to wear a wig and makeup. I mean, come on, if he can do it, I can do it.

• 2:32:49Speaker 06

  That's my boy.

• 2:32:50Yasi Salek?

  I love him. Incredible. Incredible, perfect answers. Okay, so in May of eighty six, Heather and Tommy get married in Santa Barbara. Nikki is the best man. However, he is a massive drugged out mess and everybody is absolutely freaked out by how how he looks. Like him and his girlfriend Nicole show up looking like just ghouls, do you know what I mean? Like have not seen the sun, have lost like fifty pounds. Um, it's a bad vibe. Nikki said, Tommy is the brother I never had. He has this energy and positivity I just haven't got. I get off on that and I give him what? Maybe a darkness and edginess he doesn't have. And which in some twisted way he admired. It freaks me out that Tommy has never mentioned how fucked up I was at his wedding. I love him from that. That was from his diary.

• 2:33:34Yasi Salek?

  Tommy said, when Nikki showed up at my wedding, he was transparent, dude. He wasn't white or even gray. I thought I could see straight through him. He looked fucking terrible. He was doing everything in his power to pull it together and be a part of the day, but I'll never forget how bad he looked. He was drinking everything in sight to try to stay even, but you could tell he just wanted to get away from everyone and get high. He had that look of panic in his eyes. And then as soon as the wedding was over, he was gone. I never gave him a hard time for it, but best man, he sure fucked that one up.

• 2:34:03Speaker 06

  The pictures are so good.

• 2:34:05Yasi Salek?

  Of the wedding, I know.

• 2:34:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34:07Yasi Salek?

  It really is like, that's like fucking November rain, you know, like that's literal, like actual November rain, you know?

• 2:34:15Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 2:34:17Yasi Salek?

  The day that Nikki comes home from Tommy's wedding, this is actually one of my favorite parts of the Molly Crew lore. There was a hand delivered letter from our accountant Chuck Shapiro waiting for me in the mailbox. You have been spending five thousand dollars a day. Five thousand times seven is thirty five thousand dollars a week. Per month, that's a hundred and forty thousand dollars. In exactly eleven months, you will be completely broke, if not dead.

• 2:34:45Yasi Salek?

  That's what the letter said.

• 2:34:47Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 2:34:48Yasi Salek?

  He really spelled it out.

• 2:34:49Speaker 06

  Rock and roll.

• 2:34:51Yasi Salek?

  He did not respond to Chuck Shapiro's handwritten, very clearly, you know, spelled out letter. They hired Bob Timmons to try and do an intervention. Famous sobriety coach to the rock stars. He did get Nikki and Nicole to go to rehab. However, Nikki broke out and left. Nicole did stay and get clean. And so when she got out, she basically couldn't obviously be with Nikki anymore because their entire relationship was predicated on doing heroin. So she left him. And one day, this is where we get to real Mel Ottenberg hours. One day Nikki is high and watching television with his live in personal assistant, Jesse James, and saw a video for the song Vanity Six, Nasty Girl.

• 2:35:37Yasi Salek?

  And he thinks Vanity is very hot. So he calls, she is, so he calls his management office and he's like, I want to meet Vanity. And they set them up and within a week, he's on his way to her apartment in Beverly Hills for their first date. Guess what?

• 2:35:53Speaker 06

  She's a junkie.

• 2:35:54Yasi Salek?

  She's freebasing cocaine, honey. She is just as bad, if not worse than him, ready to party.

• 2:36:03Speaker 06

  The hottest junkie babe in Hollywood, it turns out.

• 2:36:07Yasi Salek?

  She would, he like went to her house and she was like making like, you know how like meth heads and like, I mean, she wasn't a meth head, she was freebasing cocaine, which is like a slightly different. She was making like insane art, you know, like collage art. Like that was her thing.

• 2:36:21Speaker 06

  Yes, Bridget Berlin in Andy Warhol's Factory was like shooting speed and making books like that. And that's what, and, and, and cool art. And that's what it reminded me about with Vanity. If Vanity is, if any, if someone from the Vanity estate hears this, I'm definitely interested in, in the work.

• 2:36:38Yasi Salek?

  And purchasing and acquiring some of that work.

• 2:36:41Speaker 06

  And also Warner Brothers, why don't you fucking stream Vanity Six? It's fucking crazy. Give the people what they want. The kids love Vanity Six.

• 2:36:50Yasi Salek?

  Vanity, Janice Matthews has passed away. I totally forgot. But she, she was a minister before she died. Yes, she became a, uh, a morning and Christian and went by the name of some sort of minister. Anyways, she, she's heavily quoted in Nikki Sixx's book about his diary. That's why. Cause she, like she came, she did an interviews with him for it, which is very nice. She died of kidney failure at 57 in 2016. R I P Vanity. Is this not one of the most unlikely relationships that you could possibly think of?

• 2:37:24Speaker 06

  I, I actually totally see it because they're both super hot and they both have, I see it, I think it's great. They're both super fucking good looking and they're both mega partiers with managers that connected them. I see it. I think shit like this is happening all the time. You know what I mean? Like hot person, hot guy meets hot chick.

• 2:37:45Yasi Salek?

  Well, it's really like drugs though, because they absolutely had nothing in common and nothing to talk. I mean, this is Prince's ex-girlfriend. Like you don't really go from Prince to Nikki Sixx. It's not really, I don't think, living in the same universe of person.

• 2:37:58Speaker 06

  I love Vanity Sixx. I love Vanity.

• 2:38:00Yasi Salek?

  May she rest in peace.

• 2:38:06Speaker 02

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• 2:38:31Speaker 03

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• 2:39:02Yasi Salek?

  Now Nicky's dating Vanity, so he's both strung out on heroin and freebasing cocaine, and it's time to make another album. Nicky said, "I didn't want to be shooting up anymore, and I put a lot of effort into trying to get straight, but I couldn't help it. When I decided to go on methadone to withdraw, it only made matters worse, and soon I was hooked on both heroin and methadone." This is bad news. Also, Vanity would like show up at the studio and like embarrass him by like dancing all crazy, which I thought was kind of amusing. He couldn't write any songs. His grandfather keeps, this is where it gets really dark, his grandfather keeps calling, and keep in mind, like, these people raised him, right? His grandfather and his grandmother.

• 2:39:44Yasi Salek?

  Grandfather keeps calling about how sick his grandmother is, and like, she's sick. It's bad, she's sick. But he was just like too smacked out to ever like get it together to go back to visit, and she died before he ever got to see her again. Nona. And he also missed her funeral. And the day after the funeral, which he missed, is when he wrote the song "Nona" and resolved to clean up.

• 2:40:17Yasi Salek?

  However, in December, he has his first overdose in London, his first ever heroin overdose. He lives. Now it's March of 87, they're trying to make "Girls, Girls, Girls" around this time. I'm just gonna read you a couple of entries from Nicky's diary from April and May, just so we get a little temp check on what's going on with Nicky's ex in 1987. "Today I checked my answering machine. I hadn't played it back in days. Steven Tyler had called, asking if I was okay. So weird. This guy I idolized as a kid is looking out for me as if he's my dad, which is more than my dad ever did. I've left messages for Keith Richards, asking if he wants to meet up and write songs together, but he never calls back." Then in April, Van Nuys, 5 a.m.

• 2:41:01Yasi Salek?

  I pushed the panic button again tonight. It wasn't my fault. Every time I dared to peer out of my closet, I could see faces at the window and I heard voices at the door. It's probably 50 feet from the closet to the security box, but it took me an hour of shaking to run there. I felt like I had to run the length of a football field. So Nicky does heroin in his closet. He had a heroin closet. And then he started having psychosis from doing so much drugs. And he was imagining people coming to his house. Here's what Doc McGee said. Nicky was always seeing Mexicans and midgets running around his fucking house. This is a quote. We don't say that that word anymore. His blow paranoia was totally out of control. I would get calls from West Tech saying he had set all his alarms off and was in the house refusing to answer the door.

• 2:41:45Yasi Salek?

  Or the police department would call me because Nicky's neighborhood phoned them to report that Nicky was crawling around in his garden in the middle of the night with a shotgun. This shit was going on at least twice a week. So Nicky is losing it, babe. Nicky is imagining little people and Latino men scaling the walls of his home to attack him. He is crawling on the ground of his garden with a shotgun. He is phoning the security company twice a week and then not letting him in the house. He has absolutely lost his marbles.

• 2:42:17Speaker 06

  Yikes.

• 2:42:18Yasi Salek?

  It's not good, babe. And then this was crazy, Mel. This whole time, Tom Zutat, who has, Tom Zutat also signed Guns N' Roses, is trying to get Nicky to produce Appetite for Destruction.

• 2:42:32Speaker 06

  Can you remind us why he wanted Nicky to produce, or more importantly, why Guns N' Roses wanted him to produce Appetite?

• 2:42:40Yasi Salek?

  Well, Slash loved Nicky. They were good friends and also Slash looked up to him since those London days. And Motley Crue was really successful and Guns N' Roses is like baby band. And Tom Zutat was like, we had so much success with Motley and Nicky's like main songwriter and like it would be a great cosign. It would, he thought it would make make sense. And Nicky said, I went to see them play at the Roxy, but I don't think they were all that great. The truth is, I was so out of it that I had no idea who was any good and who wasn't. This is another dire entry from April. For reasons unknown to me, I believe I am not meant to live much longer. I am dying a slow, unhappy death, shrouded in confusion and questions. I am confused as to how I've become the drugs and the drugs have become me.

• 2:43:25Yasi Salek?

  We live together in complete harmony. What was once a question, an inquisitive interest, a curiosity even, has finally answered itself. It's a death wish I cannot will away. Like Hemingway said, "The only thing that could spoil a day was people." I am the person who had spoiled my life. I have lost track of all time here.

• 2:43:45Speaker 06

  That's a diary entry from 1987?

• 2:43:48Yasi Salek?

  Diary entry from 1987.

• 2:43:52Yasi Salek?

  How come every guy I've dated couldn't even string together one of those sentences sober as a fucking judge with like a zen and a Celsius in their system? And Nikki Sixx is like barely keeping one eye open and having absolute hallucinations and quoting Hemingway?

• 2:44:08Speaker 06

  It's a question to ponder.

• 2:44:09Yasi Salek?

  It's a question to ponder. Something I need to look in the mirror myself. All right, May 1st, Nikki calls Bob Timmons, "I need help." Yes. However, he refuses to do 12-step because he does not want to accept a power greater than himself. So he tries to go cold turkey instead, which he does for a little while, but then he's upset that he's getting fat.

• 2:44:30Yasi Salek?

  And he says, "Is it worse to be fat or to be a junkie?" And it's tiring. It's worse to be a junkie. I'm just gonna go on the record and say that, but he was questioning it. Now it's time to talk about Girls, Girls, Girls, which during this time is being made. Comes out May 15, 1987. This is also produced by Tom Mormon. I'm just gonna tell you guys, the vibes of making this album are absolutely atrocious, even worse than the last one. They're all doing drugs, they're not talking to each other. Tommy is in Heatherland and has to hide his drugs from her. Vince is trying to stay sober, but failing at it. Mick was doing something behind everyone's backs, but they didn't know what it was.

• 2:45:13Yasi Salek?

  And the months before we returned to the studio, we were so busy fighting over our own demons that we completely forgot about Mick. When we saw him again, it looked like someone had sewn his body onto the body of a Samoan wrestler. His arms and neck were so bloated, we worried he wouldn't be able to reach the frets. So actually, what was happening with Mick was that he was dealing with chronic depression over that bone disease that I mentioned earlier that is still absolutely going on and he's in crazy pain and like can barely move. And that's why he is self medicating with tons of alcohol and getting fat, but no, he wouldn't tell anyone. That's when none of them knew that. And then also everyone is rich, but Mick is broke because he has, I forgot to mention Mick has like five kids or something already. Like he started having kids very young and he has like all these alamondies and, and child supports to pay.

• 2:45:58Speaker 06

  Poor Mick, man. That's a story like, it's like a really rare, it's a super rare disease and he has it harder than most people. He has like a more severe case than everybody else to the point that he can barely move, but then gets wasted and then rips on stage every night. And they're also touring in a massive way. Yasi said that a million times, but like they're really like on the fucking road.

• 2:46:23Yasi Salek?

  They're being like driven into the ground, which we'll get into. Doug Thaler said of the making of this album, "One side of Nicki's control freak nature was that whenever Mollie was in the studio, he wanted to be there every single minute of the night and day. But on Girls, Girls, Girls, he was a lot more removed from the process. He often wasn't there at all. And when he did come in, he was in no shape to do anything. He would just be making no sense. That's when I started to realize how ill he was.

• 2:46:50Yasi Salek?

  Somehow this album sold four million copies and peaked at number two on the Billboard and went quadruple platinum. And that somehow is the song Girls, Girls, Girls, which is the number one strip club anthem of all time, probably at this point. Would you agree?

• 2:47:03Speaker 06

  I would agree. I think this is a two-song album.

• 2:47:07Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. What is your other song?

• 2:47:09Speaker 06

  Well, now you have to guess because I'm, um, what, what, what are, what are the songs that you think are, are relevant to this album?

• 2:47:16Yasi Salek?

  I mean, the only song that I like wrote that like, I feel this is good, however, the lyrics are absolutely mental and it's like the most, it was different, it was a different time hours is all in the name of.

• 2:47:29Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. All in the name of, oh babe, those lyrics.

• 2:47:32Yasi Salek?

  And I have a lot to talk about with You're All I Need, but I'm not sure it's a good song. So what, I don't know. I have no idea where you're going. It can't be Dancing on Glass. Is it Dancing on Glass?

• 2:47:42Speaker 06

  This is, this is Camp Me. This is maybe not Quality, but I was gonna say the two songs to me are Wild Side and Girls, Girls, Girls.

• 2:47:51Yasi Salek?

  Wild Side is the second best song after Girls, Girls, Girls.

• 2:47:56Speaker 06

  What's the one that's like talking about like the 15-year-old that he really wants to fuck? Is that All in the Name of?

• 2:48:02Yasi Salek?

  That's All in the Name of. She's only 15. She's the reason, the reason I can't sleep. You say illegal. I say legal's never been my scene.

• 2:48:11Speaker 06

  Yo.

• 2:48:12Yasi Salek?

  These are insane lyrics.

• 2:48:14Speaker 06

  Yo.

• 2:48:15Yasi Salek?

  Again, real, it was different. It was a different time hours.

• 2:48:18Speaker 06

  In the, All in the Name of says to me, Daddy, can I have some candy? Wanna be your nasty anytime you want. You know you can have me. All in the name of rock and roll.

• 2:48:28Yasi Salek?

  I, I don't.

• 2:48:30Speaker 06

  Not, not, not the words of Mel Ottenberg.

• 2:48:32Yasi Salek?

  Not the words of Mel, right? Not the words of Yasi Salek. Likely not the words of Nicki Six, given that he was not even having sex with anybody at the time. Like I said, he was crawling around commando army style in his backyard, trying to shoot imaginary people. Not having sex with anyone, but regardless, it did make it onto the album and no one said one single word about it. Girls, Girls, Girls.

• 2:48:55Speaker 06

  It's not my favorite song.

• 2:48:56Yasi Salek?

  No. No. Tommy said, we never really thought it would become so popular, but anywhere you go in the world, walk into a strip joint and nine times out of 10, you'll hear this song. That is something I'm so proud of having done. It brings tears to my eyes. You go to a Motley Show these days and there will be kids, some as young as five years old, who just holler out the lyrics when we play it. I'm really glad that there's five-year-olds just screaming out about the dollhouse in Fort Lauderdale.

• 2:49:26Speaker 06

  Raising hell at the seven fail.

• 2:49:29Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:37Yasi Salek?

  I really can't get over how Vince says motorcycle for some reason. Friday night and I need a fight my motorcycle. Switchblade knife. Why does he say motorcycle?

• 2:49:55Yasi Salek?

  This is a massive song. Do you think? Have strip clubs fallen off?

• 2:50:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, like when you go to Jumbo's Clown Room, they give you like a giant wad of dollars because otherwise no one's gonna get a tip. Like, you know what I'm saying? Like, you know what I mean?

• 2:50:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I just, and Jumbo's Clown Room is one of the last remaining kind of cool ones, but like, it feels like it was like extremely 80s and then like a bit 90s and then just like, people just don't be going to the strip club as much as they used to.

• 2:50:26Speaker 06

  I just, it's so funny talking about these songs because I still, I really do have a clear memory of being like 10, being like, oh, God, this video again? Like, give me a break. But now I'm like, I love it. I love it for cheap thrills.

• 2:50:39Yasi Salek?

  It's not a great song, but it is extremely 1987 and it's extremely Motley Crue and it's extremely probably Nicki Six phoning it in from heroin land and it went fucking crazy. It went hard. You can probably still hear it anytime you go into any strip club. Dancing on Glass, which I don't think is a good song. I do like the riff in it. And it is Nicki's anti-heroine song as he's trying to get, he's, he's, he's taking a stand about that heroin is bad.

• 2:51:21Yasi Salek?

  Bad Boy Boogie, which again, a bit of a forgettable song, does once again have an Aerosmith reference and also like kind of an insane lyric, which is the Aerosmith reference. I got my finger in the pie, my hand in the cookie jar. It's just a lick and a promise in the backseat of my car.

• 2:51:38Speaker 06

  Yo.

• 2:51:45Yasi Salek?

  Lickin' a Promise is a 1976 Aerosmith song.

• 2:51:54Yasi Salek?

  I love Nona. Okay, I take it back. My favorite song on here is Nona. It's one minute and I don't know, 11 seconds or something long, one minute 26. And it's just this tender little dirge about Nicky having nightmares about his grandmother's sickness and funeral because he couldn't be there for her. And it's one of the things he regrets most in his life.

• 2:52:15Speaker 06

  I get it.

• 2:52:16Yasi Salek?

  I want to talk about You're All I Need. That's like, they're like, valid.

• 2:52:20Speaker 06

  My thought here is like, the boys are slipping and this is not, I don't like it. Why are we talking about this?

• 2:52:29Yasi Salek?

  Because I want to tell you, it actually has a very fun and hilarious backstory.

• 2:52:33Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:52:33Yasi Salek?

  Because you think it's just this cheesy ballad, which it totally is. However, Tommy was like, this is one of the great tragic love songs, which it's not. Bon Jovi called it the best Motley Crue song ever written, absolutely wrong. However, here's what it is. Nicky wrote this song back during the Theater of Pain tour, when he was sure that his girlfriend, that his ex-girlfriend, Nicole, had cheated on him with the actor, Jack Wagner, who was then on General Hospital, who you might remember. Now, Jack Wagner had had a hit song on the charts with a song called You're All I Need. Hilariously, by the way, written by Glenn Ballard. We don't need to get into

• 2:53:15Yasi Salek?

  that part. Nicky said he wanted to get revenge. So this was his like, fuck you to Nicole, was putting this, he literally wrote this whole song as a fuck you to Nicole because he thought she had cheated on him with Jack Wagner, who also had a song called You're All I Need. That's kind of cool. It's not, it doesn't warrant the song because it's bad, but I did like that backstory. He also apparently hired some bikers to break Jack Wagner's kneecaps. And then later Nicole called him and she was furious because by some bizarre coincidence, the bikers had not gone to break Jack Wagner's kneecaps, but Jack Wagner had fallen over during filming and broken his

• 2:53:57Yasi Salek?

  knees anyways on the soundstage. Nicky is a powerful witch. That's all. I just wanted to bring that up. I thought that was funny.

• 2:54:03Speaker 06

  We built this city on rock and roll.

• 2:54:05Yasi Salek?

  We built this city on spite and anger.

• 2:54:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:54:09Yasi Salek?

  All right. Like you said, they're unstoppable.

• 2:54:13Yasi Salek?

  They're too big to fail. Doesn't matter if the album is bad. No one cares. There are other media. The cog has been thrown up one, you know? There's a really insane piece in August Rolling Stone about the Girls Girls Girls Tour, which is, I think arguably the peak of Molly Crew debauchery. Like, they're out of their fucking minds. They're doing the craziest shit. They're so famous. They're so rich. They just have chicks at every show, just like, ready to go.

• 2:54:46Speaker 06

  Are they sober right now?

• 2:54:48Yasi Salek?

  No, they're absolutely not sober. No one's sober. Everyone's crazy. There's a part in the Rolling Stone thing where a kid, like, the journalist says a kid comes up to Vince Neil and says, "Will you sign an autograph for my friend Daniel?" And Vince says, "Sure." "How do you spell Daniel?"

• 2:55:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:55:03Yasi Salek?

  "How do you spell Daniel?"

• 2:55:05Speaker 06

  I'd love to read this article.

• 2:55:07Yasi Salek?

  "How do you spell Daniel?" I'll send it to you. It's truly amazing. Nikki Sixx also shits on YouTube in this. He said, "I don't understand YouTube'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." This article also says that Vanity tells the journalist that her and Nikki Sixx are engaged.

• 2:55:26Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:55:27Yasi Salek?

  Which apparently they were, although Nikki says they weren't, but I think they actually were, because I think she asked him to get married, and he said yes, because he was like fucked up, and then he was like, "I don't want to get married." They took Guns N' Roses on part of this Girls Girls Girls Tour. Nikki, in his diary back then, said, "I want to help slash out and give his band some shows. They're not worth any tickets, but I believe in them." "Cool new band. The singer can be an asshole, but what's new?" I can see him and Vince bumping heads.

• 2:55:54Yasi Salek?

  Ah, I love that they... This actually was a huge deal, by the way. Like, taking Guns N' Roses on this tour in a Sliding Doors scenario, if they hadn't done this, it's totally possible we wouldn't have had... The Guns N' Roses we have now because according to Tom Zutau, who was their A and R, he said that Geffen was about to pull support for the Appetite for Destruction album. And it had sold like a little bit less than 200,000 copies. But that Motley Tour tipped the scales for the band. And so then Geffen put more support behind it. And then it took off and ended up selling more than 20 million copies.

• 2:56:31Speaker 06

  It's incredible. Yeah, because Appetite for Destruction came out a long time before Sweet Child O' Mine became

• 2:56:38Yasi Salek?

  Exactly.

• 2:56:39Speaker 06

  The gigantic, one of the biggest songs of the eighties.

• 2:56:41Yasi Salek?

  Totally. And I think this Motley Crue tour, arguably, you could say, like, had a huge hand to play in that. Putting them in front of these audiences and having Geffen want to put money behind them. This is also the tour where they stopped wearing makeup.

• 2:56:55Speaker 06

  Also, just like a moment of silence for the moment in that diary where he's like, we're gonna take these guys on tour because they're cool. It's like nothing that anyone really wants to see, but like, I like Slash and he's my friend. And by the way, I'm not saying that snidely. I'm like, wow, that's, that happened.

• 2:57:12Yasi Salek?

  It's amazing.

• 2:57:12Speaker 06

  You know what I mean?

• 2:57:12Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. There wasn't some fucking like managers breathing down your neck being like, you have, well, they did. Then they made them take Whitesnake, which Nikki hated Whitesnake and talked at every turn as he could how much he fucking hates Whitesnake. And they're corny and they suck. So there's a little column A, a little column B. Slash is also a pretty gnarly heroin addict to this point, so that's going on. They're insane. Okay, they're literally insane. Here's a, here's one little brief from that Rolling Stone thing. No one in Motley Crue is wearing underpants. So before sliding into his leather stage pants for a photo shoot, Nikki Sixx wipes his ass with a towel, which she then tosses at his bandmates who flee in all directions. The band members take turns pumping a 20-pound barbell before doing a bare-armed pose.

• 2:57:57Yasi Salek?

  Sixx, who has been working out regularly, throws a mini tantrum when he sees how chubby his arm photographs in the Polaroids.

• 2:58:05Speaker 06

  Love it.

• 2:58:06Yasi Salek?

  I told you he thought he was getting that.

• 2:58:08Speaker 06

  And also, guys, look at Google these shoots. I mean, they're just,

• 2:58:11Yasi Salek?

  I know.

• 2:58:12Speaker 06

  They're so good.

• 2:58:13Yasi Salek?

  So good. From Nikki's diary on this tour. Doc told me that we all had our dicks out on the bar and poured Jack on them and lit them on fire. What the fuck? I have no pubes.

• 2:58:27Yasi Salek?

  They were being insane. Nikki and Tommy at some point cut Doc's bed in half with a knife. So when he got in it, it collapsed. Like, they were just like psycho. It's kind of amazing. Here's what, this is actually, you're gonna love this. This is what Fred Saunders said. Fred Saunders was the head of tour security for Molly Crew ever since, shout out the devil. "When Doc McGee first hired me, he said the band was so wild, I should do whatever it took to keep them in line. In fact, he said he'd give me a bonus every time I hit them." I hit Motley a lot. I once broke Tommy's nose in Indiana. I broke Nikki's ribs. And I beat the shit out of Vince many times. Well, because he's an asshole. I think I even hit poor Mick once. That was just to complete the set.

• 2:59:13Yasi Salek?

  By all accounts, even though Nikki is the most gnarly drug addict, the most annoying person on the tour to everyone was Vince. So one time, he had a fit backstage because there was only gray poupon mustard and not regular mustard for his sandwich. And he threw the jar against the wall and it exploded, but it flew back at him. And the glass cut his hand open very badly and he had to go to the hospital. And they had to delay the show. And then the rest of the tour, he had to wear a glove.

• 2:59:47Speaker 06

  I love gray poupon.

• 2:59:48Yasi Salek?

  Me too. Vince, already like 10 points negative for you don't even, you don't like gray poupon. He was driving them crazy. As Nikki, as Nikki said, Vince is a drama queen. And that wears you down. Little episode by episode temper tantrums.

• 3:00:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:00:05Yasi Salek?

  Um, this is also really fun. So they had walkie codes for everyone. Did you, did you come across this in your?

• 3:00:09Speaker 06

  I did not, I did not.

• 3:00:11Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so here they are. Number one, Doc McGee. Two, Doug Thaler. Three, Rich Fisher. Four, Fred, head of security. Five, Vince. Six, obviously Nikki. Seven, Mick. Double zero, Tommy. Twenty, where are you? A hundred, Krell. Do you know what Krell means in the world of?

• 3:00:30Speaker 06

  No.

• 3:00:31Yasi Salek?

  Means cocaine. It's some, it's some Star Wars term and I'm really sorry for the people at home that I don't know dick about Star Wars and I didn't retain the, I didn't retain that information. 101 Hotel, 129 Gig, 268 Tour Bus, 714 Groupie, 747 Pig With Lipstick. Nicky is in really bad shape, you guys. Nicky is not doing well. He said, "I used to look at the tour dates and think, "When is this gonna end? And when it does, do I have to go home? "I resented that management put us on the road and just left us there. "Tommy and Vince were both married. It must have been hard for them to keep things together. "I was different. I felt detached from everything. "We knew we needed a break or something was going to break.

• 3:01:15Yasi Salek?

  "We asked for time off and Doc always said, "No." Here's what Doc said back, and I want to ask you about it. "I always had a real problem with Nicky's line of argument here. "Sure, the tours were too long for them, but only because of the way they behaved on them. "Don't forget, these were guys in their twenties who were only being asked to work two hours a day. "What about all the guys who get up at 5:00 a.m. to lay bricks and only get two weeks off a year? "If Motley Crue were burnt out on the road, it was purely because they were stupid fucking drug addicts. "It's not rocket science."

• 3:01:48Speaker 06

  I think that the road is crazy.

• 3:01:50Yasi Salek?

  I agree. The working two hours a day thing doesn't stand, because if you've ever been on tour, "You know that that's not how it feels and that's not, that it really wears you down. "But he is also right that they're insane."

• 3:02:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, like, they're a money machine because they go onstage and give it their all two hours a day "In a way that's like really incredible. "And so it seems from like watching videos and stuff and the crowds going crazy and blah, blah, blah, blah. "And they're doing that all around the world, but they're definitely, "Burning the candle at both ends is not the right metaphor here. It's just like..."

• 3:02:22Yasi Salek?

  Burning the candle, burning the dicks at both ends is really what they're doing with Jack all over them and losing their pubes.

• 3:02:28Speaker 06

  I think they're both right, because like, what are they doing at home? Like, just, you know, freebase. They're, they're just, they're, they're stuck with themselves here and they're just like in a, "They're on the cog, babe."

• 3:02:40Yasi Salek?

  They're on the cog, but they're also being about to be chewed up and spit out by this world. Yeah, to your point, like, you, what do you want? You want time off to do what? Freebase cocaine at home, you know? Somehow during all of this, Nicky is writing in his diary about reading Jack Kerouac and George Orwell's Animal Farm and I just can't get over. I'm sure there was lots of junkie bookworms, right? I mean, William Burroughs, he invented junkie bookworm author, but like, you just don't hear so much about that anymore.

• 3:03:10Speaker 06

  We love you, Nicky. I'm sorry that I said that before. I'm on team them. I gotta, I gotta correct myself. If they're burned out on the road, they're burned out on the road. I believe reading all the stuff I've read about them, that they were pushed too hard.

• 3:03:23Yasi Salek?

  I agree.

• 3:03:23Speaker 06

  To tour too long. They are also like deeply damaged people who are all going through, are in really precarious places mentally and with their addictions and stuff. And everyone's just watching it happen because they're making tons of money on these guys. That's just, come on, like, that's just real. Are they assholes that are, that are making it hard on themselves? Yes, that's also very true.

• 3:03:46Yasi Salek?

  Totally. And even Doug Thaler pointed out, like, I could see how mess, how much of a mess they were. And it's like, at that point, you kind of gotta like, it's also just not good business. Like, long, you gotta protect your long-term investment.

• 3:03:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:04:00Yasi Salek?

  It's getting, so it's getting really dark. Nicky said, "After six months of touring Girls, my existence had disintegrated to the point where every waking moment was about drugs. I went onstage to get drugs, I came offstage to find more drugs, I used my per diem to buy drugs, and I traveled to each city only to see if anyone had drugs." Nicky and Tommy started making crack in the backstage microwaves.

• 3:04:19Speaker 06

  Damn.

• 3:04:20Yasi Salek?

  Doc McGee said, "So just, if it sounds like Doc McGee is really mean about them, just keep in mind that they fired Doc McGee at one point, so this is all past, this is all after he was fired." Now Nicky, king of the losers, had begun to unravel on the Girls tour. Neither Doug nor I wanted to be around him, so we drew straws to see who would accompany the band to Japan. I drew the short one. Mr. Udo, the promoter there, is one of my best friends. Every time he takes the band to Japan, he puts his reputation on the line for them. And it was no different for Motley Crue, except that Motley Crue couldn't give a fuck. They are savages with cash who care nothing about nobody, even each other. Well, they do do some fuck shit in Japan.

• 3:05:05Yasi Salek?

  There's also a really sad diary entry from Nicky on his birthday, December 11th, where he says he just, he wakes up at home and realizes it's his birthday and there's no messages on his machine and no one had sent him a card or a present or a call or anything. It's very sad. Okay, so in Japan, they kick it off. Tommy gets caught with pot in his drum kit. They have to, Mr. Udo has to get them out of that. Then they're taking the bullet train to Osaka and they're like full gear and they get wasted and terrorize the entire train car and Nicky throws a bottle of Jack Daniels and hits a Japanese businessman in the skull.

• 3:05:38Speaker 06

  Not good.

• 3:05:39Yasi Salek?

  No, he does go to jail for that as well and Mr. Udo, once again, has to bail him out from getting arrested. This is also a tour where he calls to the hotel and complains about the fans that are banging on his window in the middle of the night, except that he was on the 26th floor.

• 3:05:56Speaker 06

  Damn.

• 3:05:56Yasi Salek?

  The tour finally ends in Japan, everyone goes home, but Nicky's like, I'm not going home. I wanna go to the rest of Asia and do drugs presumably. Mr. Udo and Doc are like, well, we can't let him go alone, he's insane. So they have to go with him and he like is so insane there, like makes them go to like prostitute brothel thing and Udo's like, bro, I'm married, like they finally just leave him alone with a translator in Hong Kong. Tommy said, I actually thought deciding to go to Hong Kong was Nicky's, one of Nicky's more sober moments. He told me he wanted to buy some furniture for his home. He seemed really sincere about wanting to go to Hong Kong and get amazing deals on furniture.

• 3:06:41Yasi Salek?

  Tommy was just like, what? He wanted to buy beautiful furniture for his home. Vin said, when Nicky announced he wasn't coming back to LA but going to Hong Kong, I couldn't have cared less. I didn't give it a second thought, just said, fine, have a nice time, bye. We weren't close in any way and I wanted to keep my distance from him because he was fucking bad news. So Nicky is in Hong Kong. I want to point out that he hasn't showered the entire Japan tour, which I presume was at least two weeks. So it's been minimum two weeks that he hasn't showered. He comes across a soothsayer on the street and he asks his translator to have this soothsayer read his fortune. And apparently what the psychic said was, you're gonna die before the end of the year if you don't change your ways, but you were unable to change your

• 3:07:25Yasi Salek?

  ways. Now, this is December 22nd. So the end of the year is in like, you know, 10 days. Well, December 23rd, what happens?

• 3:07:33Speaker 06

  He ODs.

• 3:07:34Yasi Salek?

  He dies. Yeah.

• 3:07:35Speaker 06

  He dies.

• 3:07:36Yasi Salek?

  He literally ODs and dies. So what had happened was, what happened was, he came home, goes out, picks up Slash, Slash's girlfriend Sally, Steven Adler, and their friend Robin, and they go to the cat house, shout out Ricky Rackman. They do a bunch of cocaine, drink a bunch of booze, take a bunch of pills. Then they're like, let's go to Slash's hotel room and do heroin. Nicky lets Slash's dealer shoot him up and he immediately overdoses. Slash said, I can't remember too much about it. Nicky asked me at the cat house if I knew where he could get dope. A friend of mine had just become a junkie, so we called him. I was so screaming drunk that I couldn't even find the floor to fall on. Thank God for Sally, dude. Sally, listen, if Sally hadn't have been there, I think Nicky might

• 3:08:21Yasi Salek?

  have been dead. So Sally said, Guns had two suites. Slash was in one and Steven Adler was in the other with Nicky and the dealer. The dealer came into our room and yelled, Nicky's dead, and ran off. He literally jumped out the window and over the balcony and ran off down the street. Slash was paralytic and Nicky was turning blue. Steven helped me drag Nicky into the bathroom and then he ran off, so I was on my own with him. I tried to get Nicky into the shower to pour water on him, but then Slash came in, saw Nicky, and started freaking out. Slash had a friend named Todd, who had died of a heroin overdose a few months earlier, so he starts yelling Todd and smashing up the bathroom. By now, I was giving Nicky mouth-to-mouth resuscitation over the bath while trying

• 3:09:02Yasi Salek?

  to hold Slash back with one hand. Slash smashed the shower screen and the glass showered down on me and Nicky. So I got up and I punched Slash and I laid him out. Yes, Sally bitch. Fucking do it. I was screaming for someone to call 911, which they did, and they said, Nicky Six is dead. I later found out that Nicky's limo driver heard that and phoned Ben Snail. So the limo driver calls Vince Neil and is like, Nicky's dead. And Vince said it brought him to tears and he never used to cry then. Anyway, Sally keeps giving Nicky mouth to mouth till the paramedics get there and they're like basically kept him going, although he's declared clinically dead on the way to the hospital.

• 3:09:44Yasi Salek?

  However, and this is dramatized in the movie as well, the paramedic is a Motley Crue fan and he's like, absolutely the fuck not is Nicky Six dying in my fucking ambulance. I love Motley Crue. Let's fucking go. We gotta get this man back. And gives him two shots of adrenaline and Nicky's back.

• 3:10:02Speaker 06

  Damn.

• 3:10:03Yasi Salek?

  I know, this is crazy.

• 3:10:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:10:05Yasi Salek?

  The media starts reporting that he's dead.

• 3:10:07Speaker 06

  The soothsayer.

• 3:10:09Yasi Salek?

  The soothsayer knew what's up, babe. This shit is real. You know, you know, I'm a believer.

• 3:10:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:10:14Yasi Salek?

  Nicky woke up in the hospital and then he leaves. He's like, I'm not staying here. Rips out, the nurse said he just ripped out the tubes of, from his nose. Walked out of the hospital wearing just leather pants, shirtless. And there's two crying fans outside the hospital thought he was dead and he's like, hey, and they're like, oh my fucking god, you're not dead. And he's like, no, can I have a ride home? And then he goes and they're like Toyota Celica or whatever and they drive him home and he immediately shoots up again.

• 3:10:41Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 3:10:42Yasi Salek?

  Also changed his answering machine to say Nicky Six isn't home because he's dead.

• 3:10:46Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 3:10:46Yasi Salek?

  It's kind of funny.

• 3:10:48Speaker 06

  Merry, Merry Christmas.

• 3:10:50Yasi Salek?

  Merry Christmas. It's December, it's Christmas Eve. I guess like then Nicky finally decides like, okay, I'm done. I'm not doing this. Like he find, he starts throwing everything away. He finds the AA book that Bob Timmons had gotten him under his bed while he's throwing away all his drugs and is like, okay, I'm actually gonna do this. Diary from Christmas says, good morning and Merry Christmas. I've decided to put this diary away and start a new one with a new day upon us. I feel hopeful. Life, I think, has somehow taken a turn for the better. I don't know how I survived the last year, but I know there has to be a reason. Today, for the first time ever, I don't care about the outcome or the whys or when. I just wanna live. I woke up happy. I still can't believe it. I wanna live and I don't know why. Merry Christmas.

• 3:11:35Yasi Salek?

  So Slash and Sally come over to Nicki's for Christmas in a limo and give each other presents. And then he stays at Doc McGee's house for a week, sobers up, I guess. And Doc McGee was like, "We called in the rest of the band and held a big meeting in my living room. They looked pathetic. There was Nicki, who was dying, Tommy, who was getting loaded and fighting with his wife, Vince, who was completely out of control, and Mick, who basically woke up every morning and drank alcohol and sobbed to himself until he passed out. And this was supposed to be one of the biggest, greatest bands in the world. Doug and I told them, first, that they were gonna pay back the promoters in Europe, because they have canceled the European leg of their tour. Second, they were either gonna straighten up or find new management. We presented a united front. Nicki admitted that he needed to check into a hospital,

• 3:12:20Yasi Salek?

  something he had never agreed to before. Tommy, who so easily led, he'd drink Kool-Aid if Jim Jones asked him to, said he was in, of course. Vince, stubborn and in denial, dragged his heels and waffled, and Mick just gave us a funny look. So basically, they all agree that they will all go to rehab in order to keep the band going. And in 1988, they all go to rehab. Tommy says they all stood in a circle with their arms around each other, singing "You Can't Always Get What You Want", and Tommy cried.

• 3:12:48Speaker 06

  And this is before they all go separately, right?

• 3:12:50Yasi Salek?

  They all go separately first, and then they come together.

• 3:12:54Speaker 06

  Oh, wow.

• 3:12:55Yasi Salek?

  Tommy said, "I turned to Nicki and sobbed, 'Isn't this the most beautiful song, dude? And he looked at me like I was crazy. And then he looked at Mick and whispered something about me falling for this Jim Jones shit. I don't think anyone in the band ever took me seriously. I was seen as the puppy dog whose paws were too big and always tripped over everything." Tommy has such, like, a pure heart, right? Like, what a sweetie pants. He really was like, "I love this song, and I feel really connected to you guys", and everyone was mean to him about it.

• 3:13:23Speaker 06

  We love Tommy.

• 3:13:24Yasi Salek?

  We love Tommy. Mick was basically like, "I don't think rehab did any good. Like, my father taught me, 'When you're a child, be a child. When you're a man, be a man.' I got so sick of seeing everyone in the band bawling their eyes out. Go back to the second grade if you wanna cry. Suck ass."

• 3:13:40Speaker 06

  Beautiful.

• 3:13:42Yasi Salek?

  So Nicki gets put on Prozac.

• 3:13:46Yasi Salek?

  And then he asks Ricky Rackman to put him on a blind date. Cause he like, doesn't know how to talk to girls anymore. And Ricky Rackman sets him up with Playboy Miss October Brandy Brant. And the first night she sleeps over, Brandy gets a call from her mom about a guy named Nikki she had met a while ago and had fun with. And should she call him? Her mom had auditioned to be a backup singer on the Girls Girls Girls Tour and had hooked up with Nikki. And just to put some respect on Bree Howard's name. Bree Howard was the lead singer of the iconic, ahead of their time, all female band Fanny, just FYI. I thought that was very cool.

• 3:14:27Speaker 06

  This is the mom?

• 3:14:28Yasi Salek?

  This is the mom. But he ends up marrying the daughter, Brandy Brant. We don't have time to fully get into, but I just thought you would enjoy the mention of Vince's feud with Izzy Stradlin and Axl that starts around this time.

• 3:14:39Speaker 06

  All we know from that story, I think, I, do you think that Vince is the tough guy here? Vince is the winner?

• 3:14:47Yasi Salek?

  I think Vince is in the wrong because he basically like grabbed Izzy Stradlin's wife, Charisse's breast at the cat house. And then she told him to fuck off and he kicked her in the stomach allegedly and she was pregnant.

• 3:15:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's.

• 3:15:00Yasi Salek?

  So whatever netted out, he's the asshole.

• 3:15:04Speaker 06

  Definitely.

• 3:15:05Yasi Salek?

  And he also sucker punched Izzy at the VMAs because Izzy was talking shit. I don't know. Yeah, but then Axl kind of, I don't know. When you see these interviews of Vince, like on MTV talking shit, he just looks like such a fucking hot mess that you're like, and Axl looks so good. So if we're judging on those standards, I think Axl won.

• 3:15:23Speaker 06

  We're talking about nineteen eighty-eight.

• 3:15:24Yasi Salek?

  Eighty-eight, this kind of stretches into eighty-nine. They just like talk to each other in the press.

• 3:15:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, like, it's just, don't, don't let me even talk about stuff like this because then I'm gonna feel bad about what I got to say because nineteen eighty-nine. Ex Mel Ottenberg, ex G N R is like.

• 3:15:42Yasi Salek?

  Totally, that's the.

• 3:15:44Speaker 06

  Is, is, is the promised land.

• 3:15:47Yasi Salek?

  You guys do yourselves a favor though, look up nineteen eighty-eight, eighty-nine Axl Rose because he looks like he was cut from marble. He is one of the most beautiful people you'll ever lay eyes on.

• 3:15:56Speaker 06

  And the voice and the songs.

• 3:15:58Yasi Salek?

  Style that he stole one hundred percent from our friend from the cult, but we don't have to get into that. All right. In eighty-nine, Motley plays this thing called the Moscow Music Peace Festival. It's a two-day rock festival in Moscow, put on by Doc McGee, who also, by the way, was managing Bon Jovi. And it had Bon Jovi, The Scorpions, and Ozzy Osbourne. Apparently, Doc McGee did not inform Motley Crue that it was really more of a big Bon Jovi headlining show, or this is what Motley said and was mad about. And they're so fucking pissed that they fire him after that. They're like, we're done with you. They also beefed with Jon Bon Jovi at it. There's like a whole thing where Tommy said he punched Jon Bon Jovi. Jon Bon Jovi said he punched Tommy.

• 3:16:39Yasi Salek?

  And then Nikki was like, oh, you really think Jon Bon Jovi could kick anyone in Motley Crue's ass? So this is like a fun little feud with Jon Bon Jovi. And then they put out Dr. Feelgood, babe. This is the big cog, right? Would you agree? This is the big cog.

• 3:16:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is the big cog. This is the cog that few people ever hit.

• 3:16:58Yasi Salek?

  Do you want to talk about the cog theory at all? I mean, it's pretty simple.

• 3:17:01Speaker 06

  First of all, I don't even know if Motley Crue really wrote this.

• 3:17:04Yasi Salek?

  No, I don't think they did. I think Neil Strauss wrote this.

• 3:17:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, but what is just interesting about is like, you know, few people get this close to the sun. Few musical artists ever make it as far as Motley Crue did with the Dr. Feelgood album. It's like Whitney Houston, it's Guns N' Roses, it's Madonna a couple of times. It's Michael Jackson, it's Nirvana, like, it's Britney Spears.

• 3:17:32Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 3:17:34Speaker 06

  You know, the list is not getting much bigger, you know? It's like, it's few, few people ever hit this hard. And what they're really saying in the book is like, few get this hard. And when you get there, it shreds your, your flesh and bone until you are basically not a person anymore.

• 3:17:54Yasi Salek?

  It's likely that it will spit you out in the most like fucked up way. I liked it too because it was, it's an interesting juxtaposition to the imperial phase theory from Neil Tennant, which is like, every artist has their imperial phase where they're like at the height of their powers. Because the implication of the imperial phase is it's just one time. The cog theory does posit, which you just said, like with Madonna is a good example. Some people get back to the big cog more than once. It's extremely rare, but it does happen. Whereas imperial phase kind of implies that you would only have it once. But I do, people do hit the peak more than once. Again, that's really rarefied air. Like, I think you could probably count on both hands, artists that have hit

• 3:18:39Yasi Salek?

  the big cog more than once. But it does happen. Anyways, let's talk about Dr. Feelgood. It's now, we've, we've gotten rid of Tom Warman. Bob Rock, the most nominative determinism person on earth. The person whose name determined their fate and career to produce rock albums. The man's name is literally Bob Rock. Robert Rock is this man's name. I can't get over it.

• 3:19:03Speaker 06

  That's his real name?

• 3:19:04Yasi Salek?

  I think so.

• 3:19:05Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 3:19:06Yasi Salek?

  If it's not, I don't want to know about it. I don't want to know anything about it. Yeah, it says he was birth name Robert Jen's Rock. That's his fucking name, babe.

• 3:19:13Speaker 06

  This is a big album.

• 3:19:14Yasi Salek?

  It's a huge album. Okay, when you say big album, are you, do you mean like it has really great songs on it?

• 3:19:20Speaker 06

  I mean that like, these are big hits. Their last two albums have like one or two songs on it that we're really gassed to talk about and that's it. This one just has a lot of songs in popular culture that are very, very big. Dr. Feelgood, Kickstart My Heart is gigantic. Without You is huge. And I like it. I like it. I'm down with it, actually.

• 3:19:44Yasi Salek?

  And fuck with it.

• 3:19:46Speaker 06

  Same Old Situation is a big song.

• 3:19:48Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, about, about chicks leaving you for chicks.

• 3:19:51Speaker 06

  Oh damn.

• 3:19:52Yasi Salek?

  You listen, I think you could make the argument that this is the second best Molly Girl album.

• 3:19:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:19:58Yasi Salek?

  Certainly to date of, of like, up to 1989, this is the second best.

• 3:20:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:20:03Yasi Salek?

  Because obviously we love the first one the most. But, and it's very interesting because this was made in sobriety.

• 3:20:10Speaker 06

  They're sober.

• 3:20:11Yasi Salek?

  Not just sober, they're jogging, they're not eating meat, they're not having cough caffeine, they're not like, they're like full like health nuts, they're taking supplements.

• 3:20:22Speaker 06

  And they're big, they're popular, they're making more money than ever.

• 3:20:27Yasi Salek?

  They hit, they hit, this is their first album to hit number one on the Billboard 200. And they got Bob Rock, I think did do an amazing job because he had done The Cult aforementioned and Ted Nugent. And the difference was that, here's what Nikki said, where Tom Warman just said, okay, that's good enough, Bob whipped us like galley slaves. His line was, this just isn't your best. Nothing was good enough. Bob was critical, demanding, and a stickler for punctuality. Six months of rigor combined with six months of sobriety tore the life out of us. In eight years together with millions of albums sold, we had never recorded properly. No one had ever pushed us to the limits of our abilities before or kept demanding more than we thought we could give, until we discovered we actually

• 3:21:12Yasi Salek?

  did have more to give. We just never tried before. Let's fucking go. Lars Ulrich liked this so much that he hired Bob Rock to produce a little album that you might remember called The Black Album.

• 3:21:24Speaker 06

  Crazy.

• 3:21:25Yasi Salek?

  No big deal. Nikki and Tommy are bestie BFF necklaces exchanged. Tommy is like really creative and like really wanting to like contribute musically in the songwriting process. According to Nikki, they're taking in new inputs. He said, we now had the patience to listen to bands besides the sweet Slade, T-Rex, Aerosmith, and New York Dolls. I opened my mind to everything from Miles Davis to Whitney Houston, and I became aware of a whole universe of sound and emotion, of intricate melodies, basslines, and rhythms that I had missed out on all my life. Gorge.

• 3:22:02Speaker 06

  Beautiful.

• 3:22:03Yasi Salek?

  The opening track, TNT, Terror in Tinseltown, is a sample of a woman saying, "Dr. Davis, telephone, please." That same sample was used by Queens Reich in their song Eyes of a Stranger one year prior. Just a fun fact for you guys.

• 3:22:19Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 3:22:26Yasi Salek?

  My favorite part in Dr. Feel Good, the song, is when Vince goes guitar.

• 3:22:37Speaker 06

  Guitar!

• 3:22:38Yasi Salek?

  It's so good.

• 3:22:41Yasi Salek?

  It's just like, what time is it? It's time for guitar!

• 3:22:46Speaker 06

  Oh yeah!

• 3:22:48Yasi Salek?

  I love it. I love, it's just like, why? Why, why was right then the time to say guitar? But it was. "Doctor Feelgood" is Molly Crew's highest ranking single to date. It's at number six on the Hot 100. It's about a drug dealer. Just in case you guys didn't know who "Doctor Feelgood" was, he's a drug dealer. He makes you feel good.

• 3:23:05Speaker 06

  He's the only one they call feel good, Yasi.

• 3:23:07Yasi Salek?

  He's the only one they call feel good guitar!

• 3:23:19Speaker 06

  "Kickstart My Heart" is also a big hit, right?

• 3:23:22Yasi Salek?

  "Kickstart My Heart" is a huge hit. It is about Nicki's dying and overdosing.

• 3:23:27Speaker 06

  Oh wow.

• 3:23:28Yasi Salek?

  Which is a great way to mine. I mean, literally, it's about the guy bringing him back with the adrenaline.

• 3:23:39Yasi Salek?

  It's so great. It's so wonderful. "He took lemons and made lemonade, honey." He said, "I overdosed on heroin and died, and I wrote 'Kickstart My Heart' for you guys."

• 3:23:48Speaker 06

  That's amazing.

• 3:23:49Yasi Salek?

  It's, it's beautiful. For "My Beatles Head," "Slice of Your Pie," the ending is based on the Beatles song "She's So Heavy."

• 3:24:12Yasi Salek?

  "Rattlesnake Shake." Not a bad, not a bad song. I'll say it.

• 3:24:17Speaker 06

  It's not bad. I just love "Without You." I love it.

• 3:24:21Yasi Salek?

  I love it.

• 3:24:22Speaker 06

  I love it. I, listen, I love, I love the 80s. I love cheesy 80s stuff, like, but I don't lo, like, I love, I love "Here I Go Again" and "Is This Love," but I don't really love "Whitesnake." I love "Tony Kattan" more than I love "Whitesnake," but I do love those songs. Or I love "17" or "Cherry Pie." But I don't really love those bands. I love, these songs are also cheesy, but they are way better musically and they aged better. They're still giving cheesy 80s, but I, I think they're great.

• 3:25:04Yasi Salek?

  Without You is gorge and do you know makes it extra tender is that Nicky Six wrote this about Heather Locklear and Tommy. He thought to himself one day, he wrote it from Tommy's perspective, thinking about how he would feel if he lost Heather.

• 3:25:19Speaker 06

  But with you by my side, you're the reason I'm alive.

• 3:25:23Yasi Salek?

  Same old situation, like I said, is literally about a girl leaving a guy for a girl. As Nicky said, the subject plagues men worldwide. I don't know if that's true. He said, I love it because when Elektra heard it, they were like, oh, this is perfect for a single. In a Motley fashion, we were like, wonderful. We'll tell you later that it's about lesbians. Motley Crue, God bless.

• 3:25:43Speaker 06

  Motley Crue.

• 3:25:52Yasi Salek?

  Sticky Sweet is notable for the fact that Steven Tyler and Bryan Adams sing backing vocals on this song.

• 3:25:58Speaker 06

  That's pretty.

• 3:25:59Yasi Salek?

  Cause they were hanging around. I don't know, big deal.

• 3:26:08Yasi Salek?

  What about She Goes Down?

• 3:26:09Speaker 06

  Can you read us some racy lyrics? Where's she going?

• 3:26:13Yasi Salek?

  She gone down, baby. Little Miss Muffet, sweet girl, school stuff and a country smile and charm.

• 3:26:21Yasi Salek?

  Um, sassy little lassie, walking right past me. Um, according to Vince Neil, there is actual sex being done in the background of that song. He said being done. I don't know if that's how you would phrase it. There's sex happening in the background. If you listen real close.

• 3:26:38Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 3:26:38Yasi Salek?

  Robyn Zander from Cheap Trick and Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick sing backing vocals on this one. Don't Go Away Mad, Just Go Away was inspired by Nicky hearing that line in a movie, but he couldn't remember which movie. But according to the internet, it's likely 1986's Heartbreak Ridge starring Clint Eastwood.

• 3:26:58Speaker 06

  Oh, okay.

• 3:26:59Yasi Salek?

  There you go.

• 3:27:00Speaker 06

  So what happens when they're on, when they're this big, Yasi?

• 3:27:05Yasi Salek?

  Okay, I'll tell you what happens. This album is like. A little more well received by the critics, like the LA Times gives it three stars. Jonathan Gold, may he rest in peace. Many people forget that besides being one of the most iconic food writers of all time, he was first a music critic. He says something really good. He says, "Of all the LA glam metal bands of the 80s, Motley Crue has always understood both the Bay City Rollers' kind of teen dream appeal and the importance of the riff, the pounding, shrieking two-chord monoliths that have always powered the best hard rock." He nailed it. It's like you said before, they always understood pop and teenagers, but they also always like had riffs.

• 3:27:42Speaker 06

  When I'm thinking back on like all the cheesy, long-haired, fluffy MTV rock that I fucking love, both ironically and non-ironically, the riffs is what saves Motley Crue. The riffs is why we actually really like them. The riffs-

• 3:28:01Yasi Salek?

  I agree.

• 3:28:02Speaker 06

  Save them from just being this like, this like E. True Hollywood story, you know what I mean? Like they're, even, even when they're bad, they're just so interesting, Motley Crue.

• 3:28:11Yasi Salek?

  I agree. I mean, the riffs, some, like, you said it already, but I think if people have chances, there's so much now extra release material where you can hear a more bare-bones version of some of the songs, like the garagey like we were talking about. And then you really are like, oh, actually, this is a good song. Like, I might not like it under like the sheen and veneer of Tom Warman's Extreme 80s production, but like, the, the bones of it are fucking, the bones of this house, they'd be good. All right. Dr. Feelgood Tour, babe. Were you into them enough in 1989, 90 to go see them on tour?

• 3:28:48Speaker 06

  Not at all. I really wasn't that interested in them. Like, listen, in 1989, when a music video is on MTV, whether or not you want to watch it, there's something else to watch.

• 3:28:58Yasi Salek?

  Totally.

• 3:28:59Speaker 06

  I mean, I'm not, I'm not changing the channel. I'm just watching MTV for literally like eight hours, you know?

• 3:29:05Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. There's a lot of videos like that that are burned into my brain that I'm like, I don't even, why do I remember that?

• 3:29:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. They, these are just on. It wasn't something that I was that into at the time.

• 3:29:16Yasi Salek?

  Yeah. Well, this tour is the one where Tommy starts using the flying drum set.

• 3:29:22Speaker 06

  Amazing.

• 3:29:23Yasi Salek?

  Is in the contraption spinning around over the audience. At a stop in New Haven, Connecticut, he does fall and hit his head really hard and has to go to the hospital.

• 3:29:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, crashes right on top of someone else's head.

• 3:29:36Yasi Salek?

  Yes, yes, but otherwise, a great success. I assume his cowbell was firmly secured in the flying contraption. Once again, they have an extremely grueling tour schedule. And they do not exactly stay sober, you guys. I'm so sorry to report. Tommy said, what began as a clean and wholesome tour had near the end turned into a sick sexual circus. We were sober and had nothing else to do, so the girls became our only entertainment. But then our relationships at home were suffering from neglect and we were all sneaking alcohol, buying drugs, and reverting to our old self-destructive habits. The possible exception of Mick, whose fiancee happened to be on the road with us as a backup singer. Oh, yeah, Mick was engaged to the backup singer Emmy.

• 3:30:22Yasi Salek?

  All right, now it's nineteen ninety-one. The Dr. Feelgood Tour, while grueling, is over. Everyone has relapsed. The band is negotiating a new deal with Elektra. Vince is really bad at this point in terms of partying. Like, he kind of like just goes crazy and like is fucking up. And they like basically tell him to stop coming to rehearsals because he just like is not being productive or helpful at rehearsals. So he goes on a bender after they tell him not to come, and then he goes to rehab again. And Doug Thaler was like, oh, we all flew down to meet with Vince. We encouraged him to make the band a priority, and he swore he would, and blah, blah.

• 3:31:05Yasi Salek?

  Okay, they put out their first greatest hits, Decade of Decadence, eighty-one to ninety-one. That's in October. And then in December, they go back to the studio. Vince just does not show up. He stops coming. It all comes to a head one day. There's a terrible storm in L.A. It caused crazy floods that swept over the Ventura Freeway and flooded the Sepulveda Basin, killed six people. But still, Tommy and Nikki drove two hours each to get to the rehearsal in Burbank. And make even longer because I think Mick lived in the South Bay. And Vince, who lived much closer to Burbank, just never showed up. They keep calling and keep calling, keep getting a busy signal. And after four hours of waiting for him, they had their tour manager send him a fax saying, get your ass to rehearsal.

• 3:31:49Yasi Salek?

  They faxed his ass. And fifteen minutes later, he called the studio and said, oh, sorry, the phone lines were down. And Nikki said, that set me off. The phone lines were down? Then how the fuck did the fax go through? You had the phone off the hook because you didn't want to fucking come in. All of us drove through floods to get here and you couldn't even be bothered. And Vince was like, dude, take it easy. I thought rehearsal was canceled anyway with the flooding. Nikki was like, we waited for him and then someone in the studio said they had seen Vince out completely wasted at three AM the previous night. Whether it was true or not, it didn't matter. The conversation had already taken on a mutinous tone. Except for Mick, we were all slipping off the wagon, but Vince was the only one who was letting it affect his work.

• 3:32:32Yasi Salek?

  Who was getting caught all the time and was constantly lying about it. By the time he arrived, the seed was already planted in our minds that he was holding us back. Maybe if Vince had walked in and apologized for staying out so late the night before and sleeping through rehearsal, everything would have been fine. But he didn't. They have a huge blowout fight, babe. Vince says, I think this album is stupid anyways. I hate it.

• 3:32:53Speaker 06

  It's not going well.

• 3:32:55Yasi Salek?

  No, he storms out. This is when Vince is out of the band. Nikki says, he says he was fired. I say he was quit. He quit, but whatever. He's out.

• 3:33:04Speaker 06

  Oh, I know the feeling.

• 3:33:06Yasi Salek?

  Of being thrown out of a band?

• 3:33:07Speaker 06

  No, no, no, of just being like, I don't give a fuck, dude. I'm so sick of this.

• 3:33:12Yasi Salek?

  Right, right.

• 3:33:13Speaker 06

  I'm so sick of this thing that has been such a big high. I'm like sick of the high. I'm not not high like drug high, like just like thinking of like career highs and then

• 3:33:24Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:24Speaker 06

  personalities get fucked up or you start being like, you know what? The reason this is a big nightmare is because of blah blah. Not not because of me. It's like, if only blah blah wasn't the biggest fucking asshole.

• 3:33:37Yasi Salek?

  Nikki basically said that too. He said Vince was the scapegoat. It wasn't really him. It was exactly what you're saying.

• 3:33:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, and like, and like, they're all falling off the wagon, but Vince is the worst. But then there's also like, maybe you need to get the music together and Vince will drop the vocals later when, you know. See what I'm saying? It's just like, the whole thing's not working. And anyway, what, sorry, what I meant, what I meant to say was, I do understand the vibe of like, Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Go fuck yourself. Like, get this fucking baby, the fu- Throw the baby in with the toaster in the bathwater. Like, we don't fucking care. Die, you know? I'm so over it. Like, on to the next. Like, we're, we don't need that fucking bitch, you know?

• 3:34:23Yasi Salek?

  Hundred percent. And, and, you know, again, they didn't really talk about this, except there's one little line from Tommy about the Dr. Feelgood Tour where he's like, it would have probably been funner for us if we could bring cool opening acts like Iggy Pop or Husker Du, instead of having to bring these cheesy pop metal posers like Warrant or Whitesnake. It's also, we have to remember, nineteen ninety-one, like, the tide is absolutely shifting. Nineteen ninety-one is the year that punk broke. Nineteen ninety-one is the year that Nirvana Nevermind came out. And it's in December, it hadn't done world domination yet, but it was just about, it's just about to go number one on the charts in January, right after Christmas.

• 3:35:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, Warrant and Whitesnake in nineteen ninety-one does sound really random to me. It sounds like they were like-

• 3:35:11Yasi Salek?

  It was nineteen ninety, but yeah, it's, it's the tail end. Like-

• 3:35:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:35:15Yasi Salek?

  Obviously, Use Your Illusion comes out in nineteen ninety-one, so like, but Guns N' Roses is a secret third thing, right? Like, Guns N' Roses, like, occupied a little bit of a different space than the Poison and the Motley Crue of the world. And they were, I remember, because by nineteen ninety-one, I'm the one glued to MTV, and I thought Guns N' Roses was cool. And I thought Nirvana was cool. Like, I thought they're, in my mi- little mind, who didn't understand the difference, I thought they were both cool. But I thought Motley Crue was fucking corny. Like, I was like, get these men with their crazy, you know, like, get Cherry Pie, like, fuck out of my television. Like, bring back the cool, you know, November Rain video, and bring back the Smells Like Teen Spirit video. Like, that was where my, and, and also Red Hot Chili Peppers, that was very, like,

• 3:36:00Yasi Salek?

  to me, those three bands were just like, in one part and parcel of coolness.

• 3:36:05Speaker 06

  It's, clearly, it's not working.

• 3:36:07Yasi Salek?

  My point was that the sun is setting on Motley Crue's type of situation.

• 3:36:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:36:12Yasi Salek?

  And I think that must have been felt in some way alongside all of this, you know? Like, you're seeing this right, like, Nicki Six is nothing if not in touch with what's cool. I mean, he loved the New York, you know, like, there's no way that he's not seeing the shift that's happening in culture.

• 3:36:31Speaker 06

  Without a doubt.

• 3:36:32Yasi Salek?

  Um, unless he's too high on drugs, I don't know. Vince said later on, this was in the dirt, so I had begged Doug for a long time for help. I told him that I was having a lot of problems between my wife and the confusion over feeling aged out of rock music at 30. I explained to him that I was badly in need of help. If the band was upset at me for missing rehearsals, I wanted them to understand that it had nothing to do with them. I loved Molly Crew. I would have done anything for them. I don't know if Doug ever told the band about our conversation because the next thing I knew, Doug was calling my house saying, "The band doesn't want you around anymore. I'm willing to release you from your management contract tonight if you want." I was stunned. I expected we'd cool off for a week, then I'd get a call from Nikki and we'd start working together again. I just butted okay and hung up.

• 3:37:15Yasi Salek?

  This is pretty much, the cog has now fallen off the thing.

• 3:37:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:37:20Yasi Salek?

  Because this is where we're just gonna get to the end of it.

• 3:37:24Speaker 06

  It's also like, when you hit it that hard, you're like, "I wanna do it again, but I'm also scared that there's no way in hell to do it." So you're really stressed and you are looking for a scapegoat because you don't know if you got it.

• 3:37:37Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, it's like a subconscious self sabotage, so you don't even have to try again.

• 3:37:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:37:43Yasi Salek?

  Also, I just want to point out, I don't remember, and you might remember, but I don't remember exactly when it is. It's a little bit, it's later than this, but when Vince has the terrible, "Oh god, I cried so much when I was reading the dirt." When this poor little girl gets cancer and passes away, that ruined me. This is after he gets kicked out of the band.

• 3:38:00Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 3:38:01Yasi Salek?

  Okay, so the team is like, "Please don't kick Vince out," because they know that this is stupid. But they're like, "Sorry, no, it's over." They also had a new contract with Elektra for $25 million, which is actually crazy, because you know who didn't see the writing on the wall was Elektra? And they were worried that they would renege on it if Vince left, but they were like, "No, we're doing this." Nikki calls up this guy, John Karabi, who is in a band called The Scream, not to be confused with the DC hardcore band Scream, you guys. And he auditions and joins the band. And Tommy said, "There was a whole new school of bands coming out, heavy hard shit like Pantera and Prong." And with Vince gone and the tattooed dirtbag like Karabi, and we really finally had the tools to get into some real shit.

• 3:38:46Yasi Salek?

  I don't know if you ever looked up what John Karabi looks like.

• 3:38:50Yasi Salek?

  The next Motley Crue album comes out in nineteen ninety-four. Honey.

• 3:38:53Speaker 06

  And also like they've spent a lot of money, right?

• 3:38:57Yasi Salek?

  Spent a ton of money. Everything has changed. Nineteen ninety-four, babe. The world is a fucking absolutely different place. We have Pearl Jam now. Do you know what I mean? We have Alice in Chains. Grunge has come and like nearly gone. Like, we're already into like Weezer and Green Day territory. This is just like the whole, the cranberries, like alternative rock. It's downward spiral Nine Inch Nails. Like, people are not checking for Motley Crue, if I'm being honest.

• 3:39:25Speaker 06

  I want your honesty. We all do.

• 3:39:27Yasi Salek?

  We all do. Well, okay, so Grunge had happened. Motley Crue self-titled comes out in ninety-four, produced by Bob Rock. They once again are like, no drugs, no drinking, healthy, healthy. This album is just.

• 3:39:41Speaker 06

  It exists.

• 3:39:42Yasi Salek?

  It exists. It is not well received. And in my kind of opinion, like, the cog fell off. And like, they'll always be iconic. They'll always be Motley Crue. And I'm just gonna go through with you, because we can't miss these things. I'm gonna go through with you in a bullet point way, what happens between nineteen ninety-six and now. In nineteen ninety-six, this is two years after the Corrabi album, Rolling Stone magazine breaks the news. Vince Neil is returning to Motley Crue. They put out an album in ninety-seven called Generation Swine. Have you listened to that one? It's kind of like they heard Nine Inch Nails. Do you know what I mean?

• 3:40:15Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 3:40:25Yasi Salek?

  It had a really cool cover, to be honest.

• 3:40:27Speaker 06

  It does. It does have a good cover.

• 3:40:29Yasi Salek?

  With the pig heads and stuff. I mean, the graphic design is a little to be, but like, it's not for me, but I could see them finding an audience with like, maybe people who like. New metal? I don't know. In nineteen ninety-eight, Nicky Six fought and like, did this whole thing and like got the rights to their catalog back, which is so crazy. I think he gave up a lot of money for it, but it ended up being the best financial decision in the world because he ended up, I mean, this is gold to have your, to own your rights to your catalog. In nineteen ninety-nine, Tommy Lee quit to pursue his own band Methods of Mayhem because him and Vince Neil were fighting all the time and Vince punched him

• 3:41:13Yasi Salek?

  on the day when they were touring their greatest hits album. They did the album New Tattoo, forgettable. Two thousand and one is when the book that you love so much, The Dirt, came out.

• 3:41:23Speaker 06

  Love it.

• 3:41:24Yasi Salek?

  In two thousand and three, they put out a box set, two box sets called Music to Crash Your Car To, which I do find to be a questionable title, given the history of the band. But Vince Neil in two thousand and three is featured on the first season of the VH1 reality show The Surreal Life with MC Hammer, Emmanuel Lewis, Gabrielle Carteras, and Corey Feldman.

• 3:41:43Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 3:41:44Yasi Salek?

  I watched a few episodes on YouTube just to get back into this. That show's crazy. In two thousand and five, I watched the show that, I want to talk about two thousand and five real quick. Tommy Lee was in a reality show called Tommy Lee Goes to College. And in two thousand and five, this kind of thing was on network. It was on NBC.

• 3:42:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, I watched part of the first episode and I really enjoyed it.

• 3:42:04Yasi Salek?

  He went, he goes to the University of Nebraska. He's like forty-two years old. It's pretty amazing.

• 3:42:10Speaker 06

  There's a great film called Back to School starring Rodney Dangerfield from nineteen eighty-five, in which they are inspired ten years later. And I say, yes.

• 3:42:20Yasi Salek?

  It's great. Twenty years later.

• 3:42:22Speaker 06

  Twenty years later. Thank you.

• 3:42:24Yasi Salek?

  They do a reunion tour, babe. In two thousand and eight, Vince Neil hosts something called The Motley Crue's.

• 3:42:30Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 3:42:31Yasi Salek?

  With Rat, Skid Row, and Slaughter. Put out another album in two thousand and eight called The Saints of Los Angeles. Two thousand and nine, important for me, they make a guest appearance on the television program Bones and perform Dr. Feel Good. I did watch, rewatched the episode in preparation for this podcast.

• 3:42:47Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:42:48Yasi Salek?

  Oh, yeah. This is really crazy. In two thousand and fourteen, they launched the final Motley Crue tour, in which they sign this very highly publicized cessation of touring agreement, like basically legally stating they'll never tour again.

• 3:43:03Speaker 06

  Only to tour like the next year.

• 3:43:05Yasi Salek?

  Yes. And.

• 3:43:08Yasi Salek?

  It will not the next year, but once they do, it causes this huge lawsuit, which I think they're currently in with Mick Mars.

• 3:43:15Speaker 06

  Oh, Molly Crew and Mick Mars are in this lawsuit together?

• 3:43:17Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, because Mick Mars doesn't want to tour anymore because he can't because he's, you know, and then he said, he said, you guys can't tour. You said, we signed this and they're like, we can't. So it's a whole thing. 2019 was when the egregious film, The Dirt came out. I'm so sorry. Respect to everyone.

• 3:43:32Speaker 06

  I'm not watching that.

• 3:43:33Yasi Salek?

  Like Machine Gun Kelly as Tommy. Tommy Lee was, is Greek, babe. Like, what are we even doing here? What are we like, what are we even doing here? It's fine. It's just that I feel protective now of the Molly Crew story and I just feel like it could have been done much better.

• 3:43:48Speaker 06

  I just want to say one more thing. Read The Dirt or 2001 book. It's so fucking good.

• 3:43:55Yasi Salek?

  I want to caveat it by saying it's, it is really good, but it's also very harrowing and it's difficult to read. And I think for a woman, it's, it's lightly triggering. And I think that that you should know that before you read it because there's definitely some treatment of women that is not ideal.

• 3:44:12Speaker 06

  I, yes, sorry. I also would like to say it's like this insane time capsule of real rock stardom and I appreciate it for what it is. And I agree with what Yasi is saying. However, it's a history of lives that will never be lived again.

• 3:44:28Yasi Salek?

  It's definitely unvarnished. It's the truth. Yeah.

• 3:44:31Speaker 06

  It's the truth. Or like it's, or sorry, if some stories are made up, the overall truth about these insane American originals is unvarnished. So I think it's interesting.

• 3:44:44Yasi Salek?

  I agree.

• 3:44:45Speaker 06

  But we don't, but don't, don't watch the fucking Netflix 2019 bullshit version of that. Read it. I mean, like, it's better to read something that's fucked up, but real.

• 3:44:55Yasi Salek?

  What would Nikki Sixx say? Nikki Sixx would say, read a book.

• 3:44:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, fuck yeah. Yeah, dude.

• 3:45:01Yasi Salek?

  In 2022, they co-headlined a stadium tour with Def Leppard with Poison early opening. This is when they were allegedly, apparently, who knows, in breach of that contract and Mick Mars said he was going to retire from health issues and blah, blah. And then just... They had a Las Vegas residency this month and literally September 12th, they put out a from the beginning, greatest hits type compilation, which we didn't even know was happening, Mel, when we were prepping for this because we just know everything. I heard they're working on a documentary too. And that has the Dolly Parton, Hems, and Home on it. And now we're present day. We've caught up. We've told the Molly Crew story.

• 3:45:42Speaker 06

  Wow. And Vince had a stroke.

• 3:45:45Yasi Salek?

  Vince had a stroke, I believe, in December of 2024, which pushed off their residency to be in the fall of this year when it was supposed to be earlier last year.

• 3:45:53Speaker 06

  Hey, Yasi, fuck, marry, kill Molly Crew.

• 3:45:57Yasi Salek?

  Okay, what year is it?

• 3:45:59Speaker 06

  It is 1985.

• 3:46:05Yasi Salek?

  I'm marrying Nikki Sixx, I'm fucking Tommy Lee, and I'm murdering Vince Neil. What about you?

• 3:46:11Speaker 06

  I am fucking Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee in a three-way. I'm murdering Vince Neil.

• 3:46:19Yasi Salek?

  You're marrying Mick Mars? Oh my God, I love that for you.

• 3:46:22Speaker 06

  I guess so, yeah.

• 3:46:23Yasi Salek?

  It actually would probably be a nice life.

• 3:46:25Speaker 06

  It's sweet. Yeah.

• 3:46:26Yasi Salek?

  Yeah, I like that. Okay, gorge. Mel Ottenberg, as always, it's been my absolute joy and honor to have you on this program. I really appreciate your enthusiasm and love of Molly Crew and the eighties and all things sleaze and trash. And that's it. I'm glad that we got to do this together.

• 3:46:44Speaker 06

  I mean, Yasi, the pleasure is mine. All 19 hours of this podcast have been a real joy. Fuck, yeah.

• 3:46:51Yasi Salek?

  Guitar!

• 3:47:05Yasi Salek?

  If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bandsplain. Our guest today was Mel Ottenberg. This episode was produced by Rob Sunderland, edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bandsplain are Gina Dalback and me, Yasi Salek. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Cosentino and Jennifer Clavon. Graciously recorded by Carlos de la Garza in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, AKA Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Sean Fennessey, Michael Hardman, Casey Simonsen, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Meyerson, Jessica Hopper, and Mr. Nicholas Six.

• 3:47:48Yasi Salek?

  Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Band Splain on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 3:47:59Speaker 06

  Has anyone ever been on this podcast, like, doing coke?

• 3:48:02Yasi Salek?

  Like, live while we record it?

• 3:48:04Speaker 06

  Like, do you think so? Like, I don't know. I just feel like if I'm so dead now, like, you could really use a pick-me-up. You know what I mean?

• 3:48:10Yasi Salek?

  Yeah.

• 3:48:11Speaker 06

  I get why these guys needed to fucking crank out the lines, you know, to keep it going.

• 3:48:17Yasi Salek?

  I don't think Nicky Six could walk a mile in my shoes, honey. I don't think he could do this, what I'm doing.

• 3:48:23Speaker 06

  Preach. Preach.

• 3:48:26Speaker 03

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• 3:48:56Speaker 04

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