Motley Memories

I was the first kid on the school bus to play Motley Crue. Back when I was in high school at Wyoming Valley West, there was a tradition of sorts: the seniors got to sit in the last few seats, in the back of the bus, and it was the seniors that got to bring their boom boxes onto the bus and blast their music on the way to school.

Underclassmen could sometimes offer some music, but the seniors decided whether or not it was played.

One day, I brought a tape on the bus from a new band called Motley Crue. The seniors agreed to pop it in, and off we went to class, jamming away to "Looks That Kill." Very metal. Within months, the band quickly shot to stardom, but we at WVW knew 'em first.

(Hey, I could always spot a hot new band.)

Over the next few years, we all saw the young, notorious L.A. unit become one of the biggest groups in the world. They even came to NEPA and played Pocono Downs in '87 at a time when we rarely got any major shows, and after I started covering music here in NEPA in 1992, I got to interview people like Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil. I also reviewed one of their shows in Philadelphia at the old Spectrum in '97, and in '98, I caught them in Wilkes-Barre again at The F.M. Kirby Center. And it was that show that eventually led to me having a nice little piece of Motley Crue history.

Prior to the show, I did an interview with Neil. It was still a post-grunge musical climate at the time, and there was still some undeserved backlash to '80s metal bands festering in the rock press. Not from me. I wrote a piece about how Motley Crue could see the light at the end of the tunnel, that the shoe-gazer era of boring live bands was thankfully coming to an end, and that they were back to kick some ass. The story was picked up on the national wire, ran all across the nation, and a few months later, the Crue called me and asked me to write the liner notes to their entire musical catalog, "Crucial Crue," which was being digitally remastered and reissued.

This was pretty cool.

The project came at a time when Tommy Lee was leaving the band, but for about a week, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx were calling my apartment every night so that I could conduct interviews on their recollections of each album. It was a lot work, on a short deadline, but it was also a lot of fun and something I'm proud to have worked on. The band even put my name on every CD, and yes, the thought of having your name on every Motley Crue CD in every record store in the world is pretty cool. I even have a framed copy of the "Crucial Crue" promo poster, boasting of the new liner notes, hanging in my home office.

(BTW: I still think "Kickstart My Heart" is one of the greatest hard-rock songs of all time)

I've caught Motley live a few more times since the CD project - at Camden , N.J., in '99, at Montage in 2000 and at the Wachovia Arena in 2006, which was the last time I talked to Nikki. They even played someone's backyard up in Dorrance a few years ago as part of a radio contest, and I caught them there, too. The guys are still very cool to me, and they even donated a very nice autographed item to "Concert For Karen" rock auction one year. And if you would have told me back in 1983 when I brought that Motley Crue cassette onto that school bus that, someday, my name would be on it, I'd have thought you were nuts.

So there you have it: I finally wrote a little something about the question I'm still asked quite often: "Why is your name on all of the Motley Crue albums?" I never really wrote about it before, but with Motley coming back to Montage on Aug. 30, I'm sure I'll be getting it more often, so I thought I'd share the story. Sure, I'm on the CDs because I wrote the liner notes, but I like to think it was also because, 25 years ago, one tall and skinny underclassmen, on one kick-ass ride to school, was the coolest metalhead on the bus.