Kickstart My Heart: A Motley Crue Day-by-Day

The
’70s
and
Times
Past
N
o question, it’s hard graft at times to
find anything heartening and unsoiled
about the sordid story of Mötley Crüe. And
the band’s mostly awful experiences through
childhoods and into the ’70s would seem to
be no exception. It’s relentless, the poop.
And yet there is one interesting and inspiring aspect to the formative years
experienced by Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Nikki Sixx, and Tommy Lee, and that is
the idea that all four of them came to the band with no musical accomplishments
of note. Rather, collapsing into Mötley Crüe for each of these guys, as the ’70s
became the ’80s, represented a degree of desperation for each of them.
Let’s lift up the rock and peer under. First off, on the surface, it would seem
that if we are to ascribe desperation to Vince’s or Tommy’s situation, it would be
of a lesser sort than that of Mick and Nikki. Essentially, what we will find is that
the pathway to Crüe for both of these guys—friends with each other and even
roommates of a sort—is quite similar.
Both Tommy and Vince took a pledge of poverty and homelessness by choice,
gradually extricating and estranging themselves from family life and educational
convention in pursuit of the rock ’n’ roll dream—food and accommodation be
damned.
Nikki, on the other hand . . . on the surface, it might have seemed he was in
the same boat—knocking about Hollywood with goofy-looking glam bands, hiring
and firing and getting kicked out, playing house parties and scoring women and
drugs instead of pay—but rather, Nikki was pushed into the squalor of Hollywood
as much by a horrible broken family life as he was by rock star aspiration. For
Nikki, basically unemployable because of the unrealistic and anti-society thoughts
in his head, it was construct a job for himself in rock or don’t eat.
And then there’s Mick, dear old Mick. Older than the rest of the guys by
essentially ten years, Mick multiplied that age gap by living too much hardship,
wearing much of himself out, throughout those ten years before the Crüe—years
when Tommy and Vince were nothing more than happy-go-lucky teenagers on the
make (Nikki, not so much). Girlfriends and wives come and gone, kids birthed
with no money and no prospects, ridiculous disappointments band after band . .
. Mick’s life was a book before Nikki stole his first guitar (thinking it was a bass).
But then we get to the end of the ’70s, and Mick gets his last chance, throwing in his
lot with three guys in roughly the same desperate rock place, and just as dead broke as Mick,
but not yet suffocated by disappointment, still spunked and stupidly optimistic about how
hard rock is for everybody and not just the most desperate.
Oh sure, read on; the guys liked their rock and there had to be some ambition in
there somewhere—that is, ambition beyond the blind ambition of somehow, improbably
snorting and guzzling one’s way to the top. But the reverberation one gets from the 1970s
experienced by these guys is one, again, of different forms and intensities of desperation.
With nowhere to live, rock is survival, and in a quick second breath, rock is chicks and
drugs. Rock might also be about acceptance and love. Rock is too fast for art.