By 1988, rude dudeness (tattoos included) was an established fact of life on Sunset Strip. What had begun a few years before as the scum also rising in sleazy Hollywood flea havens like the Starwood and Gazzarri’s was now the mainstream. Millions were being made out of what these days is called hair-metal. Living a block away, at the time, from where the twin meccas of the scene – the Rainbow and the Roxy – sat side-by-side on the boulevard, I assure you, ‘hair-metal’ was not a term used by anyone back then. We simply revelled in it as shameless LA-style rock with a capital ‘R’, into which the terms glam-metal, popmetal, punk-metal and – much later – hair-metal, fitted snugly.
This was make-up and metal, built on the gleefully recycled meet-cute riffs of original English glam-rockers like Sweet, Slade, David Bowie and T.Rex, delivered with a thumping-headache Gary Glitter beat and full-fat chorus of mascaraed males in silvery space-boots. The exemplars appeared like hastily chopped rails of coke on a toilet seat at The Whisky: Quiet Riot, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Poison, Guns N’ Roses.
They were chased by a hairsprayed horde of coulda-wouldas: W.A.S.P., Vixen, Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns… The second-bananas had occasional hits that rotated briefly on MTV. But the big boys stormed the palace of Tower Records, and the biggest multiplatinums were now anything by Whitesnake and Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses and Def Leppard. Or Poison. Or Ozzy. Or Van Halen. Or…
By the summer of 1988 it was official: LA metal didn’t just rock, it ruled, dude.
The shrapnel hit everywhere. The Cathouse, co-owned by soon-to-be Headbangers’ Ball host Riki Rachtman and Faster Pussycat singer Taime Downe, took over from the Rainbow as the place where rock stars mingled freely with duded-up scenesters. Slash and Duff leering from the balcony, CC Deville and Tracii Guns on a couch surrounded by eager admirers, not all of whom were strippers and mud wrestlers from the Tropicana.
LA-based magazine RIP was now the place for 80s-age metal fanatics to get their vicarious kicks. The first non-porn magazine published by Larry Flint, creator of Hustler, the worst-selling issue of RIP had the Rolling Stones on the cover; their best-selling cover: Axl Rose in full-bearded Charlie Manson mode, aiming a shotgun at you, with the headline: ‘THIS INTERVIEW WILL BLOW YOU AWAY!’
Filmmaker Penelope Spheeris freeze-framed the scene with her 1988 documentary The Decline Of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years. Tawn Mastrey, aka The Leather Nun, was the hottest DJ at KNAC, the LA metal station with a traffic reporter named Headbangin’ Barb and car insurance ads for “dudes” with questionable driving records.
“Everyone wants to look like Nikki Sixx now,” said Melissa Lopez, a local hairdresser who specialised in “rock’n’roll hair”. By 1988 everyone did look like Nikki Sixx.
Sixx days till Christmas, 1987. The third sold-out night of Mötley Crüe at the 14,500-capacity Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. The last night of what has been a catastrophic Japanese tour and, although they didn’t know it yet, the final night of the Girls, Girls, Girls world tour.
Mick Mars, their corpse-faced guitarist, stumbles around. Long, tall Tommy Lee, stripped to the waist, stands and leers, a badass twirling sticks of dynamite. Blond-bimbo singer Vince Neil – Baby Lee Roth – does his every-frontmanyou’ve-ever-seen shtick. But this is Nikki’s ride. Lean, and blood-famished as a vampire, he’s so strung out from heroin withdrawal that he doesn’t even remember throwing a whisky bottle at someone’s head and being thrown in jail. High instead on bourbon and bile, Nikki is a blurred vision of debauched splendour, cradling his white bass like a dead body.
Every band needs a leader, a whip-cracker, someone to kick ass. Van Halen had Diamond Dave. Ozzy has Sharon. Mötley have Nikki. Sixx-feet-plus of baaad attitude built on zero self-worth and hard-won street smarts. Where would the other three be without him?
The Girls, Girls, Girls album was Mötley Crüe’s biggest yet, reaching No.2 in the US. The sleaze-classic title track, with its singsong chorus that sounded like the Beach Boys detoxing, was also a big chart hit. There was one other killer track: Wild Side. The rest, not so much.
It had been the same story for every Mötley album. A couple of built-in-the-lab hits floating like dead flies in a toilet. Tom Werman, producer of three quadruple-platinum Mötley albums in a row, had developed a fastmoving style suited to a band that treated recording sessions like another night at the Tropicana, filling it with groupies, dealers, hangers-on. To get as many as two decent tracks out of them was considered near-genius.
The success of Girls, Girls, Girls was meant to herald the next step in world domination. Instead it signalled the end. The same month, Guns N’ Roses released Appetite For Destruction. LA rocknoir at its apotheosis. Suddenly easy-action popcorn metal didn’t cut it any more and Mötley Crüe were no longer the big dogs of the scene. In fact they were already dead. They just didn’t know it.
When Nikki got back to LA and immediately OD-ed on smack while “partying” at the Plaza hotel with Slash and members of Ratt and Megadeth – he was pronounced dead at the scene when his heart stopped beating for two minutes – manager Doc McGhee cancelled the rest of the tour and issued an ultimatum: get straight. Or Doc was out.
First to volunteer for rehab, ironically, was Mick Mars. Mick didn’t have a drug problem, he had a drink problem, getting so rotted on tour that he’d wake up in closets, where Tommy had dumped him in disgust. Mick thought the rehab thing was stoopid. Just wanted to get it over with. “The only bad habit we had was therapy,” he later claimed.
Then Tommy said yes to rehab and everyone paid attention. Tommy loved cocaine, sex, Jack Daniel’s, weed and breaking shit. But lately, he confessed, he’d taken to shooting smack with Nikki “once in a while”.
For Nikki it was always drugs. Nikki was addicted to everything. A multiple-overdose overlord. Vince liked to drink a lot and do drugs a lot and fuck and fight a lot, pausing only for restorative blackouts. He’d killed his friend Razzle three years earlier when wasted-at-the-wheel Vince crashed his orange-red ’72 Ford Pantera sports car with the Hanoi Rocks drummer in the passenger seat. Vince ultimately got off with a $2.6 million compensation payment and three weeks in jail. Vince in rehab, though? But he had no choice. None of them did.
Aerosmith had recently gone into group rehab. But they were oldsters compared to the Crüe. When word got out that Mötley were now part of the hugs-not-drugs brigade, their image took a hit. “Dude, tell me again: Nikki and Tommy and Vince and even Mick have gone away together to get clean and sober? You must be tripping, man!”
It was a million-to-one shot. But it worked. The four came out so clean they squeaked when they walked. With nothing left to do with their time, they came out energised and eager to kick ass in the studio with their new producer, Bob Rock. Hot from producing Kingdom Come’s platinum debut and The Cult’s first multi-platinum US album, Sonic Temple, not only was Bob on a winning streak, best of all he had his own studio, Little Mountain, in Vancouver, about as far from the Wild Side of LA as a bunch of newly sober, emotionally fragile, bitchy and freaked-out freaks could possibly get.
Talking via Zoom from the Wyoming farmstead where he lives with his 39-year-old wife Courtney and their five-year-old daughter Ruby, Nikki remembers recording at Little Mountain as “a special experience”. He says Bob Rock told them: “Look, you guys all have lives, and it’s hard to have this much focus for this big of an initiative.”
“That’s why we changed producers. Bob said: ‘I would like you guys to come to Vancouver and just… you get up every day, you do whatever your morning ritual is. Then come into the studio ready to work.”
They would meet every morning in the gym. Aerosmith were also recording at Little Mountain, working with Rock’s mentor, Bruce Fairbairn, on their album Pump.
“They’d be in the gym too,” says Nikki. “Then we’d be outside, taking in nature, jump on our motorcycles, drive over to the studio. Be there by eleven-thirty or noon and be creative all day, and then go back to our apartment and listen to mix-down tapes, and rewrite lyrics.”
If that sounds a little dull, for Mötley Crüe it provided two things they had never known before: discipline and structure. And a bulletproof shield from the outside world.
“It was a complete submersive experience,” he says. “That’s what gave us the ability to kind of dodge and weave with some of the different kinds of tracks we had in there.”
Nikki recalls Bob telling him to “take a shot at rewriting the lyrics” to a new number Mick had conjured up a thundering riff for.
“I had a little room that I’d go in and sit on the floor. No computer to pull information from, just books and magazines. I’d work on lyrics then come out and show Bob, who would be like: ‘I think you could do better.’ I’d go back in the room, come back out again. Bob would go: ‘You’re halfway there.’
“Eight times I rewrote that song. He kept saying: ‘More Springsteen! More Ian Hunter! You know how to do this. You’re a storyteller!’”
The end result was something Nikki called Dr. Feelgood, which zeroed in on true-life tales of Hollyweird madness. The tank-rolling, sirens-wailing Dr. Feelgood concerned ‘a second-hand hood’ named ‘Rat-tailed Jimmy’ who traded his ’65 Chevy ‘for some powdered goods’. The same ‘Jigsaw Jimmy’ who ‘got a cozy little job selling for the Mexican mob’.
It wasn’t just the lyrics Bob pushed them on, says Nikki. “He’s pushing Vince to sing better. Nobody had done that before. He’s pushing Tommy to change up the beat. He’s pushing Mick: ‘I want to re-do the guitars, double them, triple them, quadruple them…’ Bob focused on the little things. You do enough little things right and you make big change.”
Rock insisted the band record their parts alone with him, so they didn’t have to suffer the others waiting impatiently while Bob drilled them forensically, take after take after take. “You’d get home at night exhausted, but it was a special experience, which then turned into a special album. We learned something that we still apply today: ignore everything else, forget whatever’s going on outside the studio. You follow the creativity, and then magic moments happen. And that inspires the artwork and a whole theme.”
Unlike previous albums, this time the Crüe had more than one ace up their tattooed sleeve. The furious Kickstart My Heart referenced Nikki’s near-fatal OD before rehab, not in a mawkish way but utterly defiant. Vince middle-fingering America: ‘Always got the cops coming after me/Custom-built bike doing 103…’
Any fans that feared a straight-no-chaser Crüe would lose their edge were proved wrong yet again as stake-thru-the-heart rocker monsters like Rattlesnake Shake and Same Ol’ Situation (both rare full-band compositions) exploded like gunfire in a Barrio turf war. There was a deep Zeppelin swagger to Slice Of Your Pie and Sticky Sweet, and whiplash AC/DC wit to She Goes Down. There was even a true-blue Springsteen-level ballad, Without You, by Nikki and Mick, which was pure street-symphony gold. Even some wry Crüe-style philosophy in the glorious chugalug Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away).
“I got the title from a movie or somewhere and built it from there,” says Nikki. Or rather, Mick built on Nikki’s street poetry with exquisite guitar chorusing and solos. Plus, Vince’s unexpectedly heartfelt vocals. That summed up the album in a nutshell. Nobody expected Mötley Crüe to ever give up drugs. Nobody expected Mötley Crüe to ever have a No.1 album. Or to ever make music as impressive as this.
But they did. Yes they fuckin’ did.
Named after its statement song, Dr. Feelgood would become the biggest and still the best album Mötley Crüe ever made. As a result, it also became Mötley’s first US No.1 album; the title track their US Top 10 single – followed by Without You, which also rode the US Top 10 like a pretty pony.
In the UK, where the Crüe lived on the covers of Kerrang! and the other dedicated metal mags but received zero daytime radio play and therefore had no hit singles at all, the Dr. Feelgood album zoomed into the Top 5, and is now acclaimed as one of the greatest albums of the hair-metal era. Second only, perhaps, to Appetite For Destruction. But then everything would be second to that album for years to come.
Last year marked the 35th anniversary of the release of Dr. Feelgood.
“I know,” says Nikki. “How crazy is that? I mean, how the fuck did we both get here?” he says with a laugh. (We are the same age.) “I can’t tell you how many times over the years I’ve seen the Dr. Feelgood ‘RX’ symbol tattooed on people.”
He acknowledges, however, that the special sauce that went into making such a peerless monument to the late-80s LA metal scene – he jokingly refers to it now as “hairspray metal” – contained almost none of the ingredients that had previously defined everything about it. No drugs, no booze, no chicks with or without dicks to distract them. As he observes wryly: “First time being sober was a real different experience from a band that was always wrecked.”
One that, sadly, was never to be repeated. It would be another five years until the next Mötley Crüe album, and by then Vince Neil had been fired, as had Doc McGhee, and the corpse of LA metal had become entombed beneath the Tower Of Babel that was grunge.
Vince would eventually return, and Tommy Lee would then leave for a period before he also returned. These days it’s Mick Mars who is now AWOL from the band, his spot taken – for now – by John 5.
When their official group biography The Dirt: Confessions Of The World’s Most Notorious Rock Band became an international bestseller in 2001, however – followed in 2019 by the equally celebrated Netflix movie of the same name – it propelled Mötley Crüe into a realm of fame where music hardly matters any more. With one exception: the one they call Dr. Feelgood.
The 35th anniversary edition of Mötley Crüe's Dr. Feelgood is out now.
