Mötley Crüe are on their farewell tour around the globe.The calculus is that they'll never play together again, and beyond that, they'll ride off into the sunset with one last cash grab. They're hoping never to go to this well again, and are trying to drink it all dry before they go out. to paraphrase TS Eliot, we don't go out with a bang, we go out with a 24month global farewell tour screaming "I'm really going to miss you guys!" in the microphone in-between playing your greatest hits.
I was lucky enough to get an invite to the corporate box so not only did I not pay, I got fed very well. I'm not entirely sure if this is meant to be the way Rock music goes - it was almost an un-Rock sort of experience having canapés before Alice Cooper came on.
What's Good About It
The amazing light show and pyrotechnics that accompany the band on stage, are amazing. The staging is extraordinary. It's somewhat like a circus - and you got Alice Cooper as the support act to boot. It's one big phantasmagorical hair metal festival that takes you back to the bits of the 1980s you didn't really enjoy the first time. (It helps to have the distance of time and the protection of the above-mentioned corporate box.)
The lighting is amazing. It has 50 moving lights, a massive structure with LED fittings, there are 10 flame-throwing things as well as umpteen pyrotechnical devices. The design of the lighting array is breathtaking and always in sync with the music. It looks the way MTV made you believe all concerts looked, back in the 80s.
The lighting is amazing. It has 50 moving lights, a massive structure with LED fittings, there are 10 flame-throwing things as well as umpteen pyrotechnical devices. The design of the lighting array is breathtaking and always in sync with the music. It looks the way MTV made you believe all concerts looked, back in the 80s.
The band is tight; very well rehearsed and don't miss their cues at all. The whole enterprise has a very mechanically correct feel, even to the point of making Alice Cooper's act look a little quaint. There's a high energy level that never really lets up and goes right to the end with it. It's a really good show.
What's Bad About It
They put across what they have very well, but what they actually have is 80's hair metal. It's been a long time since I was living the musical universe where this stuff was the backbone the music industry, but basically their material is as simple as any old dumb rock band of that era. There's a lot of sound and fury but there's very little actual musical content to hang your hat upon. It's sort of amazing that music this simple in conception could have rung up so much sales.
Never has so little been stretched out to such magnificent folly-like dimension. But then again this was unabashedly showbiz and hardly an attempt at art. If you' looking for artistic merit, you'd be very wrong to look for it at a Mötley Crüe concert. So, back to what's good about it - it was actually a good show.
What's Interesting About It
Oh the irony of it all, really.
There I am sitting in a corporate box watching this corporate entertainment. It was entirely the opposite experience to seeing the Crimson ProjeKCt last year. With that one, I was up front by the stage listening to musicians craft the most adventurous music in the total dark of the Hi-Fi Bar. This was me sitting up on the third deck looking down at the throbbing throng crowding the stage to hear this unadventurous music packaged with the most amazing light and fireworks show.
To add ironic insult to injury, they covered 'Anarchy in the UK' by the Sex Pistols, which was most likely the worst act of appropriation I've ever seen. Not only were they phoneys, they made us the audience equally phoney and even complicit in this orgy of phoniness. It was like a semiotic train wreck; a cum-shot of phoniness splattering across our faces. Yes, horrible metaphor, but it's still accurate.
I mean, really, what would Johnny Rotten of '77 make of something so cynical, exploitative, and unedifying as Mötley Crüe? 'Anarchy in the UK' sung by LA native corporate rockers in 2015? It's banality stands as the mirror image of Sid Vicious covering 'My Way'. Oddly enough the band walks off to Frank Sinatra's rendition of 'My Way' at the end of the night.
I mean, really, what would Johnny Rotten of '77 make of something so cynical, exploitative, and unedifying as Mötley Crüe? 'Anarchy in the UK' sung by LA native corporate rockers in 2015? It's banality stands as the mirror image of Sid Vicious covering 'My Way'. Oddly enough the band walks off to Frank Sinatra's rendition of 'My Way' at the end of the night.
Alice Cooper
In some ways the highlight of the night was the demented gothic vaudeville of Alice Cooper and his band. being the support act, the sound had the clarity of a sewage outlet in Shengzeng industrial sector in China. Yet the playing was spirited and the stage show a pleasant pantomime of gothic horror archetypes. He even did 'Welcome to my Nightmare' which is the title track of my fave Alice Cooper album. Steve Deacon wasn't there, but he had 3 shredding guitarists playing their hearts out.
The show sort of underlined the possibility that if Rock isn't dead, it surely is in its undead zombie phase. The problem I've always felt with Alice Cooper's material is that these play-acting mini-stories he tells in song and on stage don't point to any kind of authenticity. Instead it underscores the entire edifice of show biz that plays musicians like puppets. That underneath all the makeup and pretend gothic-gore, there's a guy playing his audience for suckers. After all, he's now a keen golfer and votes Republican.
He's a fricken' class enemy for the values of Rock.
He's a fricken' class enemy for the values of Rock.
Mick Mars
Mick Mars looked sickly. At 64, he's a full 10years older than Vince and Tommy and Nicky. He looks like a vampire. Alice Cooper's ghoulish makeup's got nothing on Mick Mars. But he sure can play. He gets beautiful singing tones out of his battered white Strat and the overtones are to die for.
Mars is the saving grace of Mötley Crüe. He is controlled, studied and succinct. While all the silly bombast comes from Tommy Lee's drumming and the pedestrian bass playing of Nicky Sixx, Mars' is the contribution that gives the rather skeletal music some actual flesh. As shredders go, he's not as impressive as a Van Halen or a Steve Vai. He's very good, but not enough to be a generation-defining player. His solo spot is pretty ordinary and reveals a rather quirky player with some fine touch, but it has nothing on the likes of his leading Heavy Metal contemporaries when it comes to gusto or emotive power.
It's a weird band to look at these days. Vince looks like a gerbil, Mick looks like a vampire, Nicky looks like he's wearing underpants on his head and Tommy Lee looks like he's getting fashion cues from Henry Rollins.
Goodbye Rock
Rock music used to mean something - I should know, I meant it when I played. Then it sort of slowly drifted up its own fundament to the point where it's now mostly just corporate entertainment. The counterculture of the 60s and 70s gave way to the Reaganomic, Thatcherite 1980s and rock music got sucked into the vortex of commerce. It became this thing where pop music could be packaged up and sold like commodities, it didn't even need to be good or meaningful. And that's how we got Mötley Crüe in the first place - a vapid mirror for a vapid age.
The fact that today, they're old and shrivelled and too misshapen to fit into their spandex trousers any more, is almost irrelevant because there is no legitimate nostalgia. It's all manufactured and marketed from the monolithic industry in LA. There was nothing ever real or authentic about this band to begin with, so complaining about the un-reality of their career oeuvre is like complaining about McDonalds as a form of cuisine. Frank Zappa used to say that anybody who thinks rock video clips (like you see on MTV) are a new form of art probably thinks Cabbage Patch Dolls (remember those?) are a new form of soft sculpture. Mötley Crüe is exactly what Frank Zappa was talking about; the disdain from Frank is fully well-earned.
But it's easy for me to diss their music. It stand for all the wrong things in rock.
My better half thought they were gas in their heyday, what with their hair and clothes and makeup and outlandish behaviour. She thought that, was rock. Needless to say, she had a good time. I did too, but it had nothing to do with the actual music.
My better half thought they were gas in their heyday, what with their hair and clothes and makeup and outlandish behaviour. She thought that, was rock. Needless to say, she had a good time. I did too, but it had nothing to do with the actual music.
No comments:
Post a Comment