Motley Crue frontman Vince Neil has shared a photo of himself driving a race car that says ‘Say no to drugs.’ Pretty ironic after watching The Dirt on Netflix! Tommy Lee was caught yelling at his wife in a hilarious video yesterday.
Neil’s former bandmate Mick Mars is working on his debut solo album, and SizzleVonSizzleton wrote on SteveHoffman.TV that it’s hard to know what to expect since Nikki Sixx was Motley Crue’s primary songwriter: Does anybody feel like they have ANY sense of Mick Mars as a songwriter? Because I don’t. In that most recent ‘update’ about his album Mick says “It’s hard to reinvent yourself, but that’s what I’m doing now. I’m trying to reinvent the way that I approach music writing.” And it also mentions that he’s “working with an orchestrator and arranger to help him with certain parts in his songs”.
I’ve always viewed Motley Crue as four separate and unique guys but I never doubted for one second that the songs were a construct of Nikki Sixx. The other three guys were perfect as players and as personalities but their value was building on Nikki’s ideas and using him as a sounding board for which of their ideas was usable.
I’ve said that I think Theatre of Pain contains the most ‘Mick Mars’ playing on any Crue album. His playing is slippery, like a perfect blend of older rock players added to the 80’s stew instead of trying to out Eddie Van Halen the Eddie Van Halen clones. A Motley Crue member recently revealed a bizarre System of a Down secret.
But Mick only has three song writing credits on TOP, and curiously to me none of them is Home Sweet Home. Because I feel like the solo section of Home Sweet Home is the pinnacle of Mick’s brilliance and it’s so vital to the song that I feel like he deserves a co-write for his contribution. Every note he plays (and constructed) from 2.02 to 2.52 is just absolute perfection and I’d be shocked if any Motley Crue fan wouldn’t rate it amongst the best things Mick ever played.
But again that’s building onto a song, so how can I have any sense of Mick’s song writing style? Mick has three co-writes on GirlsX3 (title track, Dancing on Glass, Bad Boy Boogie) and a whopping eight on Dr. Feelgood. But the Crue was already getting more and more generic by this time to the point where there was a lot of filler.
All those years ago Mick talked about his future solo album being his more bluesy side. Now? Who the hell knows. I’m certainly interested to hear it but it’s impossible to get excited about it. I don’t have clue one about Mick as a writer even from Motley Crue so how could I form any anticipation or excitement about where he might take his song writing next?
This is where it baffles me when Mick talks about ‘not losing too many fans’. Mick is a complete blank. Motley Crue couldn’t sell a lot of albums now so I hope he realizes that on his own his sales will be minimal. And let’s be honest, nobody knows who Mick Mars is so virtually every sale will be to a Crue fan.
And we’ve all got this built in empathy and love for Mick so we’re going to be more forgiving. It’ll be a ten dollar purchase in a lifetime of supporting the band. Where we’ll drag Nikki over the coals for writing another soundtrack to a first menstruation or Tommy for writing another soundtrack to an identity crisis, Mick will get a wider berth. And the album will sink like a stone no matter how good it is. Is there a touring strategy in 2020 for a 70 year old guitar player on his debut album? Nikki Sixx recently dropped a Motley Crue reunion bombshell.
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