MÖTLEY CRÜE

Be warned! Just when you thought it was safe to come out of the house, the world’s most notorious hard rock band is back and better than ever. The story isn’t a pretty one, but this time it has a happy ending. No band has consumed as many drugs and downed as much booze without dying as L.A.’s Mötley Crüe.

The Crüe returned in summer 2008 with Saints of Los Angeles, their first CD with the original line-up - Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars, Tommy Lee and Vince Neil - in over a decade and the ninth studio album in their career, and the inaugural season of Crüe Fest, the band’s version of the new great American rock festival, which became the top rock festival of the summer. Mötley Crüe returns to the road this summer for Crüe Fest 2, marking with it a very special occasion – the 20th anniversary of the iconic rock album Dr. Feelgood.

Inspired by Mötley Crüe’s New York Times best-seller The Dirt, Saints of Los Angeles offers tremendous insight into the lives of the rebellious leaders of the “L.A. sleaze rock” movement. The album scored a #1 debut on the Billboard Independent Albums chart and landed as the top debut of the week on Billboard’s Top 200, marking another major event for the band that has sold more than 80 million albums, 25 million in the U.S.A., to date including 1983’s fourmillion- selling Shout at the Devil, followed by five consecutive Top 10 singles in 1985’s Theatre of Pain (#6), 1987’s platinum-selling Girls, Girls, Girls (#2), 1989’s six-million-selling and chart-topper Dr. Feelgood, 1994’s Mötley Crüe (#7) and 1997’s Gold selling Generation Swine (#4).

Having survived three decades of decadence and nearly every possible obstacle, including several brought on by themselves, Mötley Crüe now find themselves in a once inconceivable position—that of rock royalty.

After regrouping and headlining their 2005 Carnival of Sins world tour, named by Pollstar as the number seven grossing tour of the year, the platinum two-CD greatest hits package Red, White & Crüe and 2006’s Route of All Evil Tour with Aerosmith, “We needed to make new music,” says Sixx of Saints of Los Angeles. “We’re not a nostalgia act. It seemed to make sense to me to get the bullshit out of the way and just make music. We’ve created our own sound and it was time to do it again.” The title track on the new Saints of Los Angeles album received a 2009 Grammy Award nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance.

Inspired by his experiences writing his own N.Y. Times best-seller, the critically-acclaimed The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star, and recording the accompanying soundtrack with his band SIXX:A.M. Nikki turned to his collaborators on that project, James Michael and DJ Ashba, to work with, Mick, Tommy and Vince on the new album. The trio cowrote and co-produced the title track and first single, “Saints of Los Angeles,” inspired, according to Sixx, by the 103 streets named after saints in Los Angeles. The single debuted on AOL Music’s Spinner.com and was the first song ever released simultaneously as a downloadable track for the revolutionary music video game Rock Band and on iTunes. Regarding the album’s title, Nikki laughs, “It’s supposed to be sarcastic, because obviously we’re not saints, but we are from the streets of Los Angeles. As a lyricist, I’ve become a storyteller of reality.” Adds Vince Neil, “Much of life is looking back and remembering what happened to you. Let’s share those memories, re-enact them, turn them into songs, plays, movies, books and a soundtrack to life.”

“It’s snotty and we’re not going to apologize for it,” insists Nikki about Saints of Los Angeles. “So let the critics line up with their poison pens and say what they will say, but in the end, they’ll be backstage just like everybody else, wishing to get a glimpse of the decadence.” Coinciding with the release of Saints of Los Angeles, Mötley Crüe kicked off their first-annual Crüe Fest. The inaugural tour was the most successful touring rock festival of the summer, playing to nearly half a million rock fans throughout North America and ranking the number ten tour overall for the season according to Rolling Stone. The Crüe Fest Tour’s partnership wtih Rock Band also received a nomination for Best Marketing and Promotion at the 2008 Billboard Touring Awards.

Crüe Fest 2 is on track to bring the same energy to rock fans across the continent in the summer of 2009. For the second incarnation of the tour, Mötley Crüe has enlisted Godsmack, Theory of a Deadman, Drowning Pool and Charm City Devils to join them on the road. The Crüe also invited members of all of the bands to take part in the music video for “White Trash Circus,” which debuted with the tour announcement.

Continuing to be innovators in branding their tours, Mötley Crüe has added an additional stage to Crüe Fest 2 sponsored by Monster Energy Drink. The new Monster Energy Stage doubles the festival’s entertainment value with five extra bands (for a total of 10 for the price of 1) showcasing the next generation of rock, including one local band in each tour market. Unique to this year’s tour, Mötley Crüe will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of their hit album Dr. Feelgood by playing the entire album from start to finish. Originally released on September 1, 1989, Dr. Feelgood reached #1 on the Billboard Charts and went on to sell more than seven million copies worldwide, producing five Billboard Hot 100 hits. The title track reached #7 on the Hot 100 and earned the band their first two Grammy nominations.

"We've been rehearsing 'Feelgood.' It sounds rad," admits Tommy Lee. Guitarist Mick Mars is also looking forward to the change of pace while on stage. "'Sticky Sweet,' we've never played live. 'Slice of Your Pie,' we've never played live. 'Time for Change,' we played at one concert. When Obama was running , they should have played that song. The song was written for the future."

Twenty years after the release of one of rock’s great albums, the band is still as vital as ever. The amazing thing is not that they lived to tell the tale (although that is, in a way, a kind of unholy miracle), it’s that all of their wildly uncontrollable habits are clearly audible in their music, then and now. Just listen to these albums and, if you concentrate hard enough, you can hear the sound of the coke coming off the tables, the squeak of the bed springs, and the sheer sleazy grind of California heavy metal over the last two decades.

Mötley Crüe is also one of the only bands in history to successfully acquire ownership of all their master recordings. In 2003, their wholly owned label, Mötley Records, licensed their catalog to Universal Music and saw reissues of all of their albums as well as the first installment in their box set, Music To Crash Your Car To – Vol. 1, a four-CD set that is the first of three volumes chronicling the band’s storied career. Volumes 2 and 3 came out in the spring and fall of 2004, respectively. The first-ever greatest hits DVD on the band was also released in 2003, entitled Mötley Crüe: Greatest Video Hits. The band now records on Mötley Records/Eleven Seven Music, FMQB’s Rock Label of the Year in 2008.

In conjunction with the band’s 2005 reunion, their first concerts in six years, VH1 produced a “behind the scenes” documentary showing how the band’s management company, Tenth Street Entertainment, managed to put the feuding group back together. The four original members recorded three new songs for the two-CD anthology album, Red White & Crüe, a platinum record. One of the three songs, “If I Die Tomorrow,” was accompanied by a video culled from footage of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, helping raise funds for recovery, and became an internet hit. A first-ever Mötley Crüe concert DVD with all four original members documenting the tour, Carnival of Sins, was also released, featuring Tommy Lee’s notorious “tittycam” and the claymation footage from the animated film Disaster which opened the show. In 2006, they were honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and co-headlined with Aerosmith on the Route of All Evil tour. To celebrate the release of the new CD, the City of Los Angeles named July 30, 2008 as “Mötley Crüe’s Saints of Los Angeles Day.

Mötley Crüe made rock and roll what it is today. Without the Crüe, stadium rock in the 1990s might have been all about Journey, Foreigner, Kansas and REO Speedwagon. And they’re not about to let it happen in 2009, either.

“This is what we need,” says guitarist Mick Mars about the band’s recent album and Crüe Fest tours. “Artists dictating what will happen musically. This is not a safe bet, a show for the weak of heart. This is fuckin’ rock and roll. This is what we need.”

And Mötley Crüe is just the band to give it to us.