College Times

Media Credit: Courtesy Live Nation

Mick Mars, Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil and Tommy Lee are all together (and according to the band, getting along swimmingly).

Mötley Crüe’s newest album debuted in the Billboard Chart’s top five, and the band is out on a wildly successful national tour. One might think it was 1986, if only for the fact that a big chunk of the Crüe’s newest fan-base wasn’t even born then.

“If you stick around long enough, people tend to re-discover you,” Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx says. “I remember about six or seven years ago, I was at a mall and I must have seen about 20 kids with Mötley Crüe’s t-shirts on. And it just kind of reinvents itself.”

The newest reinvention of the band is really a reformation: the new record Saints of Los Angeles is the first to feature the original lineup in over a decade.
“We want to be together,” says lead guitarist Mick Mars. “We’ve set out to be together since day one. There’s a lot of bands that have been together for three, four, five years and they’ve done their run. We’re one of the kind of bands that keep going, and changing, and keeping up with the times. Like the Stones, Aerosmith or U2, bands like that.”

But Mötley Crüe won’t change so much to the point of losing its edge, Sixx says, and the thought-process in producing the incessantly dirty Saints of Los Angeles is proof.

“Mick just said, ‘I want to hear a lot of guitars, and I want to hear snotty lyrics,’” Sixx says. “And I was like, ‘exactly where I’m coming from, dude.’ I don’t want loops and samples and beats. You know, I don’t want to be Nine Inch Nails, I don’t want to be Jay Z or Rage Against the Machine, I don’t want to be Gwen Stefani. I don’t want to be over thought and over processed. Me and Mick just said, ‘We just fuckin’ want to sound like Mötley Crüe.’ And that’s what we did. And that’s easy.”

Upon listening to Sixx gush about the record, he gives the impression that Saints is as much a defense of the genre as it is another chapter in the band’s long history.

“There’s always these people that go, ‘Rock is dead, rock is over,’” Sixx says. “It’s like, constantly, people always out to kill rock ‘n roll. I don’t get it. It’s like we’re the ugly stepchild of the music business. And yet, we’re the one brand of music that continues to be viable and valuable, if you think about it. One of the things for us is that we want to go out and stand up for rock ‘n roll. We have been our whole career. But to really be able to say, you know what, it’s not like rock is back, it never left.”

The band’s crusade to defend rock ‘n roll’s good name has swept up a whole new generation of Crüeheads, too. Touring with younger rock groups – Buckcherry, Papa Roach, Trapt, and Nikki Sixx’s side-project Sixx:A.M., all included on this summer’s Crüe Fest – certainly helps. But it’s the decision to release the title track from Saints of Los Angeles on radio and the “Guitar Hero” video game simultaneously that made the most noise. The band’s “endorsements” of the game are perhaps the best reminder that they are, in fact, nearly all in their 50s.

“My kids kick my ass on [“Guitar Hero”],” Sixx says. “Like, I can’t do it. Yeah, it’s weird.”

“It’s so much different than playing guitar,” Mars says. “It reminds me – this isn’t like being mean, or anything – but it reminds me a lot of that old game “Simon.” Remember that game? There’s like buttons that you push, and different colors and stuff, and how fast you can do it, and trying to remember what it is. It kind of reminds me of that.”

Crüe Fest: Mötley Crüe w/Buckcherry, Papa Roach, SIXX:A.M., Trapt, Cricket Wireless Pavilion, Thursday, July 31, 5 p.m., $30-$95

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