Hella Nation - Evan Wright [129]
Mötley Crüe is determined to prove their reunion is not merely a business decision to exploit fans with a greatest-hits, nostalgia act. To that end, they are performing all twelve songs from their new Generation Swine album, followed by a handful of crowd-pleasing standards at the close. This is a particularly ballsy or foolish move, since no one in the audience has heard their new album. It doesn’t go on sale until midnight after their final show in New York.
The sellout crowd, chanting in Cleveland, represents a cross section of ages and white suburban life-forms. There are the cheesecake blonds with feathered bangs lacquered onto their heads with hair spray, wearing tight shorts with black lace fringe. There are pencil-thin kids in black Iron Maiden T-shirts who lean against walls, gazing openmouthed with blank, detention-period stares. There are burly guys with the classic heavy-metal short-in-front-long-in-back El Camino haircuts, who wear sleeveless jean jackets and look like pro wrestlers trying to dress like Hells Angels. There are die-hard punks, including a girl at the door with a metal-studded face who pulls down her lower lip to reveal a tattoo that says “Clevoscum.” She’s the kind of person about whom, if you looked at her even without reading her tattoo, you’d probably still think “scum.”
Standing in the aisle closer to the stage is a guy in a tuxedo who got married a few hours ago. The bride he is now stuck with, presumably for life, hangs on his arm in a ruffled dress. Her eyes are rolled partially back in her head, apparently from excess drink. Vomit strings hang from her chin and trail the side of her dress.
The first riff of “Find Myself ” triggers a mass Pavlovian response in the audience. As one, the crowd begins the headbangers’ jerk—chopping their heads down like ax blades. Those on their feet begin body slamming. Even the aisles take on the feel and intimacy of a mosh pit.
Vince starts the chorus with the line “I’m a sick motherfucker!” and his voice, the quintessential heavy-metal screech that approximates the sound of a tomcat being neutered with a rusty can opener, quickly has the audience singing along.
Tommy described their first performance in L.A. nearly two weeks earlier as being like “scared deer trapped in headlights.”
It was worse than that. Vince was supposed to enter the stage by dropping down from between the spokes of a chandelier suspended above it and shaped like a wagon wheel. But somehow he became trapped in the spokes. He sang all of “Find Myself” with his tiny legs kicking helplessly as the chandelier swung more violently, until a stagehand assisted him down.
By the time of the Cleveland show, they have tightened their set (and worked out Vince’s entry via the chandelier) to the point where they carry the audience through the eleven brand-new songs, but it is only during the final renditions of “Shout at the Devil” and “Dr. Feelgood” that the girls riding atop the shoulders of their boyfriends demonstrate their gratitude by raising their baby T-shirts and unbuckling their halter tops to wiggle their naked pulchritude at the band.
Cleveland is now officially having a good time.
When Nikki stage-dives into the audience, he rides atop hundreds of clenching,