The rest of the album does not let up one iota. Over a pounding rhythm section ably provided by Sixx and Lee, Neil screams, “He’ll be the love in your eyes / He’ll be the blood between your thighs / And then have you cry for more,” before adding what winds up being an unexpectedly positive message: “But in the seasons of wither / We’ll stand and deliver / Be strong and laugh and / Shout at the devil.” ” If the music that followed didn’t kick your ass from here to next week, then such ridiculousness would be a recipe for disaster, but when you hear Mars’s opening riffs on the title track, you know these boys are for real. In the dusts of hell lurked the blackest of hates, for he whom they feared awaited them. But in time the nations grew weak and our cities fell to slums while evil stood strong. It gets off to an auspiciously Spinal Tap-like start on the intro “In the Beginning”, with its gloriously bombastic opening narration, “In the beginning, good always overpowered the evils of all man’s sins. “hair bands” from the same decade, people often forget how dark, how sleazy, how menacing Shout at the Devil really is. They looked like rejects from The Road Warrior (Sixx later said that their image was inspired by Mad Max and Escape From New York), with their leather, spikes, makeup, and lest we forget, the codpieces.Īlthough the Crüe get lumped in with all the other L.A. Teenaged kids would pick up the vinyl LP, with the embossed pentagram on the black cover and open the gatefold to see four huge portraits of the scariest looking dudes they’d ever seen. Released in the fall of 1983, Shout at the Devil marked a massive improvement in the songwriting, was as cocky as any hard rock album that came out in the ’80s, and above all else, was heavier than all get-out. It did land them a recording deal with Elektra Records, though, and Sixx, the band’s leader, impresario, and chief songwriter, knew that they were on the verge of something huge. The band’s first album, 1981’s Too Fast For Love was a strange debut, boasting a couple of good songs (“Livewire”, “Piece of Your Action”), and a whole lot of weak filler. Still, the few times when these four guys got their minds into the music, some very good music came out of it, and their second album, Shout at the Devil, remains to this day Mötley Crüe’s finest hour. Singer Vince Neil’s flamboyant Robin Zander-meets-David Lee Roth style always masked the fact that his voice wasn’t overly great to begin with, bassist Nikki Sixx’s playing, while solid, showed very little range, and guitarist Mick Mars definitely had the chops, but never really did anything new or exciting. Aside from drummer Tommy Lee, who will go down in history as one of hard rock’s greatest drummers, the rest of Mötley Crüe were only average musicians. Musical growth always seemed to take a backseat to the lifestyle (the book dwells very minimally on their actual music, which speaks volumes), and they never came off as being exceptionally talented.
However, they never really got the rock ‘n’ roll part going as much. As their highly entertaining autobiography proves, the band had the sex and the drugs thing down perfectly in their heyday, few managed to even come close to matching the levels of depravity Crüe had sunk to.
Mötley Crüe rank as one of the worst bands in rock ‘n’ roll history to ever put out a classic album.
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