More Old Dirty Laundry That I would Like to Share... (Ignore the Skidmarks!)

So here's something I spit out on Friendster a while back, in the heady days when Social Networking Software was something interesting, and not just the booty call network. (A bit of sour grapes there...)

Almost a year on I find everything I wrote here to still be true. Especially the parts about the umlauts.

Hair Metal and Mortality


So it finally hit me.
The ugly truth that yes indeed, I'm getting older, and will one day stop being/existing/breathing/getting unsolicited telemarketer calls.
I have always been rather painfully aware of my mortality, the receding hairline, the constant battle to fit into the jeans that fit just fine 3 years ago, the fact that some of my sartorial choices garner snickers from the kids in the record store... but none of this has ever really bugged me.
At some level, I was inside a little bubble of stasis, "existential amber" to be kinda intellectual about it... floating along at a certain mental position in life while the rest of the world continued on it's
merry way, and I could occasionally reach out of my bubble and grab things from the "trudge to
oblivion" that appealed to my worldview. But even with all that, underneath it all I was still the same.

Then came the hit. The universe finally decided to send me the wake up call: "Hello mister Luc - you are
indeed getting older, and here's the solid proof."
But I didn't get mine in the usual manner. No near-miss car crash, No recovery from some almost fatal disease, not even an "almost happened" meteor strike... I guess I wasn't on the budget for the big showy reminder.
No, I got mine in a much more subtle and nefarious manner, by way of my watermarking events in my life according to the music that I was into at the time.

Motley Crue's "Shout At The Devil" is 20 years old.
Which means that since this was a big album to me when I was 12... add 20 to me and that makes me 32... in comparison, it has weathered the score of years better than I have.
That isn't to say SATD has withstood the test of time either, but I sure as hell ain't getting a "Specially Remastered 20th Anniversary Edition" of anything I've done released. So I figure I can
kvetch if'n I want.

Think about that for a minute...
Shout At The Devil.
20 years old.
Hair Metal is almost drinking age.

20 years ago, 4 doofuses from LA brought pentagrams, big scary hair, and bigger scarier codpieces to the masses. Sure, if you lived in one of the coastal burgs, you were hip to all this, but for an alienated
dork into Dungeons and Dragons and Horror movies living in Suburban Oklahoma City? This was the A-bomb of Strange, Scary and "Satanic".
Yeah Ozzy Osbourne was always around, but I figured he was a one man show, ya know? Riding the wave of the "Exorcist in England" imagery of the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album cover. And there was that Alice Cooper guy, but how scary could a dude with a girl's name be? "School's Out" ain't exactly the kind of music you think the Devil is going to listen to.
But the Crue? For proof look no further than the pictures on the cover. The band photos are all Snarls, more leather than in "The Road Warrior" and mysterious hand gestures (Nikki Sixx doing the "Hook Em Horns" thing - later immortalized by Bloom County's "Billy and The Boingers" as the "Secret Devil Sign"). This Combined with all the flames in the background, the psuedo gothic lettering and of course the
pentagram was to my warped little mind "the-book-of-revelations-has-come-to-pass" apocalyptic
America... and these guys were the soundtrack.
(For all you music snobs... just remember that this was while Metallica was still just hitting
stride and making waves in the underground... but for Shopping-Mall-As-Cultural-Mecca MidSouth America - the Crue as fed by MTV to our young and impressionable minds was the Shit.)
Most importantly - these guys had little dots over their name.
Little Scary Dots.
Over the "O" and the "U".
(Many Sooner fans were noted to ponder if perhaps the LA based minions of Satan were Big Red fans... and the rumour that the music played in the background of "In The Beginning" was "Boomer Sooner" played backwards on a pipe organ.)
To my sheltered worldview - nothing was more "satanic" and guaranteed to cause friction with my parents than those terrible terrible little dots.
They just oozed evil.
Of course, two years later in German class when I learned they were called "umlauts" and the
function they played in pronunciation, I couldn't help but pronounce Motley Crue as "merhtly chruu"
as the umlauts would inflect it.

So - yeah... the album... the music. Nowadays, I find the whole Hair Metal thing of the 80's laughable and embarassing, but back then, "Looks That Kill" was the song that rocked my little preteen universe. "In the beginning" ? Man, this was the opening scrawl for the end of the world... and yes, the hair on the back of my neck still tingles a little bit when I hear the opening riff of the title track. The other tracks all blur together for me now, but one time recently I found myself humming "Ten Seconds To Love" -
(well okay more like tunelessly going babababumbum TEN SECONDS TO LOVE! and then giggling maniacally) I still have the same cassette tape I borrowed and never returned of this, and I have an MP3 of "looks that kill" somewhere that I'll throw on a mix CD for the smug ironic "gosh can you believe we thought this
was cool?" track, but I dunno if I could consider it the cultural milestone that garners a special "20th anniversary re-mastered edition" including bonus tracks and extensive liner notes...

So while you metal faithful out there get your bonfire ready I'll close up by saying this:
Motley Crue nowadays are a bunch of has-been yutzes who garner all the derision that being on a VH-1 behind the Music entitles them to.
Yes, Tommy Lee IS a great drummer, but since he's more known now for his acting than for his music...HAS BEEN.
Vince Neil wears a bandanna all the time to hide his receding hairline (David Lee Roth Level Has-Been), Nikki Sixx spends more time talking about how drugs f**ked up his life than about his music (perhaps he knows where his talent lay after all) (talentless Has-Been)
and Mick Marrs is even uglier without the makeup (Mutant Has-Been).
But at one point in my life - they were the beginning of the end of the world. And that was cool.

I see that on Amazon they're selling a box set of all their stuff, as all bands are wont to do nowadays. I wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing annual summer tours outta them like we did for the Beach Boys back when we were kids and our parents were our age... Big Quadruple Bill Tickets with RATT, whoever is still alive from WASP, and perhaps Poison, if Bret and CC can ever bury the hatchet.

Man, I need to stop watching VH-1 when I'm bored.