This morning I finished my book The Dirt by the band Mötley Crüe. I was a big Crüe fan back in the day and saw them when the Shout at the Devil tour came to the UCSB campus. I would love to have been a bug on the wall in the ECEN (the venue) admin office the Monday after that show. I’ll bet a few heads rolled. My own personal experience of that weekend lived up to the Crüe search and destroy ethos and was fun the way that the irresponsible and inconsiderate asshole behavior is when you’re 20 years old. We’ll leave it at that.
At one point, I owned every album up to Girls Girls Girls. I didn’t think I had any of them any more but I was wrong. I still have Too Fast for Love AND Shout at the Devil. I listened to a little Shout at the Devil yesterday afternoon and it sounded fantastic.
The first 100 pages of the book is hard to read without running to the bathroom to take a shower. A phrase like pure unmitigated debauchery doesn’t begin to cover it. And they went on like that for years. Drugs, booze, women and destruction. And they’re pretty straightforward about their personal shortcomings.
But after awhile they’re just whiny and come off as addicted to their own victim-drama. How sorry am I supposed to feel for a filthy rich and famous rockstar who’s indulged himself in every urge to please himself at the expense of everyone around him? Like it’s a major personal insight that life is hard and less of an insight that they brought a lot of it on themselves.
After I finished the book I did a quick trip through the NY Times and there’s a story about Jay McInerney and he’s going on about what it was like being young and successful and famous and how hard it was to hold it together. wah.
