RAMBLE ON: "Saints of Los Angeles" by Mötley Crüe

“Mötley Crüe: the band that would not fucking die,” I remember one frustrated hater saying about the band. That line from an early ‘00s Flash cartoon, a perfectly sarcastic parody of Behind the Music: “Before Kid Rock, there was Warrant. Before Warrant there was Poison. Before Poison there was Mötley Crüe. And before Mötley Crüe, there was… good heavy metal music.” That’s a pretty funny burn, but the line about Crüe’s astonishing unkillableness is one they’d probably take as a compliment. At the time of that cartoon they hadn’t even released my favorite song by them yet.

The ‘90s are often seen as a time when alternative swept away the party-hard rock ethos, but the old guard weren’t completely gone. KISS, AC/DC, Aerosmith and Ozzy Osbourne were still making waves, and there’s no reason why the Crüe couldn’t have joined them. What stopped them were lousy records; they made three unsuccessful albums after the ‘80s, only one of them with the original lineup intact, none of them making much impact even by the managed expectations of an aging act long past their heyday. I’m listening to them now and yeah, these are not overlooked gems. Crüe should have been relegated to the nostalgia circuit with Ratt and Quiet Riot.

And yet, they managed to avoid being totally left behind, by establishing and polishing their mythos as the most excessive band of the most excessive decade in music. Sure, Bon Jovi peaked higher, but they were too clean-cut to really represent the decade of sleaze. Sure, Poison could match them with the sex and drugs, but not the rock and roll; their bubblegum metal didn’t have the nasty dangerous edge of the Crüe. Sure, Guns n’ Roses was probably the better and more iconic band, but they showed up late and left early, collapsing in overambition and Axl’s mental illness, a disappointing waste of potential. You definitely could not say that Mötley failed to accomplish all they could in the time they had. If there was to be one band to sum up the ‘80s, it would be Mötley Crüe, and they made sure no one would forget it.

In 1996, Tommy Lee’s leaked sex tape with Pamela Anderson launched him back into the limelight (at his poor wife’s expense). A short time after, they were featured on an all-timer episode of “Behind the Music,” the first chronicle of the Crüe legend. (On the hilarious “Pam and Tommy” miniseries, Tommy glares in resentment as that episode of Behind the Music rubs in his irrelevance, which is both anachronistic – the show takes place two years before BTM existed – and ahistorical – all the members of that band owe quite a bit to that episode. Still, it’s a perfectly fitting use of Behind the Music, which seemed to exist solely to chronicle the death of hair metal.) Their 2001 biography The Dirt, the infamous, jaw-dropping account of ridiculous depravity, etched their legend permanently. Now all they needed was one last ass-kicker song to underline their legacy.

In 2008, Mötley Crüe launched their headlining touring festival, Crüe Fest, a wild success that cemented them as the beloved elder statesmen of metal. It helped that Sixx:A.M., a side project of bass player NIkki Sixx, became a surprise success in the post-numetal scene, giving them a relevance and connection to the younger rockers that they hadn’t had in the ‘90s. To coincide with Crüe Fest, they released one last album in 2008, Saints of Los Angeles. All told, it’s not really any better than the other late-period Crüe records. (“This Ain’t a Love Song” has the chorus “this ain’t a love song / this ain’t a fuck song!” Man…) However, it does contain their last hurrah, the title track, one last genuine headbanger that ranks with their classic work. This song fucking kicks ass.

“Saints of Los Angeles” begins with one trick it picked up from the nu-metal kids, a sludgy bass riff intro that could have come from Staind or Korn. (Unsurprisingly, Sixx wrote the song with the members of Sixx:A.M. rather than the rest of the band.) Then the guitars come in, recognizably Crüe but with a darker edge than most of their bigger songs. The previous hit it most resembles in “Wildside,” but it carries differently; “Wildside” was written and sung by rowdy young men, “Saints of Los Angeles” is by veterans, survivors, the band that would not fucking die.

If their most successful output after the ‘80s was packaging their biography, it finally pays off here in a big way. Crüe may or may not deserve their icon status, but this is a song that only works because they carry themselves likes titans. “We are, we are the Saints / we signed our life away.” The L.A. metal scene had long passed into mythology by that point, and “Saints of Los Angeles” ticks all the boxes – the Sunset Strip, the Troubadour. This could all feel very lame and dated, if not for all the work put into making Mötley seem like larger-than-life figures. In real life I know that none of these guys are admirable or probably even that cool – they’re an aged hair-metal band who did some absolutely reprehensible things, I know how the machinery works and I know all the work they did in writing their own story, but I can’t help but hear the song and buy it completely, that Motley Crue literally sold their souls to the devil and now deserve to be honored for their unholiness. That’s so stupid. I love it so much.

The video is interesting because it could not be more ‘00s, and less ‘80s. It’s shot in ugly muted near-black-and-white, a grim look that should feel incongruous for a hair metal band, but it works with the band as they are, older and weathered, long past their makeup and hairspray days. (Mick Mars, the oldest member of the band and long suffering from chronic illness, plays his solo with an otherworldly stiffness that makes him straight-up look like the Babadook.) They’re joined on stage at the end with the frontmen of their Crüe Fest co-stars: Papa Roach, Buckcherry, Trapt. It gives me a weird feeling seeing them there, because it now feels like a dead lineage. None of those singers were big enough to ever become rock godfathers (and one of them is now mostly known for being an embarrassing right-wing Twitter troll), and even if they had been bigger, there’s not much of a new generation of metalheads to revere them. The guy from Papa Roach was on an Ice Nine Kills album recently, which was fun, but Ice Nine Kills is never going to be a household name; no kind of metal band may ever be that big again. Even Machine Gun Kelly, who is the closest thing we have to a modern rock star, and who is close with Tommy Lee after playing him in the movie version of The Dirt, doesn’t seem all that influenced by “Dr. Feelgood.” By 2008 the writing was already on the wall – not just hair metal, not just any kind of metal, but rock music as a whole was on its way out. And yet there Mötley Crüe was, still rocking harder than ever – almost a defiant last stand for their way of life. Mötley Crüe were never a critical darling, so calling them saints (even dark saints of rock & roll) doesn’t quite fit. They’ve never been canonized, they have no Grammys, they were never critical darlings, they are likely never to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. If they were elevated to sainthood, it’s because they sainted themselves, writing their own story into rock mythology. Who else could do it for them?