MOTLEY CRUE TRIVIA
Trivia
On 18 November 2025 Motley Crue announced a 2026 North American tour, The Return of the Carnival of Sins. Beginning in July, it marks both the twentieth anniversary of the Carnival of Sins tour and the band's forty-fifth, and runs to thirty-three dates with a reimagined show and a changed setlist. Tesla and Extreme travel with them as guests. One dollar from every ticket sold goes, through the band's Giveback Initiative, to ASAP! — the After School Arts Program, which supports students with hands-on programmes in music and the arts.
Shout at the Devil was going to be Shout WITH the Devil. Tom Zutaut, the man who signed the band to Elektra, writes in The Dirt that Nikki Sixx was looking into Satanism at the time and meant to go through with that title; Sixx told him it was meaningless symbols that simply looked cool, done to annoy people, and not devil worship. Two nights later, Zutaut writes, he watched a knife and a fork lift off the table in front of Sixx and bury themselves in the ceiling. He told Sixx that if he kept shouting with the devil he would get himself killed — and Sixx changed the title to 'at' on his own.
'Home Sweet Home' became a hit against the label's wishes. By Nikki Sixx's account, Elektra had already rejected Shout at the Devil on delivery: it did not sound like the first record, and the logo and the look had changed. The band said fine, they would go elsewhere, so the label put it out — and it sold four million copies and saved a company that was close to going under. The same thing happened with Theatre of Pain. The label rejected that record too and told them to take 'Home Sweet Home' off it, on the grounds that they were not a ballad band. When the band then wanted it as a single and a video, the label refused, so they funded and shot the video themselves and took it to MTV. Sixx has said the song was never worked at radio at all, and that without MTV playing videos in those days it would not be the song it is.
On 20 June 2025, forty years after the song first appeared, Motley Crue released a new version of 'Home Sweet Home' with Dolly Parton. Parton adds her voice to the chorus and takes the lead on the second verse. A portion of the proceeds went to Covenant House, the non-profit that provides shelter and support for homeless and at-risk young people.
The title Dr. Feelgood was not Nikki Sixx's invention. It was the nickname of a real physician, Max Jacobson, who was the subject of a New York Times investigation in 1972. According to that story Jacobson, then seventy-two, had given amphetamine injections to a long list of well-known people, President John F. Kennedy among them. It was after the story appeared that the press began calling him Dr. Feelgood.
The title of 'Kickstart My Heart' is not a metaphor. The song was written out of what happened on 23 December 1987, when Nikki Sixx was pronounced dead after a heroin overdose and the paramedics who reached him administered adrenaline as a last resort — which restarted his heart. The song does not stop there: it is also about a band newly sober, finding in other and more natural ways the rush they used to take from drugs.
Motley Crue's rider carried, for years, a jar of Grey Poupon mustard. On one occasion in 1988 Vince Neil found the wrong brand waiting backstage, lost his temper and threw the jar at the wall. It bounced back and severed an artery in his thumb.
The pyrotechnics that define a Motley Crue stage come down to one man's fixation. Nikki Sixx is obsessed with fire and insisted that pyro be central to the show. The longest-running of these projects was a flamethrower mounted on his bass: he spent roughly ten years trying to get one to work properly, and finally did on the 2014 tour, where he used it to set light to the band's pentagram logo.
The first Motley Crue shows in Japan with John 5 in the band were on 3 and 4 November 2023 at K-Arena Yokohama in Kanagawa — the Japanese leg of The World Tour, shared with Def Leppard, and the band's first playing here since February 2015. Nikki Sixx had previously named Japan as his favourite of all the places he had been, and on the eve of the shows he wrote that once Crue and Sixx:A.M. had ended he had not expected to play here again.
Motley Crue have a museum of their own. The Crüeseum, reached from the band's official site, is an online display drawn from their archives: personal gear, stage clothes, photographs, posters, tour souvenirs. A great many of the artefacts in it are being shown for the first time, and the band say more will keep being added.
The tally the band's own site sets out reads as follows: more than a hundred million albums sold worldwide, seven platinum and multi-platinum albums in the United States, twenty-two top-forty mainstream rock hits, six top-twenty pop singles, three Grammy nominations, five New York Times bestselling books, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and a hit film on Netflix.
Theatre of Pain was reissued as a box set in November 2025, forty years on. Inside are the remastered original album on a single colour vinyl; a previously unreleased two-record set of a 1985 Long Beach concert, originally recorded for a Westwood One radio broadcast; a further record of rare demos; and a seventy-six-page hardcover book carrying a great many previously unpublished photographs from the Theatre of Pain tour. The release was given as 14 November, and 28 November for the rest of the world.
The name Nikki Sixx was borrowed from someone. Born Frank Feranna in 1958, he was raised in part by his mother and grandparents after his father left. When he co-founded the band London in 1978 he changed his name legally, because he did not want to carry his father's surname around with him — and the name he took came from Jeff Nicholson, who fronted the California covers band Squeeze under the name Niki Syxx.
'In the Beginning', the spoken-word track that opens Shout at the Devil and became a fixture live, was written by Nikki Sixx. The credit, however, does not carry his name: it goes to Allister Fiend, a character Sixx invented, and the voice on it is that of the engineer Geoff Workman. The monologue itself is a menacing one — evil has overcome good, and the time has come to shout at the devil.
'Shout at the Devil' was never released as a single. It is nonetheless the song the band has played on stage more than any other across their career — roughly fifteen hundred performances.
'Home Sweet Home', the song that carries Theatre of Pain, exists because they got home and had no idea what to do with themselves. As Nikki Sixx tells it, the Shout at the Devil tour was their first long one: a bus collected them outside their tiny apartments and dropped them back at the same doors eighteen months later. He would ring Tommy Lee — what are you doing, sitting here, I don't know what to do either. Not knowing what else to do, they started writing for the next album, and this is what came out. The lyric comes from having been away so long and wanting to come back — which, as he points out, is the irony: all you ever want is to be in a band and get out on the road, and then you are on the road and you want to go home.
Vince Neil has said he remembers the moment 'Home Sweet Home' arrived as if it were yesterday: he was sitting in the studio, Tommy Lee came up with the piano chords, and he began humming almost at once.
The 'Home Sweet Home' video was directed by Wayne Isham. Before the song starts there is a short sequence in which each member of the band takes a phone call and answers that he is on his way — and the man handing over the receiver in each scene is a face you will know. He is Michael Berryman, who played the principal in Motley Crue's 'Smokin' in the Boys Room' video and who appears in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Hills Have Eyes.
As a single, 'Home Sweet Home' never did much. On release in 1985 it reached number eighty-nine in the United States; a 1991 reissue as 'Home Sweet Home '91' got to thirty-seven. Carrie Underwood's countrified version in 2009 reached twenty-one — higher than the original ever went.
Nikki Sixx is clear-eyed about the template 'Home Sweet Home' created. Before it, the idea of pairing a power ballad with MTV to produce a hit simply did not exist. After it, every band had the one ballad that came out as their second or third single. He has also said the reason they did it was that it was so unlike Motley Crue — which is what pushed them into the mainstream, and none of them, he admits, had the foresight to see that coming.
Producer Tom Werman is blunt about the state the band were in while making Theatre of Pain. Werman, who produced Shout at the Devil, Theatre of Pain and Girls, Girls, Girls, told Songfacts that behaviourally this was their low point — and the reason is simple enough: they were sandwiched between tours. They had to go out behind the previous album, and when they came back another tour was already booked, so twelve or fourteen songs had to be written in a hurry.
The main guitar part of 'Dr. Feelgood' and the melody of its chorus came from Mick Mars; Nikki Sixx put the words over the top. Those two were the band's principal songwriters.
There is a completely different lyric for 'Dr. Feelgood'. What Nikki Sixx brought in when the sessions began carried the same title but an entirely different subject, and it was the producer Bob Rock who made him rewrite it. The version that replaced it is about his drug dealers — plural, because, as Sixx put it, a serious addict never has just the one. He says he still has the original words.
In 1988, the year before Dr. Feelgood, Motley Crue did not tour at all. The point was to concentrate on the music and on staying sober. Rather than write about recovery, Nikki Sixx poured his addictions and his near-death experience into fast, hard rock songs — which is what the first two singles off the 1989 album, the title track and 'Kickstart My Heart', are.
Dr. Feelgood is the only Motley Crue album to reach number one in the United States, and it stayed on the chart for a hundred and nine weeks. It was their fifth album, at the top of a steady climb that began with the debut, Too Fast for Love.
The Dr. Feelgood album opens with a forty-two-second piece called 'T.n.T. (Terror 'n Tinseltown)' — sirens, and a police dispatch calling in an overdose in a seventeen-year-old boy. 'Dr. Feelgood' follows straight after it, which makes the song a flashback explaining how that boy got his drugs and what became of him. The sequence sets out the rush and the price of it side by side rather than making drugs look good.
Nikki Sixx thought 'Kickstart My Heart' was a throwaway. He told Rolling Stone that he had written it very quickly and brought it into rehearsal believing it belonged on something like Too Fast for Love. Instead it took on a life of its own and fitted the Dr. Feelgood album far better than it had any right to.
There is more than one account of that December 1987 night. Steven Adler, formerly of Guns N' Roses, told the Australian radio station Triple M in May 2018 that the syringe was not what happened. By his telling, he dragged Nikki Sixx into the shower with a cast on his broken hand, ran cold water over him and kept hitting him in the face with the cast until the purple went out of it. The paramedics arrived just after that, pulled Sixx out of the shower, put him down in the living room and pumped his chest by hand. Adler added that a good song came out of it, and that it is entertainment after all.
The date Motley Crue formed and the date they first played are two different days. Nikki Sixx has recalled the first show as being at the Starwood on 17 January 1981; Songfacts treats that as a mix-up, giving 17 January 1981 as the day the band formed and 24 April 1981 as the day they first played the Starwood club in Hollywood. What Sixx describes in that recollection is that nobody cared, that they could not get a record deal, that the only thing they could get was arrested, and that the first show ended in a fistfight in the audience — not the band fighting each other, but the band answering people who had started on them.
In 2006 Motley Crue were given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was the 2,301st.
The autobiography The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band was written with the New York Times writer Neil Strauss. It spent four weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2001, and returned to that list eighteen years later when the Netflix film of it appeared.
Tommy Lee's first tattoo was Mighty Mouse crashing through a set of bass drums. It is on his right shoulder. He has also said that without Nikki Sixx he would not have any tattoos at all.
Vince Neil worked out that he could sing at a roller rink. As a teenager he and his friends travelled to lip-syncing contests at skating rinks and he won every one of them — and somewhere in there he realised he was not miming at all but actually singing the songs, and singing them well. That is where his interest in music began.
Mick Mars stopped taking the medication prescribed for his back pain because of what it did to him. His doctor said the hallucinations would pass; they did not. He began seeing his own footprints glowing orange on the ground, and seeing ghosts. So he came off the drug.
In April 2023 Motley Crue went into the studio with Bob Rock, who had produced two of their studio albums: Dr. Feelgood in 1989 and Mötley Crüe in 1994. A few days earlier Nikki Sixx had written that they were writing songs, that the creative process of songwriting had always been the heartbeat of this band, and that they would go into a big studio, record a few things and see what happened — no clear plan, just letting the songs lead.
The dispute between Mick Mars and the band was settled by an arbitration award in January 2026. According to a statement from the band's attorney, Sasha Frid, the arbitrator — the retired judge Patrick Walsh — found entirely for the band, rejected every claim Mars had made and ordered him to pay damages back to the group. The ruling turned on a rule that a member who stops touring does not share in touring income, a clause Mars himself is said to have demanded and written into the band's governing agreement in 2008. Mars had nonetheless sought to keep receiving twenty-five per cent of touring revenue in perpetuity while no longer performing, and the arbitrator rejected that. The award also upheld the band's removal of Mars as an officer for legal cause and ordered him to repay more than $750,000 in unrecouped tour advances.
Mick Mars's side does not accept the award. His lawyer, Ed McPherson, told Rolling Stone that the decision is awful and unfair, and that the band has never been fair to Mars. As McPherson describes it, Mars said he could no longer tour because of a hideous disease but could still write, play one-off shows and residencies, and record — and the band told a man who had been there forty-three years that he was out and would not be paid any more. The arbitrator said that was fine. Whether to challenge the decision is under consideration, McPherson said, but Mars himself is essentially done with Motley Crue.