MÖTLEY CRÜE's Badass Reputation Began In Edmonton - "We Were Just Poor, Crazy Rock Kids"
May 10, 2013, 10 years ago
Fish Griwkowsky from the Ottawa Citizen is reporting:
MÖTLEY CRÜE's international reputation as badass insaniacs began, of all places, in downtown Edmonton.
Months before their first single Live Wire started a giant ball rolling around the next 30 years of glam metal, Crüe made the cover of a 1982 Edmonton Journal under the headline “Police rush band offstage after threats.” It was their very first stop on their very first tour, an impossible leap to their 80 million albums sold worldwide today.
“I remember it like it was yesterday,” singer Vince Neil says over the phone from Los Angeles. “Every time I go to Edmonton I think about that. I look around the city and I’m like, ‘I wonder where that was.’”
While the Sheraton Caravan Hotel and its storied Scandals Discotheque are both history, the balconied building at 10010 104th Street is now the Holiday Inn Express. The 1982 news story — where drummer Tommy Lee claims someone called his room with a bomb threat before violent words were phoned to the police directly — was picked up nationally.
Adding to this reputation, the day before, Mötley Crüe had been held at customs for hours, having their stage costumes, which they’d worn though security, declared “dangerous weapons.”
Neil, now 52, laughs. “The very dangerous stuff in my bag was handcuffs; most of our stuff was chains. We didn’t have any money back then. We made our costumes out of stuff from the hardware store. I had porn magazines, but it wasn’t as bad as people seemed to think. We were just poor, crazy rock kids.”
Read more at the Ottawa Citizen.
