Mötley Crüe - Dr. Feelgood

This 1989 album is considered by most - including the band members themselves - to be the best Mötley Crüe record so far, and probably ever. personally, I think it's the only Crüe record worth a damn, which might go a long way to explain the complete absence of Crüe records in our collection up until this purchase.

This record came out approximately at the same time as I started listening to heavy metal, after a very good friend gradually introduced me to heavier side of music. He started with Doro (the former singer of German HM band Warlock), progressed via Lita Ford, Alice Cooper and Poison to Mötley Crüe, softening me up before exposing me to Iron Maiden, Dio, Running Wild and W.A.S.P. After that, there was no turning back.

The actual purchase of this record - as opposed to borrowing it from any of the many friends who already owned this album - occurred after I'd read "The Dirt", "Tommyland" and "Heroin Diaries", and so the backdrop for the songs was much clearer than it was when I last listened to this album in the mid-to-late nineties. This is THE album where they were clean, and when they at least semi-functioned as a unit. Never was much of a Crüe fan, but I used to like this album a lot.

Listening to it now, I still like it - especially the production - but there are some glaringly obvious flaws I really wasn't aware of back when I first heard it. First of all, Crüe by and large suck on their respective instruments. Well; Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee do minimalist work on bass and drums, respectively, so they're not really trying. Hardly groundbreaking. Vince Neil has overdubbed his vocals so much that it sounds full and on average within the target pitch, although with a wide spread. Mick Mars is an old-school bluesy minimalist who covers himself up by using gobs of distortion and Def Leppard-esque numbers of overdubbed layers. Dude plays slide on several tunes, and it's pretty obvious that he's more at home doing stock blues and chordal licks. The solos ain't much to write home about - Mars does attempt some basic tapping in order to speed things up on some occasions, like the solos to the title song and "Slice Of Your Pie". Have to admire the producing skillz of one Bob Rock, who introduced pitch and layering to Crüe and bass to Metallica. Still; where Nikki Sixx gets off dissing other bands like Poison for their musical performance is beyond me. Crystalline courage perhaps?

The style of music ain't hardly original either, despite Sixx's claims to the contrary. As a matter of fact, if it wasn't for the amounts of distortion and processing, this would've been difficult to distinguish from classic/old school rock bands such as The Sweet, Slade, Status Quo or Nazareth. Blues-based, 4/4 and stock all the way. Some tunes, like "Don't Go Away Mad" even sound like a hybrid between Eagles and Smokie. Most of these songs are excellent for swing, which sorta' tells you they're not griundbreaking from a stylistic point of view. And it doesn't take a musical genious to figure out that "Kickstart My Heart" - an excellent party tune in it's own right - is a blatant rip-off of The Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz". Oh well.

So the musicians haven't contributed anything new to the scene, and the songs are indistinguishable from older acts but for the amount of fuzz. So what's left is the lyrical content, right - the area in which Nikki Sixx swears he's top-notch? Weeelllll....let's just say that the more frequently you fill entire lines with "Oh baaayyybeeeeee", "No no no" and even worse; "No no yeah" (as in "SOS"), the less likely you are to be named in the same breath as lyricists like Springsteen and Billy Joel. Not to mention that artists typically known for their song-writing abilities don't usually write songs like "Slice Of Your Pie", "Sticky Sweet", "Same Ol' Situation", "She Goes Down" and "Get It For Free" and put them all on the same album. If anything, I personally think that bands like Poison, White Lion and Warrant write far superior lyrics to what Nikki Sixx has rattled off. On the song-writing spectrum of heavy metal, Sixx is way more likely to have Joey DeMaio of Manowar on speed dial than he is to have frequent talks with Dave Mustaine or Blackie Lawless.

At the end of the day, Dr. Feelgood is a great party album, but nothing more. Then again; not every album has to be about something or possess world-class musicianship.