Mötley, The Final Chapter

So, the new Crüe (that's the last umlaut I'm typing, deal) show is presented like a wild and evil circus. There's a grimy curtain and a midget master of ceremonies. Can someone explain the rock and roll/midget connection to me? I just don't get it.

Anyway, here's how it went down...

The show started with a claymation cartoon about the Crue trying to save the world from a huge asteroid. It was actually kind of funny at first, but it devolved into a huge long set up for a not funny joke about fake boobs. Oh well.

Pete and I were not deterred by the cartoon, though. We were ready to rock. And so when the lights went down and the curtain came up we went absolutely mental like everyone else.

They started it off with Shout at The Devil and in two seconds I was fifteen years old again, making devil horns and screaming the chorus. It was one of those transcendent concert moments where you can't stop the adrenaline pumping through your veins and the overwhelming sensation of "this is me!" It's very validating.

Pete and I were so excited that we kept turning to each other and high fiving, my cardinal concert pet peeve. Ah well. They followed it up with Looks that Kill, Too Fast For Love and Too Young to Fall in Love. It was, in a word, awesome. It was just great to hear these songs I loved as a kid being enjoyed by people my age without irony. It's powerful; to feel 15,000 people all feeling the same thing - yes, I like Motley Crue a lot, fuck you.

This feeling didn't last too long. After a flurry of old hits they proceeded to play approximately 9,054 songs 12-G and I have never heard. Thus began my second sensation of the evening - Motley Crue isn't very good at music. Don't get me wrong, I think Nikki Sixx is a great hard rock songwriter, and Motley's records are great, but they can't play live for shit. So I sat there looking at them and realized that FXA is a better live act than Motley Crue. Whoa. It was a weird feeling, like going to see the Red Sox and realizing that they're just a bunch of normal guys, not 18 foot tall supermen.

Later in the evening we got back to the hits, but some of the magic was gone. Tommy Lee did his obligatory ridiculous drum solo, Vince Neil asked the crowd 8 billion times if we were having a fucking good time as motherfuckers and if we would make some fucking noise, Nikki Sixx was, frankly, awesome, prowling the stage like a demented rock zombie and Mick Mars, to his credit, stayed alive during the entire show.

Finally, the curtain came down and I was ready to go, but we couldn't leave before the encore. As the arena was bathed in darkness, a bunch of weird shit was played over the PA - bits of music, dialogue and just wacky crap. There was also a siren like noise followed by the word "evacuate". Now, as any loyal reader knows, I did not handle the Great White fire very well, and so I am now hyper-vigilant about my safety at large events. And so I thought to myself "this is really irresponsible of motley, what if people take this seriously and there's a stampede?" Then I thought "what if this is real? You know, the people at the Station that night thought the fire was part of the show.." And so I started freaking out.

Pete was also freaking out a bit, but we didn't move.

The band came back on and in the third bar of the first encore I heard the siren again. That was it for us. We jumped over our seats and started making for the door. As we were getting there the house lights came up and security started storming in. I freaked the fuck out and went into protective panic mode. I grabbed Pete's hand, he grabbed back and we pushed our way to the door and out into the night.

It turns out Motley's pyro set off the smoke detectors and there was no real danger, but it was still pretty scary. On the way home, not knowing if it was nothing or if 700 people had been trampled to death, we debated the news report. We decided it would go something like this "Tonight, we have a terrible tragedy to report. Everyone at the Motley Crue show in Portland was killed by a terrible fire, except for these two selfish homosexuals we caught on tape pushing their way to the door and holding hands. Truly awful people."

All in all, it was an experience that I'm glad I had, but that I don't need to have again.

Shout! Shout! Shout at the Devil!