Chronological Crue - The History of Motley Crue in 1983

3/1/83
Vince Neil marries his fiancée Beth Lynn at the Crystal Cathedral church building in Garden Grove, Orange County, just near Disneyland. All members of the Crüe jam on Looks That Kill at the wedding reception.

26/1/83
Mötley Crüe’s Too Fast For Love album is released in Australia, as the Live Wire video airs for the first time on U.S. TV. The first time Nikki sees the Live Wire video on TV is on the new cable show HBO.

2/83
The Crüe flies to Las Vegas on Doc McGhee’s private plane to see how he runs his organisation, McGhee Entertainment Inc. The meeting arises after Doug Thaler and McGhee witnessed Mötley’s mind-blowing show on New Year’s Eve and are keen to manage them. Impressed and eager to play bigger shows, they soon agree that Doc and Doug will be Mötley’s new management team and are pleased they come through when their chips are down. Doc’s under-the-table gifts and masterly methods of manipulation soon ensure Mötley becomes more of a priority with Elektra Records.

3/83
Mötley’s new management line up a string of dates as support act for Kiss. Doug Thaler attends the band’s first pre-tour rehearsal, and feels each guy is twenty pounds overweight and instructs them to get in better shape before the shows commence in a few weeks. Returning from business in New York ten days later, Thaler sees each member down ten to fifteen pounds after rehearsing two sets every night. Barry Levine assists Mötley with their image via a number of photo shoots. He also works with them on video concepts and choreography, as well as marketing and merchandising consulting. Nikki buys himself a new Porsche 911SC after landing a publishing deal with Warner-Chappell.

26/3/83
Mötley opens their first support show for Kiss on the west coast leg of their Creatures of the Night tour at the 5,700-capacity Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre in California, playing a forty-minute set. The band members are excited at travelling on a tour bus for the first time, even though it breaks down for many hours on the way to their Phoenix show.

3/4/83
The Moral Majority tries to stop the Crüe and Kiss Easter performance at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium by pushing bike racks in front of the stage doors, to keep them from entering the venue. After five Kiss support shows celebrating their tenth anniversary, Gene Simmons kicks Mötley off the tour for bad behaviour, although Doug Thaler believes the decision is made because Mötley is upstaging Kiss' performance. The real reason is later revealed: Tommy and Nikki were caught having sex with Eric Carr's girlfriend behind the fox's drum kit in Phoenix, Arizona as he played Rock 'n' Roll All Nite.

4/83
Bob Krasnow takes over the reigns at Elektra following Joe Smith’s termination and he replaces Tom Werman with Roy Thomas Baker. Werman is still keen to produce the new Mötley album, but just as they are about to go into the studio, Krasnow decides he wants to drop Mötley, as he feels rock’n’roll isn’t happening anymore. He also instructs MTV to take Mötley’s Live Wire video off the air, thinking it’s an embarrassment to the record company with a tradition of such talented acts like Linda Ronstadt, The Doors and Jackson Browne. After negotiations, Krasnow tells Mötley’s management that he will put the album out, but make it easy for them to move on.

11/4/83
Known to the band for her work with Van Halen, clothing designer Fleur Thiemeyer is engaged by Mötley Crüe to come up with new stage clothes. After liking her initial sketches that look like a cross between Genghis Khan, medieval knights and barbaric warriors, they get together at her apartment on Ocean Ave, Santa Monica where they further refine sketches to redraw and colour the designs so they are exactly as they want.

5/83
Mötley works on recording their new album at Cherokee Studios with Geoff Workman engineering. The Doors’ keyboardist, Ray Manzarek, records his Carmina Burana album in the next room and regularly parties with the Crüe and their cocaine. The sessions also have girls streaming in and out of the studio constantly. The introduction of the unreleased song Black Widow is re-worked into an instrumental titled God Bless The Children Of The Beast. A song Wild Dogs was brought in by Mick and worked on, but the lyrics were never recorded on the unreleased instrumental track. Nikki has a grand vision of the album and tour looking like a cross between a Nazi rally and a Black Mass service.

29/5/83
On Memorial Day long weekend, Mötley plays the huge three-day Us Festival on the outskirts of Los Angeles in Glen Helen Regional Park near Devore, San Bernardino, California. Mötley arrives at the festival by way of their first helicopter ride. Day two is Heavy Metal Day and Mötley plays second on stage at 12:30pm after Quiet Riot, in front of three hundred and seventy thousand peoplein the scorching spring heat. Tommy Lee passes out just before going on stage and requires oxygen to assist him. The band sees the concert as a great chance to test some of the new material they have just begun recording. They're unhappy with their sloppy musical performance, but very pleased with the huge response from the crowd. After leaving the stage, they head back to their dressing room trailer and Mick’s girlfriend Linda punches him in the face for no apparent reason, without saying a word. Vince then makes out with Tom Zutaut’s date Ashley, much to Nikki’s disapproval. Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, Triumph, Scorpions and Van Halen follow Mötley’s set on stage. The festival attracts one hundred and thirty arrests, and one murder over a drug deal. Acts including The Clash, Men at Work, David Bowie and The Pretenders play on the other two days. In time, Mötley’s performance at this festival goes down as one of the most important and influential of their career.

The festival is the first show that Mötley has their own bodyguard: Fred Saunders is hired by management and becomes their Security Director. He previously worked in production for Avalon Attractions, the promoter of the band's large shows at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and Perkins Palace.

6/83
Nikki goes to a party at Roy Thomas Baker’s house in Hollywood with Tommy and his girlfriend Candice Starrek. They take heaps of drugs in the Jacuzzi at the party, including lines of cocaine off his glass top grand piano. Nikki joins Tommy and Candice in the Jacuzzi, along with a dozen or so naked others. When RTB locks-down the house so people can’t leave in their intoxicated state, Nikki decides he wants to go and see Lita, but he can’t find his clothes. He finds a way to scale the wall of RTB’s house and drives off naked in his Porsche 911, as he had left the keys in the ignition. Two girls who couldn’t get into the party chase him down the street in their ‘68 Mustang. As his speedometer clocks 90mph, he looks back to see if he has lost the girls, before slamming his Porsche into a telephone pole, which now sits next to him in the passenger’s seat. Hitching a ride, the naked Nikki Sixx is picked up by a couple and driven to hospital, where his dislocated shoulder sustained in the accident is put back into place and into a sling, before he is sent home with a bottle of Percodan painkillers. Lita talks him into backing off from flirting with Satanism.

7/83
Nikki begins to smoke heroin with Vince to help numb the pain of his shoulder. They then have access to higher-grade smack by way of Gregory Boaz aka Smog Vomit, the bassist from local punk band Tex and the Horseheads, and their mutual friend, Robbin Crosby from Ratt. They show Nikki how to use needles, and he is soon inventing his own speedball combinations, realising that drugs are to be his vice for life. Vince prefers to chase the dragon instead, having stopped using needles when he left his former girlfriend Leah.

8/83
Blackie Lawless approaches the Crüe with a song he has written called Wild Child. Nikki feels the vocals are out of Vince’s range for Mötley to use it, so Blackie retains it as a song for his band W.A.S.P. It is later released in 1985 as the opening track on their sophomore album The Last Command.

As work on the new Mötley album draws to a close, Nikki’s shoulder is now fully healed. Seeing that other bands have now copied their glam-punk Too Fast For Love image, Mötley evolves their look with designer Fleur Thiemeyer into a cross between Mad Max and Escape From New York, two movies they watched many times while they lived together in The Mötley House. Nikki has a single studded shoulder pad made to look like a gas pirate from Mad Max, while he has thigh-high leather boots made with a cage in the heel to eject smoke at the press of a button. All of the larger-than-life boots for the band are custom-made by Di Fabrizio Shoes on Fairfax Ave, while buckles and chains are sourced from adult store The Pleasure Chest.

17/9/83
Mötley plays a huge show with Def Leppard, Uriah Heep and Eddie Money in front of fifty thousand people at San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium.

Around this time, a video is shot for the band’s anticipated first single Looks That Kill, from the soon-to-be-released album. Nikki wrote the song with girlfriend Lita Ford in mind. Marcelo Epstein produces the video on a budget of seventy five thousand dollars, shot over two very long days on the lot of A&M Records on the main sound stage. Mick gets drunk on the set by drinking vodka out of his Coke can. The video's central female character is Wendy Barry from Los Angeles, who was the last girl to audition and gets paid about a hundred dollars for her first music video performance. The video is designed to shock and make viewers feel uncomfortable.

26/9/83
Mötley Crüe’s Shout At The Devil album is released, selling two hundred thousand copies in its first two weeks and eventually reaching number seventeen on the charts. With its cover designed by Bob Defrin, the album contains the track Knock ‘Em Dead Kid, dedicated to the L.A. Police Dept., and another song called Bastard, written about former manager Allan Coffman. There’s also a cover version of The Beatles’ classic Helter Skelter included. Mötley insists the album is not satanic, but about shouting AT the devil, not WITH. The instrumental God Bless The Children Of The Beast is inspired by the introduction on David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album. Sound Engineer Geoff Workman narrates the introductory track In The Beginning, even though the album’s packaging says its band mascot Allister Fiend who narrates Nikki’s lyrics. The song contains the lyric "It has been written, 'Those who have the youth, have the future'" that is an adaption of “whoever has the youth has the future” written by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf. The album eventually goes on to sell over three million copies.

Acclaimed session keyboardist Jai Winding (who has worked on albums by Jackson Browne, Cheap Tick, Boz Scaggs, Dusty Springfield, Donna Summer, George Benson, and Molly Hatchet) is credited on the album, along with session synth player Paul Fox, formerly of the Ruts. Tom Kelly and Richard Page, who have both worked on albums by REO Speedwagon, Barry Manilow, Cher, Rick Springfield, America and Survivor, receive backing vocal credits for their work.

10/83
Tommy is currently living in a condo at 1734 North Fuller Street, Los Angeles with his girlfriend Candice.

29/10/83
At 2pm, the Crüe attends a personal in-store appearance at Tower Records in West Covina, California.

11/11/83
Mötley commences a twenty-three-city Shout At The Devil headlining tour with a sell-out show at the six-hundred-seat-capacity Orange Pavilion in San Bernadino. Axe from Florida and Heaven from Australia play as the support bands on the tour. The stage set represents a desolate debacle of civilisation, with a painted backdrop of a city skyline, based on the movie Escape from New York. Tommy’s drum riser is constructed to look like rubble from an exploded freeway, while their amps are adorned with Styrofoam spikes. The set was built piece-by-piece in the backyard of Barry Levine's friend over a three-month period earlier in the year before he was fired. At the start of Mötley’s set, one of the roadies enters the smoke-filled stage with a horror mask and mimes to a tape of someone reciting Edgar Allan Poe’s poem from 1843 called The Conqueror Worm, where it says, “That Mötley drama – oh, be sure... it shall not be forgot.”

The video for Looks That Kill is aired for the first time and the band flies between shows in Doc McGhee's eight-seat plane, with the plane nose-diving to the ground after an electrical malfunction one flight. The only real damage sustained is the Crüe's stage makeup and cleansers that explode in their luggage due to the sudden drop in cabin pressure.

16/12/83
The final show of the Shout At The Devil headlining tour takes place in Arizona. Vince and Tommy then head to the Cayman Islands for a two-week holiday.

31/12/83
In the Cayman Islands on New Year’s Eve, Vince and Tommy jam with a local reggae band on I Shot The Sheriff at the island’s Club Inferno. They then fly out to meet Nikki and Mick at Long View Farm rehearsal studio in North Brookfield, Massachusetts to start preparing for a tour support slot on Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon tour. At the farm, the band’s limo drivers bring them copious amounts of drugs and hookers from Manhattan that they indulge in over the week-long stay. Under the influence, Nikki smashes his guitar on a few exit signs so he has to buy another one. The Rolling Stones had used the farm to rehearse in during 1981, and Aerosmith recorded Chip Away The Stone there in 1978.

On with the show