Inside Motley Crue’s Live Excess: From Roller Coaster Drums to Fire-Spitting Bass
Indestructible glam metal icons Mötley Crüe are currently on the Final Tour, a series of more than 150 shows capping nearly three and a half decades of decadence, concluding with a New Year’s Eve throwdown at Los Angeles’ Staples Center. If you haven’t caught the tour thus far, let bassist Nikki Sixx describe “Kickstart My Heart,” the 1989 hit that has been serving as the main set closer.
“At some point toward the end of it, Tommy [Lee] raises up 40 feet in the air. Mick [Mars] is on a platform about 20 feet high. Vince [Neil] and I are flying over the crowd on these big transformer arms, going all the way out to the nosebleeds. I’m spitting blood. The transformer arms are shooting sparks. There’s a giant burning pentagram. The whole stage is engulfed in flames. There are explosions everywhere. We’re dropping more confetti than you’ve ever seen. And we’re doing it all while playing one of the biggest hits of our career,” Sixx tells Rolling Stone and then pauses.
“That’s how you put on a show.”
Certainly, if there’s one thing Sixx and his Crüe-mates know, it’s how to cause a scene. The band have always positioned their live show as something of a grand-scale orgy of audio-visual depravity: spinning drum kits, acrobats, motorcycles and explosions galore.
For their final tour, the band — who, even by indulgent Eighties standards, managed to scale uncharted highs and lows of excess — has now surpassed even their own extravagant history. The Final Tour offers up a slew of high-tech and ridiculously outsized production elements, among them a rotating drum kit that travels on a multi-directional roller coaster track; a flamethrower bass that spits fire 30 feet into the air; a state-of-the-art light show; imaginative stage gags; and as much pyro, cryo and confetti as can be crammed into an arena. Just how much pyro?
“I couldn’t even give you a number,” admits Mötley Crüe production manager Robert Long, who’s been with the band since 2008. “It’s just very excessive. Every show has about 375 pyro cues, and each cue is full of everything you can imagine — fire, fireworks, explosions. We go through a 50-gallon drum of isopar maybe every other night, and that’s just one of four different liquid flame units we’re using onstage. But when it comes to fire, the goal is basically to have as much as you can possibly get up there, within safe limits.”
“In the old days, you could have some lights, some different guitars, a few wardrobe changes, an explosion or two,” Sixx explains. “Now, it’s 2015. We live in a different world. People want to document what they see, and they want to share it, and they want to do it fast. So we like to create things that make them pull out their phones.
On the Final Tour, that experience is delivered via a massive operation that travels from town to town in 12 trucks and nine buses, overseen by a crew of close to 100 people (as well as an extra hundred or so local stage hands at each stop).