Motley Crue’s Big, Badass Influence on Today’s Country
If there was ever any doubt as to how Eighties hard rock influenced contemporary country music, press play on Nashville Outlaws: A Tribute to Mötley Crüe. Released today, the album assembles a cadre of modern country artists to interpret some of the Crüe’s biggest songs, along with a smattering of more obscure, deeper cuts from albums like 1997’s Generation Swine and 2008’s Saints of Los Angeles.
Rascal Flatts handle “Kickstart My Heart,” Brantley Gilbert does “Girls, Girls, Girls” and Eli Young Band tackle “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)” while Florida Georgia Line cover the Red, White & Crüe compilation’s “If I Die Tomorrow” and Cassadee Pope (with an assist from Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander) takes on Saints‘ “The Animal in Me.” The project’s first single, currently at radio, is a duet between Justin Moore and Mötley Crüe‘s Vince Neil on the epic power ballad “Home Sweet Home.”
“If that song came out now, even how they recorded it back in the day, it’d probably be on country radio,” says Moore, “and one of the more country things on country radio.”
Neil, however, says he initially wasn’t sure if there was a home for his notoriously wild band in country music. When Big Machine Label Group, who is releasing Nashville Outlaws, first approached the high-voiced singer, he hesitated.
“Because I’m a diehard rock & roll guy, who listens to classic rock radio in my car,” Neil tells Rolling Stone Country. “What I remember of country, 30, 40 years ago, isn’t what it is today. Today, it’s rock & roll. It’s more rock than a lot of the rock & roll out there is.”
Nikki Sixx, Mötley Crüe’s bassist and chief songwriter — who along with drummer Tommy Lee and guitarist Mick Mars round out the group — shared Neil’s wariness.
“We started talking about it and, at first, like Vince said, well…I’m not sure,” Sixx recalls. But then he realized the genius of what modern country artists were doing, both on radio and especially onstage: furthering the “party never ends” attitude that the Crüe and their peers depicted on MTV. If Nirvana and the grunge revolution doused that decadent fire, then young country artists raised on Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi and Def Leppard rekindled it.
“It’s very smart of the new country music artists to look at that whole thing in rock where it just became a downer. Bands like us weren’t around…there weren’t new versions of us. So those fans started going somewhere else,” says Sixx of the rock-to-country migration. “I remember watching some country awards show, and I was going, ‘Jesus, they have pyro, girls, production, lasers, smoke and shredding guitar players.’ I was like, ‘This looks familiar.'”
The lyrics and rock-based sound also caught Sixx’s ear. “I was really impressed by their songwriting skills, the ability to take that lyric and thread it all the way through and build it,” he says. “And Vince said to me that it was like Seventies rock at its peak. You can almost hear songs like ‘Free Ride’ in it.”
Jaren Johnston of dirty country outfit the Cadillac Three, who turn in a greasy, slide-heavy version of “Live Wire,” sees obvious similarities between the lyrics coming out of Music Row and those that originated from the Sunset Strip in the Eighties.
“They were talking about convertibles and hot legs. I get that. Now, you take the convertible and replace it with a truck,” says Johnston. Himself a hit songwriter, Johnston has had his songs cut by Tim McGraw and Keith Urban. “[Bands like Mötley Crüe] were singing about cocaine and shit too! At least that hasn’t hit country yet. Not since Hank and Waylon back in the day anyway,” he says laughing.
The Cadillac Three are perhaps the Nashville Outlaws act closest in style to the band they’re honoring, a point that isn’t lost on the group’s singer. “I love the mentality of Mötley Crüe because they were badass, they didn’t take no shit from nobody and that’s kind of the way we look at ourselves,” Johnston says.
“Mötley Crüe were the band that would come to town and steal your girlfriend,” says Raul Malo, lead singer of the Latin-flavored country group the Mavericks. “I love that about them honestly.” Malo and the Mavericks provide, if not the high point of the tribute, then certainly the most musically adventurous: a flamenco-like reinvention of “Dr. Feelgood,” that 1989 tale of doomed drug dealer “Rat-Tailed Jimmy.”
“It’s definitely an East L.A. meets Miami kind of [sound]. It’s really what the Mavericks do anyways. We don’t really worry about what genre or where it comes from. We just kind of go with the vibe,” Malo says. “That’s why we chose that song; because I thought we could step out of ourselves and have some fun with it.”