BRYN BRIDENTHAL (publicist, Elektra Records, Capitol Records, Geffen Records) When Tom Zutaut first signed Mötley Crüe, it was really funny because they came in through the underground parking garage, and people went and hid in their offices.
TOM WERMAN (producer, Mötley Crüe, Dokken, Twisted Sister, Poison, Kix, L.A. Guns, Junkyard, Stryper, Lita Ford) Elektra did not have much of a rock ’n’ roll roster then.
BRYN BRIDENTHAL The band came to the label to meet everybody, and they came in to a lot of closed doors. You know how they looked—they were tall and they jingled with all the bracelets and stuff, and the hair, and people were scared of them. But I liked it. The “scared sell” has always been my favorite. To sell through sex is powerful, but to sell through fear is much more powerful.
Anyway, I took them down the street to Benihana, and we just had a fabulous time. I really connected with Nikki. He’s sort of always been like my oldest son.
DOC MCGHEE (manager, Mötley Crüe, Bon Jovi, Skid Row, Scorpions; co-organizer, Moscow Music Peace Festival) Joe Smith was the head of Elektra at the time, and he signed Mötley Crüe. Then when Bob Krasnow got there, Bob basically said, “If I was here when Mötley Crüe got here, they wouldn’t be here.”
TOM WERMAN Bob Krasnow, he was a talented guy. Didn’t know shit about rock ’n’ roll. When he first became the head of Elektra, he came to L.A., which was the Elektra headquarters, and announced that he was going to have a headquarters in New York as well and that his first official duty would be to drop Mötley Crüe.
BRYN BRIDENTHAL Well, Krasnow didn’t want any circus acts on his label, is what he said.
DOC MCGHEE “I’m not running any fucking circus!”
TOM WERMAN He called them an embarrassment.
DOC MCGHEE So I said, “Well, why don’t you just let them go?” But Bob said he wouldn’t let us go because we had sold two hundred thousand records [of Elektra’s 1982 remix of Too Fast for Love] and that we should go make a new record. My question was, Who was going to determine what that record would be? It certainly couldn’t be Bob. And he said, “No, we’ve just hired Tom Werman, he’s the producer.” So I sat down with Tom. We had kind of the same visions, and we made Shout at the Devil.
TOM WERMAN Mötley Crüe were young, uncomfortable, surly … kind of concerned that they were being fed to the corporate machine. They were pretty combative. They were concerned about being misinterpreted and led down the wrong road. But Tommy Lee finally said, “Listen, if this guy’s going to produce our record, we ought to listen to him.” And so I said something along the lines of “I’m going to work with you. I’m hired by you. I’m not a dictator, I’m a collaborator, and I’ll try to help you make the record you want to make.”
BRYN BRIDENTHAL Nikki had the whole concept in his head right from the beginning. He’s a very smart guy, and very ambitious.
NIKKI SIXX We had the goods for that record—songs like “Looks That Kill” and the title track were just killer. Plus, Tom Werman knew how to help us crystallize our vision without imposing his own.
TOM WERMAN So we made Shout, and it was quick … and difficult.
NIKKI SIXX If Shout at the Devil is a darker album than Too Fast for Love, it’s because it reflects that we were into this whole heavier trip. I was dabbling in black magic, and I think that that generated a lot of bad, negative energy. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah.
DOC MCGHEE I think some of it was shock value, but a lot of it was just Nikki’s personality. He loved to shock people. He was kind of a spooky kid at the time.
BRYN BRIDENTHAL The lore is he slept in garbage cans and was raised mostly by his grandparents. He came to all of this … There was no training or preparation.
DOC MCGHEE Whereas Vince and Tommy were more like Van Halen, Fast Times at Ridgemont High guys, you know what I mean?
BRYN BRIDENTHAL The moment I felt like I was finally accepted by them was when they started changing their clothes in front of me. That’s how I knew Mick Mars was a redhead.
DOC MCGHEE But Nikki was this gothic, kind of Billion Dollar Babies–influenced kid that had a real dark side to him.
TOM WERMAN There was one story, I was not there, but there was one story about a female and a coke bottle, and that after one session …
NIKKI SIXX I was doing a lot of drugs, and lots of weird shit was happening, especially sexually. There were orgies, and days and days of being in some person’s house that I didn’t even know. I would wake up out of a binge and there’d be naked people and drugs everywhere. I’d have blood all over my hands and my feet and not know what happened. I remember that one girl wanted me to take her up into the Hollywood Hills and sacrifice her.
DOC MCGHEE Nikki separated his shoulder during the Shout at the Devil sessions. He crashed his Porsche—how unusual—going down Laurel Canyon or Benedict Canyon. He had to go do what he had to do, but it hurt.
TOM WERMAN He was playing the bass parts with his arm in a sling, and that was very slow. It would take us hours and hours to do a track.
NIKKI SIXX I had to finish the bass on “Red Hot” with a metal pin in my shoulder and a huge cast. I could barely move my arm, but I did it. It was so painful that I took ten Percodans that day.
TOM WERMAN There were drugs involved. I never saw them actually do heroin, but I know that they were doing heroin while we were in the studio. But we worked through it. I was pretty lenient. I mean, if they started yelling and running around, I would say, “Come on, sit down,” or “Go outside, we’re working here.” But I didn’t mind. I wasn’t strict, like, “Silence!” I wanted the artist to be happy.
RICHARD PAGE (session vocalist, Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister; Singer, Bassist, Mr. Mister) I remember walking into Cherokee Studios in Hollywood and there was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on the console. And I said, “Okay, here we go! This is gonna be good.” That was my first memory of that session.
TOM WERMAN I would hire background singers for my records. Tom Kelly [who went on to co-write Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” and Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors,” among other hits] was on all of them, and he was the guy who brought in Richard Page. Richard Page was the son of a minister, and he wouldn’t sing some of the Mötley Crüe lyrics.
RICHARD PAGE I don’t know where the story came from that I didn’t like their lyrics. It wasn’t my kind of music, and I may have mentioned that to someone at some point and that got blown out of proportion. But I thought that what they were doing was cool. I remember that when we were singing the song “Bastard” I really blew my pipes out. It wasn’t even like there were any notes. It was just me screaming, “Bastard! Bastard!” over and over again.
BRAD HUNT (executive, Elektra Records) Shout at the Devil, this was a metal band. I mean, that’s what the perception was. It wasn’t easy to get them on the radio. It took a lot of work. Because it didn’t fit an easy model. It wasn’t holdover Flock of Seagulls—it was something different. You know, you think about the transition period from the late ’70s to the early ’80s, and then, oh my god, here comes Shout at the Devil, and it’s right in your face.
MIKE BONE (executive, Elektra Records) When Shout at the Devil came out, Zutaut came to a marketing meeting and, you know, we’re telling him we’re gonna take out some trade ads, we’re gonna do a video, we’re gonna do some consumer print, we’re gonna take an ad in Kerrang! and Thrasher and Rolling Stone … And Zutaut came in and he said, “I don’t give a fuck about trade ads. I don’t give a fuck about consumer press. I don’t give a fuck about pricing and positioning. Here’s what I want.” And what he wanted was a gatefold package—a single record, but in a gatefold sleeve. And everyone was just like, “Are you fucking crazy?” The CFO said, “That’s gonna cost another twenty-five or fifty cents a unit.” Tom said, “Look, if you do this gatefold package, this makes the band seem bigger than they actually are. ’Cause kids will get this record, they’ll open it up, and they’ll see the band.” He said, “That’s the marketing plan.”
So per Tom Zutaut we did a gatefold. And the finance people were having heart palpitations. We also did all the other stuff, but that gatefold took up a lot of bandwidth. But Tommy, god bless him, he knew that market up, down, and sideways.
“WILD” MICK BROWN Shout at the Devil, here’s this album cover, you open it up and here’s these amazing photos. Mötley Crüe and Dokken were both on Elektra and I said, “Oh my god, we’re gonna get lost in the shuffle.”
TOM WERMAN The record became a hit so quickly that Bob Krasnow couldn’t drop the band.
MIKE BONE Thank god Bob didn’t drop them, ’cause we sold a fucking shit-ton of those records!
DOC MCGHEE But I had to pay for the photo shoot, I had to pay for the videos. Bob wouldn’t pay.
ROBIN SLOANE (vice president, video, Elektra Records) Bob Krasnow and Mike Bone hired me to start a music video department at Elektra, and “Looks That Kill” was the first video I made there. We did it for, like, fifty grand. It was a dominatrix kind of thing. It was ridiculous. I was terrified meeting the band. Mick Mars was the scariest guy imaginable to a twenty-six-year-old neophyte. And I’ll say as a woman it was sort of horrifying to see women objectified as they were in that particular video. But the other side of it is no one held a gun to those women’s heads to be in the video. So, you know, it was fine. And it got into heavy rotation.
BRYN BRIDENTHAL The first press they did was them on the cover of, I think it was Circus. There were girls in the shot, too. I had approval on the girls to make sure they looked right. But when we got there for the photo shoot, the magazine had switched them out and had other girls there who weren’t as hot. I was not happy with that.