“Uh, you’ve gotta read this Mötley Crüe book. I swear, you get to the point where Ozzy Osbourne snorts a row of ants and you think, it cannot get any grosser, and then you turn the page and oh, hello, yes it can! It’s excellent!”
Lorelai Gilmore, Gilmore Girls episode 2.18, “Back in the Saddle”

Quoting Gilmore Girls may be the least rock and roll way to introduce The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Mötley Crüe (with Neil Strauss) which may possibly be the most cliché-ridden, overblown rock and roll biography of all time. Who would open this book expecting anything less? When it comes reading about excessive rock and roll exploits, one doesn’t only expect cliché, but craves it. And the dirt is definitely all here: the alcohol, the drugs, the groupies, the sex, the near-death experiences, the band member feuds, the record company feuds, the replaced lead singer, the fans, the jailtime, the gossip, the marriages, and a little bit of the music.

Unlike other music biographies I have read recently, I can’t claim to be a fan of Mötley Crüe’s music. Sure, I went through a hair metal stage when I was about six (and I still have the cassingles to prove it), but the Crüe never really interested me. Their music still doesn’t interest me, but they have lead some debauched and voyeuristically interesting lives. The Dirt is told through multiple perspectives, each band members voice is given equal time, and other major players also get a look in. It’s difficult to read all the activities both legal, illegal, questionable and unmentionable that they got up to and know that they came out of it alive. And The Dirt shows that maybe, just maybe, they came through it all with some semblance of self-awareness and insight. Or maybe not:

After the insanity of the Girls tour, I think we lost sight of ourselves. Mötley Crüe became a sober band, then we became a band without a lead singer, then we became an alternative band. But what everybody always loved Mötley Crüe for was being a fucking decadent band: for being able to walk in a room and inhale all the alcohol, girls, pills, and trouble in sight. I suppose a happy ending would be to say that we learned our lesson and that it’s wrong. But fuck that. (Vince Neil)

I may have had to suspend some of my usual critical faculties in order to enjoy the book – particularly the attitudes about women: of course marriage break ups are never the fault of boozing, high, cheating men, but always of the wife that doesn’t understand him. I recognize that the problematic mindset was there, but my lack of previous connection to the band meant I wasn’t heavily emotionally invested in them as people. I didn’t expect them to have amazingly progressive approaches to well, anything, and they didn’t. They do paint themselves as clichéd rock and roll caricatures: the drug-addled “creative genius” with the troubled childhood, the tempestuous and egotistical lead singer, the quietly suffering guitarist and the hyperactive bad boy drummer. There are a few genuinely heartfelt moments – through debilitating disease, depression, death – where they begin to appear as human, but these moments are brief and quickly shoved aside in favour of more cartoonish misadventures.

That’s not to say that The Dirt isn’t insanely fun to read, because it really is an ant-snorter of a read. But, it is also enjoyable in a way that allows the reader to look at that rock and roll lifestyle and realize the sheer ridiculousness and scale of it, and to feel immense gratitude for quiet anonymity. The Dirt is the band’s way of self-mythologizing beyond their music, because even non-fans like myself want to read this book, thus cementing themselves in the public imagination as rebellious degenerates, as the “world’s most notorious rock band.” Mötley Crüe’s decadence is seedy yet glamourized with a strong undercurrent of misogyny, male rage and sadism. Many may find something to admire or aspire to in that, and while it does make for riveting reading, it is also faintly distasteful.