Published on May 9, 2002
At what point in a band’s career is it almost anti-climactic to
release a live album? Obviously, it’s a bit pushy for a group with
only one or two albums under their belt to put out a live effort
(though there are times this works to their advantage).
Motley Crue has been slugging it out now for two decades (though
the band’s future is reportedly in flux at this writing), but it
took them until 1999 to release a full live album. When
Live: Entertainment Or Death first came out, the label’s
publicist sent me a single-disc version, saying she was waiting on
the full two-CD sets. Three years later, I finally gave up on
waiting and bought it.
I should have saved my money.
As a studio band, Motley Crue has been notoriously uneven. As a
live band, Vince Neil and crew can’t even rely on the trickery of
the studio to enhance the band’s sound. As a result, this set –
culled from dates spanning 17 years – is spotty at best, vulgar and
sloppy at worst.
Taking up the bulk of the first disc is a collection of tracks
mostly from the Crue’s early albums up to
Shout At The Devil. With most of these 11 tracks pulled from
1982 and 1984 shows, the listener is given a band who was still
discovering their own unique sound while dealing with the excesses
that would have made William S. Burroughs puke. Neil’s vocals often
seem to go out of tune, especially when he attempts the high-pitch
shrieks he was able to nail in the studio (though, to be fair,
Roger Daltrey has the same problems), while the overall sound is
muddy thanks to poor mixing of Nikki Sixx’s bass and Mick Mars’s
guitar parts. For that matter, the overall sound loses a lot when
Mars goes into a solo, since there’s no other guitar to back up the
band. The fact that a latter-day recording of one of the Crue’s
early songs, “Ten Seconds To Love,” fails to light things up,
should let the listener know that something’s not right here.
Disc two isn’t much better. Relying heavily on tracks from
Dr. Feelgood (an album I freely admit I don’t like), Motley
Crue shows they haven’t made that much improvement on their overall
sound. Some songs, notably the power ballads (“Home Sweet Home,”
“Without You”), have not aged particularly well; others, like
“Smokin’ In The Boys Room” (pulled form a recording in 1985) and
“Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)”, make the listener long for the
studio versions. Even a track like “Wild Side” sounds like it needs
some outside help – c’mon, with all the chaos on stage and poor
excuses for back-up vocals on other tracks, I’m supposed to believe
the note-perfect vocals on this one were live?
Looking back at
Live: Entertainment Or Death, one has to assume that this is
a disc which should have been released about 10 years ago. Had it
come out in 1992 (right around the time Neil was taking his
leave/getting sacked from the band, whichever story you believe),
it might have worked a little better. But Motley Crue is a band
pretty well removed from their glory days, and this disc sometimes
sounds like a half-hearted attempt to remind listeners what they
used to be like. Unfortunately for the Crue, they do succeed in
this – only they remind us how chaotic of a band they really
are.