Mötley Crüe Once Made a Song That Sounds Nothing Like Mötley Crüe
There is something strange about the feeling you get when listening to Mötley Crüe’s new/old song Nobody Knows What It’s Like to Be Lonely, recorded in March 1981 and now officially released for the first time. Vince Neil is squealing, Mick Mars is shredding away on guitar, Nikki Sixx is doing what Nikki Sixx normally does while Tommy Lee is pounding the drums with all his might. But it’s not quite it. It sounds like it’s not Mötley Crüe at all, but some random hard rock band from the late ’70s with it’s unmistakable “plastic” production.
There’s none of the usual stuff like sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, but also none of the violence and accidents on Sunset Boulevard that followed the band during those formative years. Here, Nikki, through Vince, is singing about how hard it is to be alone. What the freakin’ hell?
Now, if you put a song like this into context and stick it on a playlist next to Girls, Girls, Girls or, I don’t know, Live Wire, that’s when you really see just how big the contrast is. The song simply doesn’t fit the image, the vibe or the whole point of the band Mötley Crüe would become. But does that necessarily mean the song is bad?
Not at all. It’s perfectly normal to expect a band in its formative years to experiment. If they could experiment with clothes and dangerous substances, why wouldn’t they experiment with emotions too? All of that can actually be much nastier than the first two.
And then, of course, we come to the timing. 45 years after the release of Too Fast For Love album, it was time to put out a box set. And you know how it goes: one version, another version, live, studio outtakes, this, that, books, posters, God knows what. But you can’t sell a box set after several previous reissues based on that alone. And that’s exactly where this song comes in.
Box sets are the classic money grab disguised as important historical events, and previously unreleased songs are a central part of every one of them. So here we have Nobody Knows What It’s Like To Be Lonely (could this title be any longer?), which had been sitting on some tape in some basement, collecting dust and moisture for 45 years. But eventually, its time came. And we shouldn’t pretend this is some great musical masterpiece, considering that nobody wanted to even touch it for 45 years. But we can certainly say that it represents an interesting footnote in the history of Mötley Crüe, showing us that before they experienced success and excesses of epic proportions, these guys were still just an ordinary late ’70s/early ’80s band on the Sunset Strip, trying to figure out what kind of band they actually wanted to be.
