Review: MÖTLEY CRÜE Concert Was 'The Most Decadent Rock Show' Ever

April 29, 2005

Jeri Rowe of goTriad.com has issued the following report:

Let's call her Katie. She was standing near me last week at MÖTLEY CRÜE's show at the Greensboro Coliseum when drummer Tommy Lee aimed his video camera toward the delirious crowd and asked women to show their essentials.

Well, quicker than you could sing the refrain from "Girls, Girls, Girls", the arena went Mardi Gras. So did Katie. After downing her fourth screwdriver, she flipped up her shirt and showed 9,000 screaming fans the Indian tribal sign that snakes from her ribs to her collarbone — and everything in between.

"That's what I'm talking about!" Lee screamed from the stage.

And why, you ask?

"I just like being the center of attention," said Katie, a 21-year-old stripper from Greensboro. "And he said it was a titty cam."

Welcome to MÖTLEY CRÜE's April 21 concert, the most decadent rock show I've ever seen. They carted in five truckloads of equipment and turned the arena into a sexy big top, complete with a fire-eating dwarf, stage hands in scary clown masks and three female dancers in thigh-high boots and second-skin bustiers.

In the middle of it all was rock's most notorious bad boys, a band whose lifestyle offstage had become the ultimate pop-culture cliché: sex, drugs and rock ‘n' roll. Watch VH1's "Behind the Music" special on the band. Or read Neil Strauss' excellent book "The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band". It all makes you wonder how they survived.

But here they were, playing the coliseum for the first time in eight years. They performed for nearly three hours — two sets, two encores — plowing through more than two decades' worth of music. The crowd went berserk.

Like the bespectacled kindergarten teacher from Durham in the third row, Gretchen Locker, 28, an admirer of CRÜE bassist Nikki Sixx. She stood the entire concert, holding a sign, "All I Want Is Sixx," which she made from supplies in the teachers' workroom.

Sixx saw her. Or at least she thought so. He smiled at her after spewing water onto fans and yelling, "Let's keep rockin' until the day we die."

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