Former Jarvis Cocker backup dancer and current Seattle Weekly Dategirl Judy McGuire's new book, The Official Book Of Sex, Drugs, and Rock N' Roll Lists, is rife with lists counting down debauched and out-there moments of —Ozzy Osbourne's health tips, pot-smoking hints from Willie Nelson, marriage tips from Coco, and so on. In advance of tonight's star-studded reading in the book's honor at powerHouse Arena, we present an excerpt where the members of Mötley Crüe offer their indelicate tips on the delicate matter of romance.

Music writer Mick Wall once described Mötley Crüe as making Led Zeppelin "look like pussycats." The band has sold millions of records, snorted, smoked, and shot up hundreds of pounds of drugs, and fucked more women than most men will even see fully clothed over their entire lifetime. As Nikki Sixx so wisely put it, "You may as well learn about sex from Mötley Crüe [rather] than your parents—it's a lot more fun."

More »

Here is a video put together by an employee of the Chicago Music Exchange that purports to tell the story of rock and roll in 100 guitar riffs, which the guy manages to do in a single take. (They're not all perfect, but you try winding your fingers around the guitar parts for "Hot For Teacher" and "Thunderstruck" in a single go. Right.) As with any "here is the grand story of this somewhat large idea" project, there are quite a few narratives that unfurl in this video's 12 minutes; you can sort of watch the guy go from learning about rock and roll from classic-rock radio and MTV to reading blogs, or at least lifestyle publications that would never sully themselves with uncool things like rap-rock. More observations below.

More »

Tom Donoghue/donoghuephotography.com

Just in the nick of time—i.e., right before "Girls, Girls, Girls" dipped below the "20% of all music played in strip clubs everywhere" threshold—the Déjà Vu chain of strip clubs brought Motley Crue's Vince Neil on board to rebrand one of their Las Vegas locations as Vince Neil's Girls, Girls, Girls, boasting rock music and tattooed women. For those lucky enough to be in Las Vegas, the club celebrates its grand reopening on the extremely rock and roll date of Friday, April 13.

If you haven't been to a strip club in real Amurica and have only seen tattoo-free dancers swaying to house and techno, the idea might seem like a fresh concept. But if you've been to a strip club outside of Vegas or Manhattan—say, to Devils Point in Portland, the Cheetah in L.A., or Lollipops in Daytona Beach—Girls, Girls, Girls just looks like a regular strip club with a really, really tan manager. There are other musicians who would make more entertaining proprietors, and they all have strip-club classics in their catalogs to boot.

More »

What authentic rock and roll looks like.

Kiss bass player/reality-TV star/political gadfly Gene Simmons let his legendary tongue loose earlier this week during a press conference announcing his band's summer tour with Mötley Crüe. The two-headed bill, which will be at the PNC Bank Arts Center on September 21 and Jones Beach on September 23, will apparently be a chance for people starved of such to hear "real music":

More »

txkimmers/Flickr

Today is Thanksgiving here in the States, and in addition to getting irritated by Nickelback's existence, lots of Americans will probably celebrate by eating pie. The word "pie" is a bit more prevalent in the lyrics of non-"Weird Al" Yankovic-crafted popular music than one might a dessert to be, but that's because of the way the term can handily double as a euphemism for a lady's nether regions. This particular double-entendre use goes all the way back to 1533, according to the slang dictionary crafter Jonathon Green: "First cite I have is 1533: 'But how say you, Sir John, was it good, your pie?'. Double entendre, as is next in 1600," he told us (thanks to the ever-resourceful Maud Newton for the research assistance). And so it went—and oh, it went!—from there. (Language expert Ben Zimmer also notes that "'Pie' is part of larger set of slang: beaver pie, fur pie, hair pie, hairburger, hairy clam, bearded clam." Quite the feast.) A bunch of the songs listed below take the euphemistic usage and run with it, for better or worse, but there are also scientific applications and materialism critiques below. Happy holiday!

More »

Near the end of A Perfect Circle's Beacon Theatre show earlier this month, Maynard James Keenan asked the audience to engage in a thought experiment of sorts. "We're going to pretend we all left the stage for a few minutes," he told the crowd. "We're just going to stay here and do a couple more songs"—and forego the charade of the encore, that seemingly mandated pause just after a concert's climax to sustain the moments before its denouement. At the time I chalked this aesthetic decision up to Keenan and his band's low tolerance for bullshit (a quality that makes their take on gloomy hard rock much easier to swallow than other, wankier acts in their realm), but in the two weeks since I saw that show I've experienced two other acts—both at the large-scale level, I should note—skip the idea of the encore, too, in favor of cramming more songs into their allotted time.

More »

Mötley Crüe w/Poison, New York Dolls
Nassau Coliseum
Wednesday, July 20

Better than: Attending an 18-year high school reunion with a cash bar, albeit one mitigated by the DJ having a music library nearly identical to yours back in the day.

An extremely partial list of pop-cultural events since Dec. 11, 1989, when I attended my first concert, headlined by Mötley Crüe and hosted by the Nassau Coliseum: John Corabi. Behind The Music. Indoor smoking bans. The Pam and Tommy sex tape. Napster. The Dirt. Cell phone cameras becoming the norm. Rock of Love. Skating With Celebrities. Blogs. (So many blogs.) Bret Michaels winning The Apprentice.

Warrant opened that show, which made Mötley, technically, the second band I ever saw live.

More »

So much to see, everywhere.

The Bamboozle
Meadowlands
Friday, April 29-Sunday, May 1

Better than: Watching scene reports scroll by on Twitter.

In a lot of ways, the Bamboozle is a festival tailor-made for the current moment of constant distraction. The festival's running time over three days totals approximately 27 hours. There are eight stages of music, plus a stage for spoken-word and comedy bits. The 100-plus acts run the gamut, from critically approved hip-hop to critically reviled screamo to nostalgia-pricking acts from rock eras past. There's a wrestling ring where luchadores--led by the not very subtly named Dirty Sanchez--fling each other around; if that doesn't satiate your urge to watch competition, there's a breakdancing stage. There are carnival rides. There are tons of merch booths, some of which host autograph signings that attract long, snaking lines of eager fans. There's a psychic, an inflatable structure where one can procure free Trojans, and a place to charge your phone so you can keep up with the tweeting that details all the things you're missing. If you play your cards right and bring enough friends, it's quite possible to get a "full" Bamboozle experience without consciously hearing a single song in its entirety.

More »

Nikki Sixx's 2008 bestseller The Heroin Diaries compiled a year of journals from the most gruesome point of his addiction to the opiate. But the Mötley Crüe bassist's second book, This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, and Life Through the Distorted Lens Of Nikki Sixx, picks the story up 20 years later and includes Sixx's photographs of amputees, prostitutes, addicts, the homeless, and Crüe drummer Tommy Lee.

Sixx's journals this time around address everything from guitarist Mick Mars's hip replacement and lead singer Vince Neil's grouchiness to Sixx's views on growing old and his heart-to-heart talks with Lemmy of Motorhead fame. If Sixx revealed himself to be an ambitious and dark wit in his first book, this new volume shows him to be an optimist who is nonetheless clued in to the absurdities of playing in a rock band for the better part of 30 years.

Along with a book tour and an appearance by Mötley Crüe at the Bamboozle Festival this weekend, Sixx continues to record with his other band, Sixx: A.M., and host a nightly radio show. We talked to Sixx about This is Gonna Hurt, photography, writing, and a good review from a fancy critic in The Atlantic.

More »

The annual multi-day Bamboozle Festival, held every spring in a lovely parking lot or three out at the New Meadowlands Sports Complex, mingles emo punks with metal dudes and crossover-minded rappers, to often hilariously uncomfortable effect: The first day of last year's version was co-headlined by Drake and Paramore, and when the former's set dragged on a little too long, fans of the latter start loudly booing and catcalling, setting rap-rock relations back a few years at least. (Paramore were awesome, by the way.) This year's version promises to be even more chaotic: Your co-headliners are Lil Wayne and Mötley Crüe. Please, lord, don't let these two collaborate.

More »