This page also available in the book: Chronological Crue Vol.1 - The Eighties

10/1/84
Mötley plays their opening show on the first leg of Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark At The Moon tour in front of nine and a half thousand people in Portland, Maine. They meet Ozzy for the first time during his sound-check, and he instantly takes a liking to them. He hardly spends a night on his own tour bus, preferring to travel on the partying bus of the Crüe instead. Ozzy’s photographer Ross Halfin takes many tour bus photos of them with groupies.

28/1/84
Tommy Lee sees snow for the first time in his life on tour in Buffalo, New York. Backstage after the show, he finds out that his girlfriend has posed for the current February issue of Penthouse magazine on newsstands without his knowledge, after a fan passes comment on the pictures. Tommy punches the fan unconscious with one hit, before Mötley’s manager Doug Thaler convinces the fan not to press any charges.

29/1/84
At the Limelight Club in Manhattan, New York, the members of Mötley Crüe are awarded Gold albums for Shout At The Devil, signifying half a million copies sold.

30/1/84
After their Gold album presentation the previous night, Mötley is awarded Platinum albums on stage during their first-ever show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City. This is the band’s first Platinum award, as they have now sold over a million copies of Shout At The Devil.

When Tommy walks into his condo with his Gold and Platinum awards for the first time after the tour, his girlfriend Candice throws a plate at him, smashing the glass framing of his Gold award, enraged over a photo she found of Tommy engaged in a sexual act with some girls.

Nikki Sixx takes his awards with him to the island of Nantucket where he plans on meeting some girls, one of them actress Demi Moore who is working on the movie set of One Crazy Summer. Demi shared a similar childhood to that of Nikki in many ways, with her father leaving before she was born, then being around drinking, arguing and beatings, and moving home a ridiculous amount of times. She greets Nikki as the prop-plane lands, who in a wasted state, falls down the plane’s steps onto the tarmac, smashing a bottle of Jack Daniels from his hand while his awards hit him in the head. Having been through Alcoholics Anonymous herself, Demi suggests the program to Nikki, who learns of it for the first time.

2/84
Mötley Crüe and Ozzy get up to all sorts of debauchery on tour. In Memphis, Ozzy, Tommy and Vince Neil nearly get arrested for urinating on a police car, after getting very drunk on sake and lying in the middle of a freeway. When they get back to the hotel, Ozzy defecates in Tommy’s bathroom and wipes the faeces all over the walls in his room. When a concert is cancelled after Ozzy injures himself on the set shooting the video for his song So Tired, they still come through the town and do a radio interview. Ozzy and Vince notice keys in a car’s ignition so they steal it and frighten pedestrians, before smashing its windows and ruining its upholstery. The Crüe is also attracting a lot of religious protesters due to their supposed worshipping of the devil.

4/2/84
Elektra releases Looks That Kill as the first single from Shout At The Devil, with Piece Of Your Action on the flipside. It spends ten weeks in the charts and peaks at number fifty four.

19/2/84
Mötley and Ozzy arrive in New Orleans on the second night of Mardi Gras. Vince and Ozzy check out some local strip clubs, while Tommy, Nikki and Jake E. Lee from Ozzy’s band get themselves into a knife fight at a bar called Dungeon on Bourbon Street, After messing around with the girlfriend of the bar's bouncer, Nikki says they got thrown out and cut, as guys with spiked clubs were trying to smash them in the head.

22/2/84
Mötley arrives at their hotel for their show in Lakeland, Florida and head to the bar. Ozzy enters with a dollar bill placed between the cheeks of his ass, and offers it to other drinkers. He runs off with the bag of an elderly woman after she hassles him over his antics, and soon goes to the pool wearing a summer dress he finds in her bag. He soon tells Nikki that he feels like doing a line of cocaine, but they have none. So Ozzy then walks over and snorts a long line of ants up his nose before urinating on the pavement from under his dress, and licking it up. He challenges Nikki to copy him, who also urinates on the pavement, but before he has a chance to lick it up, Ozzy beats him to it.

24/3/84
While playing the final show of the first leg in support for Ozzy in Portland, Oregon, sixteen pounds of glittery flour is dropped from the lighting rig onto the heads of Mötley Crüe throughout their forty-five-minute set. As they leave the stage, Ozzy and his band-mates continue the attack by throwing custard at the Mötley members. Ozzy then goes on stage in fishnets and garters. Vince soon comes out on stage clanking in a knight’s full suit of armour, to give Ozzy his drink: a cup full of flour in the face, before mooning the audience as he leaves the stage. The Crüe also gets even by walking on stage naked under Monks’ clothes, flashing Ozzy and his band.

With Mötley’s popularity growing, Ozzy opts for the lamer Slade to open as support on his tour’s second leg.

31/3/84
Shout At The Devil peaks on the US charts at number seventeen, while Too Fast For Love also enjoys its highest position at number seventy seven.

4/84
Randy Castillo plays drums on the second solo album titled Dancin’ On The Edge by Nikki’s girlfriend, Lita Ford. He joined the band after his roommate, who played in Lita’s band, called upon him to replace their fired drummer. On the tour following its release, he is introduced to Nikki and Tommy at Lita’s Los Angeles concert, and they quickly become friends.

This month’s issue of Record Review magazine features Mötley Crüe on the cover for the first time in their career, and a telephone interview with Nikki from Glen Falls, New York before they played their second show with Ozzy.

25/4/84
The Crüe commences their three-week second headline tour in Bakersfield, California with Saxon and Glasgow’s Heavy Pettin’ in support, playing to audiences between 3,000 and 8,500.

30/4/84
In Colorado Springs, Colorado, Tommy runs down the fifth-floor hallway of the Antlers Hotel in his leather g-string. Spotted by an old lady, she calls the concierge to report the indecent exposure and disturbance by a man with long black hair, and hotel security then call the police. Upon arrival, the cops find Mick in a state of undress in the men's restroom with eighteen-year-old Heather Anderson. They are arrested at 3:45am and taken to El Paso County Jail, where they are soon released on $50 bond. This is luck for Tommy, since he had been convicted of disturbing the peace earlier in the year and sentenced to two years' probation.

Too Young To Fall In Love is released as the second single from Shout At The Devil and is again backed with a B-side from their previous Too Fast For Love album; this time the track chosen is Take Me To The Top. It peaks at number ninety and spends only two weeks on the U.S. charts. The oriental-themed video for the single is set during the 1920s in Shanghai, China. It is shot in an abandoned train tunnel under a 12th Avenue warehouse on the outskirts of Manhattan, New York, over thirty five hours using six sets and fifteen actors, running up a total production cost of seventy five thousand dollars. One of the actors is a young Michelle Yeoh, while a little boy named Billy acts in the clip by passing Nikki a note during a scene. The video is directed and produced by Martin Kahan, whose previous clips include Lick It Up by Kiss and Rock School by Heaven, both of whom Mötley has recently played shows with. Tommy phoned Nikki after seeing one of his video clips and said he wanted to work with this outrageous director for their next video.

15/5/84
Mötley plays the final show of their headlining tour in Memphis and celebrates by having Kevin Brady from Sunset Strip Tattoo join them on the road to ink the band’s name on all of their upper left arms. In Evansville, Indiana two days earlier, Kevin tattooed a USDA Choice meat stamp on Vince Neil’s left buttock. Tommy has a red rising sun with Japanese symbols for rhythm and power tattooed on his left shoulder.

The Crüe then heads out to begin playing another ten dates with Ozzy from tomorrow, including two festivals: the American Rock Festival held at Michigan's Timber Ridge Ski Area in Kalamazoo, and the Iowa Jam in Des Moines, Iowa in front of fifty two thousand punters with Accept, Night Ranger and Ted Nugent also on the bill. It’s around this time that a Mötley Crüe vs. Quiet Riot war of words begins after their vocalist Kevin Dubrow says the Crüe sucks and wouldn’t sell a record.

19/5/84
Before their show in Hollywood, Florida, Mötley holds an afternoon in-store at Peaches Records & Tapes in Fort Lauderdale.

20/5/84
Nikki’s grandmother calls to let him know his Mum has had a heart attack and is in a very bad condition. He feels he should call her but feels he doesn’t really know her, or care, since it’s been ten years since he’s had anything to do with her.

30/5/84
With a sell-out show in Syracuse, New York, Mötley kicks off a further thirteen headline shows, this time with their good friends in Ratt as support on seven of them, following release of their Out Of The Cellar debut album. Tommy previously appeared in Ratt's video for You Think You’re Tough, and makes another appearance in their Back For More clip, this time with Nikki acting as policemen – they frisk drummer Bobby Blotzer up against the wall of the building at 8080 Melrose Ave. During the tour, Mötley develops a habit of biting everyone they like, often breaking the skin on people's arms.

15/6/84
The U.S. tour in support of Shout At The Devil ends in front of eight thousand people in Springfield, Massachusetts. After the tour, Vince and wife Beth move to 916 Esplanade, Redondo Beach into a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth-floor of the ten-story high-rise right on the beach front, not far from Mick and his girlfriend Linda Correia. Nikki soon moves in across the street from Mick with Robbin Crosby from Ratt, as his girlfriend Lita Ford goes on her own tour. His apartment only has one bed and Robbin lets Nikki sleep in it while he crashes on the floor. Nikki buys a new Corvette and makes out with other women. He soon hears that Lita is dating Mick Cocks from the band Heaven and formerly Rose Tattoo, after apparently being introduced by a local punk. Tommy and Nikki go to Lita’s house and beat the punk with pieces of wood. Lita later calls Nikki and abuses him, also telling him they didn’t meet through that punk.

4/7/84
With his friend Bob, a stoned Nikki fires a huge skyrocket out of his garden. It sets a forty-foot palm tree on fire that falls onto a 1965 Mustang convertible, sending it up in flames. Nikki thinks it’s hilarious.

8/84
Nikki flies to Seattle to visit his sick mother who has recently been committed to a mental institution. It’s the first time he has seen her since she put him on a Greyhound bus to his grandparents’ home in Idaho six years ago. After asking if he wrote Looks That Kill about her, Nikki checks her out and takes her to his sister Ceci’s place, before catching the next plane back to Los Angeles where he feels he belongs.

Around this time, Tommy’s new champagne-coloured ‘82 Corvette runs over his foot as he urinates beside it.

18/8/84
The Crüe makes their first trip to the U.K. and plays the huge Monsters of Rock Festival in Donington at noon in front of about sixty thousand metalheads. The set comprises of songs Bastard, Ten Seconds To Love, Looks That Kill, Live Wire and Helter Skelter. After kicking off the show, Mötley is followed on stage by Y&T, Accept, Gary Moore, Ozzy Osbourne, Van Halen and AC/DC. A cow’s eyeball is hurled at the band, amongst other animal parts, and it lodges in Tommy’s drum riser. At the end of their set, Nikki throws his bass into the crowd and it lands on a fan named Stu Taylor, smashing his glasses and cutting his head open. A number of people take the guitar to the side of the stage to smash it up and share out the pieces.

25/8/84
The Crüe moves on with a lot of the bands on the Donington bill (Dio replaces Y&T after one show) to play six shows throughout Europe; the first in Stockholm, Sweden. Backstage at this show, Nikki lifts up Eddie Van Halen’s shirt and bites him on the stomach, before Vince bites him on his hand, all much to the disgust of Eddie’s wife, Valerie Bertinelli. At the Ritz hotel in Paris, France, a wasted Vince kicks in and shatters the glass entrance door as he tries to take a phone call.

2/9/84
Playing in Nuremburg, Germany, Mötley opens the show that in time turns out to be the last Van Halen performance with David Lee Roth singing. The mayhem continues afterwards as they get high in the hotel room of Dio’s keyboardist Claude Schnell. While Claude leaves the room for a while, they throw his beds, chairs, desk, TV and dresser out of the window on top of two brand new Mercedes Benz cars parked below. On his return, he soon answers his door to German police with Rottweilers, before Dio’s entire band is kicked out and banned for years. After the final show in Turin, Italy, Nikki travels to Paris where he spends a few days, before flying back to Los Angeles and meeting back up with the rest of the band.

9/84
Mötley Crüe begins recording demos of their new material for their third album, which is scheduled for release next January. A song title of Raise Your Hands To Rock is suggested by former Ozzy Osbourne drummer Carmine Appice. They also work on the previously demoed Nobody Knows What It’s Like To Be Lonely.

27/9/84
The success of Shout At The Devil assists Mötley’s debut album Too Fast For Love to achieve Gold status, now having sold five hundred thousand copies of the Elektra version in the U.S.

12/10/84
Mötley returns to London as they prepare to tour Europe in support of Iron Maiden on their Powerslave Tour. They attend the Iron Maiden party at Legends nightclub and photos of Vince and Tommy ‘working’ with female friends circulate quickly afterwards. Rehearsal venues include a kids’ gymnasium in London, and a thirteenth century castle recommended by AC/DC. Nikki captures a lot of events at these rehearsals on his video camera, including footage of Mick poking his white butt out of a castle window.

15/10/84
The first of over twenty shows with Iron Maiden takes place in Cologne, Germany, before moving through Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Italy and Switzerland. During the tour, practical jokes continue as members of Iron Maiden handcuff Vince to the stage so he can’t sing, and they chant Alka Seltzer into the PA system during Helter Skelter. The Crüe then brings a table and chairs on stage during Iron Maiden’s set, and sit down and enjoy a beer.

14/11/84
The final show of the Iron Maiden support tour takes place in Basel, Switzerland. Vince is so wasted that cortisone shots from doctors aren’t helping him to sound any better on stage any more. In the hotel, Tommy and Vince let off a flare in their room after buying some flare guns. They run out of their room to get their manager Doc McGhee, to show him how funny it is that the flare landed on Tommy’s mattress and set it on fire. On return, they realise they left their keys in the room. Smoke pours out the door and the sprinklers come on after a hotel worker finally opens it. They get kicked out of the hotel the following day, after breaking mirrors in the elevators.

19/11/84
As their last Shout At The Devil show, Mötley Crüe also plays their first U.K. headlining gig to wind up their European dates, in front of almost three thousand people at the Dominion Theatre in London’s West End, with Stratus in support. Nikki wears a dark green one piece jester suit and paints his bass the same colour. Vince trips on a monitor during the set and they are generally disappointed with their performance. A new song called Raise Your Hands To Rock is played live for the first time. The English crowd again throws strange butcher meats at the band during the songs, while Tommy pulls a dart from his drum tech’s back while he plays. The dry ice smoke machine then blows up on his drum tech Clyde, whose face is badly burnt from the scorching water. As they leave the stage, Tommy moons the crowd with his bare butt for first time.

24/11/84
Tommy Lee Bass marries his girlfriend Candice–real name Elaine Margaret Starchuk–after she says she wants to marry him when he returns from the European tour. They open the phonebook and pick a minister within minutes, before Tommy picks out her wedding ring in downtown Los Angeles. At seventeen years of age, Elaine Starchuk first arrived in L.A. from her native Vancouver, Canada, and danced using the stage name of Candice Starrek at The Body Shop on Sunset Boulevard as well as other clubs. That same year, a couple of her photos were published and led to a call from Penthouse to do a shoot. Her marriage to Tommy lasts three months. Before they were married, she found a photo of Tommy doing sexual acts with two girls and in their first week of marriage, one of the girls keeps calling their home phone number (that Tommy gave them while he was drunk) and hanging up, causing the newlyweds to argue. Convinced Tommy is having an affair, she enters the kitchen where Tommy is making a peanut butter sandwich, and tries to stab him with a butter knife grabbed from the drawer but the knife doesn’t go through. The final straw comes after they go to a big World Wrestling Federation event and head for the Tropicana afterwards to watch mud wrestling. On the way in the limo with Vince, Beth, Roy Thomas Baker and Tom Zutaut, Candice continues to rile Tommy by calling his mum foul names, after she recently called her Lisa, the name of Tommy’s previous girlfriend. When she doesn’t stop, Tommy loses restraint and punches her in the mouth knocking a temporary cap off her tooth. This is the first time Tommy ever hits a woman. She later claims Tommy forced her to abort their unborn child.

11/84
Mötley heads back to Los Angeles for a short break before recording their new album. In the meantime, a Helter Skelter picture disc begins pressing in the U.S., released with a huge poster and insert inside. Elektra is now giving Mötley the red carpet treatment and they plan to do big Christmas promotions and radio giveaways with the picture disc.

1/12/84
With his girlfriend, house and most of his friends gone after being on tour for over a year, Nikki decides to go on a Club Med holiday to the French-owned island of Martinique in the Caribbean, with Ratt’s Robbin Crosby and photographer friend Neil Zlozower.

8/12/84
Vince is throwing a party at his apartment in Redondo Beach. Members of the Finnish band Hanoi Rocks end up partying with them for days, as they are on their month-long first U.S. tour, supporting their Two Steps From The Move album. A couple of girls with apartments in the complex also party with them, as well as Vince’s neighbour Jim Thomas, who is an NBC anchorman.

A couple of days into the party after taking some Quaaludes, and drinking Jack Daniels and a mix of Brandy and Kahlua, Mick has enough of the abuse dished out to him by his girlfriend Linda. He walks out of Vince’s home onto the beach where he wades out into the water with his drink, intent on drowning himself to end it all before he blacks out. Vince later spots him washed up on the beach in his leather pants, jacket and boots, but Mick just wants to be left alone.

Vince asks his neighbour and car enthusiast Jim if he wants to drive his new red ‘72 Ford De Tomaso Pantera sports car to take him to the liquor store Redondo Food Mart at 529 S Catalina Ave so he can restock the party. Jim declines since him and his fiancée are heading off to a French restaurant in Malaga Cove. As he leaves, he introduces Jim to Razzle who says he'll go to the store with Vince instead.

Vince drives to the store with his passenger, twenty-four-year-old Hanoi Rocks drummer, Nicholas ‘Razzle’ Dingley, picking up a couple of hundred dollars-worth of beer and other alcohol, which Razzle holds in his lap during the ride back. At 6:38pm, just three to four blocks from his home 0.4 miles further ahead on the same street, Vince’s car skids sideways for thirty-five feet, as it goes through a fifteen-feet wide wet spot of residential water run-off on the road. He loses control of the vehicle that’s doing 65mph in a 25mph zone at the time. The car heads into oncoming traffic on the beachfront Esplanade northbound lane, and at three hundred and eleven feet north of Topaz St, in the block halfway between Sapphire St, it collides into the passenger’s side of the only oncoming vehicle: a white ’67 VW driven by eighteen-year-old Lisa Hogan, a resident of Rancho Palos Verdes. Her twenty-year-old passenger and boyfriend, Daniel Louis Smithers, is injured in the crash, as is Vince’s friend Razzle, whose passenger side of the vehicle takes the crash impact. Vince is concussed and has cracked ribs and minor facial cuts when the ambulance arrives. When Tommy arrives at the scene on foot after hearing sirens go by Vince’s house, he sees Vince sitting on the kerb with his head in his hands, and also sees Razzle’s blue Converse sneaker in the middle of the road. Vince’s blood alcohol level reads 0.17 when given a breathalyzer on the scene–well above the legal limit of 0.10. He is read his rights and taken by police in their squad car to the nearby city of Torrance, due to Redondo’s jail being given its yearly painting.

Razzle is taken to Redondo’s South Bay Hospital while Tommy drives his wife Candice, Vince's pregnant wife Beth and members of Hanoi Rocks there. After a long wait, a doctor advises them that Razzle died at 7:12pm, after his severe head injuries were too much. Lisa Hogan is rushed in critical condition to the intensive care unit of Little Company of Mary Hospital in Torrance where she remains in a coma until the end of the month, with a broken arm and two broken legs. Her head injury leaves her liable to fly into psychomotor seizures as a result of some brain damage. Daniel Smithers is taken to South Bay Hospital suffering a broken leg and some brain damage. The driver of a third car involved, twenty-five-year-old Karimi Khaliabad of Torrance, is uninjured.

This date is ironically the first day of U.S.A. National Drunk Driving Awareness Week. The final five Hanoi Rocks shows in California and Arizona of the band’s thirty-city U.S. Tour are cancelled, including what was to be their Los Angeles debut next Friday night.

9/12/84
Thinking he has drowned himself, Mick heads back to Vince’s house from the beach, where he sees Tommy, Candice and Beth crying. He tries to walk through a glass door to hear them, thinking he is a ghost, but ends up flat on his back in the sand.

Vince is questioned about the accident by police, before they send him home as the sun comes up, where Beth and Tommy are waiting for him. Vince still has Razzle's blood on his Hawaiian shirt and shorts. His phone runs hot with many calls from people asking what had happened. Manager Doc McGhee calls to tell him that the police have decided to arrest him for vehicular manslaughter, so he turns himself in to the precinct station where he is charged.

As Nikki enters Miami airport, returning from his holiday in Martinique, a fan wearing a blue blazer tells him that Vince has died in a car crash. Nikki calls Doc McGhee from a payphone and gets the full story.

The band’s managers Doc McGhee and Doug Thaler were also on vacation at the time of the crash, and refuse to comment on the accident when contacted by their office. Staff members at Elektra Records are warned their jobs will be on the line if comments on the situation are made, due to the high possibility of lawsuits, should any damaging statements be made. Elektra decides to cancel the huge Helter Skelter picture disc promotional campaign and subsequently recalls the product from any further sales.

13/12/84
Vince is freed by posting $2,650 bail after being booked for investigation of driving under the influence and vehicular manslaughter.

28/12/84
Daniel Smithers is transferred from South Bay Hospital to a hospital in Ventura, California to be nearer his family. He attends rehabilitative therapy to learn how to speak all over again, as a result of his brain damage sustained. Ironically, he previously worked as a counselor at the Palmer Drug Abuse Program. Meanwhile sales of Mötley Crüe and Hanoi Rocks albums effectively double, as Vince grows a beard and continues to struggle to come to grips with what has happened.

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