"Got a little hideaway, does business all day
But at night he'll always be found"
Mötley Crüe - Dr. Feelgood - 1989

From the time I was born in 1969, music has always been in my life. Dad, and Mum especially, liked listening to the current popular music played on commercial radio, along with their favourite hits from the ‘50s and ‘60s. As a boy, this was the music I knew and mostly enjoyed. In 1979, I was gripped by a rock phenomenon that controlled many other kids at the time: Kiss. Their November 1980 tour in Australia where I lived shattered concert records and received an enormous amount of media and public attention. Although deemed too young to attend the shows, a permanent scar was left on me.

As I entered high school in the early ‘80s, my mates and I were still predominantly listening to chart music, with favourites including INXS, Split Enz, and Billy Joel. Seeing David Bowie live in November 1983 as my first concert gave me more of a taste and I started exploring his back catalogue. Through my early teen years I took hold of the radio dial and started listening to the stations run by Universities. This triggered my appetite for music as I was discovering alternative bands like The Cramps, Violent Femmes, The Cult, The Birthday Party, Alien Sex Fiend, and The Stooges.

Further varied listening then introduced me to all sorts of punk music and I enjoyed early English giants The Clash, The Damned, Generation X and the Sex Pistols. While I loved the melodies of these bands’ songs, I found myself preferring the bands with more snarl. The Dead Kennedys were one such favourite that continued to expose me to different styles. Lots of American hardcore punk bands then occupied my turntable, like Channel 3, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Fear. So much so that in 1986 a friend and I were spending some late nights at a University radio station, playing hardcore and other punk music for listeners. I left High School with my best marks in English and ironically a fail in History!

I continued to enjoy exploring punk music listening to the more English punk bands like Subhumans, The Exploited, Angelic Upstarts, The Partisans, and the Clay Records trio: English Dogs, Discharge, and G.B.H. It was these latter three I liked the most, and when I sang in my first band called Barbary Corsairs in 1987, I belted-out some versions of our favourite songs from these bands. Coupled with punked Rose Tattoo, Devo and Sixto Rodriguez covers amongst our set of originals, we found ourselves frequently opening for local act Cremator.

Cremator were the first speed metal band in hometown Perth Australia, influenced by the likes of Slayer, Possessed, Dark Angel and Metallica. I found myself getting into this heavier music more and more. Slayer’s Reign In Blood and Metallica’s Master of Puppets wore thin on my turntable as well as discs from bands like Whiplash, Exodus, Anthrax, Onslaught, Death Angel and Death. I loved listening to these bands but after a while found myself preferring a slower pace with a heavier groove. Enter Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus, Trouble and some Led Zeppelin.

As 1988 came around, The Cult’s Electric was all over the night scene and Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction was just breaking ground in Australia. It was not only the hard rock sound that grabbed me but the image style these bands had. My discovery of these bands and a re-discovery of Kiss had me exploring more hard rock. By the time early 1989 came around I was digging up vinyl on more of these rock bands. I remember buying import records of Skid Row, Faster Pussycat, Dangerous Toys and Poison, and turning many friends on to them. I also began collecting videos and audios of my favourite bands around this time, as it was near impossible to obtain anything but standard commercial releases in Perth – the most isolated capital city in the world.

It was at this time I met the lady that became my wife and she introduced me to Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe's Too Fast for Love album, which we partied to for many, many months on end. My path somehow never previously crossed with Too Fast for Love, nor Shout at the Devil and Theatre of Pain in their day. I recall seeing the Girls, Girls, Girls record in a store prior to this but never picked it up.

For my next birthday, I was gifted a pair of black leather pants with a lace-up crotch made for me by the ex-wife of Sex Pistol Glen Matlock and they were just like Vince’s from the Too Fast for Love album cover. I remember making myself a handcuff belt and screen-printing Crüe t-shirts for friends and myself.

Later in 1989, I obtained a ‘hot off the press’ bootleg video of the Crüe’s performance at the Moscow Peace Festival. If I wasn’t hooked before I certainly was now. That video was played over and over and over. When Dr. Feelgood was released soon after, the Crüe was building mainstream popularity in Australia. When they toured Australia in late March-early April 1990 – the one and only time until Dec 2005 – they did not play on our west coast. I was unemployed at the time and preparing for my wedding in a few months, so had to sit back and hear stories from people we knew that were able to make the 3,500km journey across the country to see them. Crüe-fever died down in Australia after that tour but it had hooked many other Aussies.

So, fast forward through many more years of listening to hard rock and metal, I then had my first exposure to the Internet in 1994 when the company I was working for at the time connected. I had an email address and a web browser, and I was away. There were only really two small Mötley Crüe sites on the net back then and these were among the sites I found myself visiting most often, hoping for news on what the band members were up to and other fresh content. I also enjoyed the variety of Kiss websites online back then.

After reading various online FAQ’s covering all sorts of topics, I realised there was no FAQ for Mötley Crüe. This realisation coupled with the desire to actively contribute to the Internet gave me the initial concept and idea for a website. I had often considered starting a Mötley Crüe fanzine (being aware of the role of fanzines from my punk days) but I held back due to my limited funds for printing and distribution, so I saw a website as the best way for me to get involved. There was no Mötley history available online back then as well, so I decided this would be the unique focus for my website, as I found the stories of their misadventures to be intriguing and so very rock ‘n’ roll. I saw no point in just duplicating information or copying ideas from other Mötley sites like so many other websites were doing (and still continue to do). I wanted my website to be a timeline of the Crüe’s history and in doing so it would answer the FAQ’s fans have about them, their music and their lives; so I came up with the name Chronological Crue.

With no idea of how to build a website, I realised I first needed to have all my content in electronic format. So early in 1995 I began entering as much information into my word processor as possible. Mountains of magazines, books, newspaper clippings, video tapes, audio tapes, etc. were scoured for dates and facts to be entered. Rather than copying articles and information as it appeared, I stripped the editorialised information back to the bare facts and completely re-wrote the text in my own style and words. It was quite amazing just how much embellishment was written around these facts by journalists, but I understand that's their craft. The many inconsistencies I found were also eye-opening and I have always strived to present the most accurate version of events that I can. The content is presented as a third person narrative in the present tense chronological, so readers can ride the ups and downs as the band's amazing story unfolds.

Towards the end of 1995, or early 1996, I felt I had enough content but still didn’t possess the technical skills to turn it into a website. I approached the webmaster of the official Mötley website hoping to come to an arrangement for my history to be published on that site. For one reason and another, nothing eventuated there, so I decided I’d do it all myself.

I also wanted the website to be a Mötley museum of sorts, so when reading the history, a simple click on linked information would display an image of the event as well. Many images were scanned from my personal Crüe collection of Mötley merchandise that had been steadily growing over the years. Throughout 1996, I constructed the website locally on my laptop in the format intended. I wanted to keep my site basic without so many of the whistles and bells, yet still being able to present a professional looking site. I recognised that depth of content and frequent updates would be the key to the site's success, as that was what I appreciated and looked for in websites generally.

In the latter half of 1996 with the information complete, the issue of hosting the website forced me to restructure much of the work I’d done. Due to limited server space and a lack of ongoing funds to invest in hosting, since the site provided no income for such expenses, I had to remove the linked historical images prior to uploading the site to its home at Australia’s then-largest ISP, OzEmail. When it came time to choose a username for the hosting account at my ISP, ‘cruekiss’ seemed the obvious choice.

So after many months of work over the last two years, the site was ready to go live in the early part of 1997. On the 16th January, a teaser awareness campaign began directing fans to a singular introductory page that invited them to come back for the launch on 27th January 1997, the day Vince Neil was to re-unite with the Crüe onstage at the American Music Awards. The website became fully accessible on the morning of the 27th so Mötley fans could spend the day reading through the band's past, then later that evening witness the beginning of a new chapter in Mötley Crüe history.

The Chronological Crue website has since gone from strength to strength, being featured in many print publications around the world and having its pages viewed more than five million times since 1997. Major US music networks MTV and VH1 have drawn upon and credited the site for production of their TV programs on Mötley Crüe. The site continues to update fans on all the latest on Mötley Crüe and its band members both past and present.

Fans from all over the globe constantly show their appreciation of my work, time invested, and experience provided for them. They are often shocked to find out that there is no team of people working on the site and it's just me, in what time ‘spare time’ I can dedicate.

The site had its first overhaul of the creative interface and navigational structure launched on 29/6/99 to coincide with the Crüe kicking off their Maximum Rock Tour and the release of their Supersonic & Demonic Relics CD. This current antique sepia design was launched in March 2002.

My dream of one-day seeing Mötley perform live on stage finally came true in December 2005, when I travelled with the band on their Australian Tour, covering all six shows in eight days. My tour adventures were released as a paperback book, along with a range of other Motley Crue books that were first released in April 2006, and then again in 2019.

I was fortunate enough to travel to Los Angeles at the end of 2015 and see the band's last two concerts, which culminated in a backstage party with Tommy after The Final Show.

This website is my SHOUT for all you Crüeheads worldwide. Enjoy it!

Rock on,

Paul Miles

PS: Check out some more from me at Paul-Miles.com and on Instagram.
 

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