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EDMONTON - If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with ... explosions!
Frankly, it's amazing Motley Crue has gotten away with it this long. Almost 30 years and these Los Angeles bad boys are still flogging the same spirit of rock 'n' roll excess and glorious decadence, the same handful of dumb fun songs they came up with in the excessive and decadent 80s before this sort of thing fell out of favour and then allegedly came roaring back again. They're still doing arenas, anyway. The rest is filler and bluster and running on fumes. Way to go, Motley Crue!
But there sure was a lot of excitement at the moment these boys took the stage at Rexall Place last night. Sure, they're all pushing 50 -- some from the other side -- but so what? There were plenty of pyrotechnics to dazzle the 10,000 fans who turned up in various states of intoxication and/or with big 80s hair. What appeared to be several metric tonnes of fossil fuels were ignited and released as the gentle strains of Kickstart My Heart wafted through the arena. Then came Wild Side and more fireworks. Then came Shout at the Devil and more excessive pyrotechnical delights. The crowd went wild.
Of course, there was no way they could keep expelling all that hot gas, and they didn't. The musical throttle was likewise set to autopilot, a loud one, mind you, with singer Vince Neil relying on the repeated use of an expletive as a term of rock 'n' roll endearment. One of the new tunes they insisted on trotting out was called (Expletive) of the Year. Good for a rousing singalong. Neil's voice at first showed much of the screamy suppleness of his youth, but soon started to crack a bit in Edmonton's dry air. This tour is called "Dead of Winter." Even drummer Tommy Lee's anticipated crowd communion lacked a certain something. He just shouted "whassup!" a couple of times and shared his flask of Jaegermeister with some kids in the front who insisted they were old enough to drink. And when he inevitably made the call for bare breasts, there was only one taker -- and no video camera or big screen to capture her! What a rip. Bassist Nikki Sixx just swaggered around a lot. And guitarist Mick Mars, meanwhile, again proved to be the best player who moved the least. He's old -- and this band would be nothing without him.
Explosions (and excitement) returned in Girls Girls Girls, the last song of the show proper, with Tommy Lee playing grand piano for I'm On My Way for the first encore. The piano did not explode, unfortunately. But things blew up again in Dr. Feelgood -- and after only 90 minutes, it was all over. Final verdict: For pure hard rock excess and decadence, Axl Rose and Guns 'N' Roses blows these guys away.
In a perfect world, Motley Crue would be opening for Aerosmith -- they did back in ought-six, in fact -- but this is not a perfect world. Perish the thought! Steven Tyler, who might just be the best rock singer on the planet, went off the deep end again, literally, leaving his accomplished but less charismatic guitarist Joe Perry to carry the Aerosmith torch. It will have to do for now.
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Not that the Joe Perry Project wasn't a competent and occasionally entertaining band last night, puffy Seinfeld shirt and behind-the-head guitar cliches notwithstanding. It's just that when they did the Aerosmith songs, they sounded like an Aerosmith cover band -- Walk This Way went over huge with this crowd -- while the originals came off as sadly generic. It's a classic case of being between a rock and a hard place, in a no-win situation, pick your cliche. Before valiantly ploughing through one wild, sloppy solo after another (with no second guitarist to back him up), he apologized for the Aerosmith no-show last summer, explaining with a shrug, "You know how things go." Yes, again: Not a perfect world.
Rock 'n' roll is getting terribly confusing. Let's review: the headliner was a band that never left the 80s, the second opener was what remains of a 70s rock band, and then, our first act of the evening was an 00s band that sounded like a 70s band -- Airbourne. Give these young Aussies a better guitarist and some devil horns and they'd be dead ringers, so to speak (in a Hells Bells reference), for the venerable AC/DC. You had your solid three-chord clompers, you had your rock songs about rocking, you had your tunes about cheap wine and cheaper women (or maybe it's the other way around) and you had your fist-pumping, beer-swilling, pot-toking, scream-along anthems on the topic of things that are hard. Like life and rock, of course. Bonus points for the synchronized guitar bobbing and hair twirling. Let's see the Young boys try that.