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Live: Entertainment Or Death
Motley Crue
Motley / Beyond Records, 1999
REVIEW BY: Paul Hanson
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 01/12/2000
Motley Crue, like Kiss, is making a fortune on their previously released songs. Name a song from each of these band's most recent releases and you have to think. Name a song that you hear on the radio and "Rock And Roll All Night" comes to mind for Kiss and "Kickstart My Heart" comes to mind for the Cruesters.
So it is not very surprising that on this, their first live two-CD set, the band encapsules songs we've all heard on CD, if we've bought their albums, or heard in concert if we've been (un)fortunate enough to see the band live. I've seen the band twice in concert and, despite all the Circus magazine polls the band has won as "Best Live Band," I must have been seeing and hearing the Crue's pale imitation of themselves: I walked out of both concerts unimpressed.
On CD, with the wonders of mixing audience levels and tweaking EQ knobs, the band sounds decent, but barely and not without some major problems. First, Vince Neil cannot sing fast. He tries hard, I'll give him that, but his vocals on "Shout At The Devil" are sloppy. His voice gets softer on "Public Enemy #1" when he sings out of breath. Likewise, when he has to string together lyrics in the anthem "Wild Side." Some classical training in breathing while singing might help.
Neil's between song babble is limited to getting the crowd to shout "Fuck yeah!" when he proclaims, "I've been screaming my ass off all night tonight. Are you ready to do some screaming Tuscon?" Equally amatuerish is his intro to "Public Enemy #1." Neil rambles that some people came up to him and said, "Motley Crue, you people are pretty bad. You tear 'em up. I said, 'Hey, you should see our fuckin' audience.'"
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