Yep...this is the 1981 full-length debut by Motley Crue; without a doubt one of my favorite albums as a kid, but one that totally confused me, and still confounds me a bit to this day. When I was younger, most of the confusion stemmed from the title. I would ask my friends "Too Fast For Love? What does that mean?" (Hey, what can I say? I had a sheltered upbringing!) then my friends would look at me and say "...oooh...y'know (wink wink)." and clueless, I would reply "Oooooooh...yea, sure...I get it...pretty fast...yep." But the real weirdness came from the really strange production...it sounds really dirty and scummy, yea...it's early Motley Crue, but this retained a great level of hunger, stupidity, and naivety that the band would surely lose upon getting their hard-earned fame. The cowbell alone on the album warrants a whole thesis... just..what? Why is it mixed so loudly on some parts? And the way that Tommy Lee utilizes it is SO FUCKING RANDOM at times that it's just ridiculous! There's even moments of OVERDUBBED COWBELL on here...i repeat: OVERDUBBED COWBELL. That means that one of two things must have happened during the recording of this album.
#1) Tommy Lee *really* wanted to emphasize that cowbell's ring and thought that the song deserved that special something to make it stand out...(yea, i know, we're dangerously close to crossing the line into SNL skit territory here)...but there's a deeper level of insanity when comparing "more cowbell" to "double tracked cowbell"! ~~~Aarrggh!!! How does genius like this go unnoticed in the annals of history for so long?
#2) Having completed the first cowbell track, Tommy was so wasted that he recorded it twice, then decided to go score more dope and hookers and the task of deleting one of those tracks was left to the engineer who was way too busy scoring his own groupies and blow. Thus, the track ("Public Enemy #1" if you must now) remained untouched in all it's out-belled glory.
Okay, this is a killer album of pop hooks, big crazy choruses, sleazy guitar and a total glammed out attitude owing lots to the New York Dolls, The Stooges, T. Rex. I could go into more critical observations regarding the music but I'll just let my 12 year old self let you all know that simply, this "rules."
THE LOUDER THE BETTER
By the way, tracks 1-9 are the original album.
Tracks 10-13 are the bonus tracks, most of them lackluster- except for the killer Crue version of The Raspberries' "Tonight."
1 comment:
I got this album (on cassette) when a year or so after it came out, as a young Metalhead looking for material at a time and in a town where there was very, very little. It was disappointing then and remains so today. Very lacklustre song writing, lyrics not worth laughing at and I can feel no nostalgia for it. The final song, "On With The Show" could rank as one of the worst songs ever written. Motley Crue where huge in the 80's, you couldn't move for them, but that was a time when major and commercial labels where saturating the market with such rubbish. Fortunately, it was also the time when Thrash was nascent and a much better and more satisfying movement was waiting in the wings.
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