Motley Crue's Circus

Between the four of them, they've been married eleven times, fathered thirteen children, fraternized with hundreds of groupies and snorted, smoked, swallowed and shot up enough drugs to kill a small army. In the mid-Eighties, they liked to chop up the tranquilizer Halcion and mix it with cocaine for a living-zombie effect that predated Red Bull and vodka by more than a decade. They've been arrested for crimes as minor as speeding and as major as vehicular manslaughter (Neil's drunken-driving accident in 1984 killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley). The Eighties was their decade, and when it expired, so did the Crüe's relevance. As Mötley Crüe's early-Nineties albums sold poorly, tensions within the band escalated to an all-time high, and Lee quit after a physical altercation with Neil at a Las Vegas airport.

It was only a matter of time, though, before the kind of Eighties nostalgia that has put leg warmers back on the market and New Wave back on the radio resuscitated Mötley Crüe. As comebacks go, this one is monstrous. Their recent greatest-hits collection, Red, White and Crue, generated a chart-topping new single, "If I Die Tomorrow." Their 2001 autobiography, The Dirt, is being adapted for a movie. This summer, Lee will release his third solo album and star in an NBC reality show, Tommy Lee Goes to College. Neil has a solo record planned for around the same time. Sixx will publish his autobiography, The Heroin Diaries, next year, and a new Crüe album is in the works.

But their top priority is their reunion tour, which started in mid-February. At the tour's kickoff in Fort Lauderdale, nerves were running high. Mötley Crüe had never rehearsed the entire two-and-a-half-hour production — which includes the requisite pyro, half-naked female contortionists and, of course, a midget — but they had done one practice gig in Puerto Rico a couple of nights earlier. "It was like Sodom and Gomorrah backstage," Kovac tells me. I have a hard time picturing it: During the week I spend with the band, things are for the most part about as dangerous as a PTA meeting. Mars and Sixx are sober, and Neil is restricting his drinking to a few glasses of wine a night. With the exception of Lee, whose tour bus is stocked with a Jagermeister machine and whose dressing room is stocked with groupies, Mötley Crüe are no longer a gang bent on drugging and fucking their way across the country.

Except when they take the stage, they are the same old glorious Mötley Crüe, banging out "Shout at the Devil" and "Dr. Feelgood" to crowds that are equal parts aging mullet-heads, thirtysomething squares, young, tattooed rocker wanna-be's and slutty girls of all ages. By the time the Crüe get to their sold-out show at Madison Square Garden two weeks into the tour, the kinks in the production have been smoothed out, and Sixx, Neil, Mars and Lee are having the time of their lives. Late in the show, Lee points a video camera at various girls in the audience, who happily lift their shirts on his cue. Prodded by Sixx, Lee then drops trou, whips out his dick, gives it a quick jiggle and busts up laughing.

"I was apprehensive before we started," says Lee. "I wondered, 'Does anybody care?' I'm blown away. Maybe I forgot how much people liked us."