Inside Motley Crue’s Live Excess: From Roller Coaster Drums to Fire-Spitting Bass
“I remember being a 16-year-old kid and going to the Girls tour and seeing Tommy spin around. I was in awe,” Long says. “So when I started working with the band I said, ‘We’ve gotta bring back some kind of big drum gag. And what we came up with was the Loop. Then, after playing with that thing for 200 or so shows, Tommy and I were sitting around one day and he said to me, ‘You know, I really want to get to front of house [with my drums] …’ That’s what he had always wanted to do. He never stopped talking about it.”
Lee’s desire to travel the length of an arena while bashing away on his kit led to the development of the Crüecifly. Unleashed for the Final Tour, it sees him negotiate 155 feet of roller coaster track in every position — forwards, backwards, even upside down.
“Tommy used to always say, ‘Man, I wanna be on a roller coaster!'” Sixx recalls. “And we would laugh and go, ‘That’s awesome … but impossible.’ But we’ve been investing a lot of time and money in these things for decades, because we believe they’re an important part of our show. We don’t need all this stuff, but if we’re able to do it, we’re going to do it.”
The Crüecifly was constructed by the Las Vegas-based overhead rigging specialists Show Group Production Services. Says Long, “We sketched out about eight different versions, and it took a long time to get it right. But we did it. And the whole thing is wireless, which is what’s so ingenious about it. If you were to look at it up close you’d see all these wireless packs strapped down to it. We’re also able to make any necessary adjustments — when we played Madison Square Garden, for instance, the scoreboard there is so big we had to shorten the track and keep it lower to the ground. Which wound up being very cool, because when Tommy would flip upside down, it looked like he was crowd surfing.”
Early on, another one of those adjustments involved just how many times Lee would actually rotate on his journey. “He’s never gotten sick on the Crüecifly, but we have had to decrease the number of flips,” Long says. “In the beginning there were just too many. You spend too much time upside down, with all that blood rushing to your head, and it becomes pretty hard to play …”
The other big set piece in the Final Tour shows is Sixx’s “flamethrower bass,” a Mad Max-ian contraption that he straps on for “Shout at the Devil.” To pull off the trick, Sixx’s instrument is fitted with a unit that taps into an offstage fuel reserve, allowing him to “shoot” flames from his bass roughly 30 feet in the air. “The whole thing weighs almost 100 pounds,” Sixx says of the apparatus. “And the tubing that hangs off it also kind of drags me down. So I have to be in shape — I’ve been doing a lot of leg workouts, a lot of squats. Because you can’t look like, ‘Oh my god, this thing’s so heavy. …’ You have to be able to control it, you have to be aware of what you’re doing. You have to be able to move around. And then you still have to play the song.”