He must have thought I was yet another writer willing to kiss his ring and that he could play the closemouthed, mysterious rock star with me. I have been snubbed by the greatest, Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmy Page and others and you are barely a blip on the screen, dude.” Mick had misjudged me. I have Mick Mars sitting in front of me and he is one of my favorite guitar players and how am I going to get him to open up and reveal the secrets of his greatness?” Hardly. If I’m being honest here, I was never a fan of the band, nor did I think he was much of a guitarist. His was a cavalier attitude that suggested, “Yes, I have arrived. Slowly, casually and disdainfully, he strolled into the room, sat down in a chair and didn’t say a word. That being said, Nikki turned out to be a very thoughtful and funny dude and for 25 minutes he gave me his full attention.Īt that point, Mick sauntered in and I used that word because that was exactly what he did. Having contributed nothing of interest to the conversation, the singer would exit after just a few minutes. Nikki and Vince were there, but Mars and Lee were nowhere in sight. But Mötley, even then, ran on a different schedule than the rest of the world, and attended to the beat of a very different drum. The band’s second album - Shout at the Devil - had just been released, and the entire group was supposed to convene at the offices of Elektra Records in West Hollywood for my interview. However, when I first met Mick in early 1983, he hadn’t yet fallen prey to the merciless curse of addiction and was still walking upright. Along the way, he would succumb to a passion for gobbling down painkillers and emptying whiskey bottles down his gullet and ultimately suffer through a debilitating illness, ankylosing spondylitis, that would virtually render him unable to play or move very much and all but end his career. The long story, the epic tale, involved a guitar player who rose from the anonymity of the Hollywood Sunset Strip club scene to become a six-string killer in one of the most outrageous, over-the-top and successful hard rock bands of all time. That’s the somewhat mythologized short story. Every band of hairy pranksters needed a name and Mick conjured up Mötley Crüe and began writing the history of what was to become hair-glam metal. Mars inserted an ad claiming he was “a loud, rude and aggressive guitar player.” Eventually he recruited three other battle weary dragon slayers: Nikki Sixx, Tommy Lee and Vince Neil in that order. The Recycler was a local paper where musicians could list free want ads in search of other musicians. Every good knight needed his fellow warriors and back in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s there was only one place to go if you were seeking out like-minded comrades-in-arms - or used car parts, a pet rabbit or vacation rentals - and that was ye olde Recycler. ĭeal became Mick Mars and didn’t that heroic nom de guerre - and indeed it was a nom de guerre, because Mars was off to the wars to do battle with the evil empire, the music business, a monster as cruel as any demon or dragon from mythology - simply roll off the tongue fabulously? He needed his armor, and thusly began donning a suit of mail - really just a t-shirt and jeans but for poetic effect I’ve taken to a more fable-like reading - as black as a starless night and dyed his hair to match. Growing weary of running into closed doors whilst churning out rehashed blues licks, the young musician made a stunning transformation: Poof!. None of them were very good and none of them ever did anything, though one anonymous outfit called White Horse sported a singer with the name Micki Marz, a moniker that appealed to our Kid Charlemagne and one he would later purloin as his own. He performed variously under several weird-sounding names including Zorky Charlemagne, parading out the riffs he’d learned in a series of mediocre blues bands. Robert practiced really hard on his electric guitar. Deal was never a particularly studious lad - more interested in shredding than scholastic pursuits - and dropped out of high school to pursue his one true love: guitar. In a previous life before he began wearing makeup and outrageous clothes and was part of a hair metal band, Motley Crue, that celebrated sex, drugs and women with big breasts, Mick Mars was a mere mortal known as Robert Alan Deal.īorn on May 4, 1951, he grew up in Terre Haute, Indiana, moved to Huntington about three hours away and then just prior to his ninth birthday relocated to California, where his family was in search of a better life. In his latest Behind the Curtain entry, veteran rock music scribe Steve Rosen details run-ins with Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars that didn’t quite go as planned … (Photo: Glen Laferman)
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