We Did All of This to Rock: Mötley Crüe's 'Dr. Feelgood' at 35

The first time I evaded the price of a concert’s admission was under the wing of my much cooler friends on the Sunset Strip. With a mumbled “she’s with us,” 13-year-old me hid my camera under my jacket, ducked under the bouncer’s outstretched arm and darted into The Whisky quick enough for reality not to follow. While my friends at the top of the bill gathered around a table upstairs, I photographed the opening act, a boy band from New Jersey, against the edge of the stage. The drummer wasn’t knocking back an entire bottle of Jack Daniels mid-song like Tommy Lee, but my imagination made up for the lack of stage antics. There’s a smell you come to love when you attend shows—booze, cigarette smoke and sweat, contrasted by the biting air that smacks you every time the door swings open—which pricked at my arms as I snapped away. I felt grown up, naively cool, but most of all, I felt like I’d snuck into the invite-only party I’d yearned for since I was a little girl. Above the bar, a dimly lit Mötley Crüe poster read “Home Sweet Home.” I swore I saw it flickering like a fire still liable to rage.

I didn’t dive into Mötley Crüe’s full discography until five years later, around the time I discovered Cinderella, Electric Angels, Smashed Gladys and a legion of other late ‘80’s hard rock acts with flashy album covers and Aqua Net allegiances. “Home Sweet Home” wasn’t a slogan, I found out, but a single from their third studio album, Theatre of Pain. When 2019’s The Dirt ushered in a brand new generation of Crüe fans—a phenomenon that swept through my high school, and likely every Southern Californian high school—I didn’t quite get it. But every time I skimmed by the cover of Shout At The Devil, the strangest premonition took over: One day, when I was older and cooler like my band friends had been back at The Whisky, I’d listen to “Girls, Girls, Girls” and it would fit as snug as those black skinny jeans. The world’s most notorious rock band didn’t come knocking until this year, my 20th, but they came knocking loudly.

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I’d missed a lot—like how Nikki Sixx had died and come back to life by the time their fifth studio album, Dr. Feelgood, rolled around. Just two years removed from a heroin overdose that pronounced him clinically dead for two minutes at the age of 29, the bassist wrote the majority of the record’s lyrics in pertinence to his experience getting sober, and how dying taught him that “it hurts to come back.” As painful as it is, resurrection had been a recurring event for vocalist Vince Neil, guitarist Mick Mars, bassist Sixx and drummer Tommy Lee since their January 1981 conception. They survived addiction, personal tragedy, legal battles and, as Sixx learned while being shocked back to life in the back of an ambulance that fateful day in 1987, death itself. But understanding Dr. Feelgood’s magnitude requires a bit of zooming out.

Every member had worked menial jobs and played in bands prior to their formation. Neil was the wailer-in-chief of Rock Candy; Mars had lended lead guitar to The Jades, White Horse and Video Nu-R with little commercial success, apart from his incessant comparison to rival band Mammoth’s guitarist, Eddie Van Halen (who Neil would later bite while on the 1984 Monsters of Rock tour); Sixx had played bass for Sister and London; Lee was working the Sunset Strip circuit as the drummer of Suite 19, which landed him in Sixx’s sights as the pair weighed the possibility of founding a new group. They did, with one small issue: Lee knew Neil from school, and knew he was a fantastic singer, but he was already in a group. “[Nikki] goes, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’ll go steal him out of that band,” Lee said in a 1990 interview. With the addition of Mars, who’d advertised himself as a “loud, rude and aggressive guitar player” in the paper, they independently released their debut record, Too Fast For Love, which clinched them a record deal with Elektra and a re-release the following year.

Shout At The Devil arrived two years later, in 1983. While the glam getups featured on the cover would lead Metallica frontman James Hetfield to mistaken the band for hookers, it sealed the deal for me in a much different, admittedly shallow way. With every pat of porcelain powder and swipe of lipstick, the band transformed into terrifyingly good-looking conveyors of truth—simple truths, sure, but truths nonetheless. From fear of commitment in “Too Young to Fall in Love” to lethal lust in “Looks That Kill,” the band spoke and screamed of love, lust and rage in no particular order, always in skin-tight leather and high spirits. “He’ll be the love in your eyes / He’ll be the blood between your thighs,” Neil sang in the title track. For a girl who grew up under the spiritual guidance of Joni Mitchell’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Sara Bareilles’s Little Voice, this was a whole new world. Nikki Sixx’s poetry had finally been discovered in my genetic makeup, like hearing your car’s distinctive beep while trudging through an endless parking lot.

In December 1984, Neil and Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle left a days-long party at Neil’s home to restock on liquor. Both were drunk, and when Neil lost control of the vehicle and swerved into oncoming traffic, Razzle was killed in the subsequent crash. Neil served 15 days in jail, was ordered to pay $2.6 million in restitution to the victims and underwent 200 hours of community service, but no amount of good behavior would prevent Mötley Crüe’s fourth record from being informed by Razzle’s death. Theatre of Pain was dedicated to the drummer, and its themes were darker than ever—its reception was, too. Sixx called it “a pile of rubbish, the whole fucking record, with a few moments of maybe brilliance.”

1987’s Girls, Girls, Girls saw the band delve deeper into fame, excess and addiction (at the height of Lee’s alcoholism, he recalled drinking upwards of two gallons of straight liquor a day). It was their slickest album up until that point, and it’s hard to deny the pulsating rhythm of its title track, but the rest of Girls, Girls, Girls was underpinned by despair and distractions. “Like Theatre of Pain, Girls, Girls, Girls could have been a phenomenal record, but we were too caught up in our own personal bullshit to put any effort into it,” Sixx wrote in The Dirt. “You can actually hear the distance that had grown between us in our performance.” Mars, who retired from touring in 2022 due in part to the effects of his ankylosing spondylitis, has said this was the year his bandmates began attempting to replace him. With tensions at an all-time high and a unilateral quest for rehabilitation underway, the band buckled down and polished up for what many consider to be their best record, 1989’s Dr. Feelgood. For the first time since their founding eight years prior, they hand-crafted a body of work without the hurt, or help, of substances.

To avoid conflict, producer Bob Rock had each member record their parts separately during their time at Vancouver’s Little Mountain Sound Studios. Location was of the utmost importance this time around, as it allowed for total focus among the band, whereas recording in Los Angeles had invariably led to partying and failing to make any real recording progress. “[Vince] used to just disappear, and then we’d find out he was passed out in the desert in Palm Springs,” Sixx said in 1990. “We’d have him wheeled in and he’d do his vocals and then pass out in the corner, [but] he stayed the whole time in Vancouver…. went over all of his vocal tracks, listened to things and wanted to correct this and correct that, and that was really neat.”

It’s said that Mars played with so many pedals that he can be heard on Aerosmith’s Pump, which was recorded at the same time as Dr. Feelgood. “Steven Tyler was doing vocals with producer Bruce Fairbairn next door, and I remember them yelling at me, ‘You’ve gotta turn your stuff down, Mick! It’s leaking into our vocals,” Mars told Guitar World. “I just told them, ‘Hey, that’s the way I play—loud.” Tyler contributed backing vocals to “Sticky Sweet,” as did Robin Zander and Rick Nielson of Cheap Trick, Bryan Adams, Jack Blades and members of Skid Row on various other songs.

When it came time to pen Dr. Feelgood’s title track, Sixx had more than enough to work with lyrically. “In the end,” the bassist said, “it was inspired by drug dealers.” The song opens on the tailend of “T.n.T (Terror ‘n Tinseltown),” which sets the scene with blaring ambulance sirens and rushed paramedic chatter. A voice assures “CPR is in progress,” and Mars’ guitar cuts smugly through the chaos to ring in their most cutting storytelling yet. “Rat-tailed Jimmy is a secondhand hood / Deals out in Hollywood,” Neil sings, “Got a ‘65 Chevy, primered flames / Traded for some powdered goods.” The real-life Dr. Feelgood was Max Jacobson, most notable for administering highly-addictive shots laced with methamphetamine and amphetamine to his famous patients. The song wasn’t written for him, though, rather as a general observation of addiction. “A good drug addict always has more than one dealer,” Sixx said of the song’s inspiration.

While “Dr. Feelgood” told the tale of an archetypal dealer, “Kickstart My Heart” was a firsthand account of Sixx’s heroin overdose in December 1987. Guns N’ Roses’ Steven Adler and Slash were among those with Sixx that night, and Adler had recently broken his hand, leaving him with a hard cast. He recalled dragging Sixx into the shower, attempting to keep him conscious under cold running water, and “slapping him in the face” with his cast until help arrived, but it was too late. “I looked down and realized I had left my body,” Sixx wrote in The Dirt. “Nikki Sixx, or the filthy, tattooed container that had once held him, was lying covered face-to-toe with a sheet on a gurney being pushed by medics into an ambulance.” A shot of adrenaline shocked him back to life, but word had already spread to fans of his momentary death. “There was a cop asking me questions, so I told him to go fuck himself. I ripped out my tubes and staggered in just my leather pants into the parking lot, where two teenage girls were sitting crying around a candle. They had heard on the radio that I was dead, and looked kind of surprised to see me.” The girls drove Sixx home in their Mazda, and gave the bassist a lecture on the dangers of drug abuse.

“Maybe deep down I knew it was going to happen one day,” Neil said of the overdose, “but it still tore me to pieces because I loved Nikki, even though he was an arrogant selfish shit. I cried. And I never used to cry then.” It seemed the world stopped turning for a while that night. Not just for Sixx, but for the thousands of fans across the globe who’d caught wind of his passing. “I got a lot of great one-liners now like, ‘Jesus Christ and I both died and came back,” he joked to Rolling Stone. “That doesn’t sit well in the Bible Belt… but you’ve got to laugh.”

“Without You” detailed Lee and actress Heather Locklear’s relationship from Lee’s perspective, and “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)” was inspired by a line in a movie Sixx saw (likely Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge). “I wanted ‘Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)’ to have a chorus you could destroy your room to. I wanted an album I was finally proud of,” Sixx wrote. It harkened bittersweetly back to Shout At The Devil: “Too young to fall in love / Guess we knew it all along,” Neil surmised. The song became the album’s fourth hit single, a full nine months after its August 1989 release. With the help of “Same Ol’ Situation (S.O.S.)” and “Rattlesnake Shake,” Dr. Feelgood filled out without so much as a second of meaningless filler. Mars’s licks were ferocious, Neil’s screams were downright feral, and Sixx and Lee formed an impenetrable rhythm section of their own as the band’s resident terror twins upped their ante.

Just a couple weeks before the album’s release, the band appeared at the 1989 Moscow Music Peace Festival after their manager, Doc McGee, was arrested for his involvement in smuggling 40,000 lbs of marijuana into North Carolina via a shrimp boat. The festival culminated in a bitter feud with Bon Jovi over pyrotechnics, a fistfight between McGee and Lee, and the eventual firing of the manager altogether. “Shit, man, do you know how fuckin’ far it is to Moscow?” Neil joked to Jon Hotten not long after the event. “It’s fuckin… it’s…” he continued, as Lee laughed on at the debacle. But Moscow was, and this was a big fucking deal considering their heightened levels of stress and fame, among the first shows Mötley Crüe played sober.

Dr. Feelgood trampled competition and shot right to #1 on the Billboard 200 following its release. It was the only Mötley Crüe record to do so, though Girls, Girls, Girls had come close at #2. It marked Neil’s last album with the band until 1997’s Generation Swine, branding it as a bit of a last hoorah before the original lineup underwent its first majorly negative change. But it also cemented the band as triumphant in every way conceivable. Lee regularly gawks in interviews at the fact that he’s still alive, all things considered: “I pinch myself on a daily basis,” he said late last year. Mötley Crüe has stood face to face with (and rescued themselves from) death time after time, proving rock ‘n’ roll is just as much a life-saving force as it is a life-sucking one.

Netflix’s The Dirt biopic resulted in a 350% increase in streams for the band, predominantly from an invigorated fanbase of 18-24-year-olds who began attending shows following the band’s 2018 reformation and extensive stadium tours. Come to think of it, it’s always been the kids who ushered the band back into the mainstream. In 1987, Russian teenagers flocked to Lee and Neil, as they raved in an interview following the Moscow festival, to call them rock gods. Now, in 2024, kids who weren’t even alive for the release of Dr. Feelgood, let alone for the band’s Los Angeles inception nearly a decade prior, represent 64% of their fanbase.

“It’s only rock ‘n’ roll,” Sixx once said. “We’re not here to change the world.” But I’m sure there’s a teenage girl somewhere out there pressing play on “Kickstart My Heart” for the first time, and if Mötley Crüe has taught me anything, this is where her new life begins. When Neil sings “Are you ready now?” she’ll know exactly what her answer is, because the question will echo from inside her own heart. And if that’s not world-changing, I don’t know what is.

Emma Schoors is a music journalist, photographer, and wannabe fifth Bangles member based in Los Angeles, California. Find her on Instagram @eschoors.

And to Think, We Did All of This to Rock: Mötley Crüe’s Dr. Feelgood at 35

Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee grappled with collective sobriety, romantic uncertainty and the ramifications of cheating death on their first chart-topping studio record, released on this day in 1989.