Mötley Crüe announced its final tour dates this week and details about its (assumed) last live performance that will officially end the band’s touring career. The Final Tour will wrap up its two-year stint on New Year’s Eve (12.31.15) in the band’s hometown of Los Angeles. You may remember that the Crüe first announced plans for their Final Tour in January of last year, signing a Cessation of Touring Agreement at a press conference in LA. The “binding” agreement supposedly prohibits the members of the group from touring in the future under the Mötley Crüe moniker. Not surprisingly, The Final Tour’s 2014 leg was one of last year’s most successful tours, grossing over $45 million and selling nearly a million tickets spread over 72 cities.
The just announced Mötley Crüe 2015 leg starts off in Japan before heading over to Australia and New Zealand, Europe, then back to North America in the summer to team up once again with Alice Cooper for the last shows ever on these shores. Or so they say. Says Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx of the newly announced dates, “In some of the cities, we could only reach a fraction of the fans who wanted to come see us play last year because of ticket demand, so we’re coming back to those places to bring them our full production including the Crüecifly drum coaster, as well as all pyro and every other bell and whistle. Even despite the overwhelming fan demand, we can only add so many new cities in North America because of our commitment to take ‘The Final Tour’ global on our final year.”
In tandem with the announcement of The Final Tour’s final dates, Mötley Crüe released a brand new single called “All Bad Things.” The video is a look back at different eras from the band’s 34-year career. And as a way of high-fiving its fans, Mötley Crue’s best-selling Greatest Hits album is up for grabs for free through Google Play now through January 27. Get it here.
Writer/director/actor Kevin Smith poked fun at Ratt with this post earlier in the week….
Metal queen Lita Ford and her ex-husband, former Nitro singer Jim Gillette, divorced in 2011 after 16 years of marriage and two sons. Gillette has custody of both boys, and Lita has spoken openly of the heartache of missing her children (James and Rocco) over the years, including recording a song, “Mother,” written expressly for them. In an interview with Classic Rock Revisited following the release of her 2012 album, Living Like A Runaway (which featured “Mother”),
Lita said, “It is my song to my kids. I want them to know how much I love them and how much they mean to me. I know their father is not going to let them listen to this record…One day, they will hear this album. It really tells the story, in a nutshell, of what really happened. I want them to know that I am not this evil, ugly monster that their father makes me out to be. They are young and they are scared and confused. They do not know who to turn to. This man is a con artist. He is the biggest liar that I’ve ever met in my life. The stuff this man lies about is unbelievable. He is mentally ill. I’m not saying that to be mean, or vindictive, he truly is mentally ill.” She continued, “The reason they are with their father is because I would have, literally, had to get into a physical fistfight with him in order to get the kids. I can’t physically fight him, as he is three hundred pounds of testosterone and growth hormone, which he injects every day. I can’t fight him. He’s like one of those guys on PCP where the entire police department is needed to take him down.”
This week, Gillette spoke out, calling Lita’s public statements “self-serving claims and slanderous allegations” that were “completely and 100% ludicrous.” Said Gillette to Metal Sludge, “Unlike Lita, I don’t believe it’s right to say bad things about a child’s parent publicly or in private. I think divorce is hard enough on kids and they certainly don’t need to be hurt or embarrassed by an irrational parent who has an agenda. That said, I suppose I could finally shed a little light on the subject without being too harsh. First of all and for the record, I have sole legal and physical custody of our sons. Unfortunately, it goes much further than that. As heartbreaking and unbelievable as this might sound, Lita Ford is not even allowed to see our sons by way of an agreed-upon court order. This order was signed after nearly two years of litigation, during which time the courts only allowed her supervised visitation. Everything is legal about the boys being with me, and all of Lita’s self-serving claims and slanderous allegations are completely and 100% ludicrous. Quite frankly, all of this is more than a little frightening for our family. Our sons have urged me for years to tell the world our side of the story but this is all I’m prepared to share at this point in time.”
As the story broke, Lita posted this on her Parental-Alienation Awareness group on Facebook , which she founded in 2012:
On a sad note, Lita’s former producer/songwriter/Svengali Kim Fowley, best known for launching and managing the rock girl group The Runaways, died after battling bladder cancer last Thursday, January 15, at his home in Hollywood. He was 75. Besides the Runaways, Fowley co-wrote songs for Alice Cooper, Kiss, the Byrds and more during his long and eclectic career.
Don’t hold your breath for a new studio album from Cinderella in the near future. BigMusicGeek.com asked guitarist Jeff LaBar if there was a possibility of an all-new studio album during a recent interview, and LaBar responded, “The last time we had a label behind us was back in 2000 and those are the demos that turned into Tom’s [Keifer, Cinderella frontman] solo record. I don’t know. Record labels these days… I don’t think anybody is signing. We could make a record ourselves and present it to a label, but it’s probably not going to happen. I would love to record as a band… as Cinderella again….I’ve seen REO Speedwagon, Journey and all of them in concert and it’s always the older people that come out and want to hear the old hits. Unfortunately, we are kind of in the same boat, but at the same time, there are several bands from our genre, like Poison, Ratt, Warrant and Winger that still put out records, but how many people actually buy them? That’s the problem. Who’s actually going to buy them? That’s the rub.”
