Mick Mars Hits Back at Mötley Crüe: “You’re the Felons, Not Me”
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The post Mick Mars Hits Back at Mötley Crüe: “You’re the Felons, Not Me” appeared first on Consequence.
Mick Mars is turning up the heat in his legal fight with Mötley Crüe, saying in a new interview that he “carried those bastards for years.”
“Those guys have been hammering on me since ’87, trying to replace me,” Mars told Variety. They haven’t been able to do that, because I’m the guitar player. I helped form this band. It’s my name I came up with [the Mötley Crüe moniker], my ideas, my money that I had from a backer to start this band. It wouldn’t have gone anywhere.”
This week, Mars filed a lawsuit against Mötley Crüe over a dispute his share of profits. Mars specifically alleges that he was “unilaterally” removed from the band after announcing his retirement from touring due to ongoing struggles with an arthritic disease called ankylosing spondylitis. As a result, his profit share was cut from 25 percent to a five percent.
“That’s an insult to me that they’re offering me that,” Mars told Variety. “No. It’s my name. It’s Mick Mars, it’s Mötley Crüe, the four of us that made the band. You would have to have a good reason to be fired. I don’t. I could come back with this and go like, “Hey, you know what? I’m gonna counter because you assholes are felons. You [Tommy Lee] for spousal abuse; you [Vince Neil] for manslaughter.” I’m not doing that. It just makes me really upset that they want to try and bully me more or less out of the band, so it’s the last man standing that collects everything. And if there’s any real justice to it, I’d be the one that would be the only one that has no criminal record. I’m pure. I’m clean as a freshly washed baby.”
“And I’m being beat up, mentally — and I’m already physically ruined. But the hazing, the gaslighting and all that stuff, when they tell me that I’m losing my mind and I’m this, that and the other — oh my God. What’s the matter with you guys? You’re the felons, not me,” Mars added. “You can’t be fired from your own company, unless you do something horribly bad — like, be a felon. That’s mean, but, sorry!”
“Retiring from touring is resigning from the band,” said Sasha Frid, Mötley Crüe’s litigation attorney, said in a statement in response to Mars’ lawsuit (via Variety). “The band’s primary function is to tour and perform concerts… If a shareholder resigns, he cannot receive any compensation from touring — which is what Mick is trying to get. It’s clear-cut that Mick is not entitled to any more money.”
Mötley Crüe’s attorneys also provided Variety with signed declarations from seven members of the band’s touring crew, alleging that his performances at the shows were under par and created problems for the entire group.
“Mick would consistently forget chords and songs so the band would have to stop and re-teach those parts to Mick to remind him of the arrangements,” the declaration read. “Mick’s performance issues continued throughout the tour. He would consistently miss notes; play out of tune; play the wrong chords during a song; stay within a chorus of a song and never come out of it; forget the song that he was playing and start a different one; and would get lost in songs. This happened at every show. … Our playback engineer put in cues for Mick so that he would stay on course but he would miss the cues.”
In his interview, Mars called “bullshit” on those allegations. Ahead of Mötley Crüe’s recent stadium tour, “I rehearsed all of these songs for three months, every day, solid, twice a day,” Mars contended.
He went on to claim that although he performed live, his bandmates relied on backing tracks. “On this particular tour, Nikki [Sixx]’s bass was 100% recorded. Tommy’s drums, to the best of my knowledge, there was a lot. I can’t say he did all of it recorded, but there were some reports from people in the audience… And actually everything that we did on that stadium tour was on tape, because if we didn’t, if we missed a part, the tape would keep rolling and you’d miss it.”
As such, Mars attributed any of his mistakes to issues with sound mixing. “What was going in my ear wasn’t really my guitar. It was some kind of weird, out-of-phase kind of a thing. And I have it here, on my iPad. I’m telling my sound guy, Scotty, to turn up my guitar, and I go, ‘Wait a minute, that ain’t mine.’ Because mine’s a big, huge, fat sound. And so when I started getting at it, it was a lot better. But there was parts with that tape on my guitar that were so horrible, yes, I did lose my spot a couple of times. But not all the time. And it is very difficult. And then it’s also difficult when they have a bunch of old-school 808 bass drums going and turning up the bass guitar. Do you know what that does to a guitar frequency? It drowns it out. And that’s what was going on a lot out front. … You’d have to be me to know it was the truth.”
“Anyway, that was the worst 36 gigs ever had with the band,” he added.
After Mars announced his retirement from touring last year, Rob Zombie guitarist John 5 was quickly announced as his replacement for Mötley Crüe’s 2023 world tour with Def Leppard. That trek continues next month, and you can get tickets here.
Mick Mars Hits Back at Mötley Crüe: “You’re the Felons, Not Me”
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