Alice Cooper Wants to 'Kill' Mötley Crüe

Tommy Lee takes a ride on the Crüecifly (Photo by Kevin Mazur/WireImage)

In January 2014, when Alice Cooper agreed to open for Mötley Crüe on the latter’s farewell tour, he didn’t exactly know what he was getting himself into. Now, a year later, Cooper wants to kill every member of the Crüe.

Not literally, of course. For more than 40 years, Cooper has staged a theatrical rock ‘n’ roll horror show that has climaxed with his own simulated death. For Mötley Crüe’s final U.S. performance on December 31, 2015, in Los Angeles, Cooper would happily pass on his murderous tradition to his tour mates.

“That would be awesome!” enthuses Crüe drummer Tommy Lee during an interview with Yahoo Music at the Langham Place Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. “I asked him earlier, ‘Can you make three more of those guillotines. Then you could chop off all our heads at the same time!’”

Cooper says it would be easy to create a few more death machines by the end of the year, and feels that his Frankenstein monster would be the perfect beast to finish the job. “It would be great for him to come out and collect their heads and put them on posts,” he says from a hotel suite black leather chair positioned in a conference room next to Lee and Crüe guitarist Mick Mars.

Mötley Crüe won’t confirm that they’ll take Cooper up on his offer to euthanize them; however, Lee insists the Los Angeles show will be a spectacle to remember. “We’re going to do something completely f--ked up on the last night of the tour; I guarantee that. I don’t exactly know what it’s going to be, but I promise it will be amazing!”

To prove they were serious about going out with a bang, the  Mötley Crüe signed an official Cessation of Touring Agreement on January 28, 2014. The Final Tour launched July 2 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the band played 72 high-energy shows last year. Aside from a set list of career-spanning hits, the Crüe featured onstage go-go dancers, more pyro than KISS, and a Crüecifly drum kit, which was built onto a roller-coaster track and spun in a loop that ascended about 50 feet in the air.

“That first roll is f---king insane,” Lee says. “I definitely had a little poo-poo in my pants when I got into that thing in the beginning. When you’re up that high it looks and feels a lot higher than it is. I was curious what it would feel like to fall from that height, so I dropped a drumstick from up there and it was like Wile E. Coyote. There was silence for a long time, and then clunk.”

Mostly, the Crüecifly has worked as planned, but at the November 11 show in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the coaster got stuck at its peak in the middle of Lee’s drum solo. “I was up there a long time — a little over a minute — and that’s not cool when you’re playing upside-down and all the blood is rushing to your head,” he recalls. “The thing is, nobody knew anything was wrong but I felt like I was going to f--king pass out and my head was going to explode. I just kept going until somebody fixed it and it came back down again. In case the thing gets seriously stuck, we have a plan B escape route. There are a couple guys that can get to me and get me out, but thank God we didn’t have to use that.”

So far during the tour, the band have been greeted backstage, not by the groupies and drug dealers of decades past, but by a variety of celebrities and dignitaries: sports heroes, politicians and their kids, actors and actresses. Before one show, Scarlett Johansson popped by to say hello, and Tommy Lee convinced her to take a wild ride with him on his roller-coaster drum kit.

“She was wearing a f--king miniskirt, which would have been perfect when she was upside down,” Lee says with a smile. “She was in town because they were filming the new Avengers movie and I was like, ‘Hey, every night I grab someone out of the audience to go for a ride and it would be really cool if you went.’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I wanna go!’ And then about five or 10 minutes before showtime somebody came back and said, ‘She’s not allowed to because she’s filming right now.’”

Mötley Crüe’s Final Tour will continue in Kobe, Japan on February 11 and the band will play a few high-profile festivals in Europe before sweeping one final time through North America. Before they head back out, they debuted their final song as a touring band, “All Bad Things,” on January 20. The tune is fast and furious, driven by a serpentine guitar riff, but embellished with strong melodic hooks and layered vocal harmonies. It’s the band’s first release since it posted “Sex” on its website in July 16, 2012.

Mars, Lee, bassist Nikki Sixx, and producer James Michael wrote “All Good Things” about eight months ago at multiple studios. “I came up with the initial lick,” Mars says. “I just got my studio together and I was playing around with a lot of stuff. I went to James Michael’s house and Nikki was there as well. We went through a few songs that I had and something Tommy had and Nikki had. And we listened to my riff and went, ‘That one!’ That lick turned into this monster.”

“We only set out to do one track and it came together really quickly,” Lee says. “We wanted something that encompassed the end of this thing and that’s what you’re hearing. We wanted something that was going to sound like today, but also captured our whole legacy.”

After recording “All Bad Things,” Mötley Crüe played the song at a few shows, but quickly removed it from the set. “When you play something brand-new that nobody’s even heard yet, they’re all just staring at you,” Lee says. “So we yanked it. But it was cool to test drive it, and we plan to put it back in the set soon.”

“All Bad Things” was released with a video that features footage shot during each of the band’s album and touring cycles. The clip shows the rapid transformation of the band as they earned more money, staged higher-budget shows, and gradually changed their look. It also features a Girls Gone Wild-type display of female fans lifting their tops throughout decades of decadence, and a longhaired Lee naked in his dressing room. The bawdy video brings up a poignant question: When all things come to an end for the band, will Mötley Crüe be remembered more for upping the ante on decadence, or for their galvanic anthems and heartbreaking ballads?

“Unfortunately, we probably won’t be remembered for some of our playing or for our actual talent,” admits Lee. “All the bulls--t seems to overshadow all that, and that just seems to be the way it’s always been. (For insight into the full extent of the band’s former depravity, check out their memoir, The Dirt, written with Neil Strauss.)

“I think the opposite,” refutes Mars. “The show is done. The stories are told. The records and the tapes and the masters will last forever.”

Once Mötley Crüe wrap up their final tour at the end of the year, they’re planning to take some time away from the road and concentrate on their own individual projects. Whenever he’s at home, Lee — who has recorded two solo albums, as well as two with his side band Methods of Mayhem — likes to write in his studio. So does Sixx, who has released three albums with his side band Sixx: AM. Not to be overshadowed, vocalist Vince Neil has written three solo albums, and will likely do more. And Mars hopes to get his hands dirty in 2016 with everything from film soundtracks and movie voiceovers to collaborations with other musicians. And now that the members of the Crüe will no longer be under the time constraints of touring, they can focus more intently on whatever artistic trails they wish to pursue.

“Now that I look back, doing solo projects and other albums has been a waste of f**king time,” Lee reveals. “Yeah, they’re kind of fun, you get your ya-yas out, but the second you try to support something like that, the mothership calls and you gotta go. We’ve put a lot of passion and energy into some of those things and sometimes you go, ‘Hmm, for what?’ But once this thing ends, we’re probably going to get involved in all kinds of crazy stuff. And the doors are always open for us to work with whoever we want.”

In the coming months, Mötley Crüe will release a final boxed set, which will feature “All Bad Things” and a bunch of previously unreleased material. Even so, that may not be the last the public hears from Mötley. While they’ve sworn off touring, they haven’t said they’d never work together again.

“All of us are completely free,” Mars says. “I can go, ‘Hey Tommy, c’mere. I got this stuff I’d like you to work on.’ Remember when the Beatles disbanded? They didn’t really disband and they did some of their best record because they went and they experimented with all of this cool stuff. We could do that, too. You never know? I’m not saying another Crüe album will happen, but I’m not saying it couldn’t happen either.”