Phil Lewis’ seven best quotes – in order – about Motley Crue

By STEVE MASCORD

IF YOU run a YouTube channel or podcast, having a guest make comments like LA Guns’ Phil Lewis did last week about Motley Crue is manna from heaven.

… you’d think. Actually, it’s not; readers still don’t come and watch your channel or listen to your podcast. They just read the story on the news aggregator site and get on with their days.

The YouTube channel that hosted the first widely-reported grab, Rock Interview Series, is still well short of the monetisation threshold of 1000 subscribers, although the publicity has pushed views into four figures … at the time of writing, still a modest 1.4K.

By comparison, an un-newsworthy interview with Tracii Guns on The Metal Voice, which has 23K subscribers, has 600 more views. 

But I digress. 

As a 37-year journalist who knows his way around a quote, I thought I would rank the ‘best’ quotes from the LA Guns frontman about his Sunset Strip contemporaries. That is, the order I would put them from lowest to highest in a straight news story, perhaps giving away a few trade secrets in the process.

Seven: “t should be absolutely fucking free to go see a giant screen with a bunch of geezers miming to a track that they did in the studio. Now, that’s a great night out!”

This one is interesting because it ingratiates Lewis to the reader. They are getting ripped off. He’s standing up for them. It grounds the whole tirade.

Six: “Somebody that became a millionaire at such an early age that they never really developed social skills. It’s like taking a bird out of a nest when it’s not ready to fly; it won’t develop. And I don’t think, really, that any of them… The three of them aren’t very well socially developed. They’re not very good. And Mick’s a different category entirely because he was so much older before success.” 

This isn’t just a gob in the face like the more belligerent quotes, it’s a well thought-out and intelligent gob in the face. It strongly suggests the attacks aren’t just a stunt to promote LA Guns’ new album (Black Diamonds, get it now!).

Five: “They really fucked up when they went with John 5 and not Tracii Guns. And I’m glad they did, obviously. He is not the right fucking fit at all. And Tracii would just be so perfect. He’s, like, Hollywood; he’s a brat like them. He’s just like the next generation down, and it would have been such an incredibly good fit. But Tracii’s not trendy. It’s gotta be fucking Rob Zombie’s guy or it’s gotta be Lenny Kravitz’s wife or ex-girlfriend. It’s gotta be trendy. It’s gotta be somebody incredibly important. It gives them a sense of importance. And, as I said, I’m glad they fucked up and they didn’t . They should have got Tracii.”

Not only does this one further display the depth of Phil Lewis’ contempt for Motley Crue but it gives us an entirely new news angle: Phil says his own guitarist should be in Motley Crue ahead of John 5.

Four: “The only good player, the only good one in the band, has been very unceremoniously dismissed.”

A back-handed compliment to Mick Mars, who is suing the people who think of themselves as his ex-bandmates but whom he insists are not his ex-bandmates.

Three: “I just find him to be a big fraud.”

That’s Phil talking about Nikki Sixx. In a corporate setting this would be defamatory. In rock’n’roll? Play on…

Two: “To called out as frauds, essentially as instrument-holding Milli Vanilli , as a disgrace. They’ve gotta be hurting real bad.”

Ouch. Throwing in a random comparison with a disgraced entity always supercharges a newsworthy quote.

One: “They really are a fucking atrocious band; they always have been.”

Simple and elegant. The best quotes are always the ones that combine the most colourful language with the most extreme sentiments.