Well to be honest ‘The Dirt (Est. 1981 (Feat. Machine Gun Kelly)’ (to give the track its full title) the opening track from the latest rehash of Motley Crue’s ‘Greatest Hits’ aimed to cash in on the latest Netflix release of the long-awaited biopic ‘The Dirt’ won’t be setting anyone’s world on fire. It’s an OK song, with a nice hook and some poppy overtones but in all honesty I don’t think it’s going to be making any appearances in anyone’s Top 50 Motley songs and probably won’t be heard of again when the dust settles on The Dirt. It is a new song by the band though and I guess for fans that is something at least now that Crue have hung up their touring boots.
If we want to get the other new material out of the way first then ‘Ride With the Devil’ is a far cooler song, a little dark, a little sleazy, a little funky, even if the chorus does try a little too hard it’s a song that does make you wonder what a new Crue album would sound like. ‘Crash and Burn’ is almost as tasty and rides a nice groove,and again comes with a suitably big chorus. Taking these two songs in isolation I’d be more than happy as a Motley fan. Conversely their oddly chosen cover of Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’ is both misguided and misplaced and with its half washed away vocals it just doesn’t work. The slowed chorus just saps the life out of what might have become a nice ‘novelty’ and instead delivers what you could argue is just plain and simply a poor cover.
The odd thing is that none of thee four songs seem to appear in the film, and with this being a ‘soundtrack’ album that’s just plain odd.
Onto the album proper, it’s nice to see that 9 of the album’s 18 tracks come from the band’s formative releases – their debut ‘Too Fast For Love’ which captured the spirit of the 7o’s UK Glam bands and gave it a Los Angeles spin that was both fresh, raw and exciting, and their follow-up ‘Shout At the Devil’ which pretty much laid the groundwork for a thousand bands that followed, adding a spiky Metallic edge to their trademark early sound.
In truth after those two albums Motley lost it for me, ‘Theatre of Pain’ was an attempt to look like the Hanoi Rocks and build momentum, but without a decent song to speak of. On ‘Theatre of Pain’ they just seemed to take a misstep where they watered down their own sound from ‘Shout at the Devil’ and were only just saved by a lukewarm ballad – ‘Home Sweet Home’ (failing to crack too Top 50 in either US or UK) and a cover song ‘Smokin’ in the Boys Room’ which is actually mentioned in the movie, and charted higher than “Home…’, but doesn’t make the Soundtrack presumably for the fact Crue didn’t write it so would have to dish out some royalties. If you don’t agree, the fact that there is only a single song on the soundtrack from ‘Theatre…’ seems to suggest that maybe the band think likewise.
Of course after ‘Theatre of Pain’ came ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ which is probably better than the single track it’s represented by here, and then the number one album ‘Dr. Feelgood’ which gets three tracks, a rather poor return for the bands’ number one album. It all kinda makes you wonder why ‘The Dirt’ movie wasn’t ripped in half , or serialized to feature the early days and then come back with a ‘Part two’ that charted the rise, the decline and then the glorious bang that ended it all?
The film itself of course ends oddly, seemingly closing out with Neil’s 1997 reunion with the band then missing the intervening years to show the band taking the stage in what appear to be their 2005 stage clothes. So if you’re looking for tracks from ‘Generation Swine’ (1997); or New Tattoo (2000) let alone tracks from ‘Motley Crue’ with John Corabi at the helm from 1994, well let’s for a moment imagine they didn’t happen..
There are some other oddities for a ‘soundtrack’ album – in that none of the non-Motley tunes appear despite a few having quite prominent roles in the film. There’s a lovely female sung slow version of ‘Live Wire’ before Tommy’s wedding to Heather Locklear and a number of prominent numbers that include ‘Solid Gold easy Action’ by T-Rex; ‘My Kind of Lover’ by Billy Squier; ‘Chequered Love’ by Kim Wilde; and ‘You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory’ by Johnny Thunders; as well as a host of other incidental music. None of it appears here. So in a way just like ‘The Dirt’ wasn’t quite ‘The Dirt’ of the book, this Soundtrack album, isn’t really a soundtrack album more a ‘Greatest hits’ with four new tracks. All of that I guess will be irrelevant to fans just wanting new material from their celluloid heroes…
