In a recent interview with Guitar Wishes, former MÖTLEY CRÜE frontman John Corabi, who joined the band in 1992 as the replacement for original singer Vince Neil, discussed some of the lessons he has learned from his three decades in the music business. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “When money comes to play, in between a relationship, when money becomes whatever, you really find out who your friends are. People, you can be great friends with ’em, but ‘it’s just business,’ is the line you hear all the time.
“I did a few things early on in my career with contracts and different things, thinking, ‘We’re bros, man. They’ll never screw me over,’ just assuming that everybody would look at it the way I look at it. People don’t. And that’s something that I had to learn. The other thing I had to learn was when I was in MÖTLEY, there was a lot of people — and Tommy [Lee, drums] and Nikki [Sixx, bass] told me in the very beginning that this was gonna happen. And I was, like, ‘Nah, nah, nah. Not my friends.’ [They told me], ‘You’re gonna find out people treat you differently because of the situation you’re in.’ And at first I didn’t think it would happen. And then I really kind of realized, ‘Oh, I’m still the same guy. Everybody else around me is changing.’ Everybody started calling me, ‘Hey, dude, can you lend me five grand?’ ‘Hey, dude, can you get a limo and get us tickets for the TESLA show?’ ‘Hey, dude, can you…?’ And then as soon as it was over, it was like crickets. But I had a few very tight little circle of friends that were with me before MÖTLEY, during MÖTLEY and after MÖTLEY. And then I went, ‘Ah, okay.’ So I would tell myself, ‘Listen, you’re gonna get this MÖTLEY gig. Everybody else is a clinger. Those little batch of friends that you’ve got there, those five or six people that aren’t ever gonna be afraid to tell you, ‘You’re an asshole…” Whatever.
“I think, really, that’s it,” he added. “I wouldn’t change anything. Everything happened the way it happened. And I actually have it tattooed here [on my chest]; it’s Italian. But I firmly believe even when shit goes wrong for you, regardless of whether you’re a musician, whether you’re a plumber — whatever — this phrase says, ‘Life is as it should be.’ Even when something bad’s happening, you have to look at it, make some adjustments, move forward and learn from it. And I think I have, with everything.”
With Corabi on vocals, MÖTLEY CRÜE released one critically acclaimed full-length CD, which ended up being a commercial failure in the wake of grunge despite a Top 10 placing on the album chart. When Neil returned to the fold in 1997, Corabi was left on his own and formed the band UNION with ex-KISS guitarist Bruce Kulick.
Corabi in 2016 said that he would avoid talking about MÖTLEY CRÜE in the future because he didn’t want his comments about Sixx to descend into a feud.
In an interview with Sweden Rock Magazine, Nikki said that writing the “Mötley Crüe” LP with Corabi was a prolonged and difficult experience. He went to call it “a very unfocused record” that was “painful for me, because John Corabi can’t write lyrics, and I had to do all that work.”
In February 2018, Corabi released a live album of his performance of MÖTLEY CRÜE‘s entire 1994 self-titled album, recorded on October 27, 2015 in Nashville, Tennessee. “Live ’94: One Night In Nashville” documents the album in its entirety along with the bonus track “10,000 Miles”, which was originally released as a bonus track on the Japanese version of the “Quaternary” EP.
