Tommy Lee has once again said that 2019’s Netflix biopic “The Dirt”, about MÖTLEY CRÜE‘s formative years, sparked a renewed interest from younger fans who wanted to see them live, contributing to the band’s decision to renege on its infamous “cessation of touring” contract.
After vowing in 2015 never to play together again, CRÜE announced last December that they would be touring in 2020 with fellow hard rock veterans DEF LEPPARD and POISON.
Speaking to “Never Meet Your Heroes”, the SiriusXM show hosted by ANTHRAX guitarist Scott Ian, about how the success of “The Dirt” affected the CRÜE‘s planned comeback as part of “The Stadium Tour”, Lee said: “I stay in touch with fans all the time; I’m pretty active. Imagine being a 16-, 17-, 18-year-old kid, [and] you’re, like, ‘Woah! Was that what it was like back then?’ Not to make us feel old — it wasn’t that long ago — but that was a time when anything went. People weren’t even wearing condoms. It was just like a free-for-all. And I think a lot of younger kids see that and go, ‘Man, we missed that. We missed out on crazy town.’ So I have a feeling that that does have a lot to do with it, where people wanna come and see what that shit was all about. It ain’t out there now, you know what I’m sayin’?”
According to Tommy, MÖTLEY CRÜE didn’t have a “master plan” when it completed its farewell tour in December 2015 to reunite several years later and stage a comeback run that would see the band playing to bigger audiences that ever before.
“For real, 2016, I think it was like New Year’s Eve, at the Staples Center, that was it,” he said. “We were, like, ‘Dude, let’s just go out like…’ We don’t wanna just continue this thing on and end up playing fairgrounds and shit we see so many of our bands we grew up on doing that. We were, like, ‘We don’t wanna do that.’ We wanna go out on top, be, like, ‘Mic drop. We’re out. We’re done.’ And that was it, man. We all said goodbye and we didn’t hardly even speak — I mean, we spoke to each other here and there, but literally, that was it. And then, what is it, four or five years later, Live Nation calls us and says, ‘We’d like to do a stadium tour,’ and all of us were, like, ‘Hold up. That’s the last thing on our mind.’ We were done, and we were all moving on to other things. And that’s the one thing… Yeah, we’ve all played stadiums, festivals here and there, but never your own stadium tour. Fuck! We were, like, ‘Hold on. Let me think about this. Okay.’ It was a no-brainer. And I wish I could say there was some weird master plan, because if there was, that would have been really smart, but that’s just not how it happened at all.”
“The Dirt” currently has a 38% critic score from 72 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, the online review aggregation service that allows both critics and the public to rate movies. The same site has an 94% audience score for “The Dirt” from 6,678 reviews.
The movie, which was helmed by “Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa” director Jeff Tremaine, was picked up by Netflix after being previously developed at Focus Features and before that at Paramount.
Last month, MÖTLEY CRÜE, DEF LEPPARD, POISON and JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS announced the rescheduled dates for their “The Stadium Tour”.
“The Stadium Tour” was slated to kick off on June 18 at TIAA Bank Field in Jacksonville, Florida and run through September 5 in Los Angeles. The bands reportedly also booked time at VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville to rehearse for the tour.
As of January 30, “The Stadium Tour” had already grossed $130 million from one million tickets sold, plus another $5 million worth of VIP seats, according to Billboard.
Tickets ranged from $150 to $400, not counting some varied pricing that reflected demand as part of “dynamic pricing.”
When it happens, “The Stadium Tour” will mark the CRÜE‘s first live dates since wrapping its 2014/2015 farewell tour. CRÜE toured with POISON back in 2011 and DEF LEPPARD teamed up with POISON for a string of road dates in 2017 — but the upcoming jaunt marks the first time all four acts have hit the road together for an extended tour.
