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Friday, March 22, 2019

The Dirt: Mötley Crüe Movie

Badlands of Indiana (March 22, 2019) WHR — Even in the sex and drugs-crazed world of rock and roll, the stories about Mötley Crüe’s Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee were legendary. There were girls, girls, girls, alcohol-fueled riots, fist fights, car crashes, cocaine, heroin, mud wrestling and stadiums filled with screaming fans who wanted more of everything. In 2001, the band proved the rumors true in their X-rated, jaw-droppingly lascivious oral history The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band.

Working with writer Neil Strauss, the band told all — the good, the bad, the shocking, the outrageous and even the likely criminal — about themselves and one another. After releasing nine albums, Mötley Crüe had a new chart-topping hit, this time in the form of a New York Times bestseller.


Now, under the direction of Jeff Tremaine, The Dirt has come to Netflix in all its sick, slick and shiny glory. The new film features rapper Machine Gun Kelly as Tommy Lee, Douglas Booth as Sixx, Iwan Rheon as Mars, Daniel Webber as Neil and Saturday Night Live‘s Pete Davidson as the Crüe’s record executive. The Dirt largely stays true to the stories the band tells in the book — though some of them are even more scandalous than the movie depicts.


Here’s a breakdown of the facts that fuel The Dirt:


Did the band’s first show really end in a fist fight? 
According to Sixx, this is true. Back in 2014, he told TIME, “The very first show, Vince and I ended up in the crowd in a fist fight! That kind of set a precedent for who we are and what we do.” The incident became a part of Crüe lore as a story of the band’s tough-as-nails, anything-goes attitude.

Did the band’s manager really punch them? 
According to Doc McGhee, the band’s longtime manager, delivering the occasional knuckle sandwich was part of the job. “Sometimes punching people is the only answer. I call it full-contact management,” McGhee wrote in an article for The Guardian on his rules of band management. “I’ve had to use it on most of my bands as a last resort. But with Mötley Crüe, full-contact management happened every couple of months. It was more about survival. You’re talking about a band who would physically bite you if they liked you. You’re talking about a band who would regularly attack their own security guard — and he was head of a Hell’s Angels chapter and a black belt in karate.”

Was the band really that girl crazy? 
Definitely. In an interview with TIME, Neil explained, “That’s the only reason guys get into music — because you get girls and free beer. It wasn’t about fame or anything. You want to get laid and you want to get drunk.”

Did Nikki Sixx really sleep with his record label rep’s girlfriend?
Mötley Crüe’s A&R man, Tom Zutaut, told The Guardian that he took his girlfriend backstage to meet the band before a gig and “within three minutes” Sixx had disappeared with the girl. When asked by the Guardian reporter to confirm whether the nefarious deed happened, Sixx shrugged. “I’m sure it did,” he said. “But I can’t remember.”

When was Mick Mars diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis?
While the band’s wild antics were well-known to fans, one of the biggest bombshells when the band’s book was published was Mars’ admission that he had been coping with a chronic, degenerative, painful disease throughout his years with Mötley Crüe. Mars was reportedly diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, a form of arthritis that primarily effects the spine and makes it difficult to move, when he was 19. While the disease frequently stops its painful, debilitating progression, Mars wasn’t so lucky. “I have a rare form of the disease that hasn’t stopped, so it’s all the way up my whole back and into my brain stem,” Mars told MusicRadar in 2008. “It’s literally squeezing my rib cage together, so I’ve lost some height. And now that it’s up in my brain stem it’s hard for me to move my head in any direction.”
The chronic pain led to drug abuse and a hip replacement. But Mars maintains a surprisingly positive outlook about the chronic illness. “There are some things about this thing that I’ve got that are not so cool,” he told Classic Rock Revisited. “But there is one thing that is cool — I ended up bent. I can always see my guitar. If I’d been straight then I would not be able to see myself play.”

What was the cause of death of Vince Neil’s daughter?
One of the film’s most tragic moments is the death of Neil’s 4-year-old daughter, Skylar. According to a 1995 story in People, she was diagnosed with Wilms’ tumor, a kidney cancer that affects children. She underwent six operations, plus extensive chemotherapy and radiation treatments, but passed away four months after her diagnosis. “This ordeal is something no parent should have to go through,” Neil told People. “More than that, I wish no child ever had to go through it.”

Did Ozzy Osbourne really snort a line of ants? 
Motley Crüe supported Osborne on his Bark at the Moon tour in 1984, at the height of Osbourne’s fame and depravity. In The Dirt, while the band is at a hotel during the tour, a dress-clad Osbourne (played by Tony Cavalero) kneels down on the ground and snorts a line of ants up his nose with a straw, much to the shock of the band. Sixx swears this is true. In an interview with Page Six, he said that while Motley Crüe was a “wild young band” who thought they could compete with Osborne, “you can’t with Ozzy. He won.”

Did Nikki Sixx really die temporarily from a heroin overdose? 
Yes. “For two minutes in 1987 I was pronounced clinically dead from an overdose,” he wrote in a powerful op-ed in the Los Angeles Times last year. While it took him several more years to finally get sober, Sixx has become outspoken about ways to combat opioid addiction.

Who was Razzle from Hanoi Rocks?
Another tragic moment in the band’s history came when Neil, while driving under the influence, got into an accident that killed his friend, Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley, and critically injured two other people. Dingley was the English drummer of the Finnish glam rock band Hanoi Rocks. Dingley and Neil had been at a party to celebrate the band’s first U.S. tour when they decided to take a drive and Neil lost control of the car. Dingley was just 24 and reportedly had a wife who was seven months pregnant at the time of his death.
Neil was sentenced to 30 days in jail but released early for good behavior. He was ordered to pay a fine, which even Neil admits was not enough of a punishment. “I wrote a $2.5 million check for vehicular manslaughter when Razzle died,” he reportedly told Blender. “I should have gone to prison. I definitely deserved to go to prison. But I did 30 days in jail and got laid and drank beer, because that’s the power of cash. That’s f-cked up.”

Did Vince Neil really quit the band?
In the film, as the band was working on a follow-up to their 1989 album Dr. Feelgood, Neil stops coming to rehearsal, eventually storming out and announcing that he quits just as Sixx tells him he’s fired. In real life, the band released a statement saying that Neil left because his longtime hobby, car racing, had “become a priority” in his life. But this explanation, which is not depicted in the film, may not have been the truth, either. In a 1992 appearance on Dennis Miller’s talk show, Neil had a very different take on the situation, saying that being kicked out of the band was a complete shock to him. “Two days after my birthday — like, ‘Happy birthday, Vince‘ … Everybody had 25 percent input, so 75 percent voted me out. They’re great guys; they just had to do what they felt they had to do.”

Did Motley Crüe break up? 
They did. In 2014, the band very publicly signed a legally binding Cessation of Touring Agreement in front of reporters that prohibits future, unauthorized performances and prevents any of the four members from touring under the band name. As Sixx told TIME, “We just wanted to have pride in the band when the band is done forever. If you put on a Crüe t-shirt and walk down the street we want someone to say, ‘The Crüe, man, those guys came in and went out on their own terms.’”
Whether or not that break-up sticks, though, is still to be determined. The band did reunite to record four new tracks for the movie. Since then, rumors have been circulating that Mötley Crüe will go on tour after The Dirt arrives on Netflix. While Sixx said there would be no one-off shows, he recently told Rolling Stone: “Sometimes I look out at my friends, like the guys in Aerosmith and Metallica, and I’m like, ‘God damn it, did we retire too soon?“ He then added, “Maybe we’ll just get together and jam in Mick Mars’ front room.”

Does the band have any regrets about their behavior? 
While the film features some of the band’s wild, reckless, depraved behavior, it barely scratches the surface of the dark, twisted and even criminal behavior documented in the book. When asked about a particular story involving Lee and Sixx and a possible sexual assault, Sixx admitted that they went too far, even though he doesn’t recall the specific incident and admits he may have made it up or embellished it. “There is a lot of horrible behavior in the book,” he told Rolling Stone. “What I can tell you is that we all lived to regret a lot and learned from it. We own up to all our behavior that hurt our selves, our families, friends and any innocents around us.”

STORY: Melissa Locker
SOURCE: Time

Barber shop spins scissors and rock music

Marshall, Virginia (March 21, 2019) WHR — It’s tough to say when it began, perhaps in the 1970s. Its progression grew quietly. Then, one day the American male arose from his hirsute slumber and realized most traditional barber shops had morphed into hair salons. Guys had lost another battle to the increasing influence of the gentler persuasion. But still. There is something nostalgic about guys chatting away among themselves as their locks are shorn.

To their benefit, there is a shop reviving the old-time haircut, but with a modern twist. “I started cutting hair at a salon near Akron, Ohio back in 2001. I don’t know why, but I picked up a really strong male following. I enjoy cutting men’s hair. I don’t like coloring, permanents and all that,” said Kristy Haase, owner of Rock-N-Barbers in the Marshall Center in Marshall. “I always thought it would be neat to combine the best of a hairstylist and a barber.” But the idea had to incubate for a few years. In the interim, Haase moved to D.C. and cut hair at a high-end male-only hair salon. “They offered a full spa with massages and adult beverages.


It was very much what I wanted to do and I spent several years researching the idea without success,” she said. But there is more than one way to trim a head. Haase took a modified approach to her barbershop dream when she moved to Front Royal seven years ago. Realizing a full-blown shop (pun intended) would take considerable financial investment, Haase elected to start where everything does: at the beginning. “I said, ‘You know, I’m just gonna start small. I don’t have all this money to get a huge, fancy place with fancy chairs so I’m just going to start somewhere.’ I knew had the experience and talent and there was no one that could do what I could do.” Confidence is what someone is looking for when they make a decision to place their hair in scissor-powered hands. It’s also why Haase’s shop has been a success from the first hairs that hit the floor.

What she has created is a traditional barbershop, catering to men but also serving women. “About 90 percent of my customers are guys. But the men will tell their wives what we do. When the women come in, they don’t see old barbers in overalls cutting hair,” she said laughing. What they do see is a shop staffed with experienced women hair stylists who know hair from the roots up. At any given time, you’ll see Haase and one or two of her staff of four cutting or shaving while chatting away with their clients.

Rock music plays in the background and friendly banter echoes around the shop. “I wanted a shop that was modern, but with a relaxed atmosphere. That’s why I went with a rock music theme. I’m originally from Cleveland, which is the home of rock and roll and I just thought it was a cool idea,” to create a shop called Rock-N’-Barbers.

In addition to custom haircuts, the guys get to choose their favorite rock genre if they like. Amazon’s Alexa stands at the ready to play classic rock or whatever generation of rock is desired. “There might be Pink Floyd or Guns N Roses playing, but a customer can ask Alexa what they want to hear,” said Haase. Clients and services So, are the loyal customers who drop by for a trim the edgy clientele she served at the high-end D.C. shop? Not quite. Haase explains her customers range across all age groups from the very young to seniors. “I’ve had customers where it was their first haircut and, unfortunately, where it was their last one,” she said.

There are a lot of businessmen and farmers who frequent the shop along with high schoolers, reflecting the demographics of a rural location. And the dream of serving adult refreshments has been put on hold for now. Instead, there is a Keurig machine at the ready, serving coffee, tea or hot chocolate. For a full description of the shop’s services and personal profiles of Haase and her four stylists visit www.rock-n-barbers.com

SOURCE: Fauquier Times

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Dick Dale dies at 81

Badlands of Indiana (March 17, 2019) WHR — Nearly 60 years ago, surfers flocked to the waves along Newport Beach to try mastering the new craze. When the sun set, they needed someplace to dance and Dick Dale delivered it at Rendezvous Ballroom on the Balboa Peninsula. Nearly every week for two years, Dale and his band packed over 3,000 people into the ballroom. “The energy between the Del-Tones and all those surfers stomping on the hardwood floor in their sandals was extremely intense. The tone of Dale’s guitar was bigger than any I had ever heard,” recalled Del-Tones bandmate Paul Johnson.


Dale, whose death was confirmed Sunday, manifested a quintessentially Southern California story, forged in surf, sand and rock ’n’ roll. They called him the Pied Piper of Balboa Beach, but his musical instrument of choice was defiantly not a flute. Rather, the electric-guitar playing son of a Lebanese father melded elements of the music of his ancestral homeland with roaring instrumental rock sounds emerging in the late-1950s, and helped pioneer an iconic American genre known as surf music. “When I got that feeling from surfing,’” he told the writer Barney Hoskyns, “‘the whitewater coming over my head was the high notes going dikidikidiki, and then the dungundungun on the bottom was the waves, and I started double-picking faster and faster, like a locomotive, to feel the power of the waves.” Those rushing guitar lines energized generations across the Southland and reverberated around the world.

Dale, who was 81, died Saturday after a long bout with rectal cancer, longtime friend and former bassist Steve Soest said Sunday. That guitar tone arrived via a blindingly fast picking technique, one of the centerpiece elements of his breakthrough hits “Let’s Go Trippin’” in 1961 and “Misirlou” the following year, that caused guitar picks to melt in his hand. A few decades later, director Quentin Tarantino tapped “Misirlou” to serve as the theme to "Pulp Fiction." The sound featured a liberal use of electronic reverb with his signature Fender Stratocaster guitar, cranked to wall-rattling volume through juiced up Fender amplifiers. Other rock instrumentalists charted wordless hits before Dale came to the fore in the early days of the electric guitar, among them Link Wray’s “Rumble” and Duane Eddy’s “Rebel Rouser,” but Dale helped push surf music into the mainstream through those high-energy performances, supplying a sound that paired perfectly with that growing surf craze.


It began as a regional phenomenon in Southern California and soon spread around the world influencing the likes of the Beatles and Rolling Stones in England, and a high-school aged Canadian named Neil Young long before he found fame. According to Hoskyns’ “Waiting for the Sun,” a young Jimi Hendrix was said to have seen Dale and his band play. Echoes of Dale’s fiery guitar runs and showmanship can be heard in Hendrix’s style. Dale was born Richard Anthony Monsour May 4, 1937, in Boston to a father who had emigrated from Lebanon and a mother who was Polish Belarusian. Growing up in a Lebanese neighborhood in Quincy, Mass., outside of Boston, exposed him to the sounds of Arabic music, which became a signature of his musical amalgam. His musical training started with his childhood interest in piano. Early on, he studied trumpet and also acquired a ukulele before eventually picking up a guitar and trying his best to emulate one of his heroes, country music titan Hank Williams.

A friend suggested he call himself “Dick Dale,” rather than Richard Monsour, because it sounded more fitting for a would-be country singer. The Monsour family moved to Southern California in 1954, when his father landed a job at Hughes Aircraft Co. in El Segundo, near the beach. Dale became a regular at the weekly live country music television show "Town Hall Party." "I wanted to be a cowboy singer, so I went on 'Town Hall Party' and entered their talent contest every week," he told the Glendale News-Press in 2015. "And I did, every week." The confluence of Dale’s ethnic heritage and newfound geographic proximity to the beach and to the flourishing factory in Fullerton, Calif., where electric guitar innovator Leo Fender worked, all blended into the music Dale would soon bring to listeners. “Misirlou” represented a cross-cultural blend, coupling minor key motifs and Middle Eastern musical scale with pounding drums and throbbing bass, all fueling Dale’s stinging “wet” electric guitar pyrotechnics.

A section of the song featuring trumpet also brought in an element of the mariachi music that was prevalent around Southern California. In interviews he would often overstate his role in the development of Fender products, but he was an important early adopter of instruments and amplifiers that would change the sound and content of popular music beginning in the 1950s. Dale liked to consider himself one of Fender’s favorite guinea pigs, and he did push guitars and amplifiers to the limits in his live performances. "Playing guitar was only a window in my life," he said in 2015. "I never practiced the guitar and when I'm done playing I just put it down. Music is like building a house. It's like going out deep into the desert to see what nature is doing. It's like painting, like Salvador Dali. I try to do that with my music, make it like a Salvador Dali painting." A freak accident, when hot oil exploded while he was cooking popcorn in 1983 left second-degree burns over much of his body, put him out of commission as a musician for months. “With every problem comes a gift in hand,” he told The Times in 1985. “For instance, when I do shows to raise money for burn victims, now I can talk to them and know what they are going through. And I can tell their family and friends that when the doctor says the recovery has begun, that's really the time they need your concern and love.”


As a celebrity, he capitalized on quirky passions. At one point he kept live tigers at his Balboa Peninsula mansion, which had previously belonged to Gillette shaving company magnate King Gillette, and titled an early-‘80s live album “The Tigers Loose.” That was his first album in 18 years after surf music fell out of favor in the mid-1960s with the rise of the Beatles, the British Invasion, psychedelic music and other genres. A decade ago Dale battled back from cancer, even playing a show in south Orange County shortly after being released from a nine-day stay at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles for treatment of an infection. “I thought, ‘I cannot cause this [club owner] to lose thousands of dollars,’” he said at the time.

That’s when he started trying to promote a new moniker to substitute for the “King of the Surf Guitar” label often applied to him: he wanted to be referred to as “Dick Dale-Cancer Warrior.” With characteristic bravado, he told The Times, he would soon return to the hospital because “everything is messed up, and if it continues that way, I will die. But I’m not ready to leave my son, not ready to leave [his wife] Lana, I’m not ready to leave all the Dick Dale music lovers. They’ve been my medicine.” Although he has not been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, he was elected to the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville a decade ago. He experienced recurring brushes with widespread popularity, notably in 1994 when Tarantino used “Misirlou” in “Pulp Fiction.” In 2010, a career retrospective album “Guitar Legend: The Very Best of Dick Dale” also helped introduce his music to a new generation.

Through his life Dale practiced martial arts and explored eastern philosophy, which he often quoted in interviews. "There are four sentences [taken from Eastern philosophy] in my life that I go by: 'To experience is to know. To know is to understand. To understand is to tolerate. To tolerate is to have peace',” he told The Times in 1985. “It took me 17 years and [training with] masters of the martial arts to make me understand what that means. But I understand it and that's how I can put up with all the stuff that goes on. "That's one of the reasons I like working with tigers and lions. If you can understand animals like that, then you can really put up with the reasons why people are the way they are and love them." Dale’s survivors include his wife, Lana, and his musician son, Jimmy. Information on services was not immediately available.

SOURCE: LA TIMES