It’s a strange thing to hear coming from the guitarist who co-wrote “Girls, Girls, Girls” and “Don’t Go Away Mad ,” not exactly minimalist, unpolished productions. But Mars was never a perfect fit for an Eighties glam-metal band. He’s a decade older than his three bandmates, and had way more love for blues-rock bands like Ten Years After and Bad Company than the glittery groups like Kiss and the New York Dolls that the others worshiped.
For the man born Robert Alan Deal in Terre Haute, Indiana, playing the guitar “mattered most” ever since he was three years old and watched country singer Skeeter Bond play a 4-H Fair while standing on two picnic tables. “He was wearing a bright-orange outfit with rhinestones all over the place, and a big white Stetson hat,” says Mars. “I went, ‘I’m doing that. That’s what I want to do.’”
But even with a steady paycheck from White Horse, Mars still couldn’t afford his own place and had to crash on the floor of an apartment Clay shared with White Horse drummer Jack Valentine. He conceived his third child, Erik, on that floor, making his financial situation even more perilous. “He was a real sad guy,” says Valentine. “Looking into his eyes, I just saw this world of sorrow. He had such a hard life.
EVERYTHING WAS SUPPOSED to be different once Mars teamed up with Sixx and drummer Tommy Lee. He was finally in a band with outsize ambition, chops that matched his own, and a firm commitment to original music. Thinking back to an alternative name that White Horse dreamed up years earlier, he named them Mötley Crüe.
Mars believes the story, though he claims the band never threatened to outright fire him. “They didn’t have the balls,” he says. “But one day at rehearsal they went, ‘[Osbourne guitarist] Jake E. Lee would look good right here.’ I went, ‘I’m the guitar player in the band. Nobody else needs to be there.’”
According to Mars, if he never brought it up, it was due to his extreme aversion to conflict and absence of any offstage relationship with the band. He says Sixx last visited his house during theera. “He’s only [ever] visited me two or three times at the most,” Mars says. “Tommy came over once, and Vince just came over once, even though he lived around the corner from me in Venice Beach. It’s just the way we worked.”“THIS IS A SONG I WROTE called ‘Killing Breed,’” Mars says.
“I used to see giant reptile aliens at the end of my bed,” he says. “And little hairy aliens. At night, cat people used to come in, the kind my mother used to warn me might come and steal my breath. Luckily, I figured out that I was hallucinating. Other people never do, and wind up jumping out of windows.”
Dodging cops. Multiple bankruptcies. Sleeping on floors. Opioid addiction. Mold-inspired hallucinations. And a disease that has crippled him for decades. Mötley Crüe’s Mick Mars holds nothing back in his career-spanning interview.