Book Review - The Dirt - Neil Strauss & Motley Crue***** Motley Crue are scum. After reading this book I don't think I'd stop to help if I saw one of them drowning, surely the world would be better off without this collection of self obsessed dealer's best friends. For anyone who has read Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew recently, Motley Crue are those kids grown up, with the same utter lack of morals, just with lots more money and access to drugs, and girls, and drugs, and more girls. You can tell what is really important to the Crue, at one point Vince Neil mentions that his wife is about to leave him and take their daughter with her, daughter ? I had just read hundreds of tales of wild narcotic consumption and reckless unprotected sex, but a daughter, she only gets the briefest of mentions. Although Motley Crue were massive, with sales reaching into the tens of millions, the band themselves seem almost detached from the music, sure it's what they want to do, but they enjoy the adulation, the groupies and the drugs far more than they do making and playing the music. Here are four boys who have hardly done a day's honest work between them, they party, they sleep around, they consume frightening quantities of booze and drugs, they fight, steal and fuck, then they become famous. You have got to give the band credit for telling the story as it happened and not trying to airbrush the facts and make themselves appear as more decent people. Everything is told in frank, honest and sometimes brutal detail. Tommy Lee and Nikki Sixx recount raping a girl who had fallen unconcious through drugs and booze, the whole band give their takes on Vince Neil's car crash that killed Razzle from Hanoi Rocks, they include every nasty fight and sex scene that their drug addled brains can remember, and it doesn't make you think well of them. The Rainbow Bar & Grill and the Whisky A Go-Go in Los Angeles became the hub for an astounding amount of rock bands at this time, and they all get a mention when they have partied with or battled against the Crue, Ratt, Dave Lee Roth, W.A.S.P., Guns 'n Roses, Metallica, they all get a party hearty mention, and then there's Ozzy Osbourne, the man even the dedicated smackheads of the Crue can't keep up with. Although I have finished the book thouroughly detesting the individual members of Motley Crue, with the possible exception of Mick Mars, it makes an enthralling read, if reading the life story of a heroin addict's collective is your thing anyway. The thing that really appalled me is that none of the Crue seem to have a concience, the evil and degrading things they do to foolish, starstruck girls, to their friends, managers and other bands are almost beyond comprehension, but they always bury their emotions and memories of bad deeds done behind another party, another bottle of JD, another bag of pills, another syringe of smack. At the end of the book, Tommy and Nikki see each other for the first time in over a year as they are both dressed down and dropping their sons off at school and you can't help thinking, what goes around comes around, what sort of children are going to grow up with these fools as parents ?