Album: Mötley Crüe, Too Fast for Love, 1982
(Parental Advisory: This album cover may be laughably homoerotic.)
Best Track: "Merry-Go-Round"
Lasting Memory: This is one of only maybe three cassettes I ever replaced with a cassette after I finally broke down in 1991 and purchased a CD player. The analog Too Fast for Love tape that got dropped and stomped on during one of my infinity-plus-one moves in the late 1980s and early 1990s had too much sentimental value to me to be supplanted with a digital disk.
I couldn't today tell you what that sentimental value was, but I know I held the tape dear and that only a cassette would fill the void created by its destruction.
Playing the replacement tape through a couple of times this morning, I am convinced I made the right choices in both re-adding Too Fast for Love to my music collection and in going analog. The Crüe's major-label debut benefits from the murky sound and a slight echo that are the hallmarks of magnetic tape and which are inevitably scoured away on digital recordings.
"Starry Eyes," for instance, would just suck if it was, you know, good. But since it sounds so amateurish, the song endears and rocks much more than it has any right to.
The whole of Too Fast for Love is like that. The album is a guilty pleasure of a hard rock album that no one should need to feel guilty about enjoying.
Certainly compared to almost all of their Sunset Strip hair band brethren -- your L.A. Gunses, your Hanoi Rockses, your Poisons -- Mötley Crüe proved itself to be the most talented. And while it can be fair to counter that even Beckley, W. Va., has its best little ballerina,* being the best of/from will always merit its own deserved respect.
Then there's this: The songs "Merry-Go-Round" and "Live Wire" kicked ass when I was 12, and they kick ass when I'm 39.
So 27 years on, I throw my horns and am happy to let Mötley Crüe go "On With the Show."
Up Next: Mötley Crüe, Shout at the Devil, 1983
* Good night, Craig McC, wherever you are.
2 comments:
Not being familiar with this album, I clicked through to "Starry Eyes" hoping it would be another version of the Too Much Joy song of the same name ... disappointed!
I'm covered by my disclaimer that the Crue's "Starry eyes" was bad in a good way.
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