Mötley Crüe – Without You

Mötley Crüe’s biggest ballad was written about the drummer’s marriage, by the bass player, who later apologized for it.

Ask almost anyone to name Mötley Crüe’s ballad and the answer is Home Sweet Home, a song Billboard’s Hot 100 never ranked higher than No.89 when Elektra released it in 1985. The one that became a real hit, a No.8, is a different record, and its author has spent years sounding faintly embarrassed about it. Nikki Sixx wrote the words to Without You about a marriage that was not his own. It belonged to his drummer, Tommy Lee, and the actress Heather Locklear.

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Sixx explained how it happened to Rolling Stone in 2009. Lee and Locklear, who had married in 1986, were at his house constantly. Watching them, he thought of the title and wrote the lyric from Lee’s point of view, the idea being simply that life without her would not be the same. So the finished song is a husband’s devotion, ghostwritten by his best friend and delivered by a third man, singer Vince Neil. Guitarist Mick Mars wrote the music with Sixx, and it is his steel guitar that opens the track and carries the solo.

It arrived on an unlikely album. Dr. Feelgood was the first record the band made sober, cut in Vancouver with producer Bob Rock, who worked them harder than anyone had before. By Sixx’s account Rock pushed Neil to sing better and sent Sixx back to rewrite the title track’s lyric eight times. A band being drilled on precision turned out to be capable of a plain love song, and Rock recorded it without irony. Elektra released the album on September 1, 1989.

A Jaguar in an Opera House

The label put out Dr. Feelgood and Kickstart My Heart first and held the ballad for early 1990. The video was shot on January 15 of that year at the Grand 1894 Opera House in Galveston, Texas, right after a concert in Houston. The director was Mary Lambert, known for her work with Madonna, who took the credit under the name Blanche White. Her first pitch was a motorcycle film. The band turned it down on the grounds that they had already made that video for Girls, Girls, Girls. What they shot instead, with cinematographer Bill Pope, is a run of abstract images: the band on an Egyptian-styled set, string players sawing away through the guitar solo, and a live jaguar named Czar, on loan from a Texas wildlife refuge. Sixx called the result surreal. Neil settled for “goofy.”

Goofy or not, it worked. Billboard’s Hot 100 ranked the single at No.8 in the spring of 1990, and the Mainstream Rock chart at No.11. Britain’s Official Charts Company had it at No.39. Billboard placed it among the hundred biggest pop singles of the year, a list the band’s better-remembered ballad had never come near.

The marriage it described ended a few years later, which is the reason for the apology. “It was sort of a romantic moment. I apologize for that,” Sixx told Rolling Stone, while insisting the relationship had been a good one when he wrote about it. Neil has been less sheepish, calling it a great ballad and one he loves to sing. He has the better of the argument. On a loud, hard-driven record, this is the one place where Mötley Crüe sounded certain about something gentle, and the song did what love songs do when they are any good. It outlasted the couple and went on meaning the same thing to everybody else.