Raunch on full display as Motley Crue begins Hard Rock residency

"Who's nice and drunk?"

Rhetorical question.

Still, Tommy Lee posed it nonetheless, scanning the crowd with the chops-licking anticipation of a coyote with muzzle deep in rabbit's den.

The Mötley Crüe drummer was looking for an audience member to bring up onstage and ride his roller coaster drum kit, a towering circle of steel that enabled Lee to play at all sorts of wild angles, including upside-down, where the skinny sticksman hung like a malnourished bat.

Eventually, Lee found a dude to join him on the contraption.

The trip was brief.

"I think he threw up a little bit," Lee said as his new buddy exited the stage. "Oh, no, that's just my snot."

Don't dismiss that last line as a toss-off -- the secretion of various bodily fluids has played a prominent, at times driving, role in the Crüe's three-decade career.

Gross?

Certainly, at times, but making raunch palatable -- inviting, even -- is what has made this band a hard rock institution with some of the most well-known pop metal sing-a-longs ever howled out.

Yeah, they're approaching the age where men should no longer be allowed to don tight leather pants, but the Crüe have managed to age well by making themselves synonymous with impulses that are ageless: the hunger for sex, the craving of raw power, the adolescent thrill of setting stuff on fire.

This is what Mötley Crüe is all about, and they put on absolutely no airs whatsoever when it comes to any of it. They spell everything out for you in their song titles, even: "Primal Scream" (that's what their music is); "Girls, Girls, Girls" (that's what they want); "Wild Side" (that's the mental state they inhabit).

'bigger, badder, sleazier'

Now, three decades into their career, the band is attempting to one-up themselves in terms of onstage debauchery with a nine-show residency at the Joint, the first for a hard rock band in Vegas, which they launched on Friday.

The Crüe knows that they've got a lot to live up to: They're a group that has long equated themselves with vice taking on a city that's practically a caricature of as much.

"It's gotta be bigger, badder, sleazier than anything we've ever done," Crüe frontman Vince Neil said of the band's Vegas stint in a pre-taped video montage that played shortly before the group took the stage.

And so at the Joint, the Crüe went for it: a scantily clad damsel breathed fire from inside an iron orb, female aerialists twisted their elastic flesh into comely knots, a pistol wielding dancer shook her mane on a riser high above the crowd.

plumes of flame

Massive plumes of flame burst from the stage intermittently; loud blasts of pyro made crowd members jump in their seats; four massive video screens displayed images of spiraling pentagrams, wild animals baring their teeth and women in bondage gear.

In other words, it was a Mötley Crüe gig.

There were some fresh touches: the band revisited the oversexed snarl of "Piece of Your Action," one of the best tunes from their 1981 debut, "Too Fast for Love," which they haven't played in years.

And, around midway through the two-hour performance, the band took to a circular platform suspended from the rafters to play an acoustic set highlighted by a bare-knuckle "Bastard."

"We've never done this," bassist Nikki Sixx announced at the beginning of the four-song unplugged suite.

There were humorous touches -- a brief show opening performance from a mini Mötley Crüe tribute band composed of little people, Neil exchanging wedding vows with a hottie in a corset and tutu before "S.O.S.," an image of Justin Bieber briefly flashed on screen in-between shots of women in various stages of undress during "Girls, Girls, Girls."

True to its location, there was a certain symmetry between the show and its setting, as voiced by the band's lone Vegas resident.

"We're the craziest band in the world, you're the craziest people in the world, in the craziest city in the world," Neil announced at one point. "I don't know what more to say about that."

Really, he didn't even have to say that much.

When it was over, following a performance of "Home Sweet Home" with Lee seated at a glimmering piano that looked as if it was fashioned from an imploded disco ball, video cameras followed the band out as they boarded a helicopter.

They'd return to the Joint the next night, so they couldn't have traveled any great distance.

This may have been the only point of the evening, then, where this bunch didn't go too far.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476.