Dibs

Between them, they did so many things: shot up drugs, married Playboy and Baywatch gals, died and came back to life, went to jail for assaulting Pamela Anderson, and played hair metal for decades. Now you can read books about them! Perth, Australia native Paul Miles – who calls himself “the world’s #1 Mötley Crüe historian” — is the author and publisher of many books about his fav band, including Chronological Crue, Vol. 1, Chronological Crue, Vol. 2, Chronological Crue, Vol. 3, Mötley Crüe Down Under and What Mötley Crüe Means to Me. The weird thing is that Miles’ publishing company and blog and three of his books, which all share the name Chronological Crue, defiantly omit the umlaut. Yet the title of his other two books, MCDU and WMMMTM for short, include it. Puzzling! But who can unlock the methodologies of a diehard fan who remembers a long-past birthday on which his wife “had a pair of black leather pants with a lace-up crotch made for me by the ex-wife of Sex Pistol Glen Matlock and they were just like Vinces from the Too Fast for Love album cover”? Miles started his site when, “after reading various online FAQs covering all sorts of topics, I realised there was no FAQ for Mötley Crüe.” It took a while to get going, but “after … two years, the site was ready to go live in the early part of 1997. On the 16th January, a teaser awareness campaign began directing fans to a singular introductory page that invited them to come back for the launch on 27th January 1997, the day Vince Neil was to re-unite with the Crüe onstage at the American Music Awards. The website became fully accessible on the morning of the 27th so Mötley fans could spend the day reading through the band’s past, then later that evening witness the beginning of a new chapter in Mötley Crüe history.” Exactly! The site includes gig updates, pix, the umlautless Chronological Crue Newswire, and a year-by-year history of the band that is so unbelievably detailed you might confuse it for a nightmare, what with every line conjuring a jet-ski accident, a road-rage punch “splitting his knuckles to the bone,” a wedding to a stripper who is also a mud wrestler, taped orgasms, “cancerous tumours on both her kidneys,” an ibuprofen overdose, opening for KISS, a blue soda-pop called Mötley Brüe and … oh. So. Much.