The story of Mötley Crüe has always been one of excess, drama, and reinvention. John Corabi, who stepped in as the band’s frontman during Vince Neil’s brief departure in the early ’90s, recently shared his raw, unfiltered perspective about his experience in an interview with Rock Daydream Nation. His candid remarks offer a rare glimpse into the inner workings of one of rock’s most notorious bands, balancing relief and regret over his tenure.
“There was so much drama in that band and turmoil,” Corabi began when asked about his experiences within the Mötley Crüe camp. “And so when they told me that they were bringing Vince back, there was a huge part of me that was bummed and kind of upset, but there was another part of me that felt like somebody was… I felt like a 300-pound man was standing on my shoulders. So I was relieved at the same time if that makes any sense at all.”
Reflecting further, he noted, “Yeah, there was shit like that going on all the time. And it’s funny, now this interview is gonna come out and it’s gonna go global, and everybody’s gonna say, ‘Goddamn it. He’s talking about Mötley again. Doesn’t that guy have anything better to talk about?’”
When asked if any band members tried to fight for him when the record label demanded Vince Neil’s return, Corabi revealed the stark reality of the situation. “I don’t know. I found out later that they had been secretly meeting with Vince, and the whole time that they were meeting with him, I was kind of under the impression… The record label had said to them — this guy Doug Morris basically said, ‘You need to bring back Vince. Get rid of that guy.’ He didn’t even know my name. He was, like, ‘Get rid of the new guy and bring Vince back.’ And they never really said that to me; they didn’t tell me that till the very end.”
The duplicity still lingers in his memory: “But I know from that point where we had all flown to New York — this was even before we started doing what became the Generation Swine record; fuck, it was probably a year and a half before, a year before — and I was getting, ‘There’s no way, Crab. We’re never bringing that guy back. No way, dude. No way, dude.’ And then in the meantime, they were meeting with him and taking meetings and trying to work things out. And I think they were keeping me in their back pocket in case it didn’t work out with Vince. Which is — to be honest with you, I get it. That’s a smart thing to do.”
Corabi also described the incessant internal discord that left him emotionally drained. “There was just so much drama with those guys,” he reiterated. “I would work out in the morning with Nikki, and he would talk about Tommy and Mick, and then I would go hang out with Tommy to write music in the afternoon, and he would talk about Nikki and Mick. And I was living in Mick’s guest house, so then I would come home at night and I would sit and have a drink with Mick, and he would talk about Tommy and Nikki. And I was, like, ‘Oh my God. It’s impossible to keep up with all this bullshit.’ You know what I mean? So when they told me, ‘Hey, dude, Vince is coming back,’ I was bummed. Like I said, it felt like someone took a 300-pound man off my shoulders.”
The live performances, while exhilarating, were accompanied by their own set of challenges. Corabi criticized the portrayal in The Dirt, Mötley Crüe’s biopic, that audiences dwindled during his tenure. “The funny thing of it is if you watch the movie The Dirt, they make it look like the band was playing in high school gymnasiums to, like, 20 people, and it wasn’t that way at all. Yeah, we were playing, like, 10,000-plus-seat arenas, but we were selling maybe four thousand, five thousand. So we were doing maybe a quarter to half of the arena. And even that, with that three, four, five thousand, six thousand people, the response was great. Singing ‘Shout At The Devil’ or ‘Primal Scream’ or ‘Wild Side,’ the audience was into it at the time, and it was fun. It was cool.”
Even the band’s setlists weren’t immune to conflict. Corabi recalled his refusal to perform one of the group’s biggest hits: “That was my first argument with Nikki. I said, ‘I am not singing Girls, Girls, Girls. I won’t do it.’ And he was, like, ‘It’s one of our biggest hits.’ We got into an argument, and then Tommy intervened on my behalf. He said, ‘Dude, if he ain’t comfortable with it… He’s the one that’s gotta sing it, so we’ll just pick something else. We don’t have to do that song every fucking tour.’ So we did Wild Side, we did Shout At The Devil, we did Home Sweet Home, Primal Scream. I can’t remember what else. Live Wire. What else did we do? I can’t remember. It’s been so long. But we did a little bit of that and a little bit of the new record and then we did a couple of covers.”
