Looking at Mick Mars, you can almost imagine that Motley Crue’s wretched career has eaten away at him, reducing the guitarist to the tragic and shrivelled thing that planted itself on-stage on Monday night. Buried in a black overcoat and barely standing upright on feeble chopstick legs, his crumbling face concealed beneath a top hat, Mars brought the single ringing note of humanity to his band’s pitiful performance. The poor man can hardly move thanks to a horrendous condition called ankylosing spondylitis, and if you’ve read the Crue’s autobiography The Dirt, you know that Mars’s health problems contributed to his addictions. It’s hard not to sympathize. As for the other guys, they’re just idiots.

The very fact that the veteran headliners were blown away by an outfit as brain-dead as Papa Roach should keep Vince Neil awake at night. It won’t, but for the record, the Roach’s extremely animated frontman, Jacoby Shaddix, used his band’s 30-minute set to level a two-thirds-full GM Place, marching across the floor and into both stands during “Time Is Running Out” and announcing, “I told you we’d wake you fuckers up.” Papa Roach also dignified itself by proving that it can actually play together like a real band, as did Buckcherry, although the latter’s overweening obsession with the gutter is tedious. “We’re all savages inside,” evangelized vocalist Josh Todd during “Crazy Bitch”, but his singing voice makes him sound like the Ethel Merman of sleaze on a helium-huffing bender, which isn’t very sexy, or even dirty, for that matter.

Of the other openers, Trapt was instantly forgettable, outside of having a name that actually describes how it feels to be in a room with it, while Nikki Sixx's solo act, Sixx:A.M., never rose above the sound of his ham-fisted bass playing and guitarist DJ Ashba’s solos, which were so tasteless it made you wonder if he was taking the piss. Mars didn’t do much better during Motley Crue’s 90 minutes, with a grating tone that undid the very small amount of good coming from his rhythm section. From opener “Kickstart My Heart” to well past the halfway point of the set, the Crue was sloppier than fuck. Then again, the sound of the band has never cohered, even on record, because music is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

After wobbling through “Sick Love Song”, drummer Tommy Lee took a break from overplaying a too-big kit to grab the “Tit E. Cam”, which he then used to find people in the audience with bigger boobs than Vince Neil. The fact that so many women lifted their shirts just goes to show how much a dumbass with a big cock can achieve in 2008. Beyond that, the defining moment of the show was provided by “Same Old Situation”, and an accompanying video that spliced together shots of Alex from A Clockwork Orange with girl-on-girl porn, dead Iraqi children, pictures of the Bush clan, and slogans like Fact: Governments Use Fear to Control You. True, but you can rest assured that the Crue will never understand its equivalent role in keeping us stupid.

Georgia Straight, August 2008