10 Biggest Sell Out Albums In Hard Rock Music History

In the wake of Van Halen lighting a fire from underneath the Sunset Strip, Motley Crue was one of the first real success stories of the glam metal movement. Taking the theatrics of KISS and the spirit of punk rock, the first handful of Motley albums were metal given to you at street level, with songs that operated like switchblades. There wasn’t much glam to be found at first, but when the Crue eventually got dolled up, they may have pushed it a bit too far.

As work began on Theatre of Pain, the guys were really starting to abuse drugs a lot in the studio, which led to them going too over the top in most of their videos. Outside of the one power ballad Home Sweet Home and their cover of Smokin in the Boys Room, most of the band even admits that this record is nothing to write home about, just being thrown together to meet their quota and trying to gain more of an audience on MTV. The problem was the fact that they were trying to mold themselves into the same kind of archetype glam band that would give us Poison, whereas Motley were much more dangerous than that.

Here you had songs like City Boy Blues and Save Our Souls, only they were coming out of guys that looked like they were cheap knockoff versions of Sweet from just a few years before. The Crue can learn from their mistakes though, and Girls Girls Girls brought it back to the wild and off the rails band that we already knew, clad in biker gear and willing to tear it up wherever they went. The makeup might work for the small screen, but the Crue always felt more at home with the denim and leather.