Mötley Crüe’s, Tommy Lee recently sat down with Zane Lowe of Apple Music to catch up.
During the show, the conversation steered toward the topic of the rise of grunge in the early 1990s. In particular, how it forced predecessor hard rock bands off of the radio and MTV, as well as causing album and tour sales to decline.
It’s a question that is seemingly as old as time: did Nirvana play a role in killing (heavy) metal music as the world knew it?
On the show, Lowe asked Tommy Lee the hard hitting questions, asking for his thoughts on the emergence of Nirvana and other grunge bands of the time.
Lee replied, “I welcomed that with the biggest open arms on the planet. I was, like, ‘Yes. Somebody’s fucking stirring it up.’ Thank you. Because if I hear another fucking song that sounds like… I don’t know. There was so many bands that were sounding like — everything was just sounding the same. And I love it when someone throws a fucking grenade into the mix and goes, ‘Nope. We’re going this way.’ And dude, I love that. And then Soundgarden. And then it just kept going. I loved it.”
Lee’s response of course touches on the seminal nature of Nirvana’s music, after all, it was a turning point for the metal genre as a whole.
This isn’t the first time that a member from Motley Crüe has commented on the grunge movement. In 2014, Blabbermouth reported that frontman Vince Neil said, “”I don’t know why people say grunge killed rock. Only people whose careers were on the way out said that. It didn’t seem to kill us.”
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Blabbermouth also reported that Courtney Love once told Neil that their 1981 album, Too Fast For Love was one of Kurt Cobain’s favourite albums.
It sounds like the appreciation was mutual.
