“They are savages with cash who care nothing about nobody, even each other,” commented manager Doc McGhee less-than-warmly of Mötley Crüe in the band’s 2001 autobiography The Dirt, the STDs’n’all book upon which a forthcoming Netflix biopic of the same name is based. The big-haired LA hellraisers shifted millions of records with their uniquely terrible glam metal, yet are remembered most of all for their legendary appetite for drugs, drink, sex and destruction, such as to endear them to few people whom they met in their pomp. Least of all those on the band’s payroll, it seems.
As the premise for a film, it promises plenty of miscreant thrills, spills and scenes of a sexual nature – albeit a story essentially hollow at its core. If it’s music badassery with heart that Netflix seeks for the biopic treatment, then they could do worse than to consider some of these lesser-recognised cult waifs and strays.
Billy Joe Shaver
Still touring at 79, grizzled Texan country music word-slinger Shaver has battled alcohol and drugs most of his life, lost his son and guitarist Eddy to a heroin overdose, lost two fingers on his right hand in a lumber mill accident, suffered a heart attack onstage, divorced and remarried the same woman three times and miraculously escaped prison for shooting a man in the face. One of outlaw country’s most wanted men, his songs – many of which are about women leaving him, and goodness knows why they’d do that – have been performed by all from Kris Kristofferson to Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan, yet he has laboured in obscurity his whole career thanks to demons and bad luck. Think Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line rewritten by Charles Bukowski.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTaUbYLzxZs
The Replacements
In January 1986, Minneapolis rock’n’rollers The Replacements had a golden opportunity for primetime success performing on Saturday Night Live, but blew it in a shambolic drunken mess – resulting in a lifetime ban from the show. It’s an episode that typifies one of the great underachievers and most mythically inebriated bands in America music history. The Replacements could have been as big as REM were they not so wracked with self-doubt as to seem to set fire to everything they touched – including, quite literally, cash. It’d be worth making a film about them just for the subplot chronicling their unlikely relationship with fellow Minneapolis musician Prince, who let them record at Paisley Park – and once filled the studio with balloons to cheer up singer Paul Westerberg after a friend of his died.
