“You bite me, mate, and I’ll chew your f**king ear off”: AC/DC’s Malcolm Young’s threat when Nikki Sixx tried to involve him in a tour brawl between Motley Crue and Van Halen
A new documentary, Nöthin’ But a Good Time: The Uncensored Story of ’80s Hair Metal, reflects on some of Mötley Crüe‘s wild antics, including – among many other NSFW escapades – their tendency to bite people.
Yep. Mötley Crüe were a pack of ravenous dogs both on and off stage, shredding fretboards and faces alike. “When they bit you, it was like a dog bite,” the band’s manager, Doc McGhee, explains. “They’d bite you right in the middle of the forehead, they’d bite you in the arm…”
READ MORE: “We got away with f**king murder”: Mötley Crüe are amazed they’ve never been cancelled on new track
McGhee remembers one instance in particular, when Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee were both trying to gnaw at him. “I think Nikki came first, I grabbed him and I pulled him down,” he says. “Then Tommy jumped on me and I pulled him over my shoulder. I had both of them on the ground and I just started punching the shit out of them, and I punched them so many times that I threw up on them.”
It didn’t matter who you were – anyone was a potential victim of a Mötley Chew. Even Eddie Van Halen wasn’t safe.
The Van Halen legend wasn’t impressed when Vince Neil, Sixx and Lee bit him in 1984. The incident took place in Stockholm right before the Monsters Of Rock festival kicked off, where Mötley Crüe would play alongside AC/DC and Van Halen.
“All off a sudden, Nikki gets up and walks over and bites Eddie on his shoulder,” McGhee remembers. “Everybody’s pissed. Fifteen minutes later, Vince goes over to bite him too.”
Understandably, Eddie was pretty disgruntled by this. “Eddie grabs Vince by the face, throws him on the table, they start fighting,” McGhee continues. “Then Malcolm [Young], the [guitarist] from AC/DC, looked at Nikki and said, ‘You bite me, mate, and I’ll chew your fucking ear off.’”
Rather than back down, this sparked something within Sixx. “Nikki grabs him by the hair and slams him against a wall,” McGhee says. All the while, “Tommy and David Lee Roth are up on the table, doing some kung fu fighting or some shit like that.”
As a result, Mötley Crüe were kicked out of their hotel. When the band were asked why they’d been so keen to bite Van Halen, Lee responded with a sincere: “Dude, we just bit him because we love him.”
“I told him, ‘You’re fucked up! You don’t bite people!’” McGhee howls.
This isn’t the first time the Crüe’s affectionate nibbling has been addressed. Earlier this year, frontman Neil reflected on the AC/DC and Van Halen incident in conversation with Outsider.
He argues that most bands played along – but Malcolm Young refused to. “Nikki, with this hair up, he’s like 6’6, and Malcolm Young, he’s like 4 foot 8,” Neil remembered. “They were arguing about something. Nikki grabbed him, picked him up by the neck and held him against the wall.”
“Van Halen got pretty pissed off at us too,” he added. “I don’t know what was in our minds, but we would bite everybody. We’d just bite them. I grabbed Eddie Van Halen and I bit him. He was not happy with that. [It was a] serious bite.”
In light of these antics resurfacing, Mötley Crüe are counting their blessings that they were never ‘cancelled’ back in the day. The group’s latest single (aptly named Cancelled) reflects on how quickly people might have written them off, had they happened in the current age of the “woke crusade.”
Mötley Crüe are currently on tour in the US. They will take part in a Las Vegas residency in March 2025. Nöthin’ But a Good Time: The Uncensored Story of ’80s Hair Metal is now streaming on Paramount+.
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