ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, a book that one celebrated writer considers his guilty or not-so-guilty pleasure. Charles Bock is a novelist. Critics swooned last year over his book "Beautiful Children." And for us, Bock swoons over something less literary for our series My Guilty Pleasure.
Mr. CHARLES BOCK (Author, "Beautiful Children"): I feel no guilt whatsoever about my love for "Motley Crue: The Dirt � Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band." I say this while admitting that Motley Crue's music was its own cliche � a form of lowest-common-denominator hair metal that dominated the rock world during that regrettable time known as the '80s.
The Crue's album titles include such demure offerings as "Shout at the Devil," "Theatre of Pain" and "Doctor Feelgood."
But band quality has no correlation with a quality reading experience. I say to you "The Dirt" is the singularly greatest sex, drugs, rock reading experience of our age. It's one of the all-time great rock bios. Not one sentence in its 448 pages is about Motley's music, which is even more impressive and appropriate.
Chapters are narrated by the band's members: Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars. We start with them as delicate unknowns, torching cockroaches with hairspray in their rat hole pad off Sunset Boulevard.
So what if young Nikki knew so little about music that he showed up at practice thinking the six-string he just stole was a bass? So what if front man Vince Neil regularly could not remember lyrics during concerts? With their black leather, apocalyptic makeup and penchant for setting themselves aflame onstage, Motley Crue was a blunt reaction to the peppish, skinny tie new wave music in vogue at the time. Moreover, the band's ravenous appetite was indicative of the gluttony that epitomized the '80s.
Ghostwriter Neil Strauss deserves combat pay for getting Motley's inner circle to reconstruct this glorious, ridiculous time, from L.A.'s club and flier scene to the newly minted power broker that was MTV, all the barroom fights and upside down drum solos, the strippers and rehab stints and marriages gone wrong.
There's Vince Neil's drunk driving accident that killed a friend from another band. The poetry Tommy Lee writes to Pamela Anderson from jail months after their infamous sex tape. The time Nikki Sixx was declared dead from a heroin overdose, then woke up, left the hospital and changed his answering machine to say: Hey, it's Nikki. I'm not here because I'm dead.
Supposedly, a movie of "The Dirt" in development, it can't possibly be any good. This is too sprawling, too wild, an experience that's better off read and left to the mind's interpretation. So go get "The Dirt." Not a guilty pleasure, just a rocking good read.
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SIEGEL: Charles Bock is the author of the novel "Beautiful Children." His pick for our series My Guilty Pleasure is "Motley Crue: The Dirt - Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band." And you can read recommendations and reviews of all sorts of books at npr.org.
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