Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee took a lot of heat when he stepped out from behind the drumkit in 1999 to front the nü-metal outfit Methods Of Mayhem. Freshly out of the glam metal/hard rock titans Mötley Crüe at the time, the project didn’t sit well with some of his longtime fanbase.
While Methods Of Mayhem‘s self-titled 1999 debut album would go on to be certified gold in the United States, the initial backlash to Lee‘s genre switch was far more than he ever expected. Speaking recently with Loudwire, Lee commented of that time:
“I got so much fucking bullshit in 2000. I needed to do all the shit I had inside of me. It had to come out, like coming out of the closet or something. I had all these ideas and I was just doing Mötley and I had to break away from that to go do this. Creatively, I was dying.”
“I took so much flak for that [self-titled] record. ‘What the fuck? Tommy Lee’s a rapper now?’ No, you fucking morons, it has nothing to do with that. I’m a drummer, first of all, everything I do, I do with rhythm. Just because you’re singing a track or screaming a track that feels like it’s rap… No, I never claimed to be a rapper.”
“I took a heap of fucking bullshit for that and I was like, ‘You know what? Whatever. I know what it is; it’s me being rhythmic and this is some brand new shit. You’re gonna take flak any time you push like that from your fans, because they’re used to seeing you do one thing. Anytime you go outside that thing, they’re like, ‘What the fuck is this bullshit?’ I listen to that record now and that record was way ahead of its time.”
Lee announced that he had resurrected the band back in the spring of 2019, though nothing new has yet to surface. Lee‘s next release will be an eponymous project which finds him exploring musical creativity with a focus on gender. Titled “Andro“, that album will be out on October 16th through Better Noise Music.
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