MOTLEY CRUE’S MALIGNED MASCOT, ALLISTER FIEND (Part 1).

My favorite band growing up was Mötley Crüe. Hearing “Kickstart My Heart” for the first time was the most explosive shot of musical adrenaline I’d ever experienced. I remember the day sitting shotgun in my older cousin’s Bronco and the hairs on my arms standing up. It felt like the audio equivalent to launching off a wave in the ocean or as Vince Neil belts out, to “skydive naked from an aeroplane”. So before I knew what the band looked like and all the debauchery that came with it, my first love was the music. Both Too Fast for Love and Shout at the Devil are easily in my top 10 “desert island” album list. My fiends I watched their VH1 ‘Behind the Music’ so many times, we made our own version of it with us playing each band member. Oh boy.

When I first saw what these glammed out barbarians looked like, I really didn’t know what to think. But I loved weird action moves and was starting to dabble in horror, so something about this started to make a lot of sense. These guys seemed like they crawled right out of the sewers of some post-apocalyptic b-movie but at the same time they were total studs. Like they could invade your high school, beat up jocks and steal your girlfriend. I was instantly obsessed. The Crüe were the only band that really sold me with the “this really is who we are” notion. They looked the part and were the part. Sleazy party animals with not a single fuck to give in the world. Straight out of a Mad Max or high-school-exploitation movie. While more shocking bands existed at the time, the difference between those groups and the Crüe (aside from the music) was that Mötley had the most fun and got the girls. Tons of girls.

My bedroom wall became a 100% Mötley Crüe shrine. Dozens of magazine clippings, posters and lithographs took over my bedroom with not an inch of wall space left. I remember opening my eyes in the morning for my paperboy route and seeing my dad staring at this 9’x13′ wall of four guys in make up, fishnet, leather, denim and women’s pants holding guitars, beers and cigarettes. I’ll never forget that bewildered look on his face.

On the backside of my bedroom door was one of those long door posters with the band’s somewhat obscure mascot, ALLISTER FIEND.

I remember laying in bed so many times and starting at this rad bastard, wondering who and what an “Allister Fiend” was?! I owned so much Mötley Crüe paraphernalia and could find virtually nothing on this guy aside from the one poster. Even the album inserts contained not a single drawing or reference to this so-called “mascot” of my favorite band. It drove me bananas. Clearly the band did not hold him in the same regard as say, Iron Maiden did with “Eddie”. But why? He’s fucking rad! I started to question his credibility and that maybe the poster was a bootleg. It also didn’t make sense because Mötley Crüe have always been a pretty transparent band. They wear everything on their sleeve and you’d think something on this guy would have floated to the surface.

Then as I was attending Crüe shows over the years, I started seeing him on fan’s t-shirts…

Still I wondered, was Allister Fiend a mascot “failure”? Or was he just some cartoonish exaggeration of Nikki Sixx with no backstory?

Then many years later I discovered this on the back of a lithograph print:

TO BE CONTINUED…
(Part 2 of this feature will be TNUC’s exclusive interview with the artist who created Allister Fiend!)