Back in 1983, the glam rockers of Mötley Crüe performed in the US Festival and played their cover of “Helter Skelter” from The Beatles.
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This song was on Shout at the Devil, the second studio album by Mötley Crüe, released on September 26, 1983. It was the band’s breakthrough album, establishing Mötley Crüe as one of the top selling heavy metal acts of the 1980s. The singles “Looks That Kill” and “Too Young to Fall in Love” were moderate hits for the band.
Shout at the Devil was Mötley Crüe’s breakthrough success, bringing them to international attention. The album’s title and the band’s use of a pentagram brought the band a great deal of controversy upon its 1983 release, as Christian and conservative groups claimed the band was encouraging their listeners to worship Satan.
In a contemporary review for The Village Voice, Robert Christgau panned Shout at the Devil and felt the band’s commercial appeal lay in false braggadocio on an album that is poor “even by heavy metal standards”.
Rolling Stone’s J. D. Considine found their style of rock formulaic, innocuous, and unoriginal: “The whole point of bands like Motley Crue is to provide cheap thrills to jaded teens, and that’s where the album ultimately disappoints.” In The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004), he dismissed the music as “a distressingly mild-mannered distillation of Kiss and Aerosmith clichés”. The magazine would later rank the album 44th in their 2017 “100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time”, anyway.
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