The Best Dang Liner Notes Of All Time
Bonus Responses To & Contextualization of Pam & Tommy
Not to brag, or anything, but actually, if you can do the thing, it’s not bragging. Herewith, THE BEST F*CKING LINER NOTES YOU’VE EVER READ!!!
Dames Nation, hello! We bring you glad tidings from our most recent adventure spelunking in the culture caves of the mid-1990s. For Vulture, we wrote about a bunch of movies, books, music, and podcasts for you to enjoy as a follow-up to Hulu’s Pam & Tommy Miniseries. We wound up having some strong misgivings about how the show handles its subject matter, so we approached our recommendations as an opportunity to provide more context and a bit of critique from our current vantage point.
Maximalists that we are, we thought of way more content than we could squeeze into 1500 words, but when you run your own newsletter, nothing really good needs to remain on the cutting room floor. So today we bring you Dame Karen’s brief essay about Mötley Crüe in the broader context of the hair metal milieu, followed by some links too good to abandon in a long-ago draft.
Mötley Crüe has remained in the public eye to varying degrees long after their heyday ended. It isn’t their music that’s kept them relevant in the 21st century; as far as most people are concerned, it’s their penchant for telling all in a series of memoirs, starting with The Dirt in 2001. The Dirt was co-written with Neil Strauss, who seems to have a penchant for getting, well, THE DIRT and encouraging celebrities with notoriety and darkness in their pasts to put it all out there with zero filter.
Strauss co-wrote Jenna Jameson’s 2005 memoir How To Make Love Like A Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale and Marilyn Manson’s 1998 memoir The Long Hard Road Out Of Hell, which is currently getting lots of attention once again, because it is full of absolutely disgusting stories, several of which detail outright crimes, which Manson tells with revolting glee and pride. Manson’s former fiancée Evan Rachel Wood and several former girlfriends and partners have recently come forward with their stories of being horrifically abused, stories Manson denies--and yet he wrote an entire book bragging about how much he loves to mistreat and assault people?! It’s all part of what we don’t miss about the ‘90s, which was full of sexism, racism, and homophobia held up as “edgy”--see also the original Vice magazine, co-founded in 1994…by an eventual co-founder of the Proud Boys. Ugh.
As we noted in our Vulture story, unlike Mötley Crüe and their ongoing fame, for better and for worse, fellow glam/hair metal pioneers Hanoi Rocks are just now getting some well-deserved attention via HBO’s over the top, yet surprisingly tender show Peacemaker. In a classic truth is stranger than fiction situation, Mötley Crüe and Hanoi Rocks have a tragic connection that has forever linked them in rock and roll history. For most people, their only real knowledge of Hanoi Rocks has been the fact that Crüe frontman Vince Neil was convicted of vehicular manslaughter in 1984 after drunkenly plowing into another car while he and Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley were running out for more beer. Razzle was instantly killed; Neil got just 30 days in jail and five years’ probation after paying off the court with $2.5 million. Hanoi Rocks had been in Los Angeles for their first U.S. tour and were seemingly on the verge of worldwide stardom. Instead, they broke up six months later and never reached the heights of fame enjoyed by those they had clearly inspired and influenced, while Mötley Crüe became, well, Mötley Crüe.
Another example of two roads diverging with very different outcomes can be seen in comparing Pamela Anderson’s story with that of Bobbie Brown. Pam and Bobbie’s paths first crossed when they appeared together on Married With Children in 1991 as Al Bundy’s dream girls during a fantasy sequence (of course)--that’s Pam in front to the left and Bobbie in front to the right. Bobbie was and is still best known for her role in the infamous “Cherry Pie” video, the Warrant song that came to be after a music executive told lead singer and songwriter Jani Lane to write a song “kind of sexy and campy…like “Love In An Elevator!”” Bobbie and Jani fell in love on the set of the video and had a quickie rock and roll marriage and divorce.
Bobbie was a hugely successful model and video vixen who just never broke all the way through, in part because of a crippling drug addiction. She eventually met and got engaged to Tommy Lee, on whom she’d had a crush since junior high, and they were still engaged when Tommy and Pamela met and married--Pam & Tommy didn’t mention that, but Pam herself reminds Tommy of that fact in Tommy’s memoir Tommyland, and Bobbie has A LOT to say about it in her own memoir, Dirty Rocker Boys. It’s an INCREDIBLY dishy and gossipy read and this Vice review sums it up well: “If you have longed for a new season of Rock of Love that would never come, or perhaps even just love hearing about simpler times when casual sex, hard partying, and nose drugs were all just part of a chill Tuesday night, then this, my friend, is the book for you.” Bobbie also starred in the reality show Ex-Wives of Rock along with Tommy Lee’s sister Athena and Vince Neil’s ex-wife, and you can see her chatting with them, the late great Tawny Kitaen, and many more on Bobbie’s YouTube channel.
The Tape is how a lot of people came to figure out that, to quote that awful song from Avenue Q that I’m begging everyone to never again sing at karaoke, if karaoke ever happens again, “the internet is for porn.” In an excerpt from his book The Players Ball: A Genius, a Con Man, and the Secret History of the Internet’s Rise, David Kushner discussed how the con man in question, Stephen Cohen, stole the domain sex[dot]com and proceeded to make a bunch of money not from subscribers, but from selling banner ads for up to $30,000 per ad. Yep, internet porn popularized and revolutionized…the use of banner ads.
There were other surprise entrepreneurs, including Beth Mansfield, a single mom and unemployed accountant who heard of people making money online from porn and decided to create a censored directory to pornographic sites of the internet (she had lots of f*cks to give.) She named it Persian Kitty after her own pet cat and people were soon paying her to have their sites listed on her site. Per Kushner, “Something about the mystique of the name, the idea that a woman was behind the site, went viral—even more so because Mansfield kept her real identity anonymous.” Where’s her biopic?! Another woman, stripper Danni Ashe, started one of the very first subscription sites, Danni’s Hard Drive, which premiered just after The Wall Street Journal’s online subscription option and made $2.5 million a year charging subscribers $15 a month and “reportedly using more bandwidth than all of Central America.” What a world!
Link Round-Up!
No survey of wronged women of the 90s is complete without Tonya Harding, whose travails are well-documented in Sarah Marshall’s definitive Believer piece, “Remote Control”, and dramatized in the Academy Award-winning I, Tonya (like Pam and Tommy, co-starring Sebastian Stan, this time as Tonya’s abusive ex-husband and assault conspirator Jeff Gillooly).
For the podcast lovers out there, we recommend You’re Wrong About’s series on Nicole Brown Simpson & OJ Simpson, and their episode on Anna Nicole Smith. Karina Longworth’s series Dead Blondes on You Must Remember This is also well worth a listen. All of these suggestions fall into a category we call Extremely Sad and Incredibly Tragic; you’ll learn interesting facts worthy of sharing with your friends, but keep a hanky handy, because none of these stories are happy ones.
We’ll close out this issue with another thing we don’t feel nostalgic about at all: Woodstock ‘99, at which every revolting feature of white lad culture – then in the midst of a dark teatime of the soul thanks to the rise of boy bands – was so fully on display that even at the time, we could see that it was awful. HBO’s documentary about the misbegotten festival, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage is sufficiently harrowing that as fascinating as it is, we can’t quite recommend it; this one is for completists only. Dame Sophie couldn’t even get past the 45-minute mark.
Two Bossy Dames is brought to you by:
Dame Sophie’s dead helpful and only lightly unhinged explainer on the new season of Netflix’s docuseries Formula 1: Drive To Survive – trust me on this one, folks, it’s a wild ride and you might just love it!
This teaser trailer for next year’s season of Drive to Survive (that is, if Dame Sophie has anything to say about it!)
A hard turn into serious territory, with The NYT’s most recent Close Read feature, by poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert – combining poetry, history (human and art), and the unique pleasure, anguish, and clarity of revisiting something you love over years and years of your life. It’s exquisite. May we all be so lucky as to have many more decades to revisit and reconsider art that we love.
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