Motley Crue - Too Fast for Love

Nobody knew it at the time, but the hair metal revolution started on November 10, 1981, when four kids crawled out of the Hollywood gutters and pressed 900 copies of their debut album on their own Leathür Records label. Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Nikki Sixx, and Tommy Lee had arrived on the Sunset Strip less as a band than as a gang, booking their own shows, doing their own promotion, and selling records out of the trunk of a car. Within four months they had moved 20,000 copies entirely through live performance and word of mouth, giving Elektra Records A&R man Tom Zutaut the ammunition he needed to sign them to their first major label deal.

Recorded in October 1981 at Hit City West in Hollywood and originally produced by Michael Wagener before being remixed by Roy Thomas Baker for the 1982 Elektra reissue, Too Fast For Love sounds exactly like what it was: four people playing as if someone might pull the plug at any moment. More punk than the polished glam metal they would later pioneer, the album draws from the Stooges, the New York Dolls, and the spirit of the Sunset Strip, filtered through a reckless Los Angeles attitude and an almost total disregard for what anyone else thought. "Live Wire," "Piece of Your Action," "Public Enemy No. 1," and the title track laid down a blueprint that countless bands would spend the next decade following.

The original Leathür pressing now sells for over a thousand dollars to collectors. The album eventually went platinum, the first of seven consecutive Mötley Crüe studio releases to achieve gold or platinum certification. This remastered edition brings the record back to vinyl sounding better than ever, a chance to hear exactly where one of the greatest careers in hard rock history began.