Guitarist Mick Mars files lawsuit against fellow Mötley Crüe members for trying to oust him

According to the other members of Mötley Crüe, Mick Mars quit when he backed out of touring

By Gabrielle Sanchez | April 7, 2023 | 5:02pm

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Guitarist Mick Mars files lawsuit against fellow Mötley Crüe members for trying to oust him

Vince Neil, Mick Mars, and Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue in 2014 Photo: Ethan Miller

Things with the Mötley Crüe are getting messy, which can only be expected when you pull your name from a phrase describing a disharmonious mixture of people. Guitarist Mick Mars filed a lawsuit against his (possibly former) band members yesterday in Los Angeles County’s Superior Court, claiming the band has wrongfully pushed him out of business proceedings and tried to “gaslight” him concerning his playing abilities.

In the filing, Mars spills the beans about the group’s most recent 36-date tour and the deeply entrenched divide between him and the other musicians.

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In October of 2022, Mars released a press statement “Mick will continue as a member of the band, but can no longer handle the rigors of the road.” Mars has long suffered from Ankylosing Spondylitis—a chronic and inflammatory form of arthritis—which has worsened over the last few years. According to the other members of Motley Crue, this public announcement effectively served as his resignation, unbeknownst to him.

“How did Mars’s brothers of 41 years respond to Mars’s tragic announcement?” Mars’ lawsuit reads, per Entertainment Weekly. “They noticed an emergency shareholders’ meeting for the band’s main corporate entity in order to throw Mars out of the band, to fire him as a director of the corporation, to fire him as an officer of the corporation, and to take away his shares of the corporation. When he did not go away quietly, they purported to fire him from six additional band corporations and LLCs.”

“After the last tour, Mick publicly resigned from Mötley Crüe,” Sasha Frid, the band’s attorney, tells Variety. “Despite the fact that the band did not owe Mick anything—and with Mick owing the band millions in advances that he did not pay back—the band offered Mick a generous compensation package to honor his career with the band. Manipulated by his manager and lawyer, Mick refused and chose to file this ugly public lawsuit.”

Despite his effort to pull back from extensive touring, Mars says he was still willing to record with the band and take on smaller residency performances.

However: “Retiring from touring is resigning from the band,” says Frid. “The band’s primary function is to tour and perform concerts. And as you saw from the amendment, if a shareholder resigns, he cannot receive any compensation from touring—which is what Mick is trying to get. It’s clear-cut that Mick is not entitled to any more money.”

It’s been a longstanding agreement between the Mötley Crüe members to equally split business and touring profits. Following Mars’ announcement, he says his bandmates swiftly sought to push him out, reducing his share from 25 percent to 5 percent. Additionally, Mars would not earn any profit from work done with his replacement (which makes sense, yeah?).

Business matters aside, the guitarist lays out an entirely different issue concerning onstage playing and touring. Mars alleges his fellow bandmates, including bassist Nikki Sixx “did not play a single note on bass during the entire U.S. tour” they embarked on in 2022.

“Ironically, 100% of Sixx’s bass parts were nothing but recordings,” the filing claims. “Sixx was seen fist pumping in the air with his strumming hand, while the bass part was playing.”

However, his bandmates and touring crew say that he was the one unable to meet the performance expectations, forgetting chords and missing cues on stage on the 2022 tour.

“Equally unfortunate are his claims about the band’s live performances,” Frid tells Variety. “Mötley Crüe always performs its songs live, but during the last tour, Mick struggled to remember chords, played the wrong songs and made constant mistakes which led to his departure from the band. There are multiple declarations from the band’s crew attesting to his decline.”

Other members of the band’s crew back these claims, with Mötley Crüe’s longtime production manager Robert Long stating, “When he is off, the band’s entire performance suffers. Mick’s performance during the Stadium Tour was unworkable and very difficult to manage. It began with the band’s rehearsals in April 2022. Mick would consistently forget chords and songs so the band would have to stop and re-teach those parts to Mick to remind him of the arrangements.

He continues, “Mick’s performance issues continued throughout the tour. He would consistently miss notes; play out of tune; play the wrong chords during a song; stay within a chorus of a song and never come out of it; forget the song that he was playing and start a different one; and would get lost in songs. This happened at every show.”

The group’s monitor engineer, Scott Megrath, adds, “I had to make sure that the other band members would not get Mick’s feed into their earpieces because that would confuse them and potentially ruin the show. Mick’s mistakes happened on numerous occasions and at every show. In my years of experience, I have never seen mistakes like this by a guitarist on stage.”

Despite these testimonies, Mars claims in a not-yet-released interview with Variety that “if he were asked to play any of the band’s songs on the spot, without preparation, he could play them all perfectly, from memory.”