Trying to fit a singer as distinctive as Vince Neil into an ill-fitting box is a recipe for disaster. Nevertheless, the rest of Motley Crue tried to do just that while making Generation Swine. Ultimately it became an album Neil hated. Find out why, below.
Videos by American Songwriter
Despite amassing a mammoth amount of fame in the ’80s, Neil was ousted by the band (Though his bandmates claimed he left of his own volition) in the early ’90s. Generation Swine was primed as Neil’s big comeback for the group after the split. According to Neil, it was less of a bang and more of a whimper.
“I hated that record,” Neil once said. “I still hate that record. [There are] no good songs on it. And I told them, I go, ‘This record sucks.'”
A large contributing factor to Neil’s opinion on the album was that it was tailored to the singer who held his spot: John Corabi. It failed to live up to Neil’s earlier successes with the group. In fact, the album was so tough to complete that Neil considered leaving the band again before all was said and done.
“I didn’t want to do those songs,” Neil once said. “I didn’t want to be there. I probably quit five more times while we were recording. It was a tough record to make.”
If anything, Generation Swine gets some points for being Neil’s first album after returning to the band. It may not be a shining moment in the band’s catalog, but it was a necessary one, we suppose. In terms of what brought Neil back to the group, he said it was somewhat of a necessity.
“Well, when Motley went out [on tour with Corabi as the band’s singer], their tickets stopped selling,” Neil said. “I was doing pretty good. But I wasn’t selling out places. I was opening for guys. And so their manager called me up and said, ‘We’d like to meet with you in New York.’ So I flew to New York and sat there and talked to them. And it took a while for me to say ‘okay.’ But I finally gave in.”
Revisit Generation Swine, below. What do you think? Is it as bad as Neil makes it out to be?
Photo by Ross Halfin / Courtesy Big Machine Records
