Motley Crue and Alice Cooper Talk Crue’s ‘Final Tour’

"We're talking about ending it at the stroke of midnight. When they drop the ball, they drop the ball on us."

So says Nikki Sixx in a joint conversation with Rolling Stone between Motley Crue and Alice Cooper, musing on the way his band's farewell tour could conclude at the end of its last leg on Dec. 31, 2015. "We've got to do something way over the top and stupid. That's the last show. That's our hometown where we started, you know?"

No matter what happens, drummer Tommy Lee is insistent that the tour will go out with a bang. As he put it during the interview, "We'll come up with something f---ing insane for sure."

End-of-tour theatrics aside, Cooper feels like his joint jaunt with the Crue gives every audience its money's worth. "The synergy of the two bands is so good because they're both bands who bring it every night. We're from the old school of, 'Don't just get up there and play the song. Sell the song. Kill the audience,'" he explained. "It's becoming a lost art. The bands I'm seeing now are just so tired and so boring. What happened? Why don't they want to be rock stars?"

Part of that attack on concert boredom is, of course, Lee's roller-coaster drum set, which he admitted still gives him pause. "I'm used to it now, but there are still moments. The peak of the coaster is about 60 feet off the ground, and it's f---ing scary up there," he explained, adding that on his first ride, he dropped an aluminum drumstick to see how long it would take to hit the floor. "It was literally like [opens hands and waits six seconds while all laugh] dink dink on the arena floor. I was like, 'Holy s---.'"

"I look at it every night backstage and go, 'Nope,'" laughed Cooper. "You can put me in a guillotine, but I'm not going on that thing."

And as for whether the band's just-released "final single," 'All Bad Things,' will actually serve as its swan song? "Who knows what happens in the future?" shrugged Sixx. "We decided to stop touring and take it one day at a time. We've got a movie coming. Who knows if we want to do music for that?"

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