Search Results - Mick Mars

After his family relocated from Indiana, to California, Robert Deal dropped out of high school and began playing guitar in a series of unsuccessful blues based rock bands throughout the seventies, taking on menial day jobs to make ends meet. After nearly a decade of frustration with the California music scene, Deal reinvented himself, changing his stage name to Mick Mars and dyeing his hair jet black, hoping for a fresh start. In April 1981 he put in a want ad in the Los Angeles The Recycler newspaper, describing himself as a "loud, rude, and aggressive guitar player". Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee contacted him and after hearing him play decided he would be their guitarist. Upon Tommy's prodding, they persuaded a former high school friend of Tommy's and local Rockandi singer/frontman Vince Neil to join. It was Mick's suggestion that the band be called Mötley Crüe, a name that had stuck in his head from his days as a member of a band called White Horse. One of his band managers walked into the room and called them "...a motley-looking crew."

Unlike many of the hard rock/heavy metal guitarists of his era, Mars' guitar style is steeped in the blues tradition. He employs frequent use of a metal slide in his soloing and takes on both the rhythm and lead guitar duties of the band. In the studio and live, Mars frequently tunes his guitar down a whole step to get a stronger and crunchier rhythm sound. The altered tuning also increases string slack to enable his characteristic hammer-on trills, pitch bending, and pinch harmonics during soloing. Mars has introduced the pedal steel guitar to many of Mötley Crüe's later recordings and live sets. In addition, Mars has taken an increasingly critical role in songwriting for the band, coming up with many of Mötley Crüe's best known riffs.

For the sum of his career with Mötley Crüe, Mars has created the aura of being a somewhat mysterious figure, letting the other members of the band speak for him in public and in print, despite being the eldest and most articulate member of the band. In what public interviews he has conducted, Mars often comes off as a very reserved and somewhat quiet individual, though not shy by any means. A home video made in 1984 and posted publicly on the web by one of his former White Horse bandmates reveals Mars to be a rather jovial, wisecracking, down-to-Earth person.