Sixx vs Hendrix (or Murder Most Foul!)

A friend of mine recently commented on a social media post comparing the lyrics of Mötley Crüe’s “Too Young To Fall In Love” with Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe”. I felt compelled to respond and, for those of you know me, the chance to avoid any semblance of brevity was far too hard to resist! 

Let’s rewind. 

I recently covered the album “Shout at the Devil” by Mötley Crüe on “The Ultimate Catalogue Clash” (UCC), a podcast I co-host with my pal and podcasting polymath (podymath?), Corey Morissette. 

The format of this show is that we review each song on one side of an album, per episode, and award it a score out of 25, with 10 points for music, 10 for lyrics, and 5 for production. Because of this method of dissection, both Corey and I frequently find ourselves giving scores to songs that are much lower than our overall enjoyment of it. Of course, because of the entertainment aspect of the show, we do allow some personal bias in here and there, because it’s much more fun to bicker sometimes than to take a very dry, academic approach to the conversation. 

Our review of “Shout at the Devil” came in a season when we’ve also covered Def Leppard’s “Pyromania”, Quiet Riot’s “Metal Health” and Kiss’s “Lick It Up”. These are not bands I grew up listening to or loving and in the case of Sheffield’s finest; a band I’ve actively disliked for pretty much the entirety of the time I’ve been aware of them. “Pyromania” was also the first of the four that we reviewed, so it possibly coloured my approach to what was to come. 

Let’s rewind a little further.

I met Corey through listening to his exceptional flagship podcast, “And The Podcast Will Rock” (ATPWR), which broke down the entire Van Halen catalogue one song at a time. I also lifted his format wholesale for another of my podcasts, “Seaside Pod Review – A Queen podcast” (SPR). I was very lucky to be welcomed into the ATPWR community with open arms and have been a frequent guest on the show, offering my opinions on the music and often the lyrics of a whole host of Van Halen songs, including those during the tenures of David Lee Roth, Sammy Hagar, and yes, even “Apologies to Gary” Cherone. My “takes” on the show are balanced between offering any insights I can musically, to the best of my amateur ability, as well as adding in colour commentary and, hopefully humorous, teasing or fun-poking. Part of my persona in that universe is an exaggeration of my preference for Sammy Hagar as a singer vs David Lee Roth. 

Another frequent guest, listener and commenter in this community is a brilliant writer also from Saskatoon, but now based out of Calgary; Heath McCoy. Heath is a huge David Lee Roth fan and is much less a fan of a lot of the Hagar-era of the band due to the switch to a more pop/radio-friendly orientation both musically and lyrically. We disagree a lot on the show, but it’s all based on completely fair subjective positions on both sides I think. 

Fast forward again. 

Heath started listening to the UCC this season and has been consistently exasperated at my dismissive lack of regard for the work of Def Leppard, Quiet Riot, Kiss, and Mötley Crüe and as well as leaning into our manufactured “rivalry” that we indulge in gleefully in the ATPWR universe, has offered some more serious counterarguments to mine and supported the work on those four hair metal/hard rock/glam metal/cock rock albums (Corey and I are still not in agreement on what to call this subgenre).

I’m a huge fan of Heath’s writing, his ability to articulate an opinion, and back it with reasoned, impassioned arguments. We recently (Christmas) met up in person, with Corey, in Saskatoon and found that despite our musical differences, we get on very well and for my part, he’s a guy I thoroughly enjoyed jousting with intellectually. We just tend to be diametrically opposed when it comes to rock music a lot of the time! 

OK, you’re up to speed on context. Back to the Facebook comment, or part thereof, that Heath posted in defence of the “Shout at the Devil” album and specifically of the lyrics to “Too Young To Fall in Love”. Here is the part of his response to our two episodes that gives context for the rest of this essay.

…the sentiment in his [Nikki Sixx] lyrics may read like juvenile delinquent fantasies scrawled in the margins of a high school dropout’s text book – but he was the smartest delinquent in the class to be sure. I think there’s a lot of raw, honest writing in Nikki’s finer moments. Bathroom stall poetry, you might say. I goddamn love the lyrics to Shout at the Devil, and many of the songs on this album. “Now I’m killing you watch your face turning blue” on Too Young To Fall in Love … it’s not a pretty lyric or sentiment. By why should it be. Before we get too precious about it … blues, country, folk … they all have their murder ballads. “Hey Joe where you going with that gun in your hand? I’m going down to shoot my old lady, you know I caught her messing around with another man.” Why should rock be any different in this respect. Great lyrics.

Let’s start out by parsing out the lines that Heath is drawing a parallel with, performed by Jimi Hendrix in 1966 and Mötley Crüe in 1983 : 

“Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand? I’m going down to shoot my old lady, you know I caught her messing around with another man.”

“Not a woman, but a whore, I can taste the hate. Well, now I’m killing you, watch your face turning blue.”

First of all, we should state that Hendrix did not write Hey Joe, with original authorship difficult to pinpoint precisely. The song seems to have its roots in several different blues standards that Heath perfectly describes as “murder ballads”. These have long been a part of the blues tradition and especially Black musical culture. Also typically, murder ballads have tended to be written from the heterosexual male perspective. As the subject of the ballad is typically an unfaithful woman, the narrative is therefore most frequently domestic violence visited on a woman by a man. This is uncomfortable subject matter and one which should be approached cautiously and with an artistic integrity critical to any commentary on such topics. I will argue that where Hey Joe accomplishes this, Too Young To Fall In Love does not.

Jimi Hendrix grew up in poverty with parents who were alcoholics, was frequently abandoned to foster care, and was sexually abused as a boy. This man had a hard childhood that was not uncommon at all within the black community. The Jim Crow laws defined the cultural landscape of Hendrix’s youth and as a shy, quiet child, music became his refuge and he went on to be on of the most important musicians rock music has ever seen, inspiring and influencing every generation that came after him. 

Nikki Sixx, author of the lyrics to Mötley Crüe’s “Too Young To Fall In Love”, also had a difficult childhood in many ways. Abandoned by first his father than eventually his mother, his upbringing was stewarded by his grandparents. As many teens do, he rebelled by committing petty crime and generally misbehaving but also saw expulsion from school for selling drugs before being sent back to live with his mother in Seattle.

If we are to be generous, we could say that both men had similarly challenging formative circumstances from which to grow, and did not have the emotional tools that would ready them for a world of stardom and its attendant excess. This excess claimed the life of Hendrix at the tender age of 27, while Sixx was able to find his way out of addiction and is still an active touring musician. 

Those are the two men we’re talking about in regards to the lyrics we’re examining. Again, let’s be generous and say that given the fact that Hendrix covered Hey Joe, he must have, at the very least, have been comfortable singing them and we can assume therefore, comfortable with their content.

So let’s take a closer look at the lyrics of these songs with a little wider context of the surrounding lyrics.

“Hey Joe”

Hey Joe, where you goin’ with that gun of your hand?

Hey Joe, I said, where you goin’ with that gun in your hand? Oh

I’m goin’ down to shoot my old lady

You know I caught her messin’ ’round with another man, yeah

“Too Young to Fall In Love”

Run for the hills, we’re both sinners and saints

Not a woman, but a whore, I can taste the hate

Well, now I’m killing you, watch your face turning blue

Not yet a man, just a punk in the street

The first, and most glaring difference to me is the point of view from which both songs are sung. Hey Joe is written from the perspective of a neutral third party talking to the person committing the “crime of passion”. It’s observational. Too Young To Fall In Love (TYTFIL) is written from the first person perspective. It’s active. I would argue that this alone is critically important in establishing a difference between the two. Where Hey Joe takes a completely neutral stance on the murder of this unfaithful woman, there’s a very overt pleasure being expressed in TYTFIL. 

“Where you goin with that gun in your hand?” suggests that this woman is going to be shot and killed. This is an execution; a sentence passed for crimes committed with the punishment being swift and precise. “watch your face turning blue” – this is not swift, not precise, and there is an implied element of the sadistic enjoyment of the act. 

It’s also worth stating that the crimes of the female victim in TYTFIL are never explicitly documented. One could generously interpret “Not a woman, but a whore” as suggestive of infidelity, but in the context of the casual misogyny that pervades this subgenre, the crime could just as easily be flirting, dressing provocatively, or having an opinion about the New York Jets. Who knows? It’s also worth remembering that this isn’t the first song on this record that has a first person view of killing someone; “Out go the lights, in goes my knife, Pull out his life, consider that bastard dead. Get on your knees, please beg me, please”. By all accounts this song is written about a business partner who screwed over Sixx in some fashion. So revenge killing is very clearly justifiable here in the aesthetic that Mötley Crüe are constructing. Or take another lyric from Side Two, “I’m black, I’m black, I’m black and I’m primed for hate”. Hate is active, not passive. There is no dispassionate observation of domestic violence in TYTFIL, but an active and gleeful engagement with the act. This is a fundamental difference between the two songs.

I don’t think you could reasonably argue that Nikki Sixx is taking a nuanced approach to the murder ballad in this TYTFIL. He’s clumsily writing a deliberately nasty account of enjoying murdering a woman. In both songs, the punishment for the crime is monstrous and disproportionate to say the least, but in the case of Hey Joe, the scene is painted with very muted colours, where Sixx is using neon and lots and lots of hair spray to get his point across. 

“Hey Joe” is, as Heath points out, a murder ballad in the traditional form. “Too Young To Fall In Love” is at best, a clumsy attempt at this and at worst, a deeply troubling first person account of fantasizing about enjoying the act of murdering a woman and watching the life slip from her face.

There is simply no comparison to make here in my opinion. 

I don’t actually think for one second that Sixx is acting out any of his own fantasies. I suspect that he’s trying to be cool and project the “bad boy” image that was contrived by Mötley Crüe to appeal to a young male demographic that, today, we’d likely consider incel, or incel-adjacent. Any way you dress it up, it’s a slightly pathetic type of toxic masculinity that you’d hope we’d have moved past by 1983 and certainly by 2025. It’s a lyric that I doubt Sixx would write in 2025 but it’s most definitely not the only lyric of its type that was written in the early 80s. Gene Simmons sang (or shouted) gleefully about dancing on a woman’s face on the “Lick It Up” album, so it’s clear that this subgenre has issues with how it treats women. But for me, that only affords “Too Young To Fall In Love” a very tiny modicum of mitigation. This is not artful, clever, or emotionally-mature lyric writing, it’s base, puerile crap that simply doesn’t stand the test of time and shouldn’t be held as any sort of high water mark for artistry, in 1983, or 2025.

Do I take this stuff too seriously? Am I “getting precious”, to quote Heath’s comment? Possibly. Is “Too Young To Fall In Love” just a silly throwaway song on a glam metal album from the 80s? Of course. But when you’re making a direct comparison with one of the most powerful examples of the murder ballad in popular music, I think it’s worth putting on your serious pants and running some hard yards to pull that idea apart.  And that’s before you factor in the music that accompanies both songs (some of the greatest guitar playing of all time vs stock 80s fare!) 

As a last note, Heath will be joining Corey and I on The UCC this season to discuss the reasons we seem to find ourselves on opposite ends of the rock spectrum this season. It will be a highly enjoyable conversation I’m sure and one that I hope people will enjoy! I look forward to Heath’s response to this essay, should he choose to write one.

If you’re interested in checking out Heath’s writing, you can find most of his recent articles on his LinkedIn page.

If you’re at all a wrestling fan, you should definitely check out his superb book on Stampede Wrestling and his contribution to a book on the Chris Benoit story. You can find those here:

And if you’re interested in hearing Corey and I discuss “Too Young To Fall In Love”, you can check out the episode here!