Motley Crue Announce Tour With Def Leppard & Poison

Motley Crue Announce Tour With Def Leppard & Poison After Details Leak on Howard Stern Show

The band’s “explosive” tour announcement was moved up several weeks after The Black Crowes’ manager blabbed about it during a radio appearance.
If loose lips sink ships, does talking to Stern make a contract burn?

Sources close to Mötley Crüe say their explosive reunion announcement Monday (Nov. 18) — where they blew up a contract signed during their final tour — came a bit earlier than expected, after The Black Crowes manager Mark DiDia blabbed about the tour on The Howard Stern Show last week.

The band had been planning a reunion announcement for the first week of December, followed a week later with news they would be touring stadiums in 2020 with Def Leppard and Poison. But that plan was uprooted last week during an appearance on Stern’s Wrap-Up show when DiDia shared the Motley news while discussing the Crowes reunion tour after about five years apart.

“There’s a Motley Crue, Poison, Def Leppard tour coming, there’s a Rage Against the Machine … AC/DC’s coming. There’s a lot of rock coming out next year,” DiDia said during the appearance. “Rock doesn’t stream, but there’s a thing that’s happening. I think people miss guitars and bass and drums.”

DiDia’s loose lips prompted the band to move up their announcement date, releasing a video narrated by Machine Gun Kelly (who played drummer Tommy Lee in the Netflix film The Dirt), in which they blow up the “Cessation of Touring Agreement” the band signed on Jan. 24, 2014, that they said prevented them from touring after their farewell tour wrapped in 2015.

The details of the contract were not made public at the time, although Lee made statements that suggested the band would be legally prevented from getting back together. He said at a press conference, “We always had a vision of going out with a big fucking bang and not playing county fairs and clubs with one or two original band members.”

Bassist Nikki Sixx was more emphatic at the time, telling the media, “You guys in the press, you keep looking for the loophole. We’re gonna stick to our word.”

Of course that was before the successful Netflix biopic The Dirt released earlier this year, starring Machine Gun Kelly as Lee, Douglas Booth as Sixx, Daniel Webber as Vince Neil and Iwan Rheon as Mick Mars.

Dates for the Crue’s tour will be announced in the coming days and if it looks anything like the band’s last tour in 2014 and 2015, the group could be in for some seven and possibly eight-figure grosses. The last stop on Final Tour in Los Angeles brought more than 37,000 hometown fans to the Staples Center for three shows generating $2.7 million in ticket sales at the end of 2015.

The Final Tour is believed to have grossed north of $100 million according to industry sources, while tour mate Def Leppard’s run last year with Journey also passed the nine-figure mark, making Motley’s 2020 run with fellow glam rockers Poison potentially one of the biggest rock runs of the year.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/touring/8544100/motley-crue-tour-def-leppard-poison-howard-stern