Mötley Crüe’s former frontman John Corabi recently sat down with Eddie Trunk and talked about the early 2000s, when he was playing for Ratt. John shared his thoughts about the inner dynamics of the group, especially between Bobby Blotzer and Warren DeMartini:
“I love Warren, Bobby, Juan, uh, even Carlos, Robbie Crane, like everybody that’s been involved in things. Jizzy, you know, Stephen, but it’s crazy, dude. Like we used to laugh. We would go out, we would show up at rehearsal and they would say, ‘Oh yeah, rehearsal at 12.’ And we’d get in there and we’d start setting our gear up and then Bobby and Warren would start going at it about the tempos of the song, and it would just go on and on.”
Corabi continued by telling that it’s become a casual thing for the other members, and he implied that the duo’s argument would take longer than a trip to a restaurant:
“So I’d be sitting there with my guitar on and Crane sitting there, and then Crane would go, ‘Hey dude, you want to go get a sandwich?’ I’m like, ‘Yep, okay.’ And we’d literally go get a sandwich, eat the sandwich at Subway or wherever we went, come back and they’d still be arguing about the same song.”
The frontman emphasised the group’s inability to work together, also explained how Mötley Crüe found a solution to work together despite their own group dynamics:
“And it’s just, it’s crazy to me. I love all those guys individually, but when you put them all together, they’re all like, it’s like this toxic, I don’t know what it is. Like they cannot function together. And I even told, I just saw Blotzer at Troy Patrick’s wedding a couple years ago, and I’m like, ‘Dude, Mötley’s figured it out. They just travel separately. Like, just do what you gotta do. Like put the band back together again. Get out there, like you said, I mean, I could have easily seen Ratt on that, you know, Mötley, Def Leppard, Poison, Ratt tour. It could have been awesome. And, but they can’t get out of their own way.”
Corabi joined Mötley Crüe in 1992 when the band parted ways with Vince Neil. His release from the band in 1997 was associated with the low sales of his EP ‘Quaternary.’ In 2022, Corabi talked about his departure, and said that it was due to Elektra Records’ decision:
“They were always cool to me. So Allen came to me and he said, ‘Here’s the deal, dude. No disrespect to you, but this isn’t what the record label paid for. His words were, ‘I don’t give a fuck if Paul McCartney was fronting this band – It’s not what they paid for. They want Vince Neil, or they’re doing nothing.’ I understood that. And, you know, that was that.”
After Mötley Crüe, he formed Union with Kiss’ Bruce Kulick, but 3 years later, the group quietly went into hiatus when Kulick joined Grand Funk Railroad and John started playing with Ratt until 2008.
You can listen to an excerpt from the interview below.