Happy LDW from our Crue to Yours!

For those of you who aren't aware, this is the last and final tour of one of our favorite bands - Motley Crue.  When they made the announcement, Mike and I vowed that we wouldn't miss the show this summer, in fact, we even bought tickets for MULTIPLE different stops along the tour.  When Motley toured with KISS two summers ago, we missed the show because of some summer travels to Europe.  So when the final tour was set to make it's stop at PNC Bank Center, we made sure that we'd stay in town over Labor Day weekend 2014.

I only know one other couple who loves Motley Crue as much as we do, and that is the Novos.  It's hard to believe that just three summers ago, the four of us took on PNC for Motley as they toured with Poison.  Instead of cabs, trains and buses as our transportation to the event, we piled into the Jeep for a full day in New Jersey this year.  And this time, because it's the final tour - we all had meet & greets (part of the reason we had to arrive at PNC by 2:30 for an 8 o'clock show!).

Our meet & greet started with a backstage tour.  We were invited to see the stage to see the crew set up the instruments and all of the accompaniments for the show.  We saw the pentagram, Tommy's drum set, Nikki's base rig, and the remnants of the previous night's confetti scattered across the stage and road cases.  There was a little too much downtime in between our call time and when we got to meet the band.  The boys got antsy and the girls got tired feet, but by the time we could finish our beers, we got to head down to our special meet & greet area for our picture with the band!  Tommy was exempt from the pictures, which was annoying, but we got to shake hands and take snaps with one of our favorite bands of all time - and that was pretty priceless.

But before the headliner took the main stage, we headed to our seats for Alice Cooper.  Oh. My. GOSH the man is a legend!  I had never seen Alice before and it was such an amazing spectacular.  Every song was like an individual show.  There were snakes, there was fire, he turned himself into a giant Frankenstein, there was a guillotine, there was money thrown across the stage, there were swords, and there were costumes galore. Probably as impressive as Alice was his kick ass female lead guitarist who quickly became my idol...in life.  Every minute of every song was completely and utterly entertaining.  The man is 66 years old, and he's pretty much the father of Halloween.  It was such a great experience and I can't believe it took me this long in life to see the man.  And I don't care if you think the song is over played or cliche, it's pretty magical when Alice get's into "School's out for Summer"!

And of course there was Motley!  We didn't get to see the full roller coaster ordeal that Tommy does over the crowd because we were in an arena venue, which was a little upsetting, but they played a set list of all our favorite songs.  And even though Mick looks like a meek little skeleton, he can still shred and he's pretty freakin unbelievable.  But our seats were the most ridiculous part of the day.  Just three rows away from the action, the heat, the sweat, and yes...the spit (Nikki likes to spit a lot).  Such an amazing view, and prime real estate for catching little trinkets from the stage!

To avoid the New Jersey traffic, we left a few songs early, but we didn't feel terrible because, guess what????  We get another chance to stay until the very last song when we go see Motley and Alice AGAIN at MSG IN OCTOBER!  Oh yes, there will be pictures and updates (and maybe even costumes if we can manage to coordinate!) from that leg of the tour as well.  But this day was definitely one for the books folks.  A meet & greet with one of our favorite bands, our first time seeing Alice Cooper together, a lovely evening of weather in August, a 3-day weekend to recover, but most importantly, a perfect Saturday with our favorite concert buddies.  Thank you to my amazing husband for hooking us up for a once-in-a-lifetime day, for all the unnecessary (albeit awesome & super metal) Motley/Alice merchandise, and for literally thinking of EVERYTHING to pack for our little concert tailgate.  I can't wait until the four of us do it one last time in October!