Home Sweet Home Motley Crue Best Power Ballad Of All Time

We recorded a cover of Home Sweet Home by Motley Crue. This was as ton of fun and also was the first time we demo’d the Aston Stealth Microphone. I have a full review of this microphone coming shortly but in short… Wow!!! It’s a fantastic Swiss Army knife for a studio. Other than that all guitars were recorded on a Hughes & Kettner Grandmeister Deluxe 40 and my super cheap Ibanez RGAMF sumthin sumthin sumthin. But here’s the backstory if you’re interested if not just click the video… I think we did a pretty decent cover.

I was probably 12ish and I was just cutting my teeth on guitar and I had been playing drums to some degree for a couple of years but guitar called me hard. I was in Jr. High at that time and was listening to a ton of Van Halen, some Cinderella, I was just exploring and it was great. As a kid that loved music there was so much of it to consume and it was all so good as an aspiring guitar player/drummer.

I started hanging out with this kid, and I don’t remember his name but he lived in basically a foster home. He called it a halfway house but it was I now believe by definition a foster home type thing. Huge house lots of rooms and kids his age living in different rooms. And a staff that took care of them.

This dude I was hanging with was the poster child of teenage dirtballs in the most accurate sense. He smoked, had a chain wallet, carried a knife, had acne, drank. Never seemed hostile, he just clearly had a rough very early start to his life. He was what my parents told me to stay away from. I later learned that was EXACTLY the type of person I not only preferred to hang out with but was myself to some degree. So, he asked me if I would come over after school one day. My mom, never really looked for me after school and in all seriousness would have much rather I lived in one of the group/foster home type places.

He found out I was a guitar player and took interest. I didn’t really know this kid so it was a weird time, a coming of age type of thing I suppose. It was either my 1st or 2nd year of Jr. High and as you know you just spent all your young years in elementary school with the same group of kids then all of a sudden you’re combined with a ton of other kids. But either way I wanted to check out his tunes. He promised he had a sweet Iron Maiden collection so I was down. And as long as I didn’t get shanked it was a win in my book.

At some point he asks me if I heard of Motley Crue and I had. He asked if I heard Home Sweet Home… I hadn’t so he put it on. My exposure to Motley Crue at that point was all the Girls Girls Girls album. That came out in 1987 my freshman year was 88 so we had to be in that time. I had heard ballads before but I don’t remember hearing one that seemed to, at my young age, tell a story or have a purpose. And I certainly hadn’t heard one with that kind of power. It was… A Power Balled. And a bad ass one at that.

For some reason that day stuck with me for the rest of my life. One of those memories that is just burned into your head for the rest of your life. I have a lot of those obscure replays. But, I often wonder what happened to that dude and I don’t even remember his name. We didn’t really hang out much but he played me Home Sweet Home at a time when my mental memorex tape heads were apparently working at peak performance. And I remember how he told me how much that song meant to him. But for him it was because he didn’t have a real home.

So I wanted to cover it and I wanted it to sound good as it really was a staple of my youth. I was fortunate to have my homie Clint to record who really should quit dicking around a be a damn rock star already….. Take a listen and let me know what you think….