Steel Panther singer Michael Starr sat down with Hear 2 Zen Magazine and talked about the band’s upcoming tour.
Mötley Crüe guitarist John 5 will be joining Steel Panther on this tour. After the interviewer mentioned the beef between him and Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx and if he has made a secret agreement with John 5 about it, the rocker responded: “I don’t really know. John and I really haven’t spoken too much since he joined Motley but I don’t know.”
“I don’t think that Nikki would care if we talked about Mötley Crüe but I don’t know, we’ll see,” he added. “We’re planning on doing a bunch of Mötley Crüe songs with John on the tour, so that should be really cool. I’m sure Nikki will like that a lot.”
The news of John 5 joining the band for the tour came a few years after the beef. The drama started when Sixx called Steel Panther a ‘wanna be’ band after Starr joked about Crüe singer Vince Neil during an interview. Sixx responded by telling Starr to ‘go f*ck himself’ and labeled the band ‘backstabbers.’
“Sounds like someone needs some f*cking attention,” Steel Panther drummer Stix Zadinia responded to Sixx.
In an interview later, the singer explained that the feud calmed down. “I follow Nikki Sixx and Vince Neil on social media and I’ve been liking stuff because he likes to post stuff from back in the day.”
“Hopefully that thing was just like a blip in the heavy metal news,” he added. “I think if we were to run into each other, I would totally be, ‘What’s up, dude?’ The last thing I want to do is have a band that influenced my musical taste and direction be mad at me. But sometimes there’s really nothing you can do about that kind of stuff. You just have to live with it.”
Four years after the comments, the singer said in an interview that he wasn’t interested in burying hatchets.
“Well, I’m not in the business of burying hatchets with people that have resentment towards me, ’cause that’s on them, dude,” he said when asked if he ‘buried the hatchet’ with people that didn’t like his band. “Anybody you usually run into is not going to confront you and go, ‘Hey, man, I hate your band.’ They’ll just either ignore you or go, ‘Hey, what’s up, bro?’ So, whoever doesn’t like the band — everybody is entitled to their own opinion.”
Steel Panther’s tour with John 5 starts on October 12 at San Jacinto, California. The tour is scheduled to wrap up on December 13 in Orlando, Florida.