Steel Panther singer Michael Starr recently spoke with Hear 2 Zen Magazine about the band’s upcoming tour.
Mötley Crüe guitarist John 5 will join Steel Panther for this tour. When the interviewer mentioned the conflict between Starr and Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx and asked if he had made any special arrangements with John 5 about it, Starr said, “I don’t really know. John and I really haven’t spoken too much since he joined Mötley, 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 conflict. It started when Sixx referred to Steel Panther as a ‘wanna be’ band after Starr joked about Crüe singer Vince Neil during an interview. Sixx told Starr to ‘go f*ck himself’ and called the band ‘backstabbers.’
“Sounds like someone needs some f*cking attention,” Steel Panther drummer Stix Zadinia responded to Sixx at the time.
Later, Starr mentioned that the feud had 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 first comments, Starr said in an interview that he wasn’t interested in resolving issues. “Well, I’m not in the business of burying hatchets with people that have resentment towards me, ’cause that’s on them, dude,” he stated when asked if he had ‘buried the hatchet’ with people who 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 kicks off on October 12 in San Jacinto, California, and is set to end on December 13 in Orlando, Florida.
