Piece Of Your Action: Motley Crue’s Raw Statement From 1981
Piece Of Your Action arrived before the world knew Motley Crue’s name, and it announced them like a threat.
The year was 1981, and four young men in Hollywood were operating without a label, without management, and without anyone’s permission.
They pressed copies of Too Fast for Love on their own Leathur Records imprint and handed them out at gigs on the Sunset Strip.
Piece Of Your Action was one of the tracks that made people stop and listen.
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Quick Navigation
- What Piece Of Your Action Says About Early Motley Crue
- Too Fast for Love and the Birth of the Crue
- Piece Of Your Action and the Sound of the Sunset Strip
- Breaking Down the Song
- The Official Audio
- Piece Of Your Action Among the Band’s Earliest Tracks
- How the Song Holds Up Live
- Piece Of Your Action and the Too Fast for Love Legacy
- Why It Still Hits
What Piece Of Your Action Says About Early Motley Crue
Piece Of Your Action captures the band in their most unfiltered state.
There is nothing polished or calculated in its delivery.
The track runs on the raw energy of a band that had everything to prove and no safety net beneath them.
Nikki Sixx was already shaping the Crue’s sound with riff-first instincts and a lyrical bluntness that left no room for subtlety.
Piece Of Your Action carries that bluntness in every bar, the sound of young men who were hungry, competitive, and absolutely certain they deserved more than what the world had handed them so far.
The original Too Fast for Love pressing on Leathur Records was limited to approximately 1,000 copies, making it one of the rarest and most sought-after items in Motley Crue’s entire catalog.
Too Fast for Love and the Birth of the Crue
The story of Too Fast for Love is the story of a band betting on themselves before anyone else would.
The album was recorded and released in 1981 under the band’s own Leathur Records label, with a pressing of roughly 1,000 copies distributed through word of mouth and sold at shows.
That original version was raw, live-sounding, and entirely self-funded.
Elektra Records took notice of the growing buzz around the band and signed them in 1982, re-releasing the album with new production from Tom Werman and a cleaned-up mix that brought the songs to a wider audience.
The bones of those songs, including Piece Of Your Action, were already strong enough to carry the upgrade without losing their edge.
The full history of that album is documented on the Too Fast for Love Wikipedia page.
Piece Of Your Action and the Sound of the Sunset Strip
Piece Of Your Action belongs to a very specific moment and place: Hollywood in 1981, where a wave of hard rock bands were competing for the same small cluster of clubs and the same small cluster of loyal fans.
The Crue came up through the Starwood and the Whisky a Go Go, building a following that showed up in leather and studs long before the band had any label support.
Mick Mars answered a newspaper ad to become the band’s guitarist, and his arrival gave the Crue a sonic weight that set them apart from many of their Strip contemporaries.
Piece Of Your Action benefits from that weight directly.
The riff is not a gesture at heaviness; it is the real thing, built by a guitarist who had spent years developing a voice that was immediately recognizable.
Breaking Down the Song
The song opens with a riff that drops like a boot heel on concrete.
Mars keeps it simple, which is exactly the right call: the power comes from commitment to the groove rather than any attempt to show off.
Vince Neil delivers the vocal with a cocky ease that fits the lyrical tone perfectly.
The chorus is built for a small room full of people who already knew every word.
Tommy Lee‘s drumming is locked in and aggressive, not yet the arena-scale showmanship that came later but already more than capable of driving a crowd.
The whole track runs under four minutes and wastes none of them.
When Elektra Records signed Motley Crue and re-released Too Fast for Love in 1982, the album was re-recorded and remixed under producer Tom Werman, giving the songs a cleaner sound while preserving the raw energy that had built the band’s Sunset Strip following.
The Official Audio
Listen to the original Piece Of Your Action below.
Piece Of Your Action Among the Band’s Earliest Tracks
Piece Of Your Action sits alongside Live Wire as one of the defining moments on Too Fast for Love.
Both tracks carry the same street-level energy, the sense of a band performing with total commitment to every note.
Where Live Wire opens the album like a lit fuse, Piece Of Your Action settles deeper into the record and rewards the listener who sticks with it.
Together they form the backbone of a debut that still sounds urgent more than four decades later.
The Crue would go on to write bigger choruses and more commercially polished material, but Piece Of Your Action represents something those later songs could not always match: the sound of a band with nothing to lose.
How the Song Holds Up Live
Early Motley Crue shows were built around songs like Piece Of Your Action.
The band’s reputation in Hollywood was earned night after night with performances that were physical, loud, and completely committed to winning over every single person in the room.
Piece Of Your Action translated directly from studio to stage because its power was never about studio tricks.
It was about four people playing together with purpose.
When the band revisited early material in later years, the track held up because its architecture is simple enough to survive any production era.
For everything that has happened since, the full arc of the band is explored at the complete Motley Crue members story.
Piece Of Your Action and the Too Fast for Love Legacy
Piece Of Your Action endures because Too Fast for Love endures.
The album is now understood as a foundational document of the Los Angeles hard rock scene that would produce some of the most commercially successful rock music of the 1980s.
What the Crue built in 1981 on a shoestring and a conviction that they were destined for more laid the groundwork for everything that followed: the arena tours, the multi-platinum albums, and the cultural moment that made them one of the best-selling rock acts of their era.
Piece Of Your Action was there at the beginning of all of it, before the limos and the sold-out arenas, when the band was still loading their own gear into clubs and hoping the electricity stayed on.
The band’s official home at motley.com continues to serve fans following every chapter of the story that started with this album.
Mick Mars was noticeably older than the other members of Motley Crue when the band formed, born in 1951 compared to the others who were born in the late 1950s and early 1960s, yet his experience and guitar tone were exactly what the younger members needed to complete the sound they were building.
Why It Still Hits
Piece Of Your Action does not need context to land.
You can hear it for the first time today and feel exactly what the crowd at the Starwood felt in 1981: that this band meant it.
That quality is the rarest thing in rock music and the hardest to manufacture.
Motley Crue would spend the next decade proving it was not a fluke, but Piece Of Your Action is where the proof of concept began, and it remains one of the most honest things the band ever recorded.
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Own the record that started it all with the Motley Crue Too Fast for Love album on Amazon.