How a Spooky Encounter With the Supernatural Convinced Mötley Crüe To Change Their Album Name

Even rock stars get spooked sometimes, which is exactly why Mötley Crüe changed its album name from Shout with the Devil to Shout at the Devil. The rock band’s sophomore album was already ripe for pearl-clutchers to protest the record’s satanic implications, but after an unnerving encounter with the supernatural at bassist Nikki Sixx’s home.

To be fair, the band might have kept their original title had it not been for their A&R rep, Tom Zutaut, who had a healthy fear and respect for otherworldly things he couldn’t fully understand.

The Spooky Encounter That Caused Mötley Crüe To Change Their Album Name

According to the rock band’s 2001 memoir The Dirt, A&R rep Tom Zutaut was always uncomfortable with his clients’ artistic direction for their sophomore album. Sure, they had a reputation to uphold after the release of their 1981 Too Fast for Love. But for Zutaut, leaning into satanic imagery was too far.

At first, Nikki Sixx pushed back against Zutaut’s hesitations. The A&R rep recalled in The Dirt that the bassist said the only reason he leaned into this type of occult imagery was because it “looks cool.” “It’s meaningless symbols and s***,” Zutaut remembered Sixx saying. “I’m just doing it to p*** people off.” While this argument might have worked at first, it became a moot point after an unsettling encounter at Sixx’s home.

“I swear to God I saw this with my own eyes,” Zutaut said in the memoir. “A knife and fork rose off the table and stuck into the ceiling just above where I was sitting. I looked at Nikki and freaked out. ‘There is no more “Shout With the Devil.” If you keep shouting with the devil, you’re going to get killed.”

“I truly believe that Nikki had tapped into something evil, something more dangerous than he could control,” Zutaut continued, “that was on the verge of seriously hurting him. Nikki must have realized the same thing because he decided on his own to change the album title to Shout at the Devil.”

The Band’s Original Intentions Vary Depending Who You Ask

While it’s hard to deny any religious implications with an album called Shout at the Devil that features a pentagram on the cover, that wasn’t the original intention of the album, according to some members. Per Nikki Sixx, the album was about earthly evils—namely, corrupt politicians and public figures. The use of the devil played into Sixx’s fascination with macabre imagery and the coincidental fact that then-President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s three names all had six letters (as in 666).

In a 1984 interview, vocalist Vince Neil backed up his bandmate’s claims that their sophomore album was a denouncement of evil, not a celebration of it. “That’s why we put the pentagram right on the front [of the album],” Neil said. “If you stand in the middle of it, the evil can’t get in to you.”

Regardless of whether the band wanted to condone or perpetuate the evil powers that be, we’d wager a bet that we’d be willing to change an album name if we felt like it had something to do with the cutlery floating before our very eyes, too.

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