He wasn’t sure he wanted to do it anymore. So around 2003, amid a divorce and the cratering music business, John Corabi decided to take a hiatus from rock & roll.

“I was just fed up,” Corabi recalls now, “with, you know, the parameters of being an old guy in the music industry.” At the time, Corabi was in his early 40s and a guitarist in the latest version of Ratt, the ‘80s hard-rockers known for hits like “Round and Round” and “Lay It Down.”

Ten years earlier, he’d rocketed to fame as the new frontman for an even bigger ‘80s band, Motley Crue. Corabi’s raspy howl replaced original Crue singer Vince Neil’s peroxide shriek as the glam-metal stars tried to navigate the grunge era. This grittier-sounding version of Motley produced the top 10 rock-radio hit “Hooligan’s Holiday.” A 1994 Corabi-fronted self-titled Motley Crue album went gold, which would’ve been great if the band’s previous five albums had all gone platinum, including previous LP “Dr. Feelgood,” which moved more than 6 million copies.

Corabi was scapegoated. The suits panicked. The three original members reunited with Neil. Corabi rebounded to team with former Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick in a band called Union that made meat-and-potatoes rock in a market geared towards nu-metal and rap-rock. Back in the early ‘90s, Corabi had first generated buzz fronting The Scream, a lean-mean cult-favorite band from which he was plucked for Motley Crue.

Although Corabi was a singer, songwriter and guitarist of considerable talent, his music hadn’t ever connected in a massive way. “It was just one of those things where I was just sitting there going, what does a guy need to do? Is it the songs that I’m writing? Is it me that’s not connecting with people? Am I just unlucky?”

It was then Corabi ditched his guitar for a semitruck. He obtained his commercial driver’s license and became a long-hauler. “I didn’t tell anybody who I was, what I did, where I came from,” Corabi says. “I just went out and drove a truck. And I watched guys load and unload my truck, forklift operators and railroad operators and factory guys. I did that for about eight months, nine months and it really made me realize just how blessed I was.”

Even without the benefit of radio or media support anymore, Corabi could make more money in an hour playing music than his newfound blue-collar coworkers could in a week of busting ass. “It really made me really appreciate everything that I have,” Corabi says. “And it actually gave me a new outlook and a new perspective and love for playing music. I think it was good to step away from it for a minute and see how the people that are actually paying for the ticket live. And it really kind of made me go. You know what? Life is as it should be.”

He’s easy to root for, this John Corabi. A genuinely soulful cat. A raven-curls rock-god turned heavy-metal-hippie sage.

Corabi’s passion and talent is intact on a couple of recent solo singles. “Your Own Worst Enemy” is funky hard-rocker with why-don’t you-get-out-of-your-own-way lyrics. Corabi pipes, soulful and agile. He cowrote the song with Marti Frederiksen, a key collaborator of stars from Aerosmith to Carrie Underwood and who recorded all the vocals for fiction band Stillwater in Cameron Crowe’s beloved rock film “Almost Famous.” Paul Taylor of the band Winger added keys to “Your Own Worst Enemy,” which gave the track extra grease.

If radio wasn’t so ageist, another recent Corabi single, “Cosi Bella (So Beautiful),” would be a hit. The smitten groover calls to mind feel-good hummers like The Beatles’ “Penny Lane” and Queen’s “Killer Queen.” The tune is sonic Prozac. As a vocalist, Corabi is known his gravelly sound but what makes him special is the combination of that tone with a gift for melody. That combination is on full display on “Cosi Bella,” another cowrite with Frederiksen.

When the concert business was sidelined during the early shutdown period of the pandemic, Corabi reached an epiphany. He needed to finally learn some recording skills, something that despite having made more than a dozen albums in his career he’d never bothered to do. “I’ve always been that guy,” Corabi says, “that would walk into a studio with a finished song, but I paid zero attention to how a mixing board works and what these guys were doing to record the songs.”

During the shutdown he learned Pro Tools, the computer music recording program. It turned a frustrating period – musicians generate much of their income through touring – into a productive writing period. One of the songs that came out of that was “Cosi Bella.” “I love that song,” Corabi says. “You know, a simple little pop melody with a cool guitar solo on it,” Corabi says, citing Cheap Trick’s influence thereof.

Having parted ways with his last record label, he relished the freedom to pursue a slightly different musical direction for him. “I’ve got nobody breathing over my shoulder and saying, ‘You need to sound like this.’ It’s like I wrote it, why shouldn’t I record it? So I recorded it, and I threw it out there.” “Cosi Bella” has been streamed more than 100,000 times and Corabi hopes the track will get picked up for a TV/film synch eventually. “It’s an odd business we live in,” he says.

On a recent afternoon, Corabi is on the porch of his Nashville home when we connect for a video call interview. Tattoos spill out from the sleeves of his black V-neck tee. He’s wearing circular John Lennon style sunglasses and his hair’s pulled back beneath a trucker hat with a metallic cross on the front. A gold guitar pick with a skull on it hangs from a chain around his neck.

Soon, he’ll embark on a run of solo shows opening for reunited ‘90s Southern rockers Brother Cane. He first met that Birmingham-founded band back in 1993. “They did a gig at The Troubadour, and we wound up talking,” Corabi says of Brother Cane, known for hits like “Got No Shame.” At that point, Corabi had already joined Motley Crue. The musicians in Brother Cane, including singer/guitarist Damon Johnson, also known for his work with Alice Cooper, were keen to hear what the new Crue sounded like, so Corabi played them some rough tracks and demos for what became the ‘94 Motley album. “We’ve been pals ever since,” Corabi says. “When we did the Motley Crue tour, Brother Cane actually did the first five or six shows with us. So I’m a huge fan of Damon Johnson, of all the guys and friends with them. We all live here in Nashville.”

In addition to an acoustic version of “Hooligan’s Holiday,” Corabi’s solo shows draw from material by Union, The Scream and The Dead Daisies, the latter his supergroup with musicians from bands like Guns N’ Roses and Whitesnake. He also drops in covers like Aerosmith’s haunting “Seasons of Wither” and The Cars’ “Drive.”

About five years ago, Corabi’s then-manager talked him into doing a tour in which he performed the ‘94 Motley album front-to-back with a full band. Although it was considered a flop at the time, that LP has a devoted fanbase, including many who think it’s the best the Crue ever made. But Corabi didn’t want to make a career about of copy and pasting that album onstage forever. So in fall 2017, Corabi enlisted a Nashville backing band including Decatur, Alabama native Philip Shouse, a musician from the solo bands of Kiss legends Gene Simmons and Ace Frehley, to perform the ‘94 Motley album front-to-back. “Let’s record it for prosperity,” Corabi says. “And if somebody wants to hear what it would have sounded like, here you go.”

Mixed by Michael Wagener, the German studio wiz known for his work with Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue’s “Too Fast For Love” debut album, the accurately titled “Live 94 (One Night in Nashville)” sounds badass and charmingly raw. “Live! Bootleg.” “Everybody played their ass off,” Corabi says. “And it was like a one-shot deal because I only had enough money to record one show.”  The vinyl pressing quickly sold out. Corabi had the album’s rough-hewn artwork patterned after the essential Aerosmith concert album. Corabi absolutely kills it replicating his challenging vocals from the Motley album live. “But I gotta be honest with you,” he says. “Going back and listening to that shit, I was sitting there at rehearsals going, ‘What the f— was I thinking when I sang this 20 years ago?’ It’s full tilt the whole time.”

Full tilt is how things generally go in the world of Motley Crue. Corabi got a crash course after Crue bassist Nikki Sixx had touted The Scream’s debut LP “Let It Scream” in an interview. A famously nice guy, Corabi was grateful for the mention and called Motley Crue’s management’s office to leave a thank you message for Sixx. He was stunned when at his small apartment in a rough Los Angeles neighborhood he picked up a ringing phone to hear Sixx and Motley drummer Tommy Lee on the other line. A disagreement with Neil stemming from the singer skipping rehearsals for the band’s next album led to Neil being out of the band.

Sixx and Lee asked Corabi to come audition. He brought a guitar and arrived at a studio in Burbank that was crammed with a dream stash of musical gear to find Sixx, Lee and Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars jamming on a version of the Jimi Hendrix song “Angel.” “It sounded loud, dirty and amazing. They were a tight band,” Corabi says in the infamous Motley Crue band memoir “The Dirt.” That said, Corabi had never owned a Motley album or been to one of their concerts, so for his audition they jammed on songs he knew from his cover band days growing up in Philadelphia that Motley Crue had recorded covers of. “Helter Skelter” by The Beatles. “Jailhouse Rock” by Elvis Presley. “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” by Brownsville Station.

Corabi was handed lyrics to a couple Crue originals, including “Dr. Feelgood,” and they hit those too. Lee was stoked to hear the band’s hits toughened up with Corabi’s vocals and rhythm guitar. A second jam session produced the seeds of two songs for the ‘94 album and Corabi was asked to join the band. After getting back to his apartment, he told his then wife. “The good news is that I did the audition, and it was cool. The band news is that you’re looking at the new singer of Motley Crue.”

It was the start of a roller coaster ride that included highs like the ‘94 album debuting at number seven and the band playing to a packed Mexico City arena and lows like the tour getting downsized to club-sized venues due to lack of fan interest. Band members and management blamed Corabi, the new ingredient. His head spun from all the different directions he was being given and later the flip-flopping on his status in the band. At one point he even taught Neil some vocal parts for what would become Motley’s reunion album with Neil, the not-very-good “Generation Swine.”

Corabi tells me “Misunderstood” from the ‘94 album is the song that best realized the potential of his era of Motley Crue. “Hands down. That song really shows a depth and all four members really firing on all cylinders. That song is really kinda like The Beatles meets Led Zeppelin.” He’s not exaggerating. “Misunderstood” really is an ambitious track. After a blues-folk intro the band lifts off into a cinematic thunder calling to mind epics like “Kashmir” and “A Day In The Life.” Corabi lauds Mars’ tasty slide work on the track and gusty backing vocals by Deep Purple singer Glenn Hughes. “We had a 53 -piece orchestra on it. We were all in the room when it was happening and the conductor, we were all throwing ideas into the pot to make that orchestra really pop.”

The ‘94 album was produced by Bob Rock who was also behind the console for “Dr. Feelgood.” It was the supersonic “Feelgood” that led to Metallica enlisting Rock to produce Metallica’s breakthrough 1991 “Black Album.”

Asked what Rock’s studio mojo is, Corabi says, “First of all he started out (recording) engineering a lot of great records as well (examples include Aerosmith’s ‘Permanent Vacation’ album’), so he knows what he wants. But he’s also a songwriter. So we sent him the demos and we really stripped every one of those songs down to its barest form. And he really made Nikki and Tommy lock in together.  And Bob’s got this really odd way of pushing you but being diplomatic about it. It’s really weird. He knows how to trigger you to make you go, ‘F— you, dude, I’m gonna do it better.’ Mick would come in with a guitar solo and he’d let Mick do his thing and Bob would go, ‘If you think that’s good enough, OK.” And he would do the same with me, vocally. So he’s got this way of just taking your idea, adding his, what he hears in his head to it and getting it down on tape.”

No matter how good the music Rock, Corabi, Sixx, Lee and Mars made together though, Motley’s time was up by that time. New, hungry and more punk-based bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden topped the flashy anthemic ‘80s groups. The ‘94 Motley record has held up over time though. Corabi and Sixx have both been quoted that in hindsight they think they should’ve changed the name of the band to something besides Motley Crue. Noted pop-culture author Chuck Klosterman has told me the same thing.

What’s more interesting to think about his how Corabi’s Motley Crue album would’ve gone over had it come out in say 1988, after GN’R’s 1987 debut “Appetite for Destruction” nudged hard-rock back to a more street sound. The two major examples of a hard-rock bands flourishing with a “replacement singer,” AC/DC with Brian Johnson after Bon Scott died and Van Halen after Sammy Hagar stepped in for David Lee Roth, had the benefit of occurring during the ‘80s, a decade hard-rock dominated commercially. We’ll never really know. It’s also worth noting that like Roth’s latter-day reunion with Van Halen totally dropping Hagar era songs from their setlists, since Motley reunited with Neil, they haven’t performed any Corabi era songs.

Post-Motley, Corabi found an empathetic collaborator in Kulick, who’d recently been let go by Kiss to make way for an original lineup reunion. Key tracks from Union’s 1998 eponymous debut album include wah-wah stomper “Love (I Don’t Need It Anymore)” and the strummy “Robin’s Song.”

“We were kind of going through the same things at the same time,” Corabi says. “So we had a lot of the same emotions to put into the songs. But it was easy for both of us because we were mirror images of each other. At that moment of our lives, we both lost huge gigs at the same time. Just about everybody in the music industry was ready to put us out to pasture. We both had women in our lives had moved on to greener pastures because the gig wasn’t there anymore and so everything that I wrote about, or I wanted to get off my chest lyrically he could relate to. We were totally in sync with each other.”

The Scream has a special place in his heart. In addition to Corabi on vocals and acoustic guitar, the group was formed with former members of shredder group Racer X: guitarist Bruce Boillet, bassist John Alderete and drummer Scott Travis, who left to join Judas Priest and was replaced by Walt Woodward III by the recording of debut LP “Let It Scream.” The Scream made their debut album with none other than Eddie Kramer, the producer known for his work recording legends like Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Rolling Stones and Kiss.  To this day, Corabi is still in contact with all the other surviving members. Unfortunately Woodward died in 2010 at age 51 from alcohol-related causes.

“You’re never going to forget your first,” Corabi says. “And this was our first major record label with a a major producer, our first big tour in tour buses, our first trip to England and Europe doing press. And we were just hungry. So that’s never gonna go away. I love that band. Fate called and I get this crazy phone call that changes everything, but to some degree I think we’d be here talking about The Scream’s 14th or 15th album if we were still together. But it was our first, man. Our first everything.” In his solo sets, Corabi often performs the bluesy Scream tune “Man in the Moon.”

Although Motley memoir “The Dirt” is known for the band’s early debauchery it chronicles, many of the most compelling chapters are actually from the slightly more cleareyed Corabi’s era. There’s just something inherently interesting about stars slogging through a tough transition in which the world’s no longer tilted to their advantage.

This summer, Corabi got to expand on his side of his Motley Crue saga, in his heartfelt and very readable memoir, the self-effacingly titled “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades.” In addition to the ups, downs and zigzags with Motley, Corabi’s book reflects on his hard-scrabble Philly youth and early Beatles fascination, his time with Scream and Union and soul-searching truck-driving phase. You can purchase the book via Amazon. Corabi did the reading for the audio book version himself. There’s also a cool vinyl record of him telling two notable stories from the book available through publisher Rare Bird.

Corabi wrote his memoir with the help of Australian author Paul Miles, who founded the website Chronological Crue, a website detailed enough “The Dirt” cowriter Neil Strauss asked Miles to help Strauss keep “The Dirt” timeline in order. After Corabi took his solo band to Australia for run of shows, it was Miles who talked the singer into doing his own book, after hearing Corabi tell war-stories and answer questions like, “What’s Mick Mars really like?”

“I have to give credit where credit is due and Paul Miles was the one that kind of spearheaded the whole project,” Corabi says, “He goes, ‘Your stories are hilarious and there’s a lot people don’t know about you.’ My biggest concern about doing the book was let’s face it: Every band has done a book now collectively as a band, and then all the members have individually done a book. And then it’s gotten to the point where I think I saw like some of Kiss’ roadies did a book. So if I do a book now, it’s totally going to look I’ve jumped on a bandwagon.”

Miles told Corabi not to worry about that and just put his thoughts down on paper, tell his story and what makes him tick. Miles would interview him via phone type up chapters from those conversations and Corabi would edit things and send them back. They went through that around 10 times.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever win a Pulitzer Prize,” Corabi says. “But it’s a good read. Paul was an awesome person to work with and I’m proud of it. So we’ll see what happens. Whether it be a book or writing a song … Write the best song you can, record it the best you can, sing it the best you can, mix it the best you can. Then put it out there and keep your f—ing fingers crossed and wish for the best. That’s all you can do.”

John Corabi upcoming shows opening for Brother Cane include: 7 p.m. Oct. 6 at Furniture Factory in Huntsville, Alabama (tickets $25 plus fees via eventbrite); 7:30 p.m. Oct. 7 at Montgomery Performing Arts Centre ($23 and up plus fee via ticketmaster.com);and 8 p.m. Oct. 8 at Lucille’s Music Hall in Destin, Florida. ($25 plus fees via eventbrite.com). More info at johncorabi.com

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