Mötley Crüe reunites again! Brings Def Leppard, Poison and Joan Jett on tour

How long does “never” mean? In the case of Mötley Crüe, which played the final show of its farewell tour Dec. 31, 2015, and vowed to never reunite on stage again, the answer appears to be a little less than four years.

After billing its 2014-15 concert trek as “The Final Tour” and signing a “cessation of touring contract,” the veteran Los Angeles hair-metal band on Wednesday announced it is is reuniting for a 2020 stadium tour that will be co-headlined by Def Leppard. Poison and Joan Jett & The Blackhearts will open all of the concerts. Jett and Def Leppard are both recent Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees.

Billed as “The Stadium Tour,” the 22-city concert trek will open July 7 at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium and will conclude Sept. 5 at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium, the soon-to-be new home of the Los Angeles Chargers and Los Angeles Rams National Football League teams. The nearly two-dozen date tour will include a July 23 show at Petco Park, the same San Diego stadium Def Leppard performed at with Journey on Sept. 23, 2018.

All dates for the appear below for the 2020 tour, which will find Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard alternating headlining slots. Mötley Crüe will top the bill for the Petco Park show, according to a representative for Live Nation, the tour’s promoter. The date of the show here, incidentally, coincides with the opening of the 2020 edition of San Diego Comic-Con at the nearby San Diego Convention Center.

Tickets for the Mötley Crüe/Def Leppard tour, including the Petco Park show, will go on sale to the general public at 10 a.m. on Dec. 13 at Ticketmaster and will be preceded by a number of pre-sales, for which information appears below. Ticket prices for the Petco Park show range from $49.50 to $750 each, plus service charges.

That Mötley Crüe is touring again may come as a surprise, at least to anyone who took the band’s members at their word. The band’s representatives declined several requests in 2014 and 2015 from the Union-Tribune to provide copies of the “cessation of touring contract” the four members of Mötley Crüe had signed when they announced “The Final Tour” five years ago.

Even so, Mötley Crüe singer Vince Neil was adamant that “final tour” meant “final tour” and that the “cessation of touring contract” was legitimate.

“(The contract) wasn’t for us; it’s really for everybody else, to show how serious we are about not trying to find a loophole (to reunite),” Neil told the Union-Tribune in a December 2015 interview. “Someone might ask: ‘Oh, what if a sheik gave you tens of millions to get back together?’ No. It’s not about that. ... We have (eight) more shows, and that’s it.”

Later in the same interview, Neil added: “We wanted to go out on top, with people saying: ‘Yeah, man, I saw the last concert. It was awesome!’ We don’t want to be that band, where it’s (billed as) Mötley Crüe, and it’s maybe one (original member’s) brother left in the band, and they’re playing clubs. ... If we let that happen, we wouldn’t be thought of or remembered like we wanted to be.”

So, then, what accounted for Mötley Crüe’s decision to renege on its vow to never perform in concert again together?

Credit, or blame, goes to “The Dirt,” the Mötley Crüe bio-pic that debuted on Netflix early this year. It introduced the band to a new generation and led to a reported 350 percent increase in online streams of Mötley Crüe’s music.

Or, as the band put it in a statement on its website on Nov. 18: “Almost 6 years after signing a cessation of touring agreement, the contract is off the table because a whole new generation of Crüeheads are relentlessly demanding for the band to come back together. Following the huge success of their Netflix biopic, ‘The Dirt,’ Mötley Crüe has seen a massive surge in new audience. And the band best known for breaking the rules has destroyed their ‘cessation of touring’ contract in true Mötley Crüe-fashion, by literally blowing it up.”

True to their word, at least this time, their Nov. 18 website post included a one-minute video that culminated in the contract (or at least some papers that resemble a contract) being blown up, along with the glass desk the papers were placed on. Kaboom.

Pre-sale tickets for the Mötley Crüe/Def Leppard tour will go on sale Tuesday at 10 a.m. to Citi card holders, Wednesday at 10 a.m. to season-ticket holders for all stadiums the tour is playing at, including Petco Park), and 10 a.m. Dec. 12 through the Live Nation app, on livenation.com and through the venues and radio stations in the cities the tour will be visiting.

Mötley Crüe/Def Leppard “The Stadium Tour” itinerary

Tuesday, July 7 Miami, FL Hard Rock Stadium

Thursday, July 9 Orlando, FL Camping World Stadium

Saturday, July 11 Charlotte, NC Bank of America Stadium

Tuesday, July 14 Arlington, TX Globe Life Park

Wednesday, July 15 Houston, TX Minute Maid Park

Sunday, July 19 San Francisco, CA Oracle Park

Thursday, July 23 San Diego, CA Petco Park

Saturday, July 25 Phoenix, AZ State Farm Stadium

Sunday, August 9 Atlanta, GA SunTrust Park

Tuesday, August 11 Hershey, PA Hersheypark Stadium

Thursday, August 13 Pittsburgh, PA PNC Park

Saturday, August 15 Philadelphia, PA Citizens Bank Park

Sunday, August 16 Buffalo, NY New Era Field

Tuesday, August 18 Milwaukee, WI Miller Park

Thursday, August 20 Detroit, MI Comerica Park

Saturday, August 22 Washington, DC Nationals Park

Sunday, August 23 Flushing, NY CitiField

Tuesday, August 25 Boston, MA Fenway Park

Friday, August 28 Chicago, IL Wrigley Field

Sunday, August 30 Denver, CO Coors Field

Wednesday, Sept. 2 Seattle, WA T-Mobile Park

Saturday, Sept. 5 Inglewood, CA SoFi Stadium