The Dirt

by Tommy Lee

  One night, while I was strung out on speed and alcohol, a slouched-over rocker with black hair walked into Magnolia Liquor. He looked like a creepy version of Johnny Thunders, so I asked him if he played music. He nodded that he did.

  “What are you into?” I asked.

  “The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Jeff Beck,” he answered. “What about you?”

  I was disappointed that this hunchback, who looked so demented, had such lame, predictable taste. I rattled off the list of the cool music I was into—“The Dolls, Aerosmith, MC5, Nugent, Kiss”—and he just looked at me contemptuously. “Oh,” he said dryly, “I’m into real players.”

  “Fuck you, man,” I shot back. Pompous little shit.

  “No, fuck you,” he said, not angrily but firmly and confidently, as if I would soon see the error of my ways.

  “Get out of my store, asshole.” I pretended like I was going to leap over the counter and kick his Jeff Beck–loving ass.

  “If you want to see a real guitar player, come see me tonight. I’m playing down the street.”

  “Get the fuck out of here. I’ve got better things to do.”

  But of course I went to see him. I may have hated his taste, but I liked his attitude.

  That night, I stole a pint of Jack Daniel’s, stuffed it into my sock, and got drunk outside the bar. Inside, I saw that gnarly little leather Quasimodo playing slide guitar with a microphone stand, running it up and down the neck as fast as he could. He was going crazy, beating the shit out of that guitar as if he had just caught it sleeping with his girlfriend. I’d never seen anyone play guitar like that in my life. And he was wasting his talent with a band that looked like abandoned Allman Brothers. After the show, we sat down and got drunk together. I was humbled by his playing and decided I’d forgive him for his shitty taste in music. We talked on the phone a few times afterward, then I lost track of him.

  I began moving through bands like crosstops. I’d go to auditions listed in The Recycler, join for a day, and then never show up again. I eventually learned to leave my bass in the car trunk when I first walked in to meet a band. If they had no vibe—which was almost always the case since they were all Lynyrd Skynyrd and I was Johnny Thunders—I’d tell them I had to run to the car to get my gear, and then I’d split.

  But persistence paid off, and I answered an ad for a band called Garden or Soul Garden or Hanging Garden or Hanging Soul. They were a bunch of shady-looking guys with long black hair, which was more or less what I looked like. However, they played terrible Doors-like psychedelic jamrock, and I split. But I kept running into the band’s guitarist, Lizzie Grey, at the Starwood. He had long curly hair, a tube top, and high heels. A cross between Alice Cooper and a rattlesnake, he was either the most beautiful woman or the ugliest man I’d ever seen, with the sole exception of Tiny Tim. We soon discovered that we both had a passion for Cheap Trick, Slade, the Dolls, old Kiss, and Alice Cooper, especially Love It to Death.

  fig. 7

  It was through Lizzie that I joined my first band in Hollywood. Lizzie had been invited by a big, intimidating bastard named Blackie Lawless to play in a group called Sister, which also included a raving mad guitarist, Chris Holmes. I knew Blackie from the Rainbow Bar and Grill: He’d just stand in the middle of the room, tall with long black hair, black leather pants, and black eye makeup, and emit some kind of bad-boy magnetic power that would soon have dozens of girls stuck to his side. Somehow Lizzie talked Blackie into letting me play bass in Sister, rounding out a very ugly and menacing band. We practiced on Gower Street in Hollywood, where the Dogs rehearsed.

  Blackie was an amazing songwriter and, despite the fact that he was cold and shut-down, he was inspirational to talk to because he was into making an impression not just with music but with appearance. He was into eating worms and drawing pentagrams onstage—anything to get a reaction from the audience. We’d record songs like “Mr. Cool” in the studio, then sit around and talk about how we were going to look onstage or what he was trying to express with his songs for hours. But Blackie fell into the class of people, like me, who saw life as a war—and he always had to be the general. The rest of us were supposed to be good soldiers and nothing more. So Blackie and I soon began butting heads, over and over until we were bruised and bloody and, as band General, he had no choice but to dismiss me from service. He soon kicked Lizzie out as well, and the two of us decided to form our own group.

  By that time, I was broke. I had been fired from the liquor store and the factory for blowing off work to rehearse. I found a job at Wherehouse Music on Sunset and Western, where I could get away with showing up whenever I felt like it. When money was really tight, I’d give blood at a clinic on Sunset to pay the bills. One morning while I was taking the bus to Wherehouse Music, I met a girl named Angie Saxon. In general, I had no interest in women except for the moment or two of pleasure they could provide me: The rest of the time they were in the way. But Angie was different: She was a singer, and we could talk about music.

  Except for Angie and Lizzie, I had no friends that lasted longer than a week and no one I could trust. Because I was always starving and amped on uppers, I often felt as if I didn’t have a body, like I was just a vibrating mass of nerves. One day, when I was feeling particularly broke and anxious, I decided to find my father. I convinced myself that I was calling him because I needed money—money that he owed me to make up for all the years he had abandoned me—but in retrospect I think I wanted to feel connected to someone, to talk to him and maybe, in the process, learn something about what made me so crazy. I called my grandmother, then my mother, and they told me that last they heard he was working in San Jose, California. I called information, asked for Frank Feranna, and found him. I wrote the number down next to the phone, and downed a fifth of whiskey to work up the courage to dial it.

  He picked up on the first ring, and when I told him it was me, his voice turned gruff. “I don’t have a son,” he told me. “I do not have a son. I don’t know who you are.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” I yelled into the receiver.

  “Don’t ever call here again,” he snapped back, and hung up.

  That was the last time I ever heard his voice.

  I cried for hours, removing records from their cardboard sleeves and throwing them against the walls, watching them smash to pieces. I grabbed the pieces of vinyl and scraped them up and down my arms, making crisscrosses of raised red flesh punctuated by beads of blood. Though I didn’t think I could sleep that night, I somehow did, waking up in the morning strangely calm with the resolve to change my birth name. I did not want to be saddled for the rest of my life as the namesake of that man. What right did he have to say I was not his son when he had never even been a father to me? First, I killed Frank Feranna Jr. in a song, “On with the Show,” writing, “Frankie died just the other night / Some say it was suicide / But we all know / How the story goes.” Then I made it legal.

  I remembered that Angie was always talking about her old boyfriend from Indiana, a guy named Nikki Syxx, who used to play in a Top 40 cover band and later with a surf-punk outfit called John and the Nightriders. I loved his name, but I couldn’t just steal it. So I decided to call myself Nikki Nine. But everybody said it was too punk rock, and punk was now too mainstream. I needed something that was more rock and roll, and Six was rock and roll. So I decided that anyone who thinks surfing has anything to do with punk rock doesn’t deserve such a cool name, and I soon applied to have my name legally changed to Nikki Sixx. It was like stealing his soul, because for years people would come up to me and say, “Nikki, dude, remember me from Indiana?” I’d tell them that I’d never been to Indiana, and they’d say, “Come on, man, I saw you with John and the Nightriders.”

  Years later, on the Girls, Girls, Girls tour, I was channel-surfing in a hotel room and saw a strange, sallow-skinned character with long hair being interviewed. I heard the words “He’s the devil” and stopped to watch. It was him, ranting and raving: “He took m
y name and sucked my soul out and sold it to you all—I was the original Nikki Syxx. And he is using my name to spread the word of Satan.” Nikki Syxx—or John as he was now called, appropriately enough since John is the saint in the New Testament who tells of the apocalypse—had become a born-again Christian.

  fig. 8

  London, clockwise from upper left: John St. John, Dane Rage, Nigel Benjamin, Nikki Sixx, Lizzie Grey

  ANGIE CONVINCED ME TO MOVE in with a bunch of musicians behind a flower shop across from Hollywood High School. There were wanna-be rock stars everywhere in the house: sleeping in the bathtub, on the front steps, behind the sofa cushions. And somehow one of them burned the place to the ground one afternoon. I returned from the record store to find the house smoldering, surrounded by curious high school students. With my bass in hand—I always took it with me in case someone in the house stole it—I ran inside to see if I could rescue anything else of mine. I noticed that there was a piano still standing that a guy who had left town to visit his parents had been renting, so I wheeled it out of the house, around the corner, and all the way to a music store on Highland Avenue, where I sold it for a hundred dollars.

  Angie let me move in with her in Beachwood Canyon, where I hung around all day listening to her records and dyeing my hair different colors while she earned money for us working as a secretary. I never thought about the piano again until six months later, when two policemen pulled up and pounded on the door, looking for a guy named Frank Feranna who had stolen a piano. I told them I knew of no one by that name.

  When Lizzie and I weren’t trying to get our own band together, I tagged along with Angie to Redondo Beach, where she rehearsed with her band. I hated them because they were into Rush and had lots of guitar pedals and talked about hammer-ons and, most egregious of all, had curly hair. If there’s one genetic trait that automatically disqualifies a man from being able to rock, it’s curly hair. Nobody cool has curly hair; people like Richard Simmons, the guy from Greatest American Hero, and the singer from REO Speedwagon have curls. The only exceptions are Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople, whose hair is more tangled than curly, and Slash, but his hair is fuzzy and that’s cool.

  For women, the equivalent of curly hair is being cockeyed. If there’s one genetic trait in women that predisposes them to hate me, it’s having a cockeye. I always fail with cockeyed women, one of whom happened to be Angie’s roommate. One night I got drunk and tried to climb in her bed, and she told Angie all about it the next day. I tried to convince Angie that I thought it was her bed, but she knew me too well and kicked me out of the house. I moved into a drug-infested, prostitute-riddled Hollywood slum, and concentrated on staying in my own bed and getting my band with Lizzie together.

  We found a dog collar–wearing, bronze giant of a drummer named Dane Rage; a keyboard player named John St. John, who hauled a giant Hammond B3 organ from gig to gig; and a singer named Michael White, whose claim to fame was that he had recorded something for a Led Zeppelin tribute album once. That, right there, should have let me know that he was not the man we were looking for. That, and the fact that he had curly hair. And was kind of cockeyed.

  We tramped around Hollywood in high heels and tube tops and anything else we could muster up to shock Rush fans and Led Zeppelin dinosaurs. It was 1979 and, as far as we were concerned, rock and roll was dead. We were Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols; we were everything that no one else was into. In our alcoholic minds, we were the coolest fucking band ever, and our confidence (and alcoholism) attracted fanatic groupies after just a few shows at the Starwood. We called ourselves London, but what we really were was Mötley Crüe before Mötley Crüe.

  Except for Michael White. Everything that I despised, he worshiped. If I liked the Stones, he liked the Beatles. If I liked creamy peanut butter, he liked chunky. So we fired him for having curly hair, placed an ad in The Recycler, and met Nigel Benjamin, who was a real rock-and-roll star in our minds not just because he had straight hair but because he had played in Mott the Hoople as Ian Hunter’s replacement. He wrote great lyrics, and when he stepped up to the mic he fucking wailed. He could really sing, like no one I’d been in a band with before. We had an insane keyboard player who had his own Hammond, a drummer with a big North trap set, and a British lead singer. We were on fire.

  I was so excited that I called my uncle at Capitol and demanded, “I want to get ahold of Brian Connolly from the Sweet!”

  “What?!” he asked, incredulous.

  “I have this amazing band, you know, and I want to send him some pictures.”

  I sent Connolly the photos and, as a favor to my uncle, he agreed to accept my call the next week. I spent the entire day at home, rehearsing what I’d say in my head. I picked up the phone and started to dial, then hung up.

  Finally, I worked up the courage. As soon as he picked up, I went right into my speech about London and how we were on our way to the big time and how we could use his advice or his support or any kind of instruction he might have. Maybe we could tour together one day.

  “Are you done, mate?” he asked.

  I was done.

  “I got your photos and music,” he continued. “And I see what you’re trying to do. But I can’t help you.”

  “Man, I think we’re going to be the biggest band in L.A., and I think it would be good for us to—”

  He cut me off: “Yeah, well, I’ve heard that before, mate. My advice would be to keep your day job. This kind of music is never going to make it.”

  I was devastated. He went from being my idol to my enemy: a bitter rock star sitting on a throne of shit in his mansion in London.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear you feel that way.” And I hung up and stared at the phone for half an hour, unsure whether to laugh or cry.

  In the end, it just gave me more motivation to succeed and make Brian Connolly rue the day he ever insulted me. Our manager was David Forest, a flamboyant party fiend who ran the Starwood along with Eddie Nash, who was later mixed up in the John Holmes murders (when the porn star was involved in the fatal beating of four people at a drug dealer’s home in Laurel Canyon). Forest, ever charitable, gave me and Dane Rage jobs at the club cleaning and doing carpentry in the afternoon. It worked out so that at night London would play and drop confetti and make a mess, and the next day we’d get paid to clean it up.

  It was through Forest that I was introduced to the decadence that the commingling of disco and rock had brought to the L.A. club scene. I’d sit in the office with him and people like Bebe Buell and Todd Rundgren, who would poison my impressionable mind with tales of Steven Tyler overdosing and Mick Jagger getting head backstage while groupies sat around nodding off on smack. Or I’d see local heroes like Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley partying. I had all the free rum and Cokes I wanted, plus I learned all about drugs whose names I had only heard of before. Real drugs. And I loved them.

  I was young and pretty and had long hair. I’d lean against the wall at the Starwood in stiletto heels and supertight pants with my hair in my eyes and nose in the air. As far as I was concerned, I had made it. I would sleep until I had to get up and do something to make money, like telemarketing or selling crap door-to-door or working at the Starwood. At night I’d go to the Starwood and drink and fight and fuck girls in the bathroom. I really thought that I had become my fucking heroes: Johnny Thunders and Iggy Pop.

  Now that I look back on it, I realize how naive and innocent I was. There were no jets or sold-out stadiums then, no mansions or Ferraris. There were no overdoses or orgies with guitar necks stuck up some chick’s ass. I was just some cocky little kid in a club who, like so many others before and after him, thought that a sore prick and burning nostrils meant he was king of the world.

  I question a lot of things and form my own opinions. They’re just as valid as a rocket scientist’s or anyone else’s. Who says you have to believe something because you read it in a book or saw pictures? Who is it that gets to say, “Th
at’s the way that it is”? When everybody believes the same thing, they become robotic. People have a brain: they can figure out things for themselves, like how a UFO flies.

  When I was in elementary school in the fifties, at the height of the Cold War, we had duck-and-cover drills. They told us that if the hydrogen bomb dropped, all we had to do was get under our desks and put our hands over our heads. Today it seems ridiculous that a desk is going to protect us from radiation and complete devastation, but it made perfect sense at the time to the supposedly intelligent and informed people we called teachers. I remember writing in big letters on my notebook the words duck and cover, with quotation marks around them and a giant question mark. What a joke. That little turtle was bullshit.

  I used to save stacks of notebooks and sheets of paper with stuff I had written down since I was a kid. Over time, a lot of what I’ve written has become true. In 1976, when my Top 40 band White Horse was on its last legs and ready to be shot, we were rehearsing in the living room of the house where we all lived when the bass player walked in and said, “Well, this certainly is a motley-looking crew.” After rehearsal, I went upstairs to my room and wrote those words down in my notebook—Motley Crew, then below it, in bigger letters, MOTTLEY CRU—and said to myself that I had to have a band called Mottley Cru. I wanted White Horse, who were actually a good band, to start playing originals and become Mottley Cru. “Why not try originals? We’re starving anyway,” I told them. They answered by voting me out of the band. So I left with everything: the PA, the lights, the van.