The Dirt

by Tommy Lee

  It was a groundbreaking moment for Suite 19: our first gig at the Starwood. I was so psyched, because if you played the Starwood, you’d made it. Man, the first time I ever fucking came to Hollywood, I went to the Starwood to see Judas Priest. I was overwhelmed: British rock stars who flew all the way to Hollywood with their equipment and leather pants. And I was seeing them. I almost lost my mind when they played “Hell Bent for Leather.” They played the heaviest music I’d ever heard, and I imagined that they must get to bang a million chicks. Little did I know.

  Unlike U.S. 101, Suite 19 played original tunes. My girlfriend, a cheerleader named Vicki Frontiere (her mother, Georgia, owned the Rams and her grandmother, Lucia Pamela, recorded an infamous album about life in outer space), had told me they were looking for a drummer. We were a perfect match: three longhaired dudes who had all failed out of high school and were going to continuation school, blowing off classes to rock out on crazy Eddie Van Halen–influenced shit. I was seventeen years old, and I couldn’t believe I was in this killer power trio.

  At the time, I noticed that there were posters all over the Starwood for a band called London. A few weeks after our gig, I went to watch London play and, man, those guys were cooler than fucking Judas Priest. They looked like chicks, like the New York Dolls or something, with crazy fucking polka dots. I was just some emaciated, scraggly Alice Cooper clone with leopard-skin spandex stretched tight over my chicken legs. But they were fucking rad, and attracted tons of hot chicks. When I saw Nikki swinging his bass around on stage, I thought, “What kind of dog is that?” He had fucking crazy hair that came down to his cheekbones like some kind of expensive Beverly Hills puppy that had gone stray and fallen on hard times.

  Suite 19 collapsed after we ran out of Eddie Van Halen guitar licks to copy. I played briefly with another band but that fell apart after I started dating the singer’s sister. Her name was Jessica, and I thought she was sexy because she was a small part-Mexican girl with natural little titties, a funny smile, and fat puffy cheeks. The first time we hooked up, I took her back to my van and, within minutes, started going down on her. She banged her fist on the wall and screamed, “Oh my God! I’m going to come!” I started licking her harder, and then all of a sudden she roared like some kind of desperate mountain lion and her pussy exploded. Water shot out everywhere. She was coming like a spilled tanker, and it was the coolest fucking thing I had ever seen in my life. I just thought, “Oh my God, I love this girl. This is the one!”

  Every day after rehearsal, I would pick her up in my van, we’d park somewhere quiet, and she’d squirt her shit everywhere. I loved to just sit there and let her cum on me. Eventually, however, my van started to stink. I drove my mom to the store one afternoon, and she kept asking what the smell was. I had to pretend like I didn’t know.

  Vince later nicknamed her Bullwinkle, because he said she had a face like a moose. And maybe she did, but I didn’t care. She was opening crazy sexual doors for me. She was my first real girlfriend, and I thought that all girls came like that when they got excited. Once I discovered that I was wrong, it was hard to break up with her.

  (The only other girl I ever met who could do that was the friend of a six-foot, part-Indian porn star named Debi Diamond. Years later, when Bullwinkle was just a soggy memory, I was working with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails at A&M Studios. It was his bassist Danny Lohner’s birthday, so I brought Debi and her friend over as a birthday present. After shooting grapes out of her pussy to entertain us, Debi’s friend sat on the piano while Debi ate her out. All of a sudden the girl threw her head back, moaned, and shot a stream six feet through the air, right into a fruit bowl at the other end of the room.)

  So, as I was fucking Bullwinkle and looking for another band, Suite 19’s guitarist, Greg Leon, started jamming with Nikki, who had left London and was trying to put a new group together. Nikki had seen Suite 19 play that night at the Starwood and liked my style. Greg gave him my number and I went to meet him at the Denny’s at Burbank Boulevard and Lankersham in North Hollywood. I was so nervous because I was a little punk-ass kid. In my mind, because Nikki could sell out weekends at the Starwood and the Whisky, that made him a huge rock god. When he sat down across from me, I grew even more intimidated because I couldn’t see who I was talking to behind the spiky black hair. I was like, “Where is this guy?” I wanted to order him dog biscuits, but I didn’t know if he had a sense of humor. I still don’t know.

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  After lunch, we went to this little shitshack house that was barely standing in North Hollywood. He was freeloading off some girl named Laura Bell, a drummer in a band called the Orchids who he had met through Kim Fowley. He played me a bunch of demos he’d been working on and, instinctively, I began playing the drums on the table, just like I used to in the kitchen when I was a kid. Our energy was the same, and we instantly hit it off. It was clear that we were going to do something together really quickly. Nikki was a driven dude, and I had that same obsession. We wanted to blow up the scene, rule the Strip, and fight or fuck anything that moved.

  A couple days later I drove my drum set to Nikki’s and we started jamming, just bass and drums, on the warped floor in the front room of his house. The room served as a kitchen, living room, dining room, rehearsal space, and office, with a closet that doubled as Nikki’s bedroom. Every few minutes during rehearsal, Nikki would pick up the telephone, dial a number, and try to sell somebody lightbulbs. That was his job.

  The wood on the walls of the house was rotted and split, and bugs would come crawling out and attack whatever food we left laying out. If you made a sandwich, you had to keep it in your hands the whole time, otherwise some insect tribe would devour it. I was psyched to be in another band with Greg Leon, but fucking Nikki threw Greg out. Greg was a great guitarist—him and Eddie Van Halen were probably the best players on the scene—but he was a very regular guy, and Nikki didn’t like that. He said that Greg didn’t have the edge that the New York Dolls and the Stooges did. He wanted everybody to look and think exactly like he did.

  We found a replacement guitar player, Robin, through an ad in The Recycler. Robin was pretty talented, but he was a pansy and everyone knew it. He tucked his shirt into his pants, washed his hands before touching his guitar, warmed up by playing scales, and, in general, acted as if he’d actually gone to college for a guitar degree. All he had going for him was cool hair.

  We continued to look through The Recycler, hoping to find a second guitarist who was an ugly and crazy enough son-of-a-bitch to counterbalance Robin. One day I found the right ad: “Loud, rude, and aggressive guitarist available.” I called and left my number for the dude, and a week later there was a timid knocking on Nikki’s front door.

  We opened the door, and there was this little troll standing outside with black hair down to his ass and high-stacked platform shoes with practically a whole roll of duct tape wrapped around them to hold them together. He looked like a flat-broke, painfully shy, freaky-looking relative of Cousin Itt. I was laughing so hard, I called to Nikki, “Come here! You gotta check this dude out!” When Nikki and him were standing there face-to-face, it was like the Addams Family meets Scooby Doo. Nikki pulled me aside, excited. “I can’t believe it!” he said. “Here’s another one like us!”

  Trailing behind Cousin Itt, carrying a Marshall stack, was a little dude named John Crouch, or Stick, a tag-along whose chief value in life seemed to be the fact that he owned a car, a little Mazda that on this wet spring day had a speaker cabinet sticking out of one window and a guitar neck out the other. (To be fair to Stick, he also had a talent for fetching burritos.)

  We set up Mick’s equipment, and Nikki showed him the opening riff of “Stick to Your Guns.” Mick watched intensely, slouching and rubbing his anxious hands together like a praying mantis, then grabbed his guitar and played the shit out of it, making the riff so distorted and insane that we couldn’t even recognize it anymore. I didn’t actually know how to judge wh
ether someone was a good guitarist or not. I was more impressed with the sheer volume of his playing than anything else. And I liked his trippy look and sound: It was as if he’d come from another planet populated by a species so sonically advanced that they didn’t need to take baths.

  When he was through, Cousin Itt turned to me, beady eyes glowing through his tangle of hair, and spoke: “Let’s go get some schnapps.” We picked up a gallon of schnapps at the liquor store, got plastered, and jammed for an hour. Then, Cousin Itt spoke again. He pulled Nikki and I aside and muttered something about Robin. Then he turned to Robin and told him, like a cranky old man, “You’re out of here. There’s only one guitar player in my band, and that’s me.” We didn’t even need to discuss whether Mick was right for the band or not: The dude was already in.

  Robin looked at Nikki, then at me, and neither of us spoke a word in his defense. His face grew cloudy, then red, as he dropped his guitar and burst into tears. He really was a pansy.

  After Robin took his shit home, Nikki dyed my hair black so that it would match his and Mick’s. And they encouraged me to get my first tattoo: Mighty Mouse, my all-time fucking favorite cartoon hero. He reminded me of myself: He’s little and I’m skinny, we’re both always trying to save the day, and we both always get the girl in the end. I had the artist design a tattoo of Mighty Mouse crashing through a bass drum with sticks in his hands.

  Nikki, Mick, and I started rehearsing every day, and it was amazing how many new songs Nikki kept coming up with. Afterward, we’d hang out at the Starwood like we were already rock stars. All we were missing was a singer.

  We auditioned a round, dumb fellow named O’Dean, who sang in a voice somewhere between the Cult and the Scorpions. He was an amazing singer, but Nikki didn’t like him because he didn’t sound like Brian Connolly from the Sweet. O’Dean’s other problem was that he was very uptight about this pair of ultraclean white gloves he always wore. He was under the impression that the gloves constituted having a look, and we tried not to say anything to the contrary because he was all we had.

  We scammed our way into a studio to record some of Nikki’s songs: “Stick to Your Guns,” “Toast of the Town,” “Nobody Knows What It’s Like to Be Lonely,” and a Raspberries tune, “Tonight.” They only gave us two hours, so when we ran out of time, Nikki made me go fuck the engineer. Her teeth stuck out the side of her head like the air spout in a beach ball, but she was nice and had a decent body. She took me back to her place and she had the fucking coolest bed. It had a mosquito net around it, and I had never experienced anything like that. I was a little slut back then, trying to taste all the flavors, so I told her, “Wow, I’d love to fuck in that thing.” We had a good time, and she made sure we got free studio time until we wore out our welcome.

  During the last song we recorded for our demo, “Toast of the Town,” O’Dean refused to take off his gloves to clap in the background. He thought that removing his gloves would ruin his mystique, despite the fact that the only mystique he had was the mystery of how he had such a good a voice. Nikki was enraged when O’Dean wouldn’t clap like the Sweet did in “Ballroom Blitz,” and Mick hated him anyway because he thought he was a fat fuck, a shitty singer, and a closet spiritualist.

  “I don’t like that guy,” Mick kept muttering during rehearsals. “He’s a hippie. And I hate hippies.”

  I told Nikki, “Mick doesn’t think O’Dean’s God.”

  “Fuck no,” Mick said. “I want that skinny blond fucker I saw at the Starwood the other night in that band Rock Candy.”

  “You mean Vince?!” I asked.

  “Hell yeah, I mean Vince.” Cousin Itt scowled at me. “That’s the guy. I don’t even care if he can sing or not. Did you see what he was doing with that crowd? Did you see what he was doing to those girls and the way he carried himself onstage?”

  “I went to school with that fucker,” I told him. “Girls love him.”

  I had given Vince my number at his show, but he never called. After we fired O’Dean, I dropped by Vince’s house, gave him a demo tape, and begged him to audition with us. We waited for weeks for Vince to call or come by, but he never did. Finally, I broke down and called him again.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” Vince said. “I accidentally washed my jeans with your number in them and couldn’t get ahold of you.”

  “Listen,” I told him. “This is your last chance, dude. You’ve got to check out this band I’m in. The stuff we’re working on will blow your mind. Nikki Sixx is in the band, and we’ve got this rad guitar player who looks like Cousin Itt from The Addams Family.”

  “Okay,” Vince said. “My band fucked me over the other night, and I’m on the verge of quitting. I’ll tell you what: I’ll come by on Saturday. Where are you going to be?”

  Saturday was a nice day: The sun was out and a cool breeze was blowing. I was drinking schnapps, Nikki was chugging Jack Daniel’s, and Mick was sipping his Kahlúa outside IRS rehearsal studios in Burbank when Vince pulled up in a 280Z with this girl who we nicknamed Lovey on the spot, because she was blond, rich, and stuck-up like Lovey Howell from Gilligan’s Island.

  She got out of the car and looked us over like she was his manager. “Well, I have to check out the guitar player because he’s got to be really good if he’s going to play with you, baby,” she cooed, getting on all our nerves instantly. Vince stood there like a little kid, half cocky and half embarrassed, with platinum blond hair exploding out of his head like fireworks. Nikki gave him some lyrics, and he started singing. He wasn’t right on top of the song, but he hit all the right notes and stayed in key. And something else started happening: His squeaky high-pitched voice combined with Nikki’s ratty out-of-time bass playing, Mick’s overamped guitar, and my way-too-busy-and-excited drumming. And it sounded right, despite all the background vocals from Lovey, who kept complaining that the songs weren’t right for Vince.

  On the spot, Nikki started rewriting his songs for Vince’s voice, and the first result was “Live Wire.” We were Mötley Crüe right then. At that fucking moment. We created one of our classic songs five minutes into our first jam with Vince. I couldn’t believe it. Missing Persons were rehearsing next door, and we got so excited that, just to be assholes, we grabbed the padlock hanging on the outside of their door and locked them in their studio. I don’t know how they got out—or if they ever did.

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  Rock Candy: James Alverson (left) and Vince Neil

  I was really into white. I’d wear white satin pants with white leg warmers, Capezio shoes, chains around my waist, and a white T-shirt that I had ripped up the sides and sewn together with lace. I dyed my hair as white as I could get it, and fluffed it until it added half a foot to my height. I was singing with Rock Candy at the Starwood, and life didn’t get any better than that.

  Then Tommy showed up at one of our shows and tried to fuck everything up. I hadn’t seen him in a year, since I’d left continuation school, and he was sporting bright leather pants, stiletto heels, dyed black hair, and a ribbon around his neck. He was actually starting to look cool.

  “Holy shit!” I blurted. “What did you do to yourself?”

  “I’m in a band now, dude,” he said, “with those guys over there.” He gestured to two other black-haired rockers in the corner. I recognized one of them as the crazy, drug-addled loser bassist in London; the other was older and very serious-looking. Not the type of person who comes to the Starwood to get laid. From the corner, the older guy was looking me up and down like I was prize beef.

  “I told them about you, bro,” Tommy said. “They saw you tonight, and they’re stoked. I know you’re in a band, dude, but come down and jam with us. We’ve got some cool motherfucking shit going on.”

  Tommy asked me to audition with his band the next weekend. I was happy in Rock Candy, but I agreed anyway so that I wouldn’t hurt his feelings. He had really helped me out when I left home in high school. He let me sleep in his van. And afte
r his parents found out there was some homeless kid living in their driveway with all his clothes packed into a Henry Weinhard case, they let me sleep on Tommy’s bedroom floor until I found a new place to live.

  I was working at the time as an electrician, building a McDonald’s in Baldwin Park. For job security, I started dating the boss’s daughter, Leah, a tall, vaguely attractive bisexual blond who, through some sort of elaborate mental airbrushing, believed that she looked like Rene Russo. She would show people modeling photos of Rene Russo and say they were pictures of her, which I actually believed. Leah (whom the band would later rename Lovey) was a filthy-rich drug addict, and bought me my first leather pants for five hundred dollars to wear onstage. I started living with her and driving her 280Z. But she drove me crazy. And I was stuck with her—not just because of the money, the car, the house, and the job, but because she had taught me how to inject cocaine and I was hooked. We would sit on the floor in her bathroom and shoot each other up while her parents ate or slept down the hall.

  One morning, after a four-day binge without sleep, my body began shutting down on me. It was 7 A.M. and I had to go to work. I vomited all over the car on the ride down the hill—I couldn’t keep anything down. On the McDonald’s job, I started hearing voices, seeing people who weren’t there, and actually having conversations with them. Every few minutes or so, an imaginary dog would run by, and I’d look off into the distance, trying to figure out where it had gone.

  I came home from work that night and slept for almost twenty hours. I woke up, shot up, and was just beginning to see straight when Tommy dropped by. He had a tape of songs for me to learn to sing. I listened to them, and tried to keep from vomiting or laughing. There was no way I was going to play with this lame band, if you could call them a band. They didn’t even have a name.