by Tommy Lee
Except for Lita, no one knew where I was. All that the band knew was that my Porsche was lying totaled halfway down the hill, and I was nowhere to be found. To this day, I still wonder how much I was missed: No one ever bothered to call the house to see if I was all right. The only good thing that came out of the experience was that I developed a lifelong love for Percodan.
The car crash, combined with everything else creepy and dangerous that had happened to us, brought me back to reality and Lita talked me into backing off my flirtation with Satanism. Instead, heroin began to consume me, first to kill the pain of the shoulder then later to kill the pain of life, which is the pain of not being on heroin. Vince had found a girl who could hook us up. He’d bring in a brown lump of tar, a sheet of tinfoil, and some kind of homemade funnel made out of cardboard and tape. We’d take a pinch of the heroin, put it on the foil, hold a lighter underneath, and suck up the smoke as we chased the burning ball down the foil. We’d get so fucking stoned we’d just sit on the couch and stare at each other.
Pretty soon, we were getting higher-grade heroin through a bassist who played in a local punk band and was good friends with Robbin Crosby of Ratt. Once the two of them taught us how to use needles, it was all over. The first times I shot up, I just passed out. When I came to, everyone would be laughing at me because I’d have been lying in the middle of the floor for fifteen minutes. Vince’s vice was women and, with those first shots, I learned that mine was to be drugs, for the rest of my life. I invented speedballs without anyone even having to tell me about them. One afternoon, I wondered whether shooting up coke with the heroin would keep me from passing out. So I did my first speedball, and I didn’t pass out. I did, however, spend the fifteen minutes usually consigned to blacking out on the floor of the bathroom, vomiting all over the toilet and floor. But I didn’t mind throwing up. I was always good at that.
Luckily, with one arm in a cast, I couldn’t shoot up on my own. It kept me in check. I couldn’t play bass either, but that was fine with our producer, Tom Werman, because he was constantly calling Elektra complaining that I couldn’t play and Vince couldn’t sing. So I would come to the studio with my arm in a sling and hang out and get high and look after things.
Werman had told me throughout the session, “Whatever you do, don’t look at my production notes. I have things there that I’m thinking about as far as the direction of the music is concerned, and I don’t want you freaking out over them.” Of course, that was the worst thing he could have told us. From then on, we kept trying to find out what he was writing. But whenever he left the studio, he’d take them with him. One evening, when he stepped out to go to the bathroom, he left the notes behind. I ran to the mixing desk, excited to finally find out what was really on his mind. I opened the book and peered at the words: “Don’t forget to mow the lawn on Sunday. Remember to get ballet slippers for school play. Buy new pitching wedge.” I seethed with anger: I could not believe that this person who called himself our producer could be thinking about anything other than Mötley Crüe and rock and roll.
I walked outside to find him, but the receptionist stopped me. Alice Cooper was working in the studio, and I had been begging her for days to let me meet him. He seemed bigger than God. And this was my lucky Sunday. “He’s ready to meet you,” she said. “He said to wait for him in the room outside his studio at three.”
Standing outside his studio at three was an impeccably dressed man in a suit holding a briefcase. “Alice will be out in a second,” he told me, as if I was about to meet the Godfather. A minute later, the door to the studio opened and smoke billowed out. Emerging slowly from the center of the cloud came Alice Cooper. He was carrying a pair of scissors, which he kept opening and snapping shut in his hands. He walked up to me and said, “I’m Alice.” And all I could say was, “Fuck yes, you are!” With an entrance like that, he really was God. It wasn’t until years later that I figured out what that smoke really was.
By the time my arm healed, our second album, Shout at the Devil, was finished and we were ready to play live again. When we were living together, we had watched Mad Max and Escape from New York nonstop, until every image was engraved in our brains. We were starting to get bored with the glam-punk image because so many other bands had copied it, so our look evolved into a cross between those two movies. The metamorphosis began one night at a show at the Santa Monica Civic Center. Joe Perry of Aerosmith was smashed out of his mind, and I walked over to him, took a grease pencil, and smeared it under my eyes, Road Warrior style. Joe said that it looked cool, and that was enough encouragement for me. From there, I put on a single studded shoulder pad and war paint under my eyes, like one of the gas pirates in The Road Warrior. Then I had someone make me thigh-high leather boots with cages in the heels, which ejected smoke when I pressed a button. We painted a city skyline based on Escape from New York as a backdrop to our shows, shaped our amps like spikes, and built a drum riser to look like rubble from an exploded freeway.
WE THOUGHT WE WERE THE BADDEST CREATURES on God’s great earth. Nobody could do it as hard as us and as much as us, and get away with it like us. There was no competition. The more fucked up we got, the greater people thought we were and the more they supplied us with what we needed to get even more fucked up. Radio stations brought us groupies; management gave us drugs. Everyone we met made sure we were constantly fucked and fucked up. We thought nothing about whipping out our dicks and urinating on the floor of a radio station during an interview, or fucking the host on-air if she was halfway decent looking. We thought we had elevated animal behavior to an art form. But then we met Ozzy.
We weren’t that excited when Elektra Records told us they’d gotten us the opening slot on Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon tour. We had played a few dates with Kiss after Too Fast for Love, and not only were they excruciatingly boring but Gene Simmons had kicked us off the tour for bad behavior. (Imagine my surprise seventeen years later when ace businessman Gene Simmons called as I wrote this very chapter, asking not only for the film rights to The Dirt but also for exclusive film rights to the story of Mötley Crüe for all eternity.)
We started warming up for the Ozzy tour at Long View Farm in Massachusetts, where the Rolling Stones rehearsed. We lived in lofts and I begged them for the one where Keith Richards slept, which was in the barn. Our limousine drivers would bring us so many drugs and hookers from the city that we could barely keep our eyes open during rehearsals. Tommy and I kept a bucket positioned midway between us, so that we’d have something to throw up into. One afternoon, our management and the record company came down to see our progress, or lack thereof, and I kept nodding out.
Mick, our merciless overseer of quality control, bent into the microphone and announced to the assembled mass of businesspeople and dispensers of checks, per diems, and advances: “Perhaps we could play these songs for you if Nikki hadn’t been up all night doing heroin.” I got so pissed off that I threw my bass to the ground, walked over to his microphone, and snapped the stand in half. Mick was already at the door by then, but I chased him down the country lane, both of us in high heels like two hookers in a catfight.
fig. 4
Mick with Ozzy Osbourne
The tour began in Portland, Maine, and we walked into the arena to find Ozzy running through sound check. He wore a huge jacket made of fox fur and was adorned with pounds of gold jewelry. He was standing onstage with Jake E. Lee on guitar, Rudy Sarzo on bass, and Carmine Appice on drums. This wasn’t going to be another Kiss tour. Ozzy was a trembling, twitching mass of nerves and crazy, incomprehensible energy, who told us that when he was in Black Sabbath he took acid every day for an entire year to see what would happen. There was nothing Ozzy hadn’t done and, as a result, there was nothing Ozzy could remember having done.
We hit it off with him from day one. He took us under his wing and made us comfortable facing twenty thousand people every night, an ego boost like no other we’ve ever had. After the first show, a feeling came over me l
ike the one I had when we sold out our first night at the Whisky. Only this was bigger, better, and much closer to the victory line, wherever and whatever that was. The little dream that we had together in the Mötley House was about to become a reality. Our days of killing cockroaches and humping for food were over. If the performance at the US Festival was a spark illuminating what we could become, then the Ozzy tour was the match that set the whole band ablaze. Without it, we probably would have been one of those L.A. bands like London, surefire stars who never quite fired.
Ozzy hardly spent a night on his tour bus: He was always on ours. He’d burst through the door with a baggie full of coke, singing, “I am the krelley man, doing all the krell that I can, I can,” and we’d snort up the krell all night long, until the bus stopped and we were in the next city.
In one case, that city happened to be Lakeland, Florida. We rolled out of the bus under the heat of the noonday sun and went straight to the bar, which was separated from the swimming pool deck by a glass window. Ozzy pulled off his pants and stuck a dollar bill in his ass crack, then walked into the bar, offering the dollar to each couple inside. When an elderly lady began to cuss him out, Ozzy grabbed her bag and took off running. He came back to the pool wearing nothing but a little day dress he had found in the bag. We were cracking up, though we weren’t sure whether his antics were evidence of a wicked sense of humor or a severe case of schizophrenia. More and more, I tend to believe the latter.
We were hanging out, us in T-shirts and leather, Ozzy in the dress, when all of a sudden Ozzy nudged me. “Hey, mate, I fancy a bump.”
“Dude,” I told him, “we’re out of blow. Maybe I can send the bus driver out for some.”
“Give me the straw,” he said, unfazed.
“But, dude, there’s no blow.”
“Give me the straw. I’m having a bump.”
I handed him the straw, and he walked over to a crack in the sidewalk and bent over it. I saw a long column of ants, marching to a little sand dugout built where the pavement met the dirt. And as I thought, “No, he wouldn’t,” he did. He put the straw to his nose and, with his bare white ass peeking out from under the dress like a sliced honeydew, sent the entire line of ants tickling up his nose with a single, monstrous snort.
He stood up, reared back his head, and concluded with a powerful rightnostriled sniff that probably sent a stray ant or two dripping down his throat. Then he hiked up the sundress, grabbed his dick, and pissed on the pavement. Without even looking at his growing audience—everyone on the tour was watching him while the old women and families on the pool deck were pretending not to—he knelt down and, getting the dress soggy in the puddle, lapped it up. He didn’t just flick it with his tongue, he took a half-dozen long, lingering, and thorough strokes, like a cat. Then he stood up and, eyes blazing and mouth wet with urine, looked straight at me. “Do that, Sixx!”
I swallowed and sweated. But this was peer pressure that I could not refuse. After all, he had done so much for Mötley Crüe. And, if we wanted to maintain our reputation as rock’s most cretinous band, I couldn’t back down, not with everyone watching. I unzipped my pants and whipped out my dick in full view of everybody in the bar and around the pool. “I don’t give a fuck,” I thought to steady myself as I made my puddle. “I’ll lick up my piss. Who cares? It comes from my body anyway.”
But, as I bent down to finish what I had begun, Ozzy swooped in and beat me to it. There he was, on all fours at my feet, licking up my pee. I threw up my hands: “You win,” I said. And he did: From that moment on, we always knew that wherever we were, whatever we were doing, there was someone who was sicker and more disgusting than we were.
But, unlike us, Ozzy had a restraint, a limit, a conscience, a brake. And that restraint came in the form of a homely, rotund little British woman whose very name sets lips trembling and knees knocking: Sharon Osbourne, a shitkicker and disciplinarian like no other we had ever met, a woman whose presence could in an instant send us reeling back to our childhood fear of authority.
After Florida, Sharon joined the tour to restore order. Suddenly, Ozzy turned into a perfect husband. He ate his vegetables, held her hand, and went to bed promptly after each show, with neither drugs in his nose nor urine in his mouth. But it wasn’t enough for Ozzy to behave. Sharon wanted us to behave. When she walked into our dressing room to find a girl on her hands and knees, and the four of us standing there with our pants around our ankles and guilty-little-boy grins on our faces, she laid down the law. She wouldn’t let us do drugs, invite girls backstage, or have fun in any way that didn’t involve a board game. To make sure her rules were followed, she eliminated alcohol from our tour rider and appointed herself as sole keeper and distributor of backstage passes. We grew so frustrated that we had the merchandising company traveling with us make a new T-shirt. The front consisted of a smiley face riddled with bloody bullet holes. The back was a circle with a vertical column containing the words “sex, fun, booze, parties, hot rods, pussy, heroin, motorcycles.” A big red line was drawn through the circle, and below it were the words “No Fun Tour: ’83–’84.” We gave a shirt to everybody on the tour, including Ozzy.
Eventually, I was reduced to crawling up to Sharon on my hands and knees and pleading, “I really have to get laid. I’m going crazy.”
“No, you can’t, Nikki,” she said firmly. “You’re going to get a disease.”
“I don’t care about diseases,” I cried. “I’ll get a shot. I just want to get laid.”
“Okay,” she relented. “Just this once.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
She led me by the hand to the side of the stage and said, “So, which one do you want,” as if I were a little kid picking out sweets.
“I’ll take the one in red, please.”
That same night, Carmine Appice left the tour. He had played with Vanilla Fudge, Cactus, and Rod Stewart, and was somewhat a star in his own right, so he thought he should be selling his own T-shirts. With uncharacteristic magnanimity, Sharon granted him permission. But when fans brought T-shirts back for Carmine to sign, all of them had a big hole over the breast: Sharon and Ozzy had cut Carmine’s face out of all his T-shirts. They got in a big fight, which concluded with Carmine quitting and Tommy Aldridge returning to the band to replace him on drums.
Whenever Sharon left the tour, Ozzy returned to complete decadence. In Nashville, he shit in Tommy’s bathroom and wiped it all over the walls. In Memphis, he and Vince stole a car with the keys still dangling from the ignition, terrorized pedestrians on Beale Street, and then destroyed it, smashing the windows and gutting the upholstery. Days later, we happened to arrive in New Orleans on the second night of Mardi Gras. The town was on fire. Tommy, Jake E., and I got into a knife fight at a bar on Bourbon Street while Vince and Ozzy toured the strip clubs. When we all returned to the hotel, drunk and covered with blood, Mom was waiting for us: Sharon had flown into town, and she forbade us to hang out with Ozzy again.
Sometimes, when Sharon was gone, Ozzy would break down like a child lost without his mother. In Italy, he bought a blow-up doll, drew a Hitler mustache on it, and kept it in the back room of our bus. On the way to Milan, he kept talking to it, like it was his only friend. He told the doll that there was some kind of conspiracy, and everyone had turned against him and was plotting to kill him. When he went onstage that night, he was wearing Gestapo boots, panties, a bra, and a blond wig. He seemed to be having a great time at first, but after a few songs, he snapped and started crying. “I’m not an animal,” he sobbed into the microphone. “I’m not a freak.” Then he apologized to the audience and walked offstage.
That night in the hotel room Mick and I shared, he asked if he could use the phone. He picked it up and said, “England, please.”
I grabbed the receiver out of his hands and hung it up. “Dude, you can’t call England. I don’t have that kind of money.”
So he called collect. Sharon accepted. “I’m just calling to tell you that I want a d
ivorce,” Ozzy said, as soberly and seriously as he could.
“Shut up and go to bed,” she snapped back, then hung up on him.
For some reason, our tour manager had the bright idea of putting obnoxious me and quiet Mick Mars in a room together: We were like The Odd Couple. I’d get frustrated writing a song and take my guitar into the hallway, where I’d smash every single light. Then I’d come back into the room, trailing my broken ax behind me and asking Mick, “Say, can I borrow your guitar?” We regularly came to blows, usually because I was partying or bringing girls to the room. After I pulled a clump of his hair out when he wouldn’t let me borrow his guitar, I was finally given my own room. It didn’t help Mick find any peace and quiet, though, because not long afterward, a hotel guest called the police after she saw Tommy streaking down the hall, and the cops accidentally arrested Mick instead.
We toured with Ozzy on and off for over a year, taking time off to play solo shows or gig with Saxon. In the meantime, we received our first gold and platinum record awards, heard ourselves on the radio for the first time, and started getting recognized in the streets outside Los Angeles. It was all happening quickly and, as a result, all of our relationships began to break down. The day the tour ended, the bus dropped me off in front of the house where Lita and I lived. I stood outside for ten minutes with my suitcase in my hand, unsure whether to walk in or not. When I did, I hugged her and didn’t say a word. I just stood there. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Something had turned off inside of me during the tour, and I had no idea how to turn it back on.
When Lita left a few days later for her own tour, I was relieved. I was in no shape to carry on a relationship with her, especially with both of us constantly traveling, and I had no idea how to interact with a woman I respected anymore. By the time she returned, I had already arranged to move across the street and live with Robbin Crosby. The day I moved in with him, life returned to complete destitution and depravity. He had just one bed, and was kind enough to let me sleep in it while he crashed on the floor. Instead of a refrigerator, he had a Styrofoam chest filled with bags of ice. It had a hole in the bottom, and the water constantly leaked all over the kitchen floor. The manager of the building hated me and warned every day that if he caught me throwing loud parties or drinking alcohol by the pool or misbehaving in any way, he’d throw me out on my tattooed ass.