by Tommy Lee
Then she climbed onto the windowsill, stepped out to the ledge, and was gone. I picked up the phone and called Mick, Tommy, and Vince to tell them what had just happened and how much I loved England.
The next day was the kickoff of the Monsters of Rock minitour. While we were traveling in the States with Ratt, we had gotten into the habit of biting each other. Tommy would grab Vince or a security guard, and clamp his teeth down on an arm until he broke the skin. It was all affectionate, of course, but it hurt like hell if you weren’t fucked up.
I was so drunk and coked up at that first show that I walked up to Eddie Van Halen and tackled him. Then I reared my head up, lifted his shirt, and sank my teeth into his bare stomach. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” his wife, Valerie Bertinelli, bellowed. “Biting my husband? You fucking freak!”
Eddie stood up, dusted himself off, and narrowed his squinty eyes. I couldn’t tell whether he was turned on or offended. Before I had a chance to apologize, Vince ran up to him like a savage dog and sank his teeth into his hand. And that threw Valerie into hysterics: Nobody bites the hand that Eddie Van Halen uses to play guitar with.
I must have bitten Angus Young, too, because his brother Malcolm walked up to me in a rage. I was wearing platform boots, and Malcolm’s face was eye level with my belly button. “You fucking bastard,” he roared at my navel. “You can bite my brother, fine! But if you fucking bite me, I’ll bite your fucking nose off, you dog-faced faggot.”
I think I said something like “you and what stepladder,” because before I knew it, he was attacking me, climbing up my leg and clawing at my face like a crazed cat. Doc McGhee pulled him off and, holding him by the scruff of the neck, threw him outside the dressing room. We could hear him scratching at the door and hissing as Doug told us the news.
“Congratulations,” he said. “After this tour, you’re opening for Iron Maiden.”
“Fucking cool, now I don’t have to go home,” I said, thinking about my midnight visitor the night before.
“By the way,” Doc continued, “Bruce Dickinson would like to meet you.” Bruce was Iron Maiden’s new singer, and though his literary, galloping heavy metal was never my favorite music, he was still a legend.
Doc walked out the door and, holding Malcolm at bay with his right hand, signaled to Bruce and a woman who was with him. They walked into the dressing room: My heart dropped into my hands and my testicles shrank to the size of Malcolm’s little fists. I tried to stammer hello to them, but found myself tongue-tied. There she was, the girl who had crawled in my window the night before. And I didn’t know if she was Bruce Dickinson’s wife, girlfriend, manager, personal assistant, or what.
It was on the Monsters of Rock and Iron Maiden tours that the tedium began. In Hollywood, gigging was a way of life. But gigging was not the same as touring. When you gig, you get to go home afterward. Touring is an endless parade of anonymity: faceless people, identical hotel rooms, and indistinguishable cities, always changing but always the same. In America, at least we had the consolation of watching our star rise as we toured. But in Europe, nothing seemed real or relevant. On past tours, I would sit in my hotel room and write postcards to my grandparents in Jerome, Idaho, population four thousand, telling them how lonely I was and how much I missed having a home to go to. But after my reunion with my mother, I didn’t want a home anymore. I became crazier and more reckless, subconsciously putting myself on the same self-destructive path my mother had been on. My rock-and-roll fantasy wasn’t just about success and decadence and rebellion anymore, it was also about pain and death. I was sure I was going to die before I was twenty-five. I think we all thought that.
Tommy and I began breaking glass bottles over each other’s head and twisting the lightbulbs out of makeup mirrors and swallowing them whole just for fun. When Vince was in a bathroom with some groupie or waitress, we’d sneak in, not because we wanted to double-team her but because we wanted to sneak the drugs out of Vince’s pants pocket while he was preoccupied. As singer, Vince had the hardest time recuperating from all the partying: He was usually so thrashed that the only way he could make it through most shows was if we called a doctor to shoot his ass full of cortisone before going onstage.
At the Ritz in Paris, Vince was trying to get to the front desk for a phone call, but he was so fucked up he couldn’t figure out how to open the glass door at the hotel entrance. So he kicked through it, shattering the glass and sending the brass door handle clattering to the ground. He picked the brass handle off the floor, handed it to the concierge, and took the call as if nothing had happened.
In Germany, we got high with Claude Schnell, the keyboard player from Dio, in his hotel room. When he ran out of the room to get something, we decided to fuck with him. We picked up the two tiny European beds in the room and threw them, piece by piece, out the window, followed by his chairs, desk, television, and dresser. Two brand-new Mercedes-Benzes were parked below the room, and each piece of furniture managed to land on one. Suddenly, the German police were knocking on Claude’s door with rottweilers. His whole band had to pack up and leave the hotel, which banned Dio for years, while we stayed there guiltily. I may not like their Intermission album, but I’ll always give Dio credit for not telling on us.
In Switzerland, after the Iron Maiden tour, we weren’t so lucky. Tommy and Vince bought flare guns and fired one in their room. A giant ball of fire shot out and ricocheted off the walls before setting Tommy’s mattress on fire. He and Vince were so amused that they ran to find Doc to show him the flaming bed. But when they returned to the room with him, they discovered that they had locked their keys inside. By the time the maid let them in, smoke was billowing from under the door. For some reason, they didn’t kick us out of the hotel until the following day, when we used the giant balls of metal attached to the room keys to break all the glass windows in the elevators. We were really fucking bored of Europe.
Adding an extra element of awkward tension to the Maiden tour was the fact that the mystery bathroom-window girl hung around Bruce the whole time. Every time I saw Bruce, he would offer me fencing lessons, because he was really into swordplay. I kept turning him down, though, because I was sure he was going to use the fencing lesson as an excuse to accidentally stab me to death for fucking her.
When Maiden’s drummer, Nicko McBain, was busted on the border between France and Germany for carrying hash, no one in the band bothered to warn us back at the venue, where we were always the last to leave because we were partying. I always thought that this was a purposeful act of revenge, because when we finally reached the border, customs officials and dogs swarmed onto the bus as we snorted and swallowed everything we could find. When they went through Tommy’s bags, a giant lump of hash fell onto the ground. It sat there for minutes, looking like a dirt clod, as we sweated nervously. Then, the official searching Tommy’s bag zipped it up, looked around the bus, and walked toward Vince. He stepped on the hash, and it stuck to the bottom of his shoe like a piece of gum. The officers then made me strip, put my arms against the wall, and bend over so that they could look up my ass. I tightened my sphincter muscle and tried as hard as I could to shit on their heads. I pushed and pushed and pushed, but couldn’t get any results.
After the border incident, we started planting bugs in Iron Maiden’s dressing room to find out, first, if they were responsible for the intense search and, second, who the fuck that girl was. Except for Nicko, none of them seemed to like us. On the last night of the tour, Bruce even walked up to Mick and challenged him to a duel. I think he thought that Mick had messed around with that girl.
By the end of the European tour, we sounded terrible. Vince was getting so fucked up every night that no doctor or medication could make him sound good onstage. Our last show in Europe, at the Dominion Theatre in London, was our worst. We looked ridiculous because our style was beginning to evolve from Road Warrior darkness to more colorful, theatrical one-piece court jester suits. For the show, I wore a dark green outfit, pai
nted my bass the same color, and put on matching moccasin shoes. I looked like an overgrown leprechaun. There must have been a butcher shop or something nearby because, throughout the show, fans kept catapulting leg bones and animal heads and strange sausages at us. We took it as a compliment until Tommy’s drum tech, Clyde Duncan, collapsed to the ground. We looked over, and he had a dart sticking out of his back. Tommy, with one hand, pulled the dart out while playing.
Minutes after that, the dry-ice machine blew up. A strong odor of what smelled like hot dog juice wafted across the stage and clung to my clothing, and a wet puddle formed around my feet. The road crew, I assumed, was pouring hot dog juice onto the stage as an end-of-tour joke. I thought it was a pretty lane prank, but when I looked back at Tommy, he seemed panic-stricken. His drum set was surrounded by water, and I assumed they had poured hot-dog juice all over him, too.
After Vince croaked through our last song, I splashed through the water on the stage to find Tommy. He was leaning over Clyde and the smell of hot dogs was unbearable. I moved in closer and discovered that the smell was actually Clyde’s burned skin. The dry-ice machine had blown up in his face, frying his skin like a kosher red-hot and sending water running down the stage, which sloped forward. Clyde was still in agony when we flew back to America afterward. Fortunately, we had a lot of painkillers.
At the time, we didn’t think of drugs as addictive. They were just something that we liked to do all the time to keep ourselves from getting bored. We weren’t addicted: We were just constant users.
As we flew home, I thought about another plane ride. A few months before, after we had received our platinum awards in Manhattan for Shout at the Devil, I flew to Nantucket to meet some girls. I had met Demi Moore at the award parties, and she was waiting to greet me as the prop plane arrived. She was working on a movie there with Bobcat Goldthwait, who was also on the runway along with a handful of other actors and crew members. My head was spinning because I had gotten so drunk and high on the flight. I walked out of the plane to the top of the staircase leading to the tarmac; I had the awards cradled in my left hand, a bottle of Jack in my right hand, and an ounce of cocaine crushed flat in my back pocket. I imagined them looking at me: I looked like a real rock star, like Johnny Thunders.
As I stepped down from the doorway, my shoe slid off the edge of the top step and I lost my balance. I tried to catch myself on the railing, but only succeeded in dropping the bottle of Jack, which smashed on the steps below. I followed it, tumbling headfirst, a mess of broken glass, alcohol, and limbs. I hit the runway first, followed by the award plaques, which knocked me in the head.
I opened my eyes to find Demi, Bobcat, and their friends standing over me, helping me to my feet and looking at me very disapprovingly. They had been where I was. That day was the first time I heard of AA. When Demi and Bobcat suggested that I look into the program, I shrugged them off. But I could see it in their eyes and the way they shook their heads and looked at each other: They knew that very soon, I would be one of them. I was partying without any thought for consequences because, to me, consequences didn’t exist. We were Mötley Crüe, we had a platinum record, and we were bigger than the New York Dolls ever were. We were young, fucked up, and worshiped for it. Words like consequences, responsibility, morality, and self-control didn’t apply to us. Or so we thought.
fig. 1
Have you ever had anyone call the police or security or your landlord on you for playing your music too loud? How can such a beautiful thing be pissed on so much? If you’re at home playing a good album, and some nosy-ass neighbor claims he can’t hear his TV, why does your music have to suffer so he can watch his TV? I say, “Too bad for the neighbor.”
Music is censored as it is: You can’t say “shit” or “piss” or “fuck” or “cock-a-doodle dipshit” on your records if you want them on the radio and in Wal-Mart. It’s not allowed. And if you want your video on TV, you can’t wear certain clothes and you can’t have images of guns or body bags. Is music that dangerous? More dangerous than the death, murder, suicide, and rape I see on TV and in the movies all the time? Yet write a little old love song about the same topics, and no one will play it on the radio. And you can’t crank it on your home stereo, because then it’s too fucking loud for your neighbors. It’s pretty powerful stuff, that music, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. People suck; music doesn’t.
When I was home in Manhattan Beach with The Thing, all I wanted to do was play my stereo or bang on my guitar, but I’d get shut down because of dumb-ass neighbors trying to watch murder and teenage sex on television. However, they never seemed to complain or interfere when The Thing was bitching me out and beating the shit out of me. That was okay. Maybe they thought I deserved it for playing my music too loud.
I was taught as a kid never to hit a lady, even if she hits you first. So when The Thing had her tantrums, I never slugged her back. In fact, I moved in with her. I felt so old that I didn’t think it would be possible for me to get another decent-looking woman.
I’ve never really understood women anyway. On the Monsters of Rock tour in Sweden, one of the guys from AC/DC brought a girl back to the hotel bar. He was really drunk and puked all over her. A hotel security guard brought him up to his room, but he was back in fifteen minutes, pounding on the bar for more beer. After drinking enough to make himself sick again, he asked the girl to come up to his room with him. She was still stained with his puke, but she said yes anyway. How gross is that? That is worse than Ozzy snorting ants. What’s wrong with these women?
Vince and his wife, Beth, had moved into a house near The Thing and me in Manhattan Beach. The Thing was friends with Beth and, together, the two were the toughest broads you’ve ever seen. The Thing was the type that punched first and asked questions later, and Beth was more the nagging kind, very sensitive about cleanliness and paranoid about germs. I don’t know how Vince got away with all the shit he did. He would go to the Tropicana, a strip club with a ring where women wrestled in baby oil, and he’d come home after two in the morning. When Beth would ask why he was covered with oil, Vince would just say, “Oh, I was at Benihana and the cook at the table got carried away.” And that would be it. I never went to those places. No interest. What’s the use of looking if you can’t touch?
After returning from the last Shout shows in England, Vince threw a party at his house to celebrate the start of our next album. A day or two into Vince’s party, The Thing walked into our living room with her sleeves rolled up. I was sitting on the couch, fucked up as usual, and watching an episode of Nova about mathematical theories. I’d taken a couple of quaaludes and was drinking Jack and bellars. A bellar was something my friend Stick and I invented: It was a mix of Kahlúa and brandy, named after the way old ladies at the bar would bellar at us.
The Thing knocked me upside the head and demanded to be taken to Vince and Beth’s. I didn’t really want to leave the couch but I figured going was easier than staying home all day and fighting. So we went to Vince’s place and ended up in a fight anyway. It was so pointless. There was no way to win with her. And I was miserable and sick of being abused. It just wasn’t worth the trouble, especially since her friends had been telling me that she was fucking some jock behind my back. I think she thought that he had more money than I did.
I was so aggravated that I walked out of Vince’s house and onto the beach. My head kept ringing: “Do yourself in, do yourself in.” I didn’t really want to end it all. I’d been through worse. I just wanted peace and quiet. So I waded into the ocean with a bellar in my hand. The waves were cold and kept smacking my clothes, higher and higher, until they knocked my drink out of my hand. Soon, my hair was wet and sticking to the back of my neck. Then I blacked out.
It was me, Mick, Vince, and the guys from Hanoi Rocks, who were in town partying. We were doing a shitload of drinking at Vince’s and just having a killer time. We’d probably been barbecuing, boozing, and occasionally sleeping for a good three or four days when we f
inally ran out of beer. Vince wanted to show off his new Pantera, so he asked who wanted to make a beer run. Razzle volunteered first, and the two of them disappeared out the door.
The liquor store was only a few blocks away, but they were gone for a long-ass time. Mick had disappeared, too, and no one knew where he had gone. But that was typical behavior for that sneaky fucker. Nikki hadn’t even shown up to the party, so no one knew where the fuck he was either.
“Dude,” I said to a collective couch of wives, “even if Vince took Razzle on a fucking joyride, they should be back by now. The liquor store is only around the corner, so what the fuck are they doing?”
That’s when we began to worry that maybe they’d crashed or been jacked for cash. I had no clue. Then we heard ambulances careen past the house, whip around the corner, and squeal to a halt. I sobered up on the spot. I think everyone did, because there was no doubt who those ambulances were for.
We ran out of the house. The road curved around to the left, making it impossible to see what was around the corner. We walked and walked and walked—it seemed like forever—watching the red flashing lights bounce off nearby buildings.
When we turned the corner, there were fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, and dozens of people in shorts standing on the corner just gawking. I turned my head to see what they were gawking at, and the first thing I saw was that red fucking Pantera. It was smashed—not head-on but at a slight angle—into another car, and its passenger side had collapsed on itself like an accordion. The road was littered with shit: glass, metal, plastic, and, in the middle of it all, a fucking Chuck Taylor high-top. It was the shoe that Razzle always wore.