by Tommy Lee
“What the…”
“If I were you, I would just split anyway. I don’t know what all goes on in that apartment, but I don’t ever want to know.”
One of her neighbors eventually told me that she’d have a dealer waiting around the corner, who would bring her bricks of coke to cook up as soon as I left. She’d hide it from me not because she was embarrassed about the extent of her habit, but because she was worried I’d smoke it all.
One night, Vanity asked me to marry her. I said yes just because I was fucked up, the idea was surreal, and it was easier than saying no. The relationship was just about drugs and entertainment, not love or sex or even friendship. But when she was fucked up in an interview, she told the press we were engaged. She always found a way to make my life as difficult as possible. Tommy was in his multimillion-dollar Hollywood home, and here I was stuck in rock city. No wonder it always felt like he was looking down on us—because we deserved it.
While I was dating Vanity, our managers started trying to put the band back into communication to record an album. By that time, I was not only freebasing, I was strung out on heroin again. I wore cowboy boots on the outside of tight pants, and the sides of the boots were constantly stuffed full of syringes and lumps of tar. I didn’t want to be shooting up anymore, and I put a lot of effort into trying to get straight. But I couldn’t help it. When I decided to go on methadone to withdraw, it only made matters worse and soon I was hooked on both heroin and methadone. Every morning, before I went to the studio, I’d drive to the methadone clinic in my brand-new Corvette and stand in line with all the other junkies to get my fix. Then I’d drive to the studio and spend half of each day taking bathroom breaks. Sometimes Vanity would stop by and embarrass me by lecturing the band on the dangers of carbonated beverages and burning incense that smelled like horseshit.
Lita Ford was working on a record in the studio next door, and when she saw me, she couldn’t believe how I’d deteriorated. “You used to be ready to take on the world,” she told me, “but now you look as if you let the world take you down.”
And though I couldn’t seem to write a song for the Mötley record, I managed to write a song with her for her album, appropriately titled “Falling In and Out of Love.”
As we were getting nowhere slowly on our record, my grandfather and aunt Sharon kept calling. My grandmother was getting sicker, and they wanted me to come visit her. But I was so smacked out, I kept ignoring the calls—until it was too late. My grandfather called crying one afternoon and gave me directions to her funeral, which was to take place the following Saturday. I promised him that I would be there. When Saturday rolled around, I had been awake for two days straight. I shot up some coke to give me enough energy to put one foot in front of the other, crawled off the sofa, started to dress, and fumbled around trying to find the directions for an hour. Then I changed my clothes three times, and puttered around looking for car keys and worrying about how I’d find the funeral home before I decided that it was too complicated and I just couldn’t get my act together. I sat back down on my couch, cooked up some freebase, and turned on the TV.
I sat there, knowing that as I watched Gilligan’s Island, the rest of my family was at her funeral, and the guilt started to seep in. She was the woman who had put up with me when my mom couldn’t, the woman who had dragged me across the country from Texas to Idaho like I was her own son. Without her willingness to take me in every time, whether she was living in a gas station or a hog farm, I probably never would have been sitting in a giant rock-star house shooting up. I’d be doing it in under a bridge in Seattle.
The next day, I resolved to clean up so that I could write some music for the album, and maybe even call my grandfather and beg him to forgive my self-centeredness. The first song I wrote was “Nona,” which was the name of my grandmother. Tom Zutaut stopped by the house and listened to it—“Nona, I’m out of my head without you”—and tears welled up in his eyes. I often have nightmares about my grandmother’s sickness and funeral, because not being there for her and my grandfather then is one of the things I regret most about my life.
Tom wasn’t working at Elektra anymore. He had moved to Geffen and had signed Guns N’ Roses. He wanted me to produce their record and see if I could give the punk-metal they were playing at the time a more commercial, melodic edge without sacrificing credibility. They were just a punk band, he told me, but they were capable of being the greatest rock-and-roll band in the world if someone could help them find the melodies to take them there. I was in too much agony trying to slow down my drug intake to consider the idea, but Tom’s confidence motivated me to write for my own album. I bought an old Bernard Falk book from 1937 called Five Years Dead, which inspired the song of the same name, and focused on kick-starting my brain. I knew my window of sobriety would be brief, so I had to work quickly.
Like Theatre of Pain, Girls, Girls, Girls could have been a phenomenal record, but we were too caught up in our own personal bullshit to put any effort into it. You can actually hear the distance that had grown between us in our performance. If we hadn’t managed to force two songs out of ourselves (the title track and “Wild Side”), the album would have been the end of our careers.
In the studio, we were each mixing our drugs with something we had never combined them with before: guilt, denial, and secrecy. And those three words are the difference between an addict and a hedonist. Tommy was in Heatherland, which wasn’t just a land of paradise but also of discipline, where he had to hide his drug use from her. Because of it, he was becoming a stressed-out wreck. Vince was trying to stay sober but failing miserably, distracting himself from his own unhappiness with girls and mud wrestling; and Mick was up to something behind our backs, though none of us had any idea what that was. In the months before we returned to the studio, we were so busy fighting our own demons that we completely forgot about Mick. When we saw him again, it looked like someone had sewn his head onto the body of a Samoan wrestler: his arms and neck were so bloated we worried he wouldn’t be able to reach his guitar frets. He always pretended like he was too old to party with us, that he had done his share of drugs as a teenager, but something was up. And he wasn’t telling us what.
fig. 3
Nikki’s grandmother Nona
fig. 1
Back in my day, baling rope wasn’t made out of wire. It was real rope, about a quarter-inch wide if you laid it out flat. It was closer to twine, really, and we used it to bale the hay. I guess we also used it to hang my older brother.
My younger brother, Tim, and I made a one-and-a-half-foot loop in the baling rope and held it together with a slipknot. I threw the loop over the branch of an oak tree and tied the other end of the rope around the trunk. Tim found a five-gallon drum in my grandmother’s shed and placed it under the hanging noose. Then we made our older brother, Frank, stand on the drum, slipped the noose around his neck, and made sure it was good and tight. I kicked the drum out from under him, and we watched him swing.
We were the Indians: He was the cowboy. He screamed and struggled as he dangled in the air, and he kept grabbing at the noose with his hands, trying to loosen it. When we grew bored of running around him whooping and hollering, Tim and I headed inside.
“Where’s Frank?” Aunt Thelma asked. Aunt Thelma, who couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, was my grandmother’s most loyal daughter and lived with her until finally marrying at the age of fifty-five.
“Out there.” Tim pointed to the side yard.
“Oh my word,” Aunt Thelma gasped, and she ran out to the tree, lifted Frank up, and pulled the noose off his neck.
I was five years old. And I wasn’t messing around. I was born B.A.D.—Bob Alan Deal. People who have had near-death experiences always say they enter a tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel there is a light. I like to think that when you die, you go through the tunnel, and when you get to the other end, you are reborn. The tunnel is the birth canal, and the light at the end of the tunnel is the ho
spital maternity ward, where your new life awaits you. When someone has a near-death experience, where they see the light but don’t walk into it, there is a woman somewhere delivering a stillborn baby who was supposed to have that person’s soul.
I used to tell people that in a past life I was Buddy Holly, then I came back as Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, and finally I returned to earth as Mick Mars. But I was never serious. That doesn’t mean I’ve ruled out the possibility of a past life, but I do wonder why people always believe they were a famous or historical figure, What happened to the chimney sweeps and beggars and housewives? Didn’t they get reincarnated, too? As for me, I was informed of my past lives by a wise old hippie burnout known as the Midnight Gardener, who used to come to my house in the Santa Monica Mountains and tend to my lawn every night at 1 A.M. The Midnight Gardener told me that I had been the King of Borneo, a cannibal, and a slave who worked on the Great Pyramids of Egypt. I think I must have been some sort of womanizer and thief, because in this life I’m being punished for it: Women and money don’t like me. In fact, the former always seem to walk out of my life with all the latter.
From the time I hanged my brother, I knew what I wanted to with this life. Because later that week, Aunt Thelma took Frank, Tim, and me to the 4-H Fair in Hiers Park in Huntington, Indiana, where we lived. She bought us Popsicles, and we sat down in the grass to eat them and watch a concert. I was so young, I didn’t even know what a concert was. I saw a tall, skinny guy in a bright orange rhinestone cowboy suit and a white hat—much fancier than the cowboy outfit Frank had worn when I lynched him. The man on the stage introduced himself as Skeeter Bond, and he started singing. There were other cowboys playing guitar and drums behind him, making a lot of noise. My jaw dropped open, and I completely forgot about my Popsicle, which melted all over my clothes. I wanted to be him. I wanted to make music on a stage. I didn’t care what kind of music really. Music was music: It was all great, whether it was Skeeter Bond cowboy music or my mom’s Elvis Presley records.
That Christmas, my brothers and I ran downstairs in the morning to open our presents. There were long stockings hanging over the fireplace, and one of them had a tiny guitar strung with what were probably rubber bands. “That’s mine!” I yelled, and I grabbed it before anyone could take it from me. The following Christmas, when I was six, my mother bought me a Mickey Mouse guitar, which had mouse ears on the head and a little crank that I could turn to make it play Mouseketeer songs. But I wasn’t interested in Mouseketeer songs. I learned how to tighten the strings so that it sounded more like Skeeter Bond’s twangy guitar, and figured out how to play actual melodies on it.
There was a cool loafer in his twenties who lived nearby, and I called him Sundance. He had an old guitar named Blue Moon, and he taught me my first real song on Blue Moon: “My Dog Has Fleas.” Sometimes I wonder whether country music was my real calling.
Eventually, Sundance taught me how to pick melodies, like the murder ballad “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley.” I liked the melodies because they jumped out of Blue Moon, and, though I didn’t know the terminology at the time, I was already favoring lead guitar over rhythm, which seemed more like something that was played in the background.
If it wasn’t for Jesus being born, I never would have gotten anywhere in music. Because it was on another Christmas, a few years later, that my oldest cousin bought me a Stella guitar that he had found in a pawnshop for twelve bucks.
Soon afterward, my parents gave birth to their first girl, Susan (or Bird, as we called her). Bird was born with a collapsed lung, and in order to increase her chance of survival, her doctors suggested that we move to a more arid climate like Arizona or California. So ten of us—me, my brothers, my parents, my sister, my aunt, my uncle, and my cousins—crunched into a 1959 Ford. After three and a half days of stiff backs and oxygen deprivation, we arrived in Garden Grove, California. It was like The Grapes of Wrath, only California actually lived up to the fantasy: There were orange trees everywhere, and at night we could see the fireworks going off above Disneyland. But in California, country music and Skeeter Bond were foreign words. Surf music was what was happening—Dick Dale, the Ventures, the Surfaris.
My father worked at Menasha Container (which made cardboard boxes for one of my favorite companies, Fender) and my mother ironed shirts on weekends for extra money—two dollars a day if she was lucky. Though I had another younger brother and a sister by then, she still saved up enough to buy me a forty-nine-dollar St. George electric guitar. Now I could make surf music that sounded like curling and crashing waves, just like Dick Dale played it. Volume was also important to me, but my parents didn’t have enough money to buy me an amplifier or a stereo. Instead I took my little sister’s phonograph speaker, removed the wires from the tonearm, and made my own combination amp and stereo so that I could play along with my favorite surf songs.
My father, in the meantime, woke up one day and suddenly decided to become a Baptist minister. When he was a child, he had suffered from a crippling disease that attacked his legs. The doctors said there was nothing they could do for him except pray for mercy from God. When the disease cleared up, it must have planted a God trigger in my Dad’s mind, which fired that morning when he came running into the kitchen raving that he had seen the error of his ways and wanted to dedicate his life to a ministry.
Despite finding religion, my father never tried to discourage me from making music. He and my mother thought that the reason I was so obsessed was that my brain had been fried when I was three. I came down with scarlet fever and ran a 106-degree temperature for three days. A doctor came to my grandmother’s house, where I was in bed almost dead, and took off all my clothes, covered me with cold towels, and packed my bed with ice. Then he opened up every door and window in the house until the winter air filled the room, and after an hour, the fever broke. I was so sick, they said, that maybe I never recovered.
Surf music, to them, was just another disease. But soon after came an even more infectious disease, the Beatles. Overnight, surf rock was archaic and pop with vocals—melodies, harmonies, and lyrics you could nod your head to—was in. I decided that I had to sing, too. I practiced every day for a year until I was ready to show my family. I gathered them downstairs and sang “Money” by the Beatles. The cousin who had bought me my first real guitar went into a fit of hysterics. He said I wouldn’t be able to carry a tune if he wrapped it up and put handles on it. I was so embarrassed that I never tried to sing again—for the rest of my life.
At fourteen, I joined my first band, the Jades, a Beatles cover group with a few originals that might as well have been Beatles songs. I started off on bass but soon replaced their guitarist. Our first gig was at the American Legion Hall in Westminster, and we made twelve bucks to split between the four of us. We were never asked back, however: either we were too heavy or too terrible.
I had a friend named Joe Abbey, a Samoan who had never given up on surf guitar and could play so well he’d bring you to your knees. I wanted to borrow his amp and reverb pedal, but he said they belonged to the Garcia Brothers. He gave me their phone number, and that’s where it really began.
I walked into their house, and found three of them—Tony, Johnny, and Paulie. They were big and mean and led a street gang called the Garcia Brothers. Tony was a guitar player who would have his brothers beat up anyone who said they were better than him, Paulie was a tall drummer who was unhappy because he felt like he should be playing guitar, and Johnny was a bass player who had been put in youth authority when he was sixteen for beating up two cops. They also played with a nonbrother, Paul, a blind harmonica player who looked like Jesus. They were tough, and they didn’t play surf rock or the Beatles. They played the blues. Hard electric blues.
Their neighbors hated them, because they knew the brothers were doing drugs and fighting. For some reason, there were always blind, deaf, or handicapped people hanging around the brothers, and I figured it was evidence that they either had a soft, compassi
onate side or were running some kind of mysterious scam. At 9 P.M. one night, the cops arrested us all because of noise complaints, and I received what they called summer probation basically just for playing my guitar. (That may be why I now have a pet peeve against neighbors who make noise complaints.) We formed a band pretentiously called Sounds of Soul, and played at underage clubs around Orange County like the Sandbox.
At school, I didn’t care about anything except for music. I was one of the three best guitarists there: the best was Chuck Frayer, who could solo like nobody I’d seen before, bending notes and letting them hang in the air forever. He ended up getting drafted into the marines during Vietnam, and the last time I saw him was on The Gong Show. He was playing the harmonica in a suit that made it look like he had two heads. And you can bet your mother’s horse-race winnings that he got gonged.
The other great guitarist was Larry Hansen, who ended up with the Gatlin Brothers. And the third was me. School was pure torture, and all I could think about was getting home to practice. In English, our teacher, Mr. Hickock, wanted us to write an essay on a poem. All the other kids wrote about Robert Frost and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but I came in with “Pressed Rat and Warthog” by Cream. When Mr. Hickock returned the papers, he had written on mine: “F—which is a big understatement.” The next day, we had a test, and I answered one question by calling the teacher a square, music-hating snob, writing “which is a big understatement” beneath it. I handed in the paper, and when he read it, he sent me to the principal, who suspended me—which was a big understatement, he said, because I should have been expelled. I didn’t care. I only wanted to be taught by people who knew something about music. But now I wish I had paid more attention in English classes, because when I talk to people, I worry that I sound uneducated or use the wrong words.