by Tommy Lee
Something not as gentle as the hand on my head, something rough and impatient, grabbed my foot. And in an instant I shot down through the air, through the roof of the ambulance, and landed with a painful jerk back into my body. I struggled to open my eyes and I saw adrenaline needles—not one, like in Pulp Fiction, but two. One was sticking out of the left flank of my chest, the other was in the right. “No one’s gonna die in my fucking ambulance,” I heard a man’s voice say. Then I passed out.
When I woke up, there was a flashlight shining directly into my eyes. “Where did you get your drugs?” a voice barked. I groaned and tried to clear the fuzz and pain out of my head. “You are a heroin addict!” I tried to move my head to avoid the flashlight beam that was burning into my skull. “Where did you get your drugs?” I couldn’t see a thing. But I could feel tubes running into my nose and needles taped against my arms. If there was any sensation I could recognize in a delirium, it was a needle in my arm. And a cop. “Answer me, you filthy junkie!”
I opened my mouth and sucked in what felt like the first breath of my entire life. I almost choked on it. I coughed and wondered why I had been given a second chance. I was alive. What could I do to celebrate this precious miracle of a second life? What could I say to show my appreciation?
“Fuck you!”
“Why, you little junkie scumbag motherfucker!” the cop yelled back at me. “Who gave you those drugs!”
“Fuck you!”
“That’s it. If you don’t tell us…”
“Am I being held on anything?”
“Uh, no.” Luckily, I didn’t have any drugs on me when I passed out. Robbin or someone must have flushed everything left in the room.
“Then fuck off.” I passed out again.
The next thing I remember, I was standing shirtless in the hospital parking lot. There were two girls sitting on the curb crying. I walked to them and asked, “What’s up?”
Their faces went white. “You’re alive!” one of them stammered.
“What are you talking about? Of course I’m alive.”
They wiped their eyes and stared at me speechless. They were real fans. “Say, can you guys give me a ride home?”
An excited sweat broke out on their faces, and they nervously led me into the passenger seat of their Mazda.
I rolled over and answered the phone, half asleep. I was the first one to get the call.
“Nikki’s in the hospital. He OD’d.” It was our tour manager, Rich Fisher, on the line.
“Jesus. What? Is he dead or alive?”
“I’m not sure,” Rich said.
“Call me back right away and let me know. All right?”
I started to dress so I could visit him at the hospital—if he was alive. The phone rang again. It was Boris, the limo driver who always worked for Nikki. He said that he had seen Nikki’s drug dealer jump out of a hotel-room window and run down the street yelling, “I just killed Nikki Sixx!” Then he saw an ambulance pull up and medics carry Nikki out on a stretcher with a sheet covering his face.
I never cry. But that night I did. Tears rolled down my face and, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I didn’t think about myself. For all the shit he put me through, I really loved that arrogant son of a bitch. I stared at the phone, not sure who to call or what to do. Then it rang again. Chuck Shapiro was calling. A reporter had woken him up asking for a quote for an obituary for Nikki. So it was true.
Panicked but always levelheaded, Chuck had me wait on the line while he placed a call to Cedars-Sinai, the hospital the ambulance had brought Nikki to.
“I’m calling about Nikki Sixx,” Chuck blurted when the receptionist answered.
“He just left,” she told him.
“He just left? What do you mean? I thought he was dead.”
“Yeah, he just left. He pulled the tubes out of his nose, tore the IV out of his arms, and told everyone to fuck off. He walked out with only a pair of leather pants on.”
On the ride home, the radio stations were reporting my death. The girls looked at me with big, wet eyes and asked with genuine concern, “You’re not going to do drugs anymore, are you, Nikki?”
I had felt so alone and monstrous on tour, as if I had nobody that cared for me and nobody to care for. In that car, I realized that I was one of the luckiest guys in the world. I had millions of people who cared for me and millions of people I cared for. “No way,” I told them from the bottom of my heart.
It was so funny to me that everyone thought I was dead that, as soon as I returned home, I walked to my answering machine and changed the message. “Hey, it’s Nikki. I’m not home because I’m dead.” Then I went into the bathroom, pulled a lump of heroin out of the medicine cabinet, rolled up my sleeve, tied off, and with one sink of the syringe plunger realized that all the love and concern of those millions of fans still didn’t feel as satisfying as one good shot of heroin.
I woke up the next afternoon sprawled across the bathroom floor with the needle still dangling out of my arm. The tile floor was covered with blood. My blood. I passed out again.
Somewhere, far away, a phone rang.
“Hey, it’s Nikki. I’m not home because I’m dead.”
My biggest regret as a manager is that I let Vince think he could get away with murder. I remember sitting with Vince after the accident with Razzle, and the lawyers said to him, “The judge wants you to do some time.” Vince looked up at them and—I’ll never forget these words—said: “I can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?” I asked him.
“I have to go on tour.”
“Oh fuck,” I slapped my head. “Why didn’t I think of using that as your defense? My client, Vince Neil, is innocent of manslaughter and cannot serve time because he has to play some concerts. Case closed.”
In Vince’s mind, he thought he was above the law. And walking away from that disaster with a few weeks in a luxury jail and a twelve-thousand-dollar Rolex certainly didn’t teach him otherwise. Now he had every excuse in the world to do what he wanted, because nothing could stop him. Guys like Mick, who never said more than seven words to me in my first five years with the band, had eaten shit for so long that they knew what it was like to be nothing. (Of course, Mick was a pretty depressed guy after all that and such a pushover that I always thought he should have his own television show: Do You Want to Take Advantage of Me?)
My real nightmare managing the band began when I tried to keep Vince sober while he was on probation. In Orlando, Florida, on the Theatre of Pain tour, we were so sick of his antics that we left him in a hotel room with two bodyguards and told them to just beat the shit out of him. The guy’s biggest enemy was always himself; on the Girls tour, he was making a sandwich backstage in Rochester and threw a fit when all they had was a jar of Gulden’s mustard, not French’s mustard. So he slammed the glass bottle against the wall and severed the tendons in several fingers on his right hand. We had to cancel the show and airlift him to a hand specialist in Baltimore.
Of course, Vince can’t entirely be blamed for his behavior. As his managers, Doug and I condoned it to a certain extent by allowing it to continue, perhaps because the band was so popular. But, finally, we had to put our foot down. And what shocked us most is that it wasn’t because of Vince. It was because of Nikki.
Now Nikki, the king of the losers, had begun to unravel on the Girls tour. Neither Doug nor I wanted to be around him, so we drew straws to see who would accompany the band to Japan. I drew the short one: Mr. Udo, the promoter there, is one of my best friends. Every time he takes a band to Japan, he puts his reputation on the line for them. And it was no different for Mötley Crüe. Except that Mötley Crüe couldn’t give a fuck. They are savages with cash who care nothing about nobody, even each other.
The first thing that happened when we arrived in Japan was that Tommy got caught with pot in his drum kit. Mr. Udo bailed us out of that and, a few days later, we were all leaving Osaka on the bullet train after a show. Thes
e clowns were in full costume, with makeup running down their faces and chains and tattoos everywhere. Nikki and Tommy went completely out of control. If you flew above the train in a helicopter, you would have seen all these Japanese people scurrying like cockroaches out of the car we were in. If you zoomed in, you would have seen Nikki throwing a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and hitting a Japanese businessman in the back of the skull. Lower the microphone and you would have heard the guy screaming and the blood pumping out of his head. It was just brutal shit. Brutal.
When we pulled into the Tokyo station, there were hundreds of policemen running alongside the car. “Hey, Nikki,” I said. “Your fan club’s here.” And he was so wacked out that he didn’t realize they’d sent the riot squad after him. He thought it was an adoring Japanese public.
They hauled Nikki and me to jail. And, as we were sitting there, he said to me, “So, dude, how do you like these tattoos? What do you think the cops will think of them?”
I thought about my life in Miami: I had a pretty good business going before I moved to the West Coast to manage these guys. I’d played guitar, produced albums by Styx, the Ohio Players, and the Average White Band, managed nice guys like Pat Travers. Life was so peaceful and easy back then. “I don’t know,” I replied to Nikki. “But I’ll tell you this: If they let me get my hands free, I’m going to beat the living shit out of you.”
Finally, despite Nikki smarting off the whole time, he was released at five in the morning. I stayed in the station taking care of paperwork all day and, when I finally returned to my hotel room that night, ready to collapse, who should come banging on the door but Vince. He was smashed and trying to fuck the girlfriend of some Yakuza gangster. But, at the same time, his brain-dead L.A. girlfriend had just arrived in Japan and was in his room. So he’s pissed off because he doesn’t want to deal with the latest mess his dick has gotten him into.
“Fire the travel agent,” he slobbers.
“What?”
“Fire the fucking travel agent!”
I had taken all I could take that day. I smashed him in the face, closed the door, and sank into a peaceful sleep. That’s how it was with those guys: We would punch the shit out of each other all the time. I called it fullcontact management.
When, a few days later, Nikki said he was traveling to Hong Kong, Thailand, and Malaysia with nothing but a pack of rubbers, I considered further violence. I knew I’d have to tag along and baby-sit, because if I didn’t he’d wind up dead or lost or sold into white slavery. Fortunately, he didn’t make it any further than Hong Kong, where he ordered something like 150 prostitutes in two days. I could have killed him when he sent a dozen giggling prostitutes to my door while I was on the phone with my family.
Of course, Nikki wasn’t sexually active then. He probably just talked and talked and talked to the poor hookers until they came to the conclusion that no amount of money was worth this torture. He was a stone-cold junkie, and he was pretty bad off. When we returned to California in December, I started getting calls in the middle of the night from the security company that protected his house because they’d answer alarms only to find him slithering around his yard with a shotgun.
A few days before Christmas, I went to dinner with Bob Krasnow of Elektra. “So,” he said. “How are the guys doing?”
“They’ll be okay,” I said, “if they can stay alive.”
Then, just after dinner, Doug called. Nikki had overdosed in some hotel room and they thought he was dead. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. After shock came disgust. Then came disappointment. I was upset with myself for being involved with a band like this and for, in some way, allowing these guys to get away with behaving like animals. Especially now that one animal had killed himself.
When I found out that Nikki was actually alive and had escaped from the hospital, I knew what I had to do. I went into the office, called Doug to my desk, and told him, “I’m not doing this. I’m not going to watch people die.”
They had a European tour scheduled, and there was a better chance of them coming home in body bags than on the Concorde. We canceled the tour and went in search of Nikki. No one answered his phone, but he had changed his answering machine message, so we knew he had been there. We drove to his house, and found him knocked out in his bathroom with blood all over the walls. He was lying there in leather pants and no shirt, smacked out and incoherent. I talked him into coming to my house to detox. The problem with Nikki is that as far as he’s concerned, nothing controls him. He controls everything. But in this case, heroin was a much bigger power than he was prepared to reckon with.
Nikki stayed at my place in Tarzana for almost a week. Bob Timmons came over every day to try to keep him sober and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, who had taken an interest in Nikki, called every day to bully him into straightening up. “You’re going to die,” he’d tell him. “You’ve got to see it.” Finally, Nikki broke down. He admitted to us for the first time that he couldn’t control his addiction. We called in the rest of the band and held a big meeting in my living room. They looked pathetic. There was Nikki, who was dying; Tommy, who was getting loaded and fighting with his wife; Vince, who was completely out of control; and Mick, who basically woke up every morning and drank and sobbed to himself until he passed out. And this was supposed to be one of the biggest, greatest rock bands in the world.
Doug and I told them, first, that they were going to pay back the promoters in Europe for their cancelled tour out of their own pockets. Second, they were either going to straighten up or find new management. We presented a united front. Nikki admitted that he needed to check into a hospital, something he had never agreed to before. Tommy, who’s so easily led he’d drink Kool-Aid if Jim Jones asked him to, said he was in, of course. Vince, stubborn and in denial, dragged his heels and waffled. And Mick just gave us a funny look.
fig. 2
I was the first one to go. Part of me didn’t want to do it, but we were all partying too hard. So we made a pact and, being a team player and shit, I checked into rehab first.
I wasn’t as bad off as Nikki or Vince, but I was drinking like a maniac, smoking weed, and every once in a while I’d fuck around shooting heroin with Sixx. That drug was so fucking good it scared me.
I didn’t think I had any problems, though, until I checked into this place in Tucson called Cottonwood. There was this doctor there who brought all this shit to the surface that I had never even really thought about.
On my second day there, he made me sit in a room while he stood behind me. There was nothing else around except for an empty chair across from me. The doctor said that I should look at the empty chair and imagine that my addiction was sitting there. Then he would say things and I was supposed to imagine that it was my addiction speaking to me.
It seemed stupid at first, but after a while I started to believe it. “I know you love me,” my addiction said. “You think about me all the time. You can’t live without me.”
Suddenly, all this anger came to the surface and I jumped up and freaked out: “Wait a minute,” I yelled at the empty chair. “Fuck you. I can fucking live without you.”
“That’s good. I want you to talk back to your addiction,” the doctor said. “I want you to get mad at it. I want you to destroy it. It is not your friend. It is your enemy.”
Then he replaced the chair with a heavy canvas sack and handed me a fucking baseball bat. I ran over and started beating the shit out of this fucking addiction sack, dude, and full-blown tears were flying out of my face.
“Show it how you feel,” the doctor kept egging me on. “It wants to hurt you. Get it out of your life.”
I kept going crazy on the bag while bawling like a baby. It was like an exorcism, bro. I’ll never forget that fucking experience because I realized that there was some other force that had been controlling me for years and it was the first time I had communicated with it. I didn’t know until then how powerful that force was, and how powerful it wasn’t. Addiction is only
as strong as you let it be, and I had let it become too powerful.
There was a sign on the wall at Cottonwood that said “Silence = Death.” And I’ll never forget that phrase, because it made me think of my childhood. My parents were always cool, but whenever I did something wrong, I was punished with silence. They’d send to me to my room and when I asked what I did wrong, they wouldn’t speak to me. So I’d sit in my room wondering what the fuck I did and why no one would talk to me. My parents thought that was how they were supposed to teach me a lesson. So from an early age I equated silence with punishment. When I became older, nothing would piss me off more than someone not talking to me. It still fucking gets to me if a girl doesn’t call back or if I do something wrong and get the silent treatment from a friend. Dude, I want to crawl into a hole and die every time. So when I saw that sign in rehab, “Silence = Death,” I said to myself, “You know what? That’s exactly what it fucking felt like as a kid.”
Everyone in the band was in a different program. But after a week or so, Bob Timmons thought that we should be together as a group. So they all flew down to meet me. We stood in a circle with some other people in the clinic, put our arms around each other, and sang “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” which was probably the perfect message for a band like us, because we were all so used to getting exactly what we wanted whenever we wanted it.
The spigots controlling my eyes turned on again, and I turned to Nikki and sobbed, “Isn’t this the most beautiful song, dude?” And he looked at me like I was crazy, then looked at Mick and whispered something about me falling for this Jim Jones shit. I don’t think anyone in the band ever took me seriously. I was seen as the puppy dog whose paws were too big and always tripped over everything.
But then, after singing, we all sat down. The counselor asked us to visualize ourselves as little boys, and all of a sudden Nikki broke down. His face turned red, and he was so choked up he couldn’t speak a word. Later, he said that he visualized himself at one end of a street with his mother at the other end, and he realized that all his unresolved bitterness and resentment toward his mother and father were still haunting him. If I was the goofball that they were learning had a genuine sadness behind the mask, Nikki was the madly charging ram who we learned had a tender spot, where real feelings and emotions lay.