by Tommy Lee
Even Vince, the most impenetrable of us all, began to open up and cry. For the first time, I saw a weakness in Mötley Crüe that I had never noticed before. We all turned into broken-down little children, except for Mick, who was being strangely stubborn and refused to open up. Every time we sang together or meditated or went through any exercise to get in touch with our emotions, I’d look at him and he’d have an expression on his face like he was about to vomit all over the floor.
It was as simple as this: I saw how ugly and bloated I looked. I saw how close Nikki had come to dying. And I saw how our managers were so sick of us they were going to quit. In fact, I was so sick of us that I was ready to quit if something didn’t change.
So I cut out the drinking. You can only stop when you want to stop. And I was ready to stop. I didn’t like the feeling of being vulnerable when I was drunk, because in that state it’s easy for people to take advantage of you. And I was badly damaging my bones, because I was getting so rotted I’d make a reckless move and wake up the next morning in crippling pain, which I’d anesthetize with more liquor until I was so drunk I’d do something stupid again.
Sober, I lost twenty pounds and a hundred wrinkles within a few weeks. Whenever I craved a drink or felt frustrated, I’d just curl my fingers into a circle as if I were holding a shot glass, yell “boom,” and snap my hand toward my mouth, as if I was hammering a shot of tequila. That was my boom, my therapy. I think it scared a lot of people, but it made me happy. It was also a lot cheaper than rehab.
Nikki, Tommy, and Vince, in the meantime, checked in and out of rehab so many times I could never keep track of who was where. Nikki thinks rehab did the band a lot of good. But I don’t believe it. I would visit them in rehab and see therapists tearing those guys apart until they felt like zeroes. They’d get humiliated and degraded and stuck in rooms with people who had real problems, people who had been raped by their father or seen their mother get killed. Tommy, Vince, and Nikki didn’t have problems like that: They were so fucking young they hadn’t even begun to live. The whole process was hardest on Tommy, I think, because he’d gotten to the point of being ultratemperamental when he was rotted and, after a blowup at his house on Christmas Eve, he needed to get sober to save his marriage. He was just a baby when the band took off, and I guess you lose your sense of perspective when you’re a teenage millionaire.
The deal we made was that before we started recording the new album, we all had to be sober. So the guys would check into rehab, go on a binge, then check into rehab again to sober up for a week. It was like an expensive vacation, because all these therapists and clinic owners would do was take as much money out of those guys as they could and keep it whether the guys got sober or not. Maybe, if you were lucky, they’d use your tens of thousands of dollars to buy you a free key chain after ninety days of sobriety. The way I see it, you can only quit when you want to, and all the rehabs in the world aren’t going to help you. That’s my opinion—because not going to rehab worked very well for me. My only vice now is collecting old guitars. Maybe that’s why I’m the boring guy of the band.
Even though I quit by myself, I still had to go to group meetings and therapy. Our management was trying to do some kind of extensive plastic surgery on the band, and we had to see all these doctors who would try to brainwash us into behaving differently. Once a week we’d have to go to relationship counseling like an old bitter married couple. There, we’d learn how to talk to each other instead of fighting or we’d discuss our feelings and whatever was going on that week.
It bummed me out. First of all, it messed up my day having to go there and sit through something I wasn’t into and didn’t believe in. And secondly, it hurt my feelings that the rest of the band wasn’t strong enough to see through the superficial therapy bullshit and just get along on their own. Every therapist wanted us to let loose and cry, and I hate crybabies. Grown men who cry in the middle of a fucking crisis will die, because you can bet your ass that the enemy won’t be crying. They’ll be killing your weak ass while you cry! My father taught me, “When you’re a child, be a child. When you’re a man, be a man.” I became so sick of seeing everyone in the band bawling their eyes out. Go back to the second grade if you want to cry, suckass.
The ideas behind all that expensive therapy were so simple: Stay away from alcohol and drugs and things that make you misbehave; think before acting on a negative impulse; and share your feelings instead of keeping them bottled in where they destroy you and those around you. We all knew that beforehand. The only bad habit we had was therapy. But I went every week anyway without a complaint, because I didn’t need a therapist to tell me that if we wanted to be a great band again we had to stick together like a band.
We moved to Canada to record our next album, and the substance-abuse therapists came with us—on our dime. When we finished and returned to L.A., I was walking through a shopping center in Beverly Hills buying furniture for a new house I had moved into with Emi and couldn’t really afford. From across the street, a woman yelled, “Mick!” She looked like a bag lady, and reeked of alcohol. She was so rotted she could hardly walk. I said hi to her and moved on.
“Who was that freak?” Emi asked.
“Her?” I replied. “That was our therapist.”
fig. 3
From left: Bob Timmons, Vince, Mick, Rich Fisher
As soon as I emerged clean from months of on-and-off rehab torture, one of the first people I saw was Demi Moore, the very person who had first whispered the letters A.A. in my ear. She was in Vancouver filming a movie while we were starting to work on Dr. Feelgood. And word on the street was that Demi and Bruce Willis had separated. We had dinner at my producer Bob Rock’s house, and afterward, she asked if I wanted a ride back to her hotel. Sometimes a ride home is just a ride home, but being a rock star I naturally assumed I was being offered another kind of ride.
I knew I was sober for real this time when I turned that ride down. The reason was Brandi Brandt. Since the age of seven, when I started smoking pot in Mexico, there was hardly a day that went by when I hadn’t gotten fucked up. I’d been successfully avoiding reality for twenty years solid. So when I finally got off heroin, I didn’t know what to do with myself. Sobriety was terrifying. I had a whole life to catch up on. And I didn’t know where to begin or what to do with myself.
I didn’t go to clubs anymore and I hadn’t been laid in so long that me and my right hand were basically engaged. I became so confused and agoraphobic that I went to see a psychiatrist. All the rehab and therapy had peeled back the onion so deep that I didn’t feel like Nikki Sixx anymore. I felt like that little boy in Idaho, supergeek and friend to Allan Weeks. I needed to learn all over again how to be a man, because I realized that all along I had been nothing but a little boy: immature, impulsive, and highly susceptible to the evils of the world.
The therapist suggested that I try a new drug called Prozac. Though I didn’t want to take any drugs, even legal ones, he said that I had become chemically unbalanced. My substance abuse, he explained, had knocked the production of something in my brain called serotonin out of whack. He gave me two boxes, each filled with ten samples of this new wonder drug. As I walked out the door, I popped two pills and, by the time I was home, I felt calm.
Maybe it was a placebo, but within two days I was able to leave the house and even socialize a little. I went on a date with Lisa Hartman, but she was too busy for me (though she evidently wasn’t too busy for Clint Black). In fact, most of my so-called friends didn’t have time for me anymore. Some of the guys from Metallica walked up to me at the Cathouse and offered to buy me a drink, but when I said I was sober, they walked away and wouldn’t speak to me. Same with Slash, same with everybody.
Fortunately, an old friend named Eric Stacy, who played bass in Faster Pussycat, had also just gotten out of rehab. I invited him to live with me so we could both sit around and feel like dorks together. Every now and then, we would venture out to a club and try to pick up chi
cks. But either we had forgotten how or we never really knew how. We’d say, “Hi.” They’d say, “Hi.” Then there would be an awkward silence and we’d say, “Never mind.”
Eventually, Rikki Rachtman, who ran the Cathouse, felt so sorry for me and my right hand that he set us up on a blind date with Miss October (though a date isn’t so blind when you know it’s with a Playboy centerfold). I was an emotionally vulnerable rock star on Prozac exploring a new world of sobriety and she was a Playmate on the rebound. It was a bad combination. Brandi, a voluptuous brunette with sparkling childlike eyes, had just broken up with Taime Downe of Faster Pussycat after finding a used rubber in his trash can.
The first night we slept together at her house, the phone rang. It was Brandi’s mother. Through the receiver, I could hear her mom talking about a guy she had met a while back named Nikki and how she was thinking of calling him because she had really liked him.
I recognized that voice: It was Brie Howard, one of the girls we had auditioned as a backup singer on the Girls tour. I had completely forgotten about her. We had a fun couple of nights rolling around together. But I had no idea she was Brandi’s…
“Uh, Mom,” Brandi said. “I wouldn’t advise calling Nikki. Maybe you should call that nice record producer I saw you with the other week.”
My life felt so empty without drugs that I let Brandi fill the void. It was so exciting to actually be hanging out with someone of the opposite sex and enjoying it that I leapt into a relationship. But I was a child: I needed to be in love with someone, and I needed to feel like someone loved me. Sobriety had allowed me to feel emotions again, but it hadn’t taught me how to interpret them.
Just a couple weeks after Brandi and I met, I had to move to Vancouver to record the Dr. Feelgood album, and the distance added more fuel to the illusion of being in love. Though I was lonely and depressed without her, at the same time, without the need to take drugs or chase pussy every night, I found myself actually doing something productive with my time and writing songs again. The experiences of the last year had given me more than enough material, with my near-death overdose inspiring the album’s first song, “Kickstart My Heart.” (I always managed to get a song out of each overdose.) This wasn’t like Girls, Girls, Girls, where I kicked my habit just long enough to write some album filler. I had the time and clarity to cut away the fat of my writing, get together with the band, and put the songs through the Mötley machine, discussing and changing each until we all liked them.
We had been through months of meetings where the band accused me of being a fascist about my songs and vision, so for the first time I listened to them and took their input. The friendship between Tommy and me deepened as he immersed himself in the songwriting process and started waking me up every morning to go over new ideas. Perhaps because my issues with my father had kept me from forming any real friendships, Tommy became my first and only best friend in that time. Clearheaded, we now had the patience to listen to bands besides the Sweet, Slade, T. Rex, Aerosmith, and the New York Dolls: I opened my mind to everything from Miles Davis to Whitney Houston, and I became aware of a whole universe of sound and emotion, of intricate melodies, bass lines, and rhythms, that I had missed out on all my life.
Together, we all wrote what we thought could be our best album yet. For once the studio wasn’t a place to party and bring chicks, it was a place to work. And work it was. We had brought in Bob Rock as a producer, because we liked the albums he had done with Kingdom Come, the Cult, and Ted Nugent. It was his job to get us to be Mötley Crüe again after having been decimated by a decade of drugs and deaths and marriages and rehab.
Where Tom Werman just said, “Okay, good enough,” Bob whipped us like galley slaves. His line was, “That just isn’t your best.” Nothing was good enough. Mick recorded all the guitar for Shout at the Devil in two weeks, but now Bob Rock would make him spend two weeks doubling a guitar part over and over until it was perfectly synchronized. And even though the process aggravated and frustrated Mick, he had it much easier than Vince, who on some days would only get a single word on tape that Bob liked. Bob was critical, demanding, and a stickler for punctuality. Six months of rigor combined with six months of sobriety tore the life out of us, and we all had to put up with each other’s violent and sudden mood swings. Before we walked in the studio each day, we never knew whether we’d leave that evening feeling like the best band in the world or four angry clowns who couldn’t even play their instruments.
In eight years together and with millions of albums sold, we had never recorded properly. No one had ever pushed us to the limits of our abilities before or kept demanding more than we thought we could give until we discovered that we actually did have more to give. We had just never tried before. Aerosmith was recording Pump in the studio next to us and meeting with the same counselor we were using, Bob Timmons. So after work we’d do the kinds of ridiculous things that sober rock stars do together, like drink Perrier or jog around a lake.
Of course, the whole process was the antithesis of every punk principle I had held fast to as a teenager. I still loved loud, raw, sloppy, mistake-filled rock and roll. I wanted “Same Ol’ Situation” to drip with filth, “Dr. Feelgood” to have a groove that could kick heads in, “Kickstart My Heart” to sound as frantic as a speedball, and “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)” to have a chorus you could destroy your room to. But, at the same time, I wanted an album I was finally proud of.
In rehab, they had told me that the only way to get clean is by believing in and seeking the help of a higher power that could return sanity to my life. Most people chose God or love. I chose the only woman who hadn’t abandoned me my whole life: Music. And it was time to pay her back for her faith and perseverance.
I was running on blind faith, though. Overwhelmed with excitement about the new material we were working so hard on, we had no idea that the music industry had pretty much said that we were over after Girls, Girls, Girls. We had been around for an entire decade and, as far as they were concerned, that was long enough. The eighties were almost over, things were brewing in Seattle, and we were just a hairspray metal band that had gotten lucky with a couple singles. In their minds, we were dead and gone.
They wrote us off early.
Just before the Girls, Girls, Girls tour, Heather and I caused the downfall of one of the country’s biggest fucking coke dealers. And it was all because we didn’t want to go to Jamaica alone.
Our manager, Doc McGhee, had a lot of suspicious friends who lived in the Caymans. They were these crazy macked-out guys with only first names—Jerry, Leigh, Tony—and they’d bring huge fucking suitcases full of coke and cash to the island, where they’d launder their money without the IRS getting up into their shit.
Leigh, a tan, suave, filthy-rich Southerner, was one of the coolest of Doc’s friends. I had originally met him with Vince when we were chilling in the Caymans. Leigh walked into Doc’s rental house with an attaché case, and the first words we spoke to him were “Gimme, gimme, gimme!” Because we knew what was in that fucking attaché case: mountains of white powder to stuff up our noses.
Leigh opened the case and gave us a little rock.
“That’s all you’re giving us?” Vince yelled at him.
“I’ll tell you what,” Leigh said. “If you can open the case, you can have more.” And with that, he gave us a knowing wink, shut the case, dropped a lock clasp, and spun the combination dials so we couldn’t open it.
We had that entire rock in our system in ten minutes, and then, as always happens when you’re high on coke, we started fiending hardcore for more.
Vince and I grabbed the suitcase and tried every single combination. We were so coked out that we actually thought we were coming up with every single permutation of three numbers. “Wait,” Vince would yell in a flash of inspiration. “Have we tried six-six-six yet?”
Finally, I went into the kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife, and cut the top off Leigh’s thousand-dollar leather briefcas
e. Glittering inside like white gold were fucking dozens of huge plastic bags filled with coke. We slit them open and just dove in like we were bobbing for apples.
After an hour of white heaven, Doc walked in. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Vince looked up at him, his face white with coke and slobber. “Well, Leigh said we could have it if we opened it. And we opened it.”
Doc was fucking pissed and kicked us out of the apartment. I think we ended up paying for all the drugs we destroyed out of our royalties.
Not long after that, Leigh got busted. He used to have superhot chicks fly in to meet him in the Caymans for a few days—always different girls coming two at a time—and we just thought that he was a mack fucking daddy. But the truth is that he was using them as mules to bring drugs into the U.S. One time these killer blonds came down from New Orleans and kicked it with Doc, Leigh, and the guys from Bon Jovi, who Doc was also managing. When it came time for the girls to leave, Leigh taped drugs all over their bodies and dropped them off at the airport. It was their first time smuggling, so one of them had the bright idea of duct-taping scissors to her body. That way, if she was in danger of being caught, she could just cut the drugs loose.
Well, Einstein and her friend went through the metal detector, and of course the scissors set it off. They searched her, found the coke, then searched her friend. It’s a small island, and they knew the girls were with Leigh and the Bon Jovi guys, who had left the island on the previous flight. So they made the plane Bon Jovi was on turn around so they could search everyone’s luggage for drugs. Then they sent cops looking for Leigh, who jumped on his jet and went into hiding on another island before they could catch him.