The Dirt

by Tommy Lee

  The beginning of the end was a flying drum solo in New Haven, Connecticut. For me, it was always so crucial for people to see what I was doing when I played. In the early Mötley days, I tried to use mirrors, but that never really worked. Then, before the Girls, Girls, Girls tour, I had a crazyass dream that I was playing drums in a cage while spinning around and gyroscoping. So we rigged up this ghetto contraption where a forklift would take the drums to the front of the stage and a motor would spin the drums around while I played upside down and shit. At first, I would get really dizzy, but then I remembered something I had learned in ballet lessons as a kid and started picking a spot on the wall to stare at while spinning.

  On the Feelgood tour, I wanted to get even closer to the bros in the audience, so we rigged up the flying drum set. And it was all good—until New Haven. To this day, I still don’t know what happened. It began like usual. During Mick’s solo, I sneaked into this long tube, stuck my feet into a strap hanging there, and wrapped my hand around a rope, which was attached to a chain motor that slowly pulled me up to the top rafters of the New Haven Coliseum. I chilled up there for a while, looking eighty feet down to scope out Mick’s solo and the audience, who couldn’t see me yet. Then, with a rigger named Norman holding on to me, I leapt into the air, grabbed the drums, and kicked my body around into the seat. Below, Mick shot some crazy shit out of his guitar, his stacks rumbled like they were about to explode—ggttccchhhggtttccchhh—and then the drums appeared—whoooosssshhh—over the heads of the audience in the midst of all this really dramatic music.

  As the audience went out of their minds, I started hitting all these electronic pads—blaowww, blammm, blammm, blaowww—as the drums shot down toward them on a hundred or so feet of invisible track. I cruised over the heads of the people on the floor, then shot to the very back of the place, so that the dudes in the full-on Stevie Wonder section all of a sudden had front-row seats. There was one dude in a jeans jacket who I swear to God shit in his pants when all of a sudden I was inches away from his face playing drums in the air. Then I spun around, and the whole track adjusted so I could get back up to the top of the arena. I triggered a sample of a long descending sound, like someone jumping off a bridge—Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh—then put my foot back in the strap, grabbed the rope that originally carried me up, and prepared to jump. It was Norman’s job to pull the handbrake at the last minute, so that I’d screech to a halt like five feet over the heads of the crowd and then just bounce there on this elastic rope. I liked it to look insane. None of this fucking Gene-Simmons-fly-me-over-the-fucking-audience-like-Peter-Pan shit. I wanted to be fully dropped, freefall style.

  So I sprung off the rafter—Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. The air whipped past my face—fwshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. And then I prepared myself mentally for Norman to pull the brake. But as I neared the ground, for some reason I inexplicably lost my trust in him. I didn’t think he was going to stop me in time, so I panicked and tried to bail out. I let go of the rope and tried to get my foot out of the strap. I think the sheer exhaustion of so many back-to-back shows had dulled my senses. As soon as Norman saw me struggling to get loose, he hit the brake. Instantly, my foot, which was still in the strap, fucking stopped midair while the rest of my body continued to fall. I was just a few feet over the audience and ccrrrrkk. My skull fucking smacked against the head of some dude in the audience. And then, because the rope had so much elasticity, I hit the ground headfirst and blacked out. The next thing I heard was reeahhrrrr-reeahhhrrr. I couldn’t remember a thing other than the fact that something had gone wrong.

  “What happened to me?” I asked.

  “You just fell, buddy.”

  “I did?”

  “You fell on your head.”

  “Where?”

  “At the concert.”

  “The concert. I need to be at my concert.” I panicked. I was making no sense. I didn’t remember having fallen. I just knew that I was supposed to be on stage. Not in a…

  “Where am I?”

  “You’re in an ambulance. We’re taking you to the hospital.”

  “But…”

  “The show’s over, buddy. Now relax.”

  We ended up canceling a show or two while I recovered from my concussion. Three days later, I found myself facing arena rafters and the elastic rope again. Norman pumped the brake so that I descended really slowly, like some sort of fairy godmother instead of a rock-and-roll madman, and he stopped me twenty feet above the audience instead of five. It took me a while to get over the fear.

  The rest of the band was thankful for the extra days off, but afterward, it was back to the never-ending road show. As exhaustion and insanity kicked in, our lives started to unravel. First the chicks came marching in. Before the encore, we would marinate in a little tent in the back of the stage and suck down cold mineral water. One day we were chilling back there when Nikki pointed out a cat litter box that was mysteriously sitting in the middle of the floor. As we were trying to figure out who was stupid enough to keep a cat backstage, we heard a loud meow. A girl came crawling toward the box on her hands and knees wearing a cat collar and a leash led by a roadie. Vince looked at me for an explanation, I looked at Nikki, Nikki looked at Mick, and Mick looked back at Vince. No one knew what was going on. The girl crawled into the cat box, hiked up her dress, peed in the sand, and then scratched at the litter until she had covered her mess.

  Soon we were finding ways out of the drudgery by amusing ourselves with stupid human tricks and watching our road crew reach new lows. A whole cat theme began to develop, based around the line “here kitty, kitty” from “Same Ol’ Situation.” The roadies would stand in a circle and jerk off into their hands while some poor but willing girl crawled around meowing on all fours and licking it out of their hands like milk. Nikki thought it was funny, but then again Nikki has mother issues.

  What began as a clean and wholesome tour had, near the end, turned into a sick sexual circus. We were sober and had nothing else to do, so the girls became our only entertainment. Once we started looking at the girls, we noticed that they were going out of their way to get our attention, sporting leather masks with ball gags, nun outfits with holes cut to expose their tits, nurse uniforms with enema bags, skintight red-devil costumes with dildos for horns, and cowboy outfits with cans of shaving cream in the holsters. The weak among us cracked under the pressure, choosing girls backstage who offered something they hadn’t tried before.

  During the show, we entered the stage by being shot up in front of 25,000 to 100,000 people from a contraption underneath the stage, as if we were four giant Pop-Tarts. Those contraptions eventually became a metaphor for the tour. Whenever we wanted to rest or sleep, all of a sudden someone would pull the lever and—pop—there we would be, standing in front of a stadium full of cheering people ready to see the same song and dance we had been through hundreds of times already. For our whole lives, every one of us had fucking fantasized about being exactly where we were on that tour; but after two years, we came to hate and dread our jobs. Nikki liked to compare it to an erection: It feels great for a few minutes, but when it won’t go down after hours of beating off, it starts to hurt like no other pain known to man.

  So we killed the pain like we always had. In Australia, Vince slipped off the wagon. After they scraped us off the floor in Australia and poured us into Japan, Nikki stumbled. And when they dragged us to Hawaii, I went to a strip club with Vince and fell victim to a big-titted waitress with a tray of Day-Glo alcohol shooters in test tubes. Soon, with our relationships at home suffering from neglect, we were all sneaking alcohol, buying drugs, and reverting to our old self-destructive habits, with the possible exception of Mick, whose fiancée happened to be on the road with us as a backup singer.

  Near the end of the tour, Elektra sent over a film crew. They were having a massive sales conference with the buyers for all the record chains and thought that it would be a good idea for us to tape a message sucking up to the retailers and thanking them for
their support. So we gathered backstage in front of the crew, they started the cameras, and we behaved like good puppets: “Hey, guys, we’re Mötley Crüe, and we’d like to thank you for making our record number one.” But then, suddenly, the puppet strings snapped. “And we want to let you know that we hate you and we hate Elektra. You guys aren’t giving us a break. You’re all a bunch of greedy fucking assholes, and we know where you live, and we’re going to come slit your throats if you don’t let us see our families.”

  When the cameras shut off, we fucking collapsed on the floor and full-on sobbed. We couldn’t even speak. We were so exhausted, so depleted, so devoid of all thought and emotion.

  Doug Thaler looked at us, shook his head, and said, “Maybe it’s time we took you guys off the road for a little while.”

  Dude, you’ve never seen four motherfuckers split up and go their own way faster than we did.

  fig. 1

  THE APPLICATION OF COG THEORY TO THE DEVELOPMENT AND MATURATION OF A COMMON ROCK GROUP

  by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil & Nikki Sixx, Ph.D.s

  Center for Studies in Popular Acoustics, Discordia University, Los Angeles, CA

  Summary: An Introduction to Cog Theory

  Cog theory is an attempt to pull back the curtain of the popular music business and examine the mechanics of success.

  There is a machine which all musical artists are put through, hereafter referred to as “The Machine” (see Figure 1). Artists’ success in navigating their way through the intricate cogs, gears, hammers, and grinders of The Machine determines the arc, scope, and course of their career. Such navigation requires talent, timing, luck, and a strong personal constitution.

  Mötley Crüe and Cog Theory: A Stage-by-Stage Analysis

  A) Stage One: The Platform and Conveyer Belt

  At the bottom of The Machine, there is a platform. And on that platform there is a long line of artists, who wait their turn to climb a ladder which leads to a conveyer belt. As the artists travel along that conveyer belt, they make and release a record. At the end of the conveyer belt is the first of several interconnected cogs, each higher and larger than the previous cog. If the artists time their jump at the end of the conveyor belt just right, they can land on the first cog. But most artists miss the cog and land on the platform again (at the rear of the line) or, in some cases, into the abyss below. Too Fast for Love as an independent release didn’t even make the first cog.

  B) Stage Two: The First Cog

  Once artists reach the first cog and experience a degree of success, they become caught in the machinery. The gear is moving, the cog is rolling, and there’s nothing that can be done to stop The Machine (see Figure 1a). Soon, a second, larger cog looms ahead, the grinding of its bottom teeth adjoining and turning the first cog. Artists must jump at exactly the right time to catch the second cog, otherwise they will be crushed in the machinery between the cogs and either dropped back to the platform or rolled around to begin anew on the cog. Shout at the Devil made it to the first cog, which tossed the band onto the second cog.

  C) Stage Three: The Second Cog

  Once artists move as high as the second cog, it is a long way down to the bottom (see Figure 1b). They realize that the machinery is stronger than flesh, and that they are caught in it and there is no way off. The Machine tears skin, grinds limbs, and slowly infects and possesses the brain. If the act is a band, The Machine can easily rip the members apart from each other and crush them individually. On the second cog, a band experiences true popularity. But to reach the next cog—the big cog, the final cog, the cog reserved for true phenomena—it is not just a matter of timing a long and arduous leap. Getting onto the big cog is something that is out of a band’s control. That power is in the hands of the mighty cog god, a whimsical, wrathful, and unpredictable deity at the top of The Machine, turning the gears.

  Mötley Crüe rolled around and around on the second cog, with Shout at the Devil, with Theatre of Pain, with Girls, Girls, Girls, and with each revolution they narrowly avoided getting crushed and dropped to the bottom. Dr. Feelgood, however, caught the big cog.

  D) Stage Four: The Big Cog

  The big cog is the cog that Guns N’ Roses got caught on with Appetite for Destruction, that Metallica got caught on with their black album. It is the cog that Mariah Carey, the Backstreet Boys, and Eminem have all reached. The big cog is a huge grinding gear, and there’s nothing artists can do about it if it picks them up. They can stand up and scream, “I hate everyone in the world and you all suck, and if you buy a single record of mine I’ll kill you.” And all that will happen is more people will run out and buy their records. Trying to get off the cog is futile: It only makes the process hurt more (see Figure 1c).

  The big cog is exciting but overwhelming. Where the second cog can dig under the skin of artists, this one can tear them apart limb by limb. The cog gives artists everything they have ever dreamed of, everything they could ever want except for privacy, solitude, friendship, stability, love (both familial and romantic), and peace of mind.

  With Dr. Feelgood on the big cog, Mötley Crüe could do no wrong. Every single they released terrorized the radio, every show sold out, every blink of their eyes was reported in the papers. When the band first caught the big cog, it rolled along with the cog. But people get tired; The Machine never stops moving. When the band could no longer keep pace, the big cog tore them apart, destroyed their marriages, and wrecked any chance of them leading a normal life, having any friends, or knowing what to do with themselves when not playing The Machine game of recording and touring.

  Yet even when the band grew tired of running around on the big cog, the cruel and impersonal Machine kept turning with them on top. The band put out a compilation of their favorite songs called Decade of Decadence, and it sold 2.5 million copies with hardly any promotion. Afterward, the businesspeople whose job it is to stand on the outside of The Machine, monitor its behavior, and see who is on what cog so that they can invest their money in them (much like the stock market) said to Mötley Crüe, “You guys are going to have the biggest tour of the summer.” It was the last thing the band wanted to hear. Because when artists are on the big cog, those who gamble their money on them don’t want them to make new music or record new albums, because that is the quickest way off the cog and into the crusher.

  E) Stage Five: The Crusher

  At the end of the big cog is a long, heavy rod with the circumference of a large tree trunk that shoots down from above at random intervals, crushing acts on their way off the big cog. Some acts have a lot of stamina, and can run in place on the big cog and avoid the crusher for years. But most get worn down by the big cog. They are knocked off by the crusher and either dropped to a lower cog, to the platform where they wait to return to the conveyor belt, or into the abyss below. Some—like Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin—get smashed completely by the crusher. And, in one sense, they win. The only way to beat The Machine is to die, because that’s the only way out of the game. When you win and make it to the big cog, you ultimately lose. There is no other way to go but down, and it’s a painful drop no matter what.

  Those who survive are not the same after the fall. They experience post-cog stress disorder in which, like Axl Rose, they fool themselves into thinking that they are still on the big cog.

  With Mötley Crüe, we shall see in the following pages how the band was chewed up and spit out by the big cog, how lives and relationships were destroyed, and how post-cog stress disorder led to a tragic turn of events.

  Conclusion: A New Beginning

  There is no way to get off The Machine without dying. Like sex, you want it over and over again, even when your organs don’t work anymore. Success, or the desire for success, is a hard habit to kick. On The Machine, an act can get second, third, and eighteenth chances. There is nothing keeping a band from reaching the first, second, or final cog again. The Rolling Stones have been dancing between cogs for years. Madonna has caught the big cog at
least three times. And Santana spent a few years on the second cog around 1969, then rolled around on the conveyer belt for decades before his Supernatural album suddenly caught each cog until it dragged him to the top.

  We shall also see in the following pages how Mötley Crüe returned to the conveyer belt, how they caught cogs again, and how they were crushed and thrown around by the machinery as never before, leading them to prison cells, hospital beds, celebrity marriages, and worse.

  References

  Dannen, Frederic, Hit Men. Vintage Books, 1991.

  Kravilovsky, William M., and Sidney Shemel, This Business of Music.

  Billboard Books, 1995.

  Sanjek, Russel, Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century. Da Capo, 1996.

  Whitburn, Joel, Top Pop Albums: 1955–2000. Record Research, 2000. Guns N’ Roses, The Spaghetti Incident? Geffen Records, 1992.

  Coming Soon from the Same Authors

  “Divorce and Downloading Theory: An Examination of the Wireless Communication System through Which All Females Are Linked, Allowing Constant Telepathic Surveillance of the Activities of Their Mates.”

  Ronnie James Dio changed my life—twice. The first time, I had graduated from Cortland State in New York in 1967 and joined his band, Ronnie Dio and the Prophets. Driving to Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in our van, we were in a head-on collision and I almost lost my leg. I was in traction in Hartford when I received my physical notice for Vietnam. I looked at the doctor and he told me not to worry: I wouldn’t have to serve in the war.

  Years later, in the summer of ’82, I was in Manhattan running tours for Contemporary Communications Corp. when I received a call from Tom Zutaut. He said he had signed this group Mötley Crüe to Elektra and wanted to put them on the Aerosmith tour. He hinted that there might be management possibilities. However, I had just put an old agency client of mine, Pat Travers, on the Aerosmith bill, so Zutaut was out of luck. Besides, David Krebs, the head of our company, didn’t think it made any sense for a New York–based company to take on an L.A. client.