The Dirt

by Tommy Lee

  I had heard of the Mötley Crüe once before Zutaut, when Hernando Courtright at A&M Records showed me the Leathür Records release of Too Fast for Love and said he was high on it and wanted to sign the band. The cover was a cheesed-up picture that I later found out had been taken by a wedding photographer who had superimposed hair on the guys. It looked pretty comical, and I didn’t think much about it.

  It was then that Ronnie James Dio came back into my life. He told me about a band with a flashy drummer that he liked. At the same time, Pat Travers’s manager, Doc McGhee, wanted me to join his company. I took him up on his offer on blind faith because I was going nowhere in my job. The first thing that Doc and I did together was head out to Los Angeles to see this band that Dio was talking about. It was Mötley Crüe again, and they knocked us out. They weren’t nearly as cheesy as my first impression. The singer had a unique voice and raw energy, the music had a great pop twist to it, and the show was unbelievable. This was a hit act: you could take them anywhere in the world and put them in front of people, and they’d kill. As soon as I saw them, I knew that all the work I’d done in the business beforehand was like going to college so I’d know what to do with this band.

  From the beginning of the band’s tour with Kiss, a work ethic materialized that I never expected. The guys turned into animals live. With Vince running all over the stage and Nikki exploding with bad-boy attitude, they put on such a knockout show that they were upstaging Kiss. With the exception of only two or three shows, the band was so consistently good live through Shout, Girls, Theatre, and the first two-thirds of Feelgood that the hair on the back of your neck would stand up at some point or another during every concert.

  But managing this band offstage was never easy. These are four damaged individuals. Vince is a California surfer-rock guy, the peacock of peacocks, who never really had to work for his fame. I think the ill will toward him began after the car crash with Razzle, because the group would be playing charity shows for him and he’d go off drinking, fucking around, and putting the band’s future at risk. To be fair, though, no one really understood the disease of alcoholism at the time.

  Mick Mars was the exact opposite of Vince: a guy who had wiped shit off his head for his whole life and was thankful just to have a moment in the sun, even if it ended the next day. Nikki was basically a nerd, except when he had Jack Daniel’s in him, which was just about every night. And Tommy was like a little kid, running around looking for mother and father figures. He could be the sweetest, most big-hearted kid in the world or the most spoiled, temperamental brat. But it was always either Vince’s behavior or Nikki’s drug addiction that jeopardized the band.

  That changed, though, when the band sobered up for Feelgood, which was a tremendous triumph. The combination of the new sobriety, the stress from their marriages, and the attainment of a level of success beyond what they had ever imagined began to work a change in the band. Fear, exhaustion, and mood swings set in, and Tommy and Vince started falling off the wagon. Nikki, who had married a girl he had hardly even seen because he was so busy, became really distasteful to deal with. Everyone was blowing smoke up his ass, and he was starting to believe them. At the height of his powers, he was a marketing genius, but now he’d call the office pissed off because his carpenter thought Feelgood should have sold 7 million copies instead of just 4.5 million. And there was nothing we could do or say to calm him.

  I wanted the band to have a long time to work on their next album. I knew it would be very difficult to write a follow-up to Dr. Feelgood, and there was a chance that by waiting to record they could get a new contract with Elektra that would earn them twenty-five million dollars. At the same time, they needed downtime to deal with their new children: within months of each other, Vince and Sharise had their first daughter, Skylar, and Nikki and Brandi had their first son, Gunner. And Tommy, left out, really started wanting to have a child of his own with Heather.

  As the new Elektra deal was being negotiated, things with the band kept going more haywire. Vince was getting back into drink again. He’d come to rehearsals for the new album a mess, and then leave early because he had to boff some porn star on his way home. By spring 1991, I had to call him and tell him that he wasn’t welcome at rehearsals until he got his act together. So Vince grabbed some porn star, flew to Hawaii without telling us, and maxed out all his charge cards until he had to return home, where Sharise was impatiently waiting to kill him. He quickly pacified her—he was so good that if you walked into your bedroom and he was banging your wife, within five minutes he would have talked you out of believing what you had just seen. Then he took a plane to Tucson and checked himself into rehab.

  We all flew down there and met with Vince, encouraging him to make the band a priority and explaining that we would be there to support him as long as he tried to be there for us. Vince swore he wasn’t just along for the ride and promised to make an effort.

  Afterward, we played on the Monsters of Rock tour in Europe with AC/DC, Metallica, and Queensryche, and that was the first time that the shows didn’t make the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Though they had so many hits they should have wiped almost every other band off the stage, something was missing: they didn’t feel real anymore, and the prerecorded tapes they used to replace their backup singers sounded phony to the crowd.

  Back home, when Decade of Decadence came out, Nikki started spending half his nights at hotels because he was fighting with his wife. Vince, meanwhile, was off on a racing jag. It always seemed like a great little hobby for him until some jerk-off in Long Beach convinced him to race on an Indy Lights team, where I was sure some driver was going to see this rock-and-roll asshole on the track and try to kill him. He started spending his weekends at race-car conferences, where we’d hear reports that he’d been up all night drinking.

  I put them back in the studio in December 1991, on a two-week-on, two-week-off schedule. But every time I went down to visit, Vince wasn’t there. He’d have left the studio after a few hours, claiming he was too tired to sing.

  Finally, in February, the band started to get pissed.

  On Monday, the floods began. The waters swept over the Ventura freeway, flooded the Sepulveda Basin, killed six people, and left hundreds more hanging on to telephone poles and antennas for their lives. On the radio, Governor Pete Wilson declared a state of emergency and said that we were in the midst of the worst storm of the century. That didn’t matter, though, to Tommy and me. We drove for two hours to get to rehearsal in Burbank from Westlake Village while Mick, who was up in the mountains somewhere, had an even more grueling ride. We met in the studio lounge and waited for Vince. On the news, we watched people swimming out of their cars on Burbank Boulevard. One hour passed. Two hours passed. Three hours passed. Four hours passed. We called Vince every half hour, but each time there was a busy signal.

  Because we had all driven through the storm just to go to rehearsal that day, the longer we had to wait for Vince—who only lived half the distance away that we did—the more pissed we became. This was a crucial album—the follow-up to the biggest success we had ever had—and he didn’t seem to be taking it seriously. He had started taking Thursdays and Fridays off to go to the races, and would usually return late on Mondays. So every week, we’d only get at most two and a half days of studio time because he was never there.

  Finally, we had Mike Amato, who had replaced Rich Fisher as our tour manager, send Vince a fax telling him to get his ass to rehearsal. Fifteen minutes later, the studio phone rang.

  “Man, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Where were you?” I asked. “We’ve been trying to call you for four hours. This is bullshit.”

  “I know. The phone lines were down.”

  That set me off. “The phone lines were down? Then how the fuck did the fax go through? You had the phone off the hook because you didn’t want to fucking come in! All of us drove through floods to get here, and you couldn’t even be bothered!”

  “Du
de, take it easy. I thought rehearsal was canceled anyway with the flooding and everything.”

  “Well, it wasn’t. Get your ass down here before we really get pissed.”

  As we waited for him to come, someone in the studio said that he had seen Vince out completely wasted at 3 A.M. the previous night. Whether it was true or not, it didn’t matter. The conversation had already taken on a mutinous tone. Except for Mick, we were all slipping off the wagon, but Vince was the only one who was letting it affect his work, who was getting caught all the time, and who was constantly lying about it. By the time he arrived, the seed was already planted in our minds that he was holding us back.

  Maybe if Vince had walked in and apologized for staying out so late the night before and sleeping through rehearsal, everything would have been fine. But he didn’t.

  “What the fuck’s going on!?!” Vince raged as the lounge door flew open and he stood there soaked and sulking.

  “You know what?” I said. “We are having new-lead-singer talks again. We are down here working, and we want to be here. This isn’t going to happen if you don’t want to be here and we have to force you out of bed every afternoon because you’ve been out all night drinking.”

  “Maybe I would come in more if I liked the material.”

  “Well, you could have told somebody.”

  Tommy couldn’t keep quiet any longer: “Maybe you’d like the material better if you had come to the studio a few times to be part of making it. Every time you fucking come in, dude, you’re staring at your watch the whole time because you need to go to a fucking golf tournament or racing school. What the fuck’s up with that?”

  “I’m looking at my watch because I can’t stand being here. The album is stupid. The keyboards you’re putting on the album make us sound like pussies.”

  “Vince, we’ve been using keyboards since ’83,” I shot back.

  The bullshit flew back and forth like a game of tennis until he finally threw his racket into the net. “I’m not going to stay here and listen to this bullshit!” he yelled at us. “I’m fucking out of here! I quit!”

  He stormed off toward the door, and looked back. “Call me if you ever change your fucking mind!”

  He says he was fired, I say he quit. Either way, his head was on the chopping block and he gave us a good excuse to lower the ax.

  Now that I look back on it, we were fried. We had toured nonstop behind Feelgood and Decade of Decadence, and then we were thrown back in the studio without a single break. I don’t know if it was management or the record label or our own insecurity, but we were being pushed way too hard. Somebody should have just stepped in, realized we were under too much pressure, and given us a month to dry out under the sun in the Bahamas. Vince wasn’t the problem: He was just the scapegoat. But the thing about Mötley Crüe is that we’re so full-on dragster-fuel-driven that as soon as we saw the green light, we put the pedal to the floor and shot through the gate so fast there was no time to look back. Until it was too late.

  A meeting was called at Nikki’s house for Wednesday morning, February 12, 1992. Chuck Shapiro, David Rudich, and Mick, Nikki, and Tommy were there. Vince hadn’t called anyone that night, and he hadn’t been invited. Maybe I should have called him, but I didn’t know what to say to him because I hadn’t been filled in yet on exactly what was going on.

  We tried to discourage the band from getting rid of Vince. They had just been given their twenty-five-million-dollar contract and, if Elektra chose to, it could exercise one of its options and renege on the deal if Vince left. And that would screw up all of their careers.

  But Tommy and Nikki insisted: they were sick of Vince and couldn’t take it anymore. They took a vote and it was unanimous: Vince was gone.

  I drove to the office, told the staff what had happened, and sat down at my desk. A few minutes later, the phone rang. A guy named Tony introduced himself and said he was a prominent attorney and co-owner of the Roxy.

  “Your client, Vince Neil, was in my nightclub on Saturday night for his birthday,” Tony began, upset. He went on to explain that Vince had been with Robert Patrick, the actor who plays the half-man, half-mercury villain in Terminator 2, and a fight had broken out that looked like something out of a western. Tables went flying, glasses were broken, and Vince was in the middle of it, breaking a bottle and slicing the manager of the Roxy in the face. He was thrown out of the club screaming that they couldn’t do this to him.

  “So you see my problem,” Tony continued. “There’s a lot of damage here. It’s going to take at least fifty thousand dollars to get this place up and running again, and I’d hate to press any drunk and disorderly charges or vandalism charges against your client.”

  I listened to all this, and then answered. “I don’t know how to tell you this. But as of a couple hours ago, this is no longer my problem.”

  I hung up the phone. And for a short while, I felt the weight of the world lift off my shoulders.

  I forget what happened. I think Nikki got mad at Vince for being late and sent him a fax or something like that. The tension was bad, and it had been building for years. Every person in the world has good qualities and shortcomings. And I guess we started making the mistake of focusing on the shortcomings of each person instead of looking at what their best asset was and what they contributed to the band.

  When Vince came to rehearsal, he was prissy mad. And Nikki was prissy mad. Though I hadn’t been that happy with Vince’s attitude lately either, it didn’t matter whether he was at rehearsal or not. I was working on the music, and you have to get the music finished before you even think about adding the vocals.

  Steven Tyler told me I was the guy in a circus who’s about to be shot out of a cannon. And that’s what it felt like. I put on my crash helmet, tied my superhero cape around my neck, climbed into the barrel, and waited while three ringmasters ran around behind me and lit the fuse. While I flew through the air, there was no sensation to compare it to. It was the happiest moment of my life. But when I landed, it hurt like no pain I’d ever experienced.

  It began in Spin magazine. Nikki Sixx told the interviewer that he was a big fan of the first record, Let It Scream, by my band the Scream. I was never a big Mötley Crüe fan—I didn’t own any albums and hadn’t seen any concerts—but I wanted to call him and thank him for mentioning my band. I also had an ulterior motive: to see if he wanted to write some songs with me for the next Scream record.

  My manager gave me the number of Doug Thaler’s office. I called and his secretary, Stephanie, answered. I introduced myself and told her I wanted to tell Nikki I appreciated the plug. I expected her to brush me off like an obsessive fan, but instead there was an awkward pause, as if she was excited that I had called. “Um, let me get the number where you are,” she stammered. “And I’ll make sure he gets the message.”

  I hung up and started getting ready for our show that night in Orange County, the last on our tour with the Dangerous Toys. I left a note and flowers for my wife, Valerie, because it was Valentine’s Day, and grabbed the keys to my Ford Taurus, which I still had two years left of payments on. As I closed the door behind me, the phone rang. I locked the door, then changed my mind, unlocked it, and raced for the receiver.

  “Hey, what’s up man, it’s Nikki Sixx.”

  “And Tommy, dude!”

  I hadn’t expected him to call back at all, let alone so soon. “Um, hey, what’s up?” I asked, unsure if this was a joke or not.

  We made small talk for a while about the Spin article, and then Nikki cut me off. “Here’s the deal. You have to promise not to tell anybody this because we haven’t made an announcement yet, but Vince left the band. So Tommy and I were wondering if you’d like to come down and jam with us one day.”

  “You mean audition for you guys?”

  “Yeah, audition. Whatever.”

  “Okay, man. Sure. No problem. Um, thanks.”

  I called my manager and asked him what I should do. He said to just play the Sc
ream show that night and keep everything quiet until I knew what was happening. I met the band at the club, sound-checked, and told them I had talked to Nikki and thanked him for mentioning the album. That was all I said.

  Before the show, we drove to KNAC for an on-air interview and acoustic set. As we began the broadcast, someone handed Long Paul, the disc jockey, a piece of paper. He read it, raised his eyebrows, and announced, “We just got a fax here. It says that Mötley Crüe has gotten rid of Vince Neil. Can you believe that?”

  None of us replied. Instead, the whole band turned and stared at me. They knew something was up. But I played stupid. “Are you serious?” I asked. “They got rid of him?”

  THREE DAYS LATER, MY TIME had come. The audition. I had no idea how I was going to pull it off because, besides my complete lack of expertise on the Crüe, Vince’s voice is so much higher than mine. His is high and clean, mine is dark and raspy. When I walked into the studio in Burbank, there they were, the enigmas themselves, jamming on “Angel” by Jimi Hendrix. It sounded loud, dirty, and amazing. They were a tight band. And they had so much equipment in the room it looked like the Guitar Center.

  To break the ice, I told them that I had considered taking off my clothes and walking into the audition naked. It was a stupid comment, but Tommy laughed. “Dude, you should have done that! That would have been amazing!”

  I exhaled and relaxed. I liked these guys. I wasn’t that familiar with their songs, but I had been in more than fifty cover bands in my hometown of Philadelphia, so I knew all the covers they did. We started with “Helter Skelter.” I grabbed the mic, started singing, and after the first verse they suddenly stopped playing.