by Tommy Lee
Rhone kept nodding her head, saying, “Yeah, baby. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. We’ll do it.” It didn’t sound very convincing, especially when she kept looking at her watch. Finally, she cut him off: “Don’t worry, it’s in good hands,” she said. “Now I have to go. I’m late for a meeting.”
“Okay,” Kovac said, and we turned around, walked down the hall toward the exit, looked at each other, and both spoke the same words at the same time: “We’re fucked.”
In the lobby, Corabi was hunched in his chair, wringing his hands and practically dripping with sweat. I smiled weakly at him and said, “You’re in.”
He grinned weakly back, and we all walked outside and grabbed a cab. Kovac took the front seat and turned back to Corabi angrily: “You are not a star,” he told him. “And we are in fucking hell. You’ve got to get it together! The rest of you guys have got to make the greatest album of your entire lives right now, because if you don’t, we are dead in the water. There is no way that woman is going to promote this record. We are a tax write-off, a loss. I can smell it. She set us up.”
Doug Morris had reached out a hand to save us from drowning, and Sylvia Rhone had walked right in, kicked his hand away, and sent us tumbling back into the depths. In the weeks that followed, we kept asking her for money to start the new record. She’d give us a little and we’d start recording. But the money would suddenly dry up and we’d have to stop. It seemed like she was trying to squeeze and demoralize us, probably because she had inherited a contract from her predecessor that required her to pay huge sums to a band that, as far as she was concerned, was washed up. If we broke up, then our contract was void and the money could be redirected toward the singers and bands she supported.
What came next was the sound of a lot of pride being swallowed. Fat from the success of Dr. Feelgood, and with prodding from my wife Brandi (whose materialism seemed to increase in direct proportion to the waning of our love), I had bought a full-on drug-dealer mansion. My overhead expenses were forty thousand dollars a month. That’s how much it cost just to wake up and go to sleep every day between my house payments and utilities bills. It cost twenty-five hundred dollars in electricity just to cool the house each month, plus I’d insist on keeping my pool heated to ninety-five degrees year-round. When Tommy and I found ourselves paying for the album out of our own pockets (Mick was long since broke thanks to Emi), those things started to matter. At the same time, my third child was being born—every time Brandi and I came close to separating, another child would pop out to keep us together—and Vince and Sharise’s only daughter, Skylar, was dying. I suddenly became aware that everything in life didn’t always turn out okay. Life was full of traps, and my future, my happiness, and Mötley Crüe were all caught fast in them.
Tommy and I decided to coproduce the album at his house with a guy named Scott Humphrey, who had done some engineering work with Bob Rock on Feelgood. What we needed was someone to tell us we were fooling ourselves trying to make some sort of electro-grunge record with Corabi. But that someone wasn’t Scott Humphrey. An engineer very skilled at a computer studio program called Pro-Tools, Humphrey had never produced a band before. He would sit me down and say, “You wrote all the great Mötley Crüe songs. I don’t want Tommy writing songs. He thinks he can write, but all he does is listen to whoever is in that week and copy them. His lyrics have nothing to do with what Mötley Crüe is all about.”
Then Scott would pull Tommy aside and whisper in his ear: “Nikki is outdated. He’s still stuck in the ’80s. You need to be doing the songwriting. You need to be using drum loops and techno beats and bringing the music up-to-date. You know what’s going on.”
He was completely incapable of dealing with these two giant egos that were Tommy and me. Whoever was in the room, that’s whose ass he’d kiss. Except for Mick, who had no ego. Scott started convincing us that Mick was a bad guitarist. When Mick would leave, Scott would pull me aside and make me play something on guitar. Then he’d make a loop of it, put it through some noise filters, and replace Mick’s playing. So for the first time in our careers, we started to turn against Mick, to think that he was actually the one holding us back because he thought that the blues and classic rock were the only genres of music that mattered.
Pretty soon, Mötley Crüe was a wildly schizophrenic beast, making some monstrosity that sounded like the Beatles mixed with all these fifth and third Alice in Chains harmonies. We had no idea what we were doing. I guess that’s why we decided to call the album, our ninth, Personality #9. (Though the gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson later inspired us to change it to Generation Swine.)
Eventually, we moved into my drug-dealer mansion. We set up the drums in my oak-walled office, the mixing desk in the bathroom, and the Marshall stacks along the marble hallways while my three children terrorized us and Brandi screamed at me with the regularity of an alarm clock with a snooze button. I’d keep turning her off, but ten minutes later she’d be blaring in my ear again.
In the meantime, Tommy and I continued to work in two completely separate directions; Mick was being brainwashed into believing that he had nothing to contribute to the band; and Corabi was being treated like a criminal who had stolen our careers. Every day, we’d take all our frustrations out on him: we’d tell him that he needed to cut his hair or that he needed to sing in a completely different style. And every week we’d change our minds about everything. We were trying too hard to make a great album, but we had no idea what great was supposed to be anymore because we were too scared to be ourselves.
Finally, one day, Corabi told us that he’d had enough. “I’m not a singer,” he complained. “I’m a guitar player. I can’t do this anymore.”
So now we had two guitar players and no singer. We were completely turned around. And that’s when Kovac, lurking quietly in the background, sprang on us.
I was so fucking dead set against meeting with Vince when Kovac brought it up. And so was fucking Nikki, who, little punk that he is, walked into the meeting wearing a T-shirt that had “John” written in big motherfucking letters on it.
But the lawyers and managers tricked us, and told us that if we just met with Vince, he’d drop the lawsuit. They set up a secret meeting in a suite at the Hyatt off the 405 freeway. Nikki and I walked in with two big-ass attorneys and found Vince chilling in an armchair with his manager and two other attorneys. It was like fucking millionaire divorce court or something. Their plan was not only for Vince to end the lawsuit, but for all of us to start recording together and being a band again. All these greasy fucking people wanted their money, and they didn’t give a shit about us or our happiness. It was like Mötley plus Vince equals cash; Mötley minus Vince equals no cash.
Vince had grown so fucking big since I last saw him that he looked like Roseanne Barr or something. His head was the size of a balloon and folds of fat were billowing over his watch. He was wearing blue slacks with a short-sleeved dress shirt tucked in, and his body was a weird yellowy shade of brown that was probably a combination of liver problems from alcohol and sunburn from lazing around all day in Hawaii. It was about 4 P.M., and I was willing to bet my fucking tits that he was plastered. I don’t think he really wanted to see us either, but he was practically broke between his daughter’s death, his leaving his deal with Warner Bros., the breakup of his solo band, his divorce, and the millions of dollars he owed on his Simi Valley home after Sharise practically destroyed the place with parties.
“I don’t want anything to do with this guy,” Nikki whispered to me. “If you want to know what uncool is, all you have to do is look at him.”
Nikki and I tried to be nice. I said something like, “Good to finally see you again, dude,” which I didn’t mean. And when he piped off like only Vince can and said something snide like, “Sure you are, buddy,” Nikki and I hit the roof.
“Fuck you, we’re out of here,” Nikki said, and grabbed my arm. All the fucking attorneys reached for us with their greasy little hands like we were million-dollar
checks walking into an incinerator. “No!” they yelled. “It took too long to get you guys together.”
“I’m going,” Nikki snapped at them. “I don’t need this fat piece of shit who looks like some reject from a Florida retirement community.”
Two attorneys grabbed Nikki and brought him in another room to calm down, while the other two worked on Vince. It was like we were marionettes that had somehow rebelled and started thinking for themselves. They wanted us to be good marionettes and let them pull all the right strings.
“If Nikki says one more word, I’m gonna knock him out,” Vince seethed with rage.
None of us ever apologized, even after two hours of bullshitting. We told Vince that we had an album that was almost done but we didn’t have a singer. Our managers, Kovac for us and Bert Stein for Vince, kept trying to steer us closer and closer together, their collective slobber increasing as they realized that their cash cow might be producing fucking milk again.
By the end of the meeting, I began to cool off and even come around to the idea a little: when a band that’s been together for fifteen years changes the main element, some people are going to get freaked out. I used to do interviews where I said we’d fucking break up if any one of us left the band because it wouldn’t be Mötley Crüe anymore. So I understood why it was necessary, though in my heart I was happy with where we were going with John.
Before we left, we scheduled a time for Vince to stop by the studio, promising to leave our baggage outside the front door.
Though Corabi had officially stepped down from the band, we continued to work with him in the studio. On a Sunday when Corabi wasn’t scheduled to come in, Vince arrived. In my head, I kept repeating, “This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.” But I didn’t say a word because all our crystal-clear resentments and issues were supposed to be left on the doorstep—which I doubted was big enough to hold all that baggage. I tried to accept the fact that Mötley Crüe was four people: Nikki, Mick, Vince, and Tommy. With that in mind, the first thing we did was start removing Corabi’s voice on each song so that Vince could resing them.
After Vince left the studio that night, I called Corabi and took him out for sushi. I was fully crying. “Dude,” I said as tears rolled down my cheeks. “I can’t believe this is happening. They are really going to let you go.”
Corabi had given them an excuse to bring Vince back, and they had seized the opportunity and left him in the dust. I don’t think he really wanted to leave the band. He liked singing with us, but he just couldn’t take the contradictory pressures we were putting on him in the studio. He thought that at least he’d be able to stay on as a second guitarist and singer.
“I’m sorry,” I told him for the tenth time that evening. “I’m only a quarter of this machine. Fucking majority rules, and the powers that be are making it happen. I just want you to know that this isn’t what I wanted.”
It was a heavy day, dude.
I think I first sensed that something was up when we ended our tour in Japan. For some reason, everywhere these guys went, disaster followed them like a black cloud: I was never in trouble before I joined the band, but now it was fistfights, drama, and police practically every day. Our Japanese promoter, Mr. Udo, shook in his patent-leather shoes the minute he saw us. Evidently, he had had some experience with the band prior to me. By the end of the tour—between the destroyed hotel rooms, Nikki inviting thousands of fans to stampede the stage every night, and, worst of all, Tommy deciding to be funny by playing “You Dropped the Bomb on Me” as the intro to our Hiroshima show—Mr. Udo was ordering not one kamikaze but a whole pitcher of them for himself every night. His hands were shaking so hard I was sure that the moment we left, he was going to check himself into a sanitarium.
After our last night at Budokan, I left Mr. Udo shaking at the hotel bar with his pitcher of kamikazes, went to the Lexington Queen, and got good and rotted. There was a big board on the wall announcing the dates that different American and British bands would be in town so that all the young models would show up. I noticed that the Vince Neil Band was playing in Tokyo the following week. “Oh, shit,” I blurted. “Vince Neil is going to be here.”
I was with a tall, twig-thin Hungarian model with brown hair who I had met that night. “I know,” she replied. “I’m going to the show.”
So, jokingly, I told her, “Well, if you get to meet him, tell him I said hi.”
At about 3 A.M., we went back to her place. There were three rooms, twelve beds, and eleven of her model roommates running around drunk and naked. Guys they had picked up, lines of coke, and used condoms were lying around everywhere. It was one of the sickest but most exciting scenes I had ever seen. So I fucked the chick and two of her friends (I was in Mötley Crüe, after all—I had a reputation to live up to) and left the next morning to catch my plane.
A week later, I was sitting at home and my phone rang. It was the Hungarian model, and she was pissed. “Are you trying to make a dummy of me?” she asked.
“What?”
“Vince Neil came into the Lexington Queen after the show and I said, ‘Hi, how are you doing? John Corabi wanted me to say hello to you.’ And Vince said, ‘Who?’ So I said to him, ‘John Corabi, the singer from Mötley Crüe, said for me to tell you hello.’ And then he became so mad.”
“What did he do?”
“He said to me: ‘I’m the singer from Mötley Crüe.’ Then he called me a whore. Then he threw a beer bottle at me. Then he told me to get out of the club. Then he threw another beer bottle at me. I think he was drunk.”
That right there should have clued me in to the fact that Vince still considered himself the singer of Mötley Crüe and me an interloper whose time had come. When we started recording again, the plan was to return to our roots with a raw, straight-ahead rock-and-roll record. We started writing songs with Bob Rock called “The Year I Lived in a Day” and “La Dolce Vita,” and at the end of each day we’d walk around carrying our huge cocks in our hands because the music rocked so hard. But all of a sudden things started getting funny. Nikki and Tommy flipped out and fired everybody, including Bob Rock because he was too expensive and over-produced the music, they said.
So Tommy, Nikki, and Scott Humphrey decided to produce together, which was somewhat of an ego trip for Nikki and Tommy. Working with this three-headed producer, I soon started tearing my hair out. The songs would change every day: Tommy and Scott would adjust some effects on the drums, which would alter the drum pattern completely, which would require the bass and guitar parts to be changed, which would require Nikki to write new lyrics. Then I’d come in to sing the tune I’d been rehearsing off our demo tapes for a week, and it wouldn’t even be the same song anymore.
They’d stick me in the booth anyway and say, “Just see what you can come up with.”
So I’d sit in there at Nikki’s house, where half the equipment wasn’t even wired up properly, and get so flustered trying to please them. Nikki would jump on the intercom and say, “Crab, I’m kind of thinking of an old Bowie, Sisters of Mercy kind of vibe.” Then Scott would hit the button and add, “But with a little Cheap Trick, Nine Inch Nails kind of thing.” Finally, Tommy would chime in, “Yeah, but make it lush like Oasis.” So I’d start trying to figure all this out, then Tommy would interrupt again and say, “Oh yeah, dude, I forgot to add that the track’s gotta be heavy, like Pantera.”
I had no clue what these guys were saying to me. None at all. I’d beg them to sing something to give me an idea of what they were hearing but they wouldn’t. They’d just say, “It’s hard to explain, but what you just sang ain’t it.”
After weeks of this, Tommy, who’d always been my biggest supporter, said, “Dude, what the fuck do you do when you go home? You suck!”
I was devastated. Two years ago, if I farted, these guys thought it was the greatest sound they had ever heard. Now, I was the shittiest singer in the world in their eyes. It felt like a relationship in which your girlfriend knows she wants her
freedom, but she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. So instead, she just gets moody, critical, and mean, hoping to drive you away. If the time we spent recording Mötley Crüe in Vancouver was the best year of my life, this was fast becoming the worst. Besides not getting along with the guys at all, my mother passed away. She had been sick for two years with cancer, and her health insurance and social security weren’t coming through at all. So I sold my Harley and anything else I could to help pay her bills. In desperation, I even borrowed money from an uncle in Philadelphia, on the condition that when I received my first publishing advance for the new Mötley record I’d pay him back.
I had also just moved in with my girlfriend, a confused model named Robin who I was madly in love with. But everything started to go wrong between us. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life and would sit around at home all day, taking out her frustrations by browbeating me. In the meantime, my son was in and out of the hospital because of his diabetes. It seemed like my entire support system—my mother, my girlfriend, my son, my best friends, and my band—was collapsing. I was locked in a room watching the walls around me fall down one by one.
Every day, things kept getting weirder with Mötley: We had a meeting in New York with some big-shot guy at our label, and at the eleventh hour he wouldn’t let me in the door. So they left the meeting blaming me for not being a star, whatever that is. No one can make themselves into a star: your fans are the people who make you a star—just look at all the unlikely characters who have become sex symbols simply by being popular. Nonetheless, they said that I had to start voice training, take choreography lessons, and get a stylist, because I wasn’t on par with the rest of the band. They wanted to do just about everything short of enrolling me in the Fame school.