by Tommy Lee
A week after the meeting, I was supposed to make an appearance with the band at the opening of the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. Though I was broke and fighting constantly with Robin, we decided the trip would be good for us and bought new outfits for the event. But the day before, Nikki called and said not to bother. The Casino hadn’t left passes for me, he said, because they wanted only the more high-profile members of the band. Those words still sting to this day, because it wasn’t too long ago that they made sure I was included in everything and insisted that Mötley Crüe was a democracy in which everyone had equal standing.
I dreaded going into the studio every day to be reminded that I was inferior and useless, then I dreaded going home afterward to be reminded of the same thing by my girlfriend. One day, I finally snapped. After hours of being told I was singing the wrong way, I picked up a guitar and came up with some chords that helped tie the song “Confessions” together for Tommy. He was so excited. “Crab,” he beamed. “That’s amazing. It’s perfect, dude.”
I turned around and cracked, “Maybe I should just be a fucking guitar player then. At least I can do that right in your eyes.” He laughed and I laughed, and I didn’t think much about it until the next day.
I walked into the studio and the whole band was sitting there with our new manager, Allen Kovac. “Crab,” Nikki said. “I can’t believe you said that. You really want to give up singing to be a guitar player?”
I told them that the comment had been sarcastic, but I think they had been waiting for me to quit the whole time. Even if I was only kidding, it was enough.
A few weeks later, I went out to shoot some pool and drink beer with Tommy. We talked about the next album and the next tour, and how we could find the middle ground between who we were and who we wanted to be. Everything seemed normal. The next day, I went into the studio and they sprang another one of their meetings on me. After my night out with Tommy, I was ready for a discussion about what we were going to do for the album and tour. But it was Friday the thirteenth of September. Kovac broke the news: “Look, this is the deal,” he said. “The record company is not going to promote anything that this band does unless we have the original lineup. End of story. I want you to know that this has nothing to do with you and is nothing against you; I don’t give a shit if Paul McCartney is singing for this band. They want nothing to do with it. So we are going to bring Vince back into the fold.”
I was crushed but, at the same time, I was relieved. No longer would I have to face feeling inadequate and completely unwelcome at the hands of the Olympic browbeating team of Scott, Nikki, and Tommy. The nightmare was over.
Oddly, even then the band couldn’t agree. Nikki came over and said he was sorry, but they had to do it because they just couldn’t get what they needed from me in the studio. Then Tommy took me out for sushi and said that it had nothing to do with the band or the record label, but that it was Kovac’s fault. He said he wanted to see me stay in the band as a fifth member and guitar player, but I knew that wouldn’t happen.
Oddly enough, a few days afterward the guys started calling me to come into the studio, saying they couldn’t get anything out of Mick and wondering if I could lay down some guitar tracks in the morning before Vince arrived. I did that for a few days until Mick called the studio one afternoon and asked, “Crab, what are you doing there?”
“I’m just playing some guitar,” I told him. And he went ballistic: evidently they hadn’t told him they were bringing me in to redo his tracks.
At one awkward point, they even called me in to teach Vince my vocal part on a song called “Kiss the Sky.” It was a strange breakup, because I became the only guy they could turn to when they had problems with the vocals or when Vince and Tommy were fighting. One day, Tommy or Nikki (I can’t remember which) called after a blowup and told me, “I will never, ever do another album with Mick Mars or Vince Neil again.”
After a few weeks, the phone calls dwindled. Then they just stopped completely. My services weren’t needed anymore.
Coincidentally or not, shortly after Mötley let me go, my girlfriend Robin told me that it wasn’t going to work between us and moved out. Four days later, a mutual friend called and told me that he had just returned from her wedding: she married a video director, a guy I had never even heard of before. For my own sanity, I assumed and will continue to assume that she met him after we broke up.
I crawled into a dark hole in my mind. Between my girlfriend, my mother, my son, and my former band, I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong to deserve all this. I drove to my ex-wife’s house to be with my son and collapsed on the couch, running through every moment of my life like a bad movie script. My son was watching television and, suddenly, he turned to me, jumped into my lap, and hugged me, snapping me out of my self-pity. “Thanks for coming over and watching TV with me, Dad,” he said. “I love you.”
I smiled and told him that I loved him too, then I told myself that none of this other shit mattered. My son loved me.
If I could rewind the years and relive all my experiences with Mötley Crüe, I wouldn’t change a thing about the first half: meeting them, recording the album in Vancouver, running around the country on our promo tour. But in the second half—recording that second album—I would probably do a few things differently. First of all, I would definitely fight back. Secondly, and most importantly, I would tell them what I really wanted to tell them at the time but never had the balls to. I was too scared of getting fired, so I kept my mouth shut and never spoke those five words that were burning a hole through my lips.
MAKE YOUR FUCKING MINDS UP!
Allen Kovac was a sneaky little bastard, and I mean that in the best sense of the word bastard because I am probably a father to many. I was in Manhattan with my manager, Bert Stein, doing press for what would be my last solo tour when we ran into Kovac in our hotel lobby. Kovac, who convincingly made his presence there seem like an accident, invited us up to his room to talk and order room service. He sat Bert and me down and began his sales pitch:
“Vince, you can get as angry as you want with me, but you have to ask yourself, ‘Are you a star as a solo artist?’”
I answered him with a glare that signified neither yes nor no but hatred. “I’ll go on,” he went on. “In the environment of four guys in a group called Mötley Crüe, you are a real star. And the audience that comes to see you gets its money’s worth. Is the audience that comes to see the Vince Neil Band really getting what it pays to see?”
He went on and on and on until I began to realize that he saw the big picture, and the big picture was that I wasn’t going to make it on my own as a solo artist and Mötley Crüe weren’t going to make it on their own as an alternative-rock band. I asked him if he had discussed this with Nikki or Tommy, and he said that they didn’t know a thing but that he could help make it happen.
Before the meeting, I didn’t really want to be back in Mötley Crüe. I just wanted to bury the hatchet, get the quarter-share of the brand name I deserved, and move on. But with his bullshit, Kovac fertilized a seed that just kept growing. When months later, I saw Nikki and Tommy at the Hyatt, we eventually came around to the idea that we needed to be together and that the rest of this stuff—the lawyers, the name-calling, the suing—was ridiculous. My lawyer bills alone already added up to $350,000, and they were sure to double if I continued the lawsuit. So by the end of the meeting, I told my lawyers, “We want to get this thing back together again. You guys do whatever it takes to get it done, and if you don’t, you’re fired.”
A week later, I went to Nikki’s house, where they were recording the album, and heard some of the tracks. Oddly, Nikki and I started to get very close very quickly. But Tommy, ever since he’d married Heather, thought he was a movie star. And now that he was married to Pamela Anderson, it was even worse. He thought he was better than everybody else, and he made it very clear that I was back in the band against his will. There were a few times when he was so condescending that I s
aid, “Fuck you guys. Go ahead and make a record without me. I don’t give a shit.” Maybe he was jealous of Nikki’s friendship with me. I didn’t know what it was.
I never heard the album they did with Corabi, but a few weeks after I started recording with them again, Corabi stopped by. We drank a couple beers and bullshitted for a while. He said that he was glad I was back in the band because the last year had been rough on him. And I surprised myself, because I actually liked him. He was a pretty cool guy.
After a week of recording, most of us started feeling pretty stupid. Everything sounded right. Everything sounded like Mötley. We were a band again. And that was how it was supposed to be. Even Tommy seemed to be accepting his fate and, begrudgingly at first, liking the songs. Everyone was happy, except for Mick, who seemed ready to lay down his guitar and quit the band.
Who or what killed the dinosaurs? My belief is that it was the Ebola virus, a virus that we are told is as old as the earth itself. Since it is a flesh-eating virus, it could easily jump from host to host without any problem whatsoever, which would explain why the dinosaurs disappeared so suddenly and completely. The virus can consume most of a living being’s flesh, organs, blood vessels, and brain tissue within five to ten days, causing a crash and bleed out in which the organs liquefy and leak out of every orifice. This deadly virus is a more likely culprit than a meteor shower as far as wiping out the dinosaurs but leaving the earth intact for later inhabitants.
And speaking of dinosaurs, what yuppie asshole decided that they should be depicted in all these bright, brilliant colors? Was it Martha Stewart? Clearly, we have reconstructed dinosaurs from bones, so there is no evidence that they were the colors of kids’ toys. Look at the Komodo dragon. There are no colors on that particularly poisonous descendant of dinos. If dinosaurs were really colored so brightly, they wouldn’t have been able to stalk their prey effectively or hide from predators.
I think about dinosaurs a lot, ever since I was made to feel like one when Corabi left the band. But instead of the Ebola virus, I had Scott Humphrey, the Great Invalidator. He invalidated Corabi out of the group. When he was through with Corabi, he went to work on me. It felt like he was always pushing his shortcomings off on other people.
With every new song we started writing in the studio, I’d take the tape home and work up new parts until two in the morning. Then I’d come in the next day, play them, and the Great Invalidator would say, “Nope.” I’d ask him if he knew what he wanted me to play, and he’d say, “Nope.” I’d ask him if he knew what key the song was in, and he’d say, “Nope.” Every sound I ever brought in on guitar was greeted with a chorus of, “Nope, nope, nope, nope.” The Great Invalidator was making me look bad to Tommy and Nikki, making it look like I wasn’t bringing anything to the table. He had them convinced that it was me who was holding the band back with my dinosaur-rock guitar playing and my love of blues and Hendrix, which I guess were out of style or something. I wanted to remind them that I had named the band, that I had molded Nikki into a real songwriter, that I had purged the band’s weak links, and that I had handpicked Vince. But, like always, I kept my mouth shut. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that overconfidence is the same thing as arrogance. And arrogant, egotistical people are the weakest, most feeble-minded people ever. If you’ve got it, you don’t have to flaunt it. Egotistical people are, in my opinion, the most incompetent losers to walk the face of the earth since the pea-brained brontosaurus.
Certain people in that studio had a problem with arrogance and, in order to maintain their confidence, had to push their problems onto other people, which is why I was ready to quit. How many times do you have to hear “no” before you start believing it yourself? I was really becoming convinced that I was no good as a guitarist, that maybe instead of kicking Corabi out they should have booted me. Then they could have Vince as a singer and Corabi as a guitarist, and they’d all be happy.
But if I had left, the Great Invalidator would probably have started working on Nikki next and driven him out of the band. That guy, Scott Humphrey, didn’t know what he wanted. On Dr. Feelgood, his job was to move stuff around on Pro-Tools and pitch-shift vocals. That’s what he was good for. But now he was starting to believe he was a musician. I wanted to say: “Then write a song, prick.” I’d never been so upset during my entire time with the band.
He would even tell Tommy that he was a better guitarist than me or he’d have Nikki, who’s a bassist, playing my guitar parts. I bought stacks of books on invalidation, trying to figure out how I could survive this experience and still have the confidence to play onstage. The last straw came when the Great Invalidator called a big powwow with the management company. The reason for the meeting: my hat. He said he didn’t like the baseball cap that I wore every day. It was a problem for him. That’s how fucked-up this asshole was. Then he told the whole management company that I wasn’t bringing anything to the table.
“So what?” I finally snapped. “Why don’t you just get rid of me, then?”
I was ready to join John Corabi. Maybe we could start a blues band or something. There are only two occasions when I write: the first is when I have an idea about politics or the world. That can be anything from different ways of thinking about major events (like what if the Titanic actually struck the iceberg intentionally because, with a world war looming, Captain Smith was under secret orders to test out then-new high-carbon steel plates and watertight cabins) to just random thoughts about how stupid people are (for example, fat people who insist on wearing red even though they always look like jolly ol’ St. Nick). The other reason I write is when I’m pissed off, and after that bullshit meeting, I was pissed off.
Dear Nikki,
I’ve been with you for so many years, playing guitar on every one of our hits. Suddenly it seems that I can’t play guitar anymore. Let’s see what’s changed between then and now. What’s different? There’s only one element I can see that is different, and that’s Scott Humphrey. You have excluded me in all the songwriting because you don’t want it to be guitar-oriented, you haven’t been happy with anything I’ve tried to contribute, and you’ve replaced all my playing on the record. It seems to me that the only thing you haven’t done is replace me in the band. Maybe Scott Humphrey could come in and play guitar, since he told Tommy he’s so much better than me anyway. So now I leave it in your hands: Have I gotten worse as a guitarist or have you gotten worse as a judge of character?
Your friend and bandmate,
Bob Deal
I’m not great with words or anything, so that letter was the best I could do as far as talking to them and telling them what was really going on. Scott had his nose so far up Nikki and Tommy’s asses that they couldn’t even see the shit all over his face. After the letter, we had another one of our famous meetings and I told the band that it was my last album, because I couldn’t work with them anymore.
But I guess that I had turned into an old broken-down coward. Where I really had been ready to leave the band when they were being assholes because I was dating Emi on the Girls tour, now I was a little too scared to go through with it. What else was I going to do? I saw what happened to Vince on his own, and I’d seen a dozen other bands where a guy splits off and it doesn’t work out for him. There was nothing else for me to do but be the guitarist in Mötley Crüe. Even if that meant just hanging in and taking the abuse.
So every day after the studio I’d bitch to John Corabi, who, after his latest woman problems, was staying in my guest house again. Then we’d drive out to the woods and let off steam by target-shooting. Before he left the band, he had met a couple of strippers and invited them to go shooting with us.
We drove with them past Lancaster and into the open desert. We put on our safety goggles, gloves, and earplugs and ran into two local sheriffs, who were admiring my guns. One of them grabbed a plate of steel, set it up twenty-five yards away, and said, “Here, shoot this.” He had been shooting at it all day with a .22, and wanted to see wh
at would happen with a bigger gun.
It was tilted upward, and I nailed it right in the center. As I did, I heard a voice behind me yell, “Ouch.” It was John’s date. “A bee just stung me,” she whined. But I knew what had happened: a tiny piece of copper shrapnel from the bullet jacket had ricocheted off the plate, whizzed past my face, and hit her in the side.
“That wasn’t a bee,” I told her. I pried her hand off her stomach and blood came squirting out. I cleaned the wound, which was only a superficial cut about one-sixteenth of an inch wide. The piece of shrapnel was the size of a fingernail, but I had enough experience with people like her to know that if I didn’t take care of her, she would sue my ass off. I drove her to the hospital in my car while John held her hand, and she said she’d be fine and promised not to sue.
I brought her home from the hospital and told her I’d pay the medical bills, get her plastic surgery so there’d be no scars, and make sure everything was taken care of. On the way back to my house, I apologized to Corabi.
“That’s all right,” he said. “She was a bitch anyways.”
While she was in the hospital, hundreds of lawyers called her. Suddenly, she was claiming she was disfigured and that this sixteenth-inch scar had ruined her promising career as an exotic dancer. She became as greedy an enemy as an ex-wife, claiming that Corabi and I had been drinking and smoking pot that day, which was bullshit. I ended up paying her something like ten thousand dollars out of court, which was just about all I had left to my name. She probably used the money to get her tits fixed or something.
When the story about the lawsuit leaked out, the newspapers reported that I had gone out and purposely shot my girlfriend. That’s why I never trust what I read. Believe me, if I was going to shoot somebody, it wouldn’t be in the side of the stomach. It would be one shot to the head. Fuck body shots.