by Tommy Lee
What were your first impressions on working with the band?
They are, you know, very unique people. At first, it was a cool thing to be working with them, because there was always drama. When I first met them, the drama was kind of fun. And I loved watching Tommy play his drums, just breaking cymbals in half and busting his drumsticks right and left. But then, all of a sudden, I was sitting in the producer’s chair and it was impossible to get anyone (except Mick) to show up on time. After a while, we instituted a system of fines: one hundred dollars for each hour someone was late. Then it was another struggle to separate everyone from their pagers and cell phones. Days were just wasted without any work getting done.
Things got worse once we moved into Nikki’s gated mansion. Every day, Nikki would have to duck out of recording to deal with the gardener or the pool guy or the fish lady or the car detailer or the maids, who came twice a day to do the breakfast and evening dishes and chores. There was no end to the number of people working to keep that house standing.
One of the things I’d like to talk to you about is Mick’s hat.
Mick’s hat? What?
He said that you called a meeting with management to complain about his hat?
This definitely confirms some of the stuff I’ve heard out of Mick Mars’s mouth. Because that is ludicrous.
So you never had a problem with his hat?
That is just not possible. Mick Mars always wears a hat, except for when he’s on stage sometimes. But who gives a shit whether he wears a hat or not?
Mick’s not one to just make something up, though.
I’m sure if it happened, no one else remembers it but Mick. I think it’s kind of weird. [pauses] In fact, you know what? He used to always wear this Mötley Crüe racing hat, and I loved it. I said, “Hey Mick, can you get me one of those?” And months later he got me one. I’m looking in my closet now, because I think I still have it. I was fixated on his hat because I wanted one, not because I didn’t like it.
Here it is. I found it. I’m blowing the dust off it now. It’s got a skull and bones and racing flags on it. It’s a black leather hat. I remember this distinctly now. He must have gotten it all wrong: the hat was all good. What was not good must have been something else.
Well, he did feel like you were invalidating him as a guitarist.
That really didn’t have anything to do with me. Tommy and Nikki both liked the way that John Corabi played guitar, and they were always encouraging John to play. As the producer, you want to be very open and let everyone bring their parts to the table. But Mick just didn’t want anyone playing the guitar. He’d scream out, “I’m the guitar player.” It’s like, “Okay, you are the guitar player, but two other guys in your band want to hear John Corabi play.” Sometimes the sound of two different guitar players playing the same part is a nice sound, like with AC/DC.
It’s funny that he would remember me being the guy who didn’t want his guitar parts because I wanted to make a Mötley Crüe record that sounded like the early stuff. What I really liked was pure Mick Mars raw guitar. In fact, I was always encouraging Mick, and he would bring me these cassettes called table scraps, which were bits and pieces of things he was working on at home. What really used to make this band work well was Mick writing guitar riffs and Nikki writing things over the top of them, and Vince singing it all. That was the formula. Most of the riffs we were working on were based on John Corabi guitar parts, and those were these bluesy Zeppelin guitar riffs. So it was almost like the Mötley Crüe writing machine had shut down. Corabi probably hated me from the get-go, because jamming was something he had brought to the band and I wanted them to get back to writing songs again.
So you were the one who wanted to make a raw Mötley record? And the rest of the guys wanted to sound more up-to-date?
Exactly. Nikki wanted to be Nine Inch Nails one day and U2’s Zooropa the next day. Nikki and I were always going at it. We had argument after argument over lyric content. Nikki didn’t like to have his lyrics scrutinized. There was this line in this song called “Glitter” that went, “Let’s make a baby inside of you.” And I was like, “There is no way. You can’t put that line on this record.” It was ridiculous. And he basically tried to say that it was the best thing he’d ever written.
What kinds of things did Nikki say about me?
I think he felt like you were getting into head games and playing him off against Tommy. He said he needed a stronger producer to tell him he was full of shit sometimes.
Really? I think that most people would remember me being the guy who kept saying, “Quit trying to be Trent Reznor. Just fucking sit down with a guitar and write songs.” All I was trying to do was get a hit: I didn’t care about anything but selling records. After all the time and grief and drama we all put in, the least we could have was a hit.
I think the band thought that, in your mind, nothing was ever good enough.
That is the way I felt. The record sounds like a bit of a mishmash, and that it didn’t sell is proof that it wasn’t good enough.
Did Vince’s return make things any easier?
No, the songs weren’t written toward Vince’s singing style or even his range. So, even more so at that point, we needed fucking Mick to do what he did and unite the band. They were so good when they worked together as a band instead of as a bunch of fucking dysfunctional partners.
With John, the problem was that his voice was always blown out. With Vince, there was an entirely different set of problems. We had what we used to call the Vince Neil window of opportunity. It was between beer three and beer six. That was where he’d be warmed up after the hangover but not so drunk that he couldn’t even stand.
And the window could close really fast. Sometimes we’d only have half an hour or twenty minutes with Vince. And if you asked him to sing more than a couple of times, he’d be like, “Fuck you,” and he’d leave. My impression of Vince was to hold up my wrist and look at my watch. He didn’t want to be in the recording studio: he’d rather be on the golf course.
So even when he was back, he didn’t act like he was part of the band?
I think there was a jealousy because Nikki and Tommy were coproducing the record, and he wanted to be a coproducer too. He could have coproduced, but we couldn’t get him to the studio to sing, much less to produce. Vince is one of those guys who you can’t push too hard. If he does show up and he happens to do something and it happens to be good, well, you get what you get.
Was Pamela Anderson around during the recording?
Well, we all went through some really good times with Pamela and some really shitty times with Pamela during the recording of that album. She used to do this thing every Friday where she’d come by the studio with a bottle of vodka. She’d say, “Okay, it’s Friday, you guys are getting drunk.” She insisted that Tommy get shit-faced every Friday. Then fast-forward a few months, and she’s on Jay Leno saying, “My husband’s an alcoholic.” I was just thinking, “What is she talking about?”
So what was going on in your mind during this whole recording process? Were you thinking, “Get me out of this nightmare?”
It was really hard, because when it was convenient, I had two coproducers; when it wasn’t, I was on my own doing all the work. In the end, I went out screaming. I’ll never forget this because my mother was sitting beside me at Christmastime and I was talking to Nikki on the phone. I was saying, “If you don’t come up with a better first single, your career is finished, and six months from now you are going to blame it all on me.” And he goes, “No, I know exactly what I’m doing and I’m doing the right thing. And this is the perfect first single.” At that point, I was sure that the reunited Mötley Crüe wasn’t going to blow up just because the material wasn’t good. If they had the right record, they could have easily gone double or triple platinum.
So you decided to wash your hands of it all?
What else could I do? You get tired of constantly saying, “No, no, no, no” and arguing with
people all the time. When the first single stiffed, I got a call from Nikki, who said, “I think we released the wrong single.”
“You fucking asshole!” I screamed at him.
It didn’t matter anyway, because by the time the album came out, Mötley Crüe had become celebrities on a scale they probably never could have imagined in their worst nightmares. It was really strange to me because, all of a sudden, their personal lives became more important than their music.
fig. 1
Tommy with Jozie, dancer,
Greatest Hits Tour, 1999
I thought she was the funniest girl on the planet. She should have been a comedian. She was nonstop action, talking faster than any girl I knew. Basically, she was a maniac and I fucking flipped out over her.
The first night we spent together was during time off from the Corabi tour. She lived in Reseda with her daughter, Taylar, from her marriage to Warrant singer Jani Lane. I remember seeing the video for “Cherry Pie” and thinking she was the hottest chick on wheels. She had perfect blond hair, huge doe eyes, big glossy lips, and huge tits—who cared whether it was all real or not. Her name was Bobbie Brown, and she stole my heart the second she opened her mouth.
I was sleeping in her bed after our first date at about four in the morning when all of a sudden the frame started shaking. I had no idea what was going on: At first I thought it was some kind of crazy dream, then I thought some dude was trying to break in. As I slowly returned to consciousness, I realized the whole house was just pounding. We lay naked in her bed, not sure what to do, when suddenly her armoire came crashing to the ground, shattering the screen of her TV into a thousand little pieces.
“Taylar!” Bobbie suddenly cried. Her daughter was alone on the other side of the house, and who knew what was going on there. We slithered off the bed and dropped to the ground, almost shitting in our pants. We pushed open the door and went into the hallway. Everything was falling onto the floor, and the house was shaking so badly we kept getting thrown against the walls as we tried to crawl. The closer we came to Taylar’s door, the more the house rattled, until it seemed like it was about to just fucking collapse. As we reached her room, I looked behind me and the whole house ripped apart. The kitchen and the living room just completely split off and disappeared, leaving a gaping hole of darkness. I was sure we were going to die.
Taylar was on the floor, crying as the earthquake tossed her around the room. I grabbed her and yelled, “Fuck, let’s go for it.” Then Bobbie and I ran out of the room and toward the front door, careful not to get thrown onto the open side of the house and whatever abyss was waiting below. The front door was gone, so we ran through the space where it used to be and into the street. Outside, the earth slowed to a tremble and we joined her neighbors, who were crying over the remains of their homes.
After a first date like that, there was no going back. Bobbie and Taylar moved into my pad on the beach and, after six months of partying together, I slipped a fifteen-thousand-dollar engagement ring onto the top of a brownie she had ordered in a diner, then got down on my knees and asked her to marry me. She said yes, and that was when everything started to go downhill. But it rolled downhill slowly, so slowly that I hardly even noticed it.
Scott Humphrey was over one day listening to some music I was writing, and Bobbie snapped at me because I hadn’t washed the hair out of the sink after I shaved or something. “Hey, dude,” Scott said. “Do you let her talk to you like that?”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“She’s not even treating you like a human being. Is she always like this?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. And all of a sudden, those love blinders came off and I started to notice things I never had before. Things about her just seemed off: She’d sneak around the house, hide things from me, disappear on strange errands, receive phone calls from guys I didn’t know, and, when I woke up in the morning, she usually wouldn’t be in bed. Now, any other guy would think she was cheating on him. But I knew Bobbie better than that.
With the love goggles off, I also noticed that she was wasting away, and she was always fucking cranky. Sometimes I would come home from tour or the studio, and she’d be sitting on the floor with all these arts and crafts spread around her. She’d be hot-gluing fruits and flowers together or covering a bowl of potpourri with gold spray paint.
The next time I was alone with one of her friends, I asked her, “Dude, is Bobbie doing fucking speed?”
“I’m not going to answer that,” she said. “But why don’t you look in her purse? Or check her makeup bag. And, remember, we never spoke.”
Sure enough, I grabbed her purse and found fucking speed in there. It made everything in our relationship seem like bullshit, and it explained the crazy random mood swings that I was always a victim of. When I confronted her, she denied it at first, then she attacked me for drinking, then she blamed it on me. The end result was a huge fucking fight that ended with me sleeping on the floor like a dog.
After that, all this deep-seated resentment that had been building up in Bobbie started to pour out daily. Everything I had begun thinking about her, she had simultaneously been thinking about me. She felt that I was the one going through mood swings; that I had become cranky, suspicious, and miserable to live with; and that I was sneaking around behind her back—not with drugs, but with other women. She was especially mad because she felt like I had asked her to give up her acting and modeling career because I was so scarred from my marriage with Heather and wanted children and a full-time wife. After a while, whenever Heather called (because we had remained friends), Bobbie would freak her shit; and whenever a guy called for her, I’d flip out. A few days before Christmas, when I wanted to go out to a holiday party, our mutual jealousies and mistrust exploded in an ugly, out-of-hand fight in front of Taylar.
We were fighting every day by then and that couldn’t have been good for Taylar’s development, let alone mine. I tried to think of a single reason why she should stay in my life, and I couldn’t think of one. Even her sense of humor, which I had originally loved about her, had disappeared as our relationship became all about negativity and accusations.
When I asked her to leave, she threw a fit and said she wasn’t going anywhere without her clothing and furniture and shit. “You know what,” I told her. “You can have your stuff when you give me back my engagement ring. Because we ain’t getting fucking married, that’s for damn sure.”
“Drop dead,” she spat, adding about a hundred rapid-fire oaths on top of it.
“Well, then, you ain’t getting your shit.” And with that, I grabbed her and marched her to the door. Strangely, I didn’t have to force her. She went a little too willingly, it seemed. I was surprised that she didn’t put up more of a fight, because she was a fucking fighter.
An hour later there was a loud knocking on my front door. I looked at the security monitor, and she was standing there with the fucking cops. I figured the cops would be fair since the house was mine and I had the right to ask her to get off my property. But I was wrong. Way wrong. She had used all her powers to conjure up the greatest sob story the cops had ever heard. She set me up.
“Mister Lee,” the officer said on the intercom. “You are going to have to let her in to collect her things.”
“Dude,” I protested. “She’s got my ring.”
“That’s not my concern,” he said. “She needs to come in and remove her possessions.”
I threw up my hands and opened the fucking door. The cop barged in, followed by Bobbie. She marched straight to the bedroom. I tried to follow her, but the cop stopped me.
“Don’t go in there!”
I lost it. “What do you mean don’t go in there? That’s my fucking bedroom. And that’s my personal stuff in there.”
“I want you to wait outside and keep quiet.”
“This is bullshit! I’m not going to do shit to her.”
“Did you hear what I said, Mister Lee?”
“I fuckin
g heard you! I just want to make sure she doesn’t take any of my stuff! I have that right, don’t I?”
I guess I didn’t have that right. Because before I knew it, I was thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and pushed into the back of their cop car.
“What are you taking me to jail for?” I yelled as they drove away.
“Assault.”
“What?”
“The lady says you tried to strangle her.”
Since it was a Friday night, they kept me there for the rest of the weekend, which gave Bobbie just enough time to clean my entire fucking place out. When I came home Monday morning to find all the rooms empty—chairs, tables, bed, everything—I wasn’t even surprised. I was just curious as to where she’d found a moving company willing to work on weekends. I hope she had to pay them some serious overtime, because I know they worked hard. All they left me was one fork in the dishwasher.
BUT HERE’S THE SICK THING about love. I fucking missed her. And she was totally missing me too. So just days after I was released from jail, I found myself in the apartment she had rented after leaving my house—fucking her on my old bed, dude. We weren’t really going out again, but we weren’t quite broken up either. It turned into one of those relationships that just needs to be shot and put out of its fucking misery. We were holding each other back from life, from meeting other people, but at the same time we couldn’t get enough of each other.
The second or third time we hooked up after jail, she started bitching me out because she thought I was interested in one of her hot friends. She stomped and screamed around the house for fucking hours without a break. I tried to laugh it off, and it only made her madder. I tried to ignore her, and it only incensed her more. I tried to reason with her, and she just grew angrier. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t know how to stop the noise. I grabbed a fucking vase off the table, smashed it on the ground, said, “You’re a fucking asshole,” and split. I was so upset. I couldn’t get rid of this crazy fucking woman or my crazy fucking feelings for her, and nothing was working. I needed to escape from this shit, get my mind off it, stop the noise. Why was I still even wasting my time on this bitch who had set me up?