by Tommy Lee
I sat there for an hour, blaming him for my entire fucked-up life. When I rewound everything—running away from my mother, stealing a homeless girl’s clothes, fighting with the cops outside the Whisky, overdosing at the Franklin—all that misanthropy and self-destruction came down to the same thing, a massive chip I had been carrying on my shoulder my whole life because my father had abandoned me. Not only had he left me at three, but he had pushed me away when I reached out to him for help sixteen years later.
When I returned home, we were on the verge of leaving for the Generation Swine tour. I decided to exorcise my feelings for my father once and for all on stage. I composed a bass piece with Chris Vrenna of Nine Inch Nails in which I soloed over all these different textures and sound-scapes while a series of slides flashed in the background. The images were of an embryo, a child being born, a cute baby photo of myself, and a picture of me when I was a happy little kid in a Halloween mask. Then the music darkened and a series of words flashed across two forty-inch-wide screens: “abandonment,” “vacant,” “heroin,” “destruction.” Then the music stopped and a big question mark appeared, as if to say “Why me?” or “What next?” To close the piece, I played dark ambient noise and short minor-key melodies on the bass as the film Donna and I had made at my father’s graveside played in the background. The first night I performed the solo, my eyes brimmed with tears. Afterward, fans backstage said that they had cried too because they had also been abandoned by their fathers. Of course, other people came up and just said I was a freak and should deal with my issues. But that was my way of dealing with them.
It was through Randy that I found out about my full sister, Lisa. My mother had always told me that Lisa had left home and did not want anyone in the family to find or visit her, so I hadn’t thought much about her. Randy couldn’t believe it when I told him: Lisa wasn’t even capable of making a decision like that. She had Down’s syndrome, and had been living in a home somewhere—he wasn’t sure where exactly—for over thirty years. She was blind, mute, and unable to walk, put on her clothes, or feed herself. As I ran around the world worrying about my band and what drugs I could put in my system, she had been sitting all that time in a wheelchair in some rest home for invalids. I swore to track her down when the Generation Swine tour ended and do everything in my power to make sure she had the best care money could buy.
I couldn’t understand why my mother never bothered to tell the truth. My whole life I’d been blowing around the world like a sapling without roots. My parents were lost to me, and, as for my children, every day I was fighting to keep them as Brandi vilified me in court (which wasn’t a difficult feat considering my past). Now, three decades too late, I finally learned that there were others out there like me.
Eight years of sobriety, six years of marriage, and the responsibility required to raise three children had cleared my head for the first time. And as I looked around, I had a revelation: my life sucked. I became angrier than ever and I wanted to start getting high again, but we had a rule on the tour that each time someone was caught drunk or high, he had to pay twenty-five thousand dollars. We wanted to be at the top of our game live, not vomiting and passing out on the side of the stage. To make sure no one cheated, we had a guy on the road administering random urine tests. Vince, of course, was busted within the first two weeks.
The sober Swine tour was supposed to be our big reunion. The world was supposed to rise up and chant “Mötley Crüe” just because Vince was back. But the truth was that we still weren’t Mötley Crüe. Sure, all the members were there. But the tour was a mess. With click tracks and backing tapes and racks of effects attempting to imitate the studio experimentation of the album, we were more a computer than a band on stage. When we played “Live Wire,” I felt a rush of excitement because the song was organic. When we played “Find Myself,” it felt as cold as karaoke. Though Vince was back in the band singing, I could tell he wasn’t happy.
Part of the problem was that, as Kovac had predicted, Elektra was shafting us on publicity, promotion, and marketing. And with our morale as low as it was—Tommy wanting to modernize, Mick still pissed because we had lost faith in him, Vince in financial hell, and all my family problems—it wasn’t going to be very hard for Elektra to lay on the extra straw to break Mötley’s back. And we couldn’t let that happen because, if we broke up, we’d owe them twelve million dollars. If we stayed together, they’d owe us twelve million.
Elektra soon stopped paying us, hoping to drive us further into debt and desperation. They tried to get to us through our wives and lawyers, planting insecurities about the band’s future. They even tried to get at us through Pamela’s manager, telling her that Tommy was the star of Mötley Crüe and would be better off on his own. They came at us from every angle. So we went to war: As far as we were concerned, the Generation Swine tour was not just an attempt to promote an album and a band, but a way to get the label to pay attention to us, to give us our money and release us from our contract so we could be free to do what we wanted.
So, from the stage, I had the audience chant, “Fuck Elektra.” I arranged for an interview in Spin magazine for the sole reason of having the opportunity to call Sylvia Rhone a “cunt” in print. I was determined to be the most painful thorn in her side. After all, this was a label that made all its money from rock and roll (from us, from Metallica, from AC/DC) but had now disavowed it, a label so stupid that as they were squeezing us they were also dropping an English group called the Prodigy because they thought the band had no future. Less than a year later, the Prodigy signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Maverick Records and became the first techno band to ever have a number one record in America.
My plan was to make Elektra so sick of us that they’d do anything to let us go. Now, I realize that probably wasn’t the best tactic. I committed the mistake of making it personal with Sylvia, so that she felt she was being abused and taken advantage of. And that led her to think that I was mean and deserved everything I got, so she tightened the screws on us further, without a thought for the fact that we had children and homes, and we were all now for the first time in our lives having trouble paying for them. It was a dark period. I still didn’t know that much about the business, how it worked, and how deep and high up the chains of command went. I’d never been on the wrong side of the record label before or imagined that Mötley Crüe would be caught between the cogs of a machine that wanted to crush it.
At the same time, I was losing my grip on what Mötley represented. I was so angry at my father and my ex-wife and my record label that my dark, demented side took over. For the Swine show, Tommy had found some bootleg footage of people committing suicide and getting burned to death. It was gruesome stuff, and the idea was to screen these atrocities during our antisuicide song, “Flush,” to show the audience that, no matter how miserable they were, they still had it pretty good. But when I looked out at the audience during the song, they all looked terrified. I remembered too late that kids don’t go to a Mötley Crüe concert to think about their own mortality; they go to a Mötley Crüe concert to hopefully get a blow job in the backseat of a car.
And then, when our morale couldn’t have been any lower and our relationship with Elektra couldn’t have gotten any worse, Vince decided to quit the band again.
I was fed up with Tommy, who had been a dick to me ever since I rejoined the band, and I was fed up with these stupid rules. All of a sudden, we went from the world’s most decadent, party-mad band to the world’s strictest, most sober band. We tried to be sober on the Feelgood tour and it didn’t work then. So I didn’t see any reason why it was going to work now. I like to have a cocktail every now and then, and I don’t like them to cost twenty-five thousand dollars each.
A buddy of mine owned a big Gulfstream jet and was nice enough to fly us to our show in San Francisco. Afterward, he was going to take us to our next stop: Boise, Idaho. We were getting close to the end of the West Coast leg of the tour, and I was thinking of quitti
ng because I had a lot more fun on my own than playing a set that consisted almost completely of new electronica grunge songs with the sobo-police and Tommy Anderson Lee. I didn’t rejoin the band to be miserable; that’s not what Kovac had promised when he begged and pleaded and wheedled. So after the show, I had a drink, went to a strip club, and took a taxi home. Evidently, Nikki ended up in the exact same taxi the next day, heard from the driver I’d been drinking, and called my room demanding twenty-five thousand dollars. I told him that I wasn’t going to give him money every time he opened his mouth. Next thing I knew, a guy with a piss test was knocking on my hotel room door. I told him to fuck off, or I’d kick his ass.
The band was meeting in the lobby at 4 P.M. that afternoon to head to Boise, so I went downstairs and told Tommy and Mick that I was sick of this bullshit and planning to bail out at the end of the West Coast tour. Nikki was standing with Donna and his grandfather by the front desk, so I walked over to break the news to him. “I quit,” I said. “I can’t fucking do this shit anymore.”
Nikki wheeled around and said, “Why? Because you can’t be honest?”
He made me change my mind. Instead of quitting during the tour break, I was going to quit right then. “Fuck you, I’m out of here,” I snapped. “It’s been fun getting to know you again. Have a nice trip home.”
He handed his jacket to his wife, gave his bag to his grandfather, turned to me, and said calmly, “Hey, Vince, if you’re going to leave, why don’t you take this on your trip?” Then he nailed me in the jaw with an uppercut. I couldn’t believe it: This was a reaction I expected from Tommy, not Nikki. I think he had built up a lot of anger over the course of the tour between his feud with Sylvia Rhone, the father issues he was trying to work out onstage, and the ten-million-dollar lawsuit from his ex. In that moment, he took it all out on me. He threw me down on the ground in an adrenaline rage, grabbed my neck, and dug his fingernails in, screaming that he was going to rip out my vocal cords while our tour manager, Nick Cua, looked on in horror.
I’m a bigger guy than Nikki and in much better shape, so I socked him square in the face and threw him off. I walked out of the revolving doors and went to my pilot friend’s hotel a couple blocks away.
“Let’s go back to L.A.,” I told him.
We took a cab to the airport and found the whole band in the waiting area, assuming that somehow everything was okay, that we had gotten the anger out of our system and were going to press on to Boise. The pilot and I walked past them; Nikki, Mick, and Tommy picked up their bags to follow. “Wait right here,” I told them. Then I boarded the plane, shut the door, sat down next to the window, and flipped them off. It was my greatest performance on the whole tour.
Predictably, Nick Cua came knocking on the door. I let him in.
“Is there any way we can work this out?” he asked.
“No,” I told him. “Go do whatever you want to do. Go to Boise. Go back to L.A. I don’t care. I’m going home.”
Within an hour, I was at the Peninsula Hotel having drinks. Then I went home, grabbed Heidi, threw her onto the bed, fucked her good, and went to sleep with the satisfaction of knowing that the band was still at the airport.
THE GUYS WERE STUCK THERE for eight hours waiting for a commercial flight. They ended up canceling their sold-out show in Boise and returning to L.A. Jordan Berliant at our management office kept calling me at home with Nikki on the line, but I refused to speak to him.
Finally, after a day or two of enjoying the freedom of doing whatever the fuck I wanted, I agreed to one of the meetings our managers seemed to like so much. We sat down in two swivel chairs in their offices, facing each other like preteen siblings forced by their parents to kiss and make up. Since Tommy and Nikki had kicked me out of the band on that rainy night six years ago, we had never really talked about our problems. We had just swept them under the carpet and ignored them, hoping they’d go away. But eventually, the carpet became too lumpy with all that dirt, and we kept tripping over it whenever we tried to walk. As we sat there, I finally had the chance to say the things to him that had been building up for those six years.
“Your problem is that you’re really condescending to people,” I told him. “You talk down to people, like they aren’t up to your level.”
“I guess I can be like that.”
“You can be such a snot to the guys in the band. Not just me: you treat Tommy like a baby and you pretend like Mick doesn’t even exist. You run this band like a fucking dictator, and everything always has to be done your way. But sometimes you don’t know everything; you were the one who made us look stupid in Rolling Stone because you didn’t know who Gary Hart was. It would help if you listened to other people.”
For an hour we sat there and ragged on each other.
“Then I want you to cut the bullshit,” he told me. “I can deal with the drinking. Maybe we can even stop the piss tests. But I don’t want you telling me you’re not going to drink, then moving the goalposts and going out drinking. I don’t want you lying to me and getting angry at me every time we talk about it. We’re out there covering your debts, and I don’t mind that. But then, when we’re getting in these stupid jive contests every night because you’re trying to hide stuff from us, it makes us resent you. Your lying is a lot worse for the health of this band than the drinking.”
“I’ll tell you what, then. I can promise you that I will never drink before a show or let it interfere with band business. But when I’m on my own time, you have to let me do whatever the fuck I want and not have some guy knocking on my door at 9 A.M. with a urine jar. If you stop acting like a cop all the time, I’ll stop feeling like a prisoner and start being honest about it.”
“Okay,” he said. “And I’ll try to listen more and not be so condescending. Because I don’t always know what’s right for everybody. We’d be a better band anyway if we listened to each other. I’m sorry. I’ve been going through a lot lately.”
“That’s why we should be getting along and sticking together. Because the truth is that you’re all I have. You know me better than anyone in the world.”
Through six albums and countless tours, Nikki and I had always been so different: I was the laid-back beach bum who loved golfing and racing; he was the unhealthy secluded rocker who loved drugs and underground music. I liked to wear shorts and flip-flops, he was always in black leather and boots. But after that conversation, Nikki and I became best friends. We were inseparable. We finally came to truly like and understand one another after seventeen years, and since then we’ve always been able to keep each other in check. That fight was the best thing that ever happened to us.
The next day, we rescheduled the show in Boise, flew there in my very confused friend’s Gulfstream jet, and played the best set of the whole tour. After we wrapped up our last show, I gave the band the best present I could: I checked myself into rehab in Malibu and quit drinking.
I’m going to stack everything up for you, dude:
Ever since Vince had returned to the band, I was unhappy with the direction we were going in, which was backward. And losing the support of our record label only made the situation more miserable. I have so much passion for music, dude, but when I went onstage I just didn’t feel it anymore. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t excited about what we were doing. I was trapped by what we were doing, and a drummer who feels like his hands are tied is no fucking good.
Then I’d just had my second child, and fatherhood doesn’t exactly come with a fucking instruction manual. I read some shit and tried to dive in and learn, but Pamela kept saying everything I did was wrong. I used to be at the top of the charts with Pamela. When Brandon was born, I dropped to number two because at that age, of course, a child needs his mom all the time. So I walked around like the invisible man. I’d say, “Hey, baby, what’s up? I love you.” And she’d just nod, not paying attention. I’d ask her to come down to the garage and listen to some new music I was working on; she’d promise to be there in a m
inute, then she’d completely forget. I couldn’t even have a conversation with her because she had her panties in a wad about the baby all the time.
Then, when Dylan was born, I dropped down to number three. Now I was full-on nonexistent. And I couldn’t deal with that. I’m a guy who loves to give love and loves to get love back. But at home, all I was doing was giving. I wasn’t getting jack back. Then, Pamela flew her parents down from Canada to help with the boys. It was great for the kids to have Grandma around, but the in-laws were at the house every fucking day at all hours, taking up more of Pamela’s time. So, unable to step back and see the situation from any reasonable perspective, I turned into a whiny, needy little brat. Maybe it was my way of becoming Pamela’s third child, so I’d get the attention I needed too. Now, all of a sudden, Pamela and I were arguing all the time. Our relationship had slowly degenerated from pure love to love-hate.
If my head had been clearer, I would have given her a break and fucking loved myself instead of looking to other people for affirmation. But old habits are hard to break: I’d spent my whole life looking for myself in other people, looking for them to tell me who I was. And once I let them define me, I became completely dependent on them, because without them, I didn’t exist.
On Valentine’s Day, when we should have been all about fucking love, we went to the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. I asked a florist to fill the room with rose petals, ordered a bottle of Dom Perignon, and set the perfect mood for our first night alone in months. But after a few glasses of champagne, Pamela became so worried about being away from the kids that she couldn’t even enjoy herself. All she could talk about was breast-feeding Dylan, and all I could think about was that it was my turn to be breast-fed. The next day we went to see the Rolling Stones play downstairs and it was all bad. She saw a stripper talking to me after the concert and we got in a huge-ass blowout in the middle of the casino. I grabbed her to take her into the room so the fucking gossip columns wouldn’t be filled with news of us fighting in public, and she went ballistic. Our anger kept escalating until she finally ran out of the hotel, took the car, and drove back to Malibu alone. Valentine’s Day was a fucking wash. I had to crawl back to the house on my hands and knees begging for mercy.