by Tommy Lee
Dennis Rodman had filed for divorce, but that didn’t mean he wanted someone else dating her. So he started stalking the band and showing up at shows. We had to order security guards to keep him out by any means necessary. And funnily enough, though I had been trying ever since my release from prison to get Pamela to talk or meet with me, as soon as word leaked out that I was dating Carmen, she mysteriously started calling again.
EXCEPT FOR THE VISITS FROM CARMEN RODMAN, I kept to myself during the Mötley tour. I took my whole studio on the road and, after every gig, holed up in my room and worked on Pro-Tools. I figured if I wrote nonstop, I’d have the Methods of Mayhem record done by the time I came home. Besides, it kept me from getting into any more trouble. In every city, I’d have to find a lab and pee in a cup before each show. And all day I’d be on the phone with probation officers and anger-management counselors and therapists and gurus. With my strict probation, it was like I was still in handcuffs. I couldn’t go to restaurants, grocery stores, gas stations—anywhere that sold alcohol except, of course, the venues we played in.
With each show, it became harder for me to play our greatest hits onstage. While I was out there playing “Girls, Girls, Girls” for the ten thousandth time, all I could think about was getting back to my room and finishing whatever song I was working on. I was much happier on the Corabi tour. Even though no one was at the damn shows, at least I was doing something that fulfilled me. I had always told myself that when my heart wasn’t in it, it was time to quit. And my heart wasn’t in it.
Nikki, however, was just as enthusiastic about Mötley Crüe as he was on the day we started the band in his old girlfriend’s home in North Hollywood, with me jamming on the fucking table while he sold lightbulbs on the phone. With the band back on its own independent label, he felt like he was in control of his own destiny and Mötley Crüe could take over the world again. I think he fucking thought that I would come around and see things his way, and stay in Mötley Crüe while releasing Methods of Mayhem as a side project. But if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it 100 percent. And I couldn’t give Methods of Mayhem and Mötley Crüe 100 percent, especially after Vince sucker-punched me.
We were at the Las Vegas airport heading back to Los Angeles after another leg of the never-ending Greatest Hits tour. Vince was highly intoxicated and, as usual, no fun to be around.
I was standing at the ticket counter talking with Ashley, who worked for our record company and was taking care of our seats, when Vince walked up all shitty drunk and slurred, “Give me my fucking boarding pass, Ashley. You can kiss Tommy’s ass later.”
Dude, I had no idea where all that fucking hostility came from. I guess I hadn’t been happy since he rejoined the band. And, sure, he wasn’t my favorite dude on the planet. But I never did anything fucking mean to that guy. He just has so much pain bottled up that he doesn’t share with anyone, and, dude, I feel that. But when he said that shit in the airport, it didn’t put me in a very sympathetic mood.
“What did you just say?”
“You fucking heard me,” he swaggered drunkenly.
“Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you!”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck me? Fuck you, bro!”
And we were off in one of those shitty little fights that weren’t so rare with us. “No, fuck you, you fucking poser piece of shit,” Vince bullied as he pushed his puffy face against mine. “What are you going to do? Hit me?”
He knew damn well that I was on probation, and he tried everything he could to get me to violate it by kicking the shit out of him. I refused to take the bait, putting my anger management training to use. “Look, dude,” I said. “I’m not going to fucking hit you. You need to calm down, big guy. Let’s just forget about it and take it easy.”
Then, out of nowhere, he fucking clocked me on the jaw. And when you get hit like that, suddenly anger management goes out the window and your animal defense system kicks in. My immediate reaction was to fucking kill. Even though I’d just had assault charges and prison and counselors up the ass, I couldn’t help it. Here was this asshole coming out of nowhere and getting up in my shit. I fucking tackled him, knocked him to the ground, and cocked my arm to send this smug shithead to the hospital. I did not give a fuck. Send me back to jail. Fine. But my fist was going to have a band meeting with Vince’s face first.
Suddenly, Chris, our security guard, dove on me. He was under strict orders to make sure I didn’t get in any trouble, and it was his ass if I was sent back to prison. He pulled me off Vince and said, “Tommy, get on the plane and get the fuck out of here. Now!”
As I turned to walk to the gate, Vince stood up and screamed at the top of his lungs for airport security. “Police! Police! I’ve been assaulted.” The fucking guy had just sucker-punched me, and now he was trying to get me arrested and put back in prison. It would have been ten years on ice if I was arrested. You just don’t do that to another human being—especially your bandmate—no matter how pissed you are.
I ran onto the plane and said to Nikki, “Bro, I am out of here. You will not see me tomorrow. You will not see me the next day. You guys had better find yourselves another drummer. This tour is over!”
I was talking to Ashley Smith, the publicist at our record company, when Tommy, being who he is, jumped in the middle of the conversation. He had nothing to do with what we were talking about.
When I told him to keep his mouth shut, he grabbed me by the neck. “Take your fucking hands off me right now!” I ordered him.
We were in the middle of a crowded airport and there were thousands of witnesses. If he didn’t watch himself, he was going to get thrown back in prison. So I warned him again: “Take your fucking hands off me.”
And when he didn’t, I knocked him to the ground. So I wouldn’t say that’s a sucker punch. I’d say he’s just a sucker who got punched.
Tommy can be the most fun guy in the world to be around. His only problem is that he is so scared other people won’t like him that he lies to make himself look better. That’s the way he is and that’s the way he always will be. He’s a chameleon. Whatever is in, he wants to do that. He never really stuck to what made him what he was, which was rock and roll. If hip-hop is in, he’s a hip-hopper. If punk is in, he’s a punk rocker. If Tommy had fucking tits, he’d be a Spice Girl.
When Tommy was released from prison, he didn’t call anyone in the band. I didn’t find out until three days later that he was even out of jail. And the way I found out was because someone had seen him in a mall. I was furious. I had visited him almost every week. I did everything I could to keep him sane in there, even starting a letter writing campaign to get him an early release. So when he didn’t even let me know he was out, it felt like a slap in the face.
I called him and said, “What’s going on? Why didn’t you tell me you were out?”
“What’s the problem?” he bristled. “It’s not my job to report to you.”
Throughout the Greatest Hits tour that followed, he was cold and aloof. He was a time bomb ticking with resentment. It was only a matter of time before he blew. So when everyone turned against Vince after the fight in the airport, I saw it for what it really was: Tommy throwing gasoline on a fire. Sure, Vince was being a jerk to our publicist. But at the same time, Tommy took a bad situation and made it worse by grabbing Vince by the neck. On the plane afterward, Tommy became very emotional and started crying while Vince sat as far away as he could, sulking and indignant. They were like two little kids.
I’d seen this kind of thing happen between any two of us a million times. But, when the dust settled, we were a band. Everyone made mistakes. Everyone was an asshole sometimes.
On the plane, I told them the new game plan: “Listen, we’re right where we want to be: we have our own label now. So we can reissue our old albums with all the unreleased tracks the fans have been asking for, make a new album of pure kick-ass rock, and, by September of 2001, take some time off and work on whatever s
olo project we want.”
But Tommy wasn’t having any of it. Back in L.A., he refused to talk to Vince and make peace. And Vince refused to talk to Tommy. They were both wrong but neither would admit it, and I knew that if they would just sit down like Vince and I had after our fight on the Swine tour, they could settle their issues. But the best I could do was talk Tommy into finishing the tour.
“Fine,” he told me. “But I want my own tour bus. And I want my own dressing room. And don’t even think about putting me on the same airplane as that dickhead. I don’t want to see that asshole until the lights come on. And when we come offstage, you better fucking take him in one direction and me in the other. I don’t want to fucking run into him. Because, dude, I don’t trust myself.”
When we came home from the tour, a friend called and told me to turn on KROQ because Pamela Anderson was being interviewed. She said that she and Tommy were back together again, and that Tommy had decided to leave Mötley Crüe to record a solo album.
That was how I found out Tommy had left the band: from Yoko Ono on KROQ. I called Tommy, but he wouldn’t return my calls. I stopped by his house, but he wouldn’t answer the door. I wrote him letters and E-mails, but he never responded. He was just gone, as if the past twenty years of friendship and music didn’t exist. It hurt immensely. But it doesn’t anymore.
I told my doc that I’d been having a hard time falling asleep and a hard time forcing myself out of bed in the morning.
He said, “You are depressed.”
I could have told him that. I’d been depressed for years. I was in pain every day and worn out from years of driving 780 miles to each gig with a band that’s still squabbling like tittie-babies. It was getting pretty hairball. My feeling when Tommy left the band was that if you’re not into what you’re doing, then you’re not going to do your best. And then you’re going to start resenting the people who you think are holding you back so that every petty little thing gets blown way over the top, like in the airport with Vince. So if Tommy wants to leave the band, let him get it out of his system and see for himself whether he was right or wrong. Like when I was in White Horse, they kept telling me I couldn’t play as good as everyone else so I followed my gut feeling and left to do what I really wanted. And, in the end, it was me who had the last laugh. So who knows what will happen with Tommy?
For my depression, the doctor prescribed Zoloft and Wellbutrin. I went home figuring I’d shake my lethargy, quit smoking, get some energy, and go out and do stuff. Nope. I took the pills and was instantly transported to another dimension. At night, I’d wake up in a panic, thinking that I was being abducted by aliens or observed by ghosts. But I’d look around and nothing would be there. Suddenly, weird shit would start dripping from the ceiling and rising out of the floor.
I called the doctor and told him what was happening, and he said to stick with the medication because my system would soon adjust. For three straight weeks, I was on a nonstop acid trip. Each day, I journeyed further and further out of my mind. When I walked on my beige carpet, I’d see the prints of my boots glowing phosphorescent orange. I was sure something was about to snap and I was either going to kill myself or take out one of my guns and spray the whole neighborhood. I knew my brain was thinking wrong, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Finally, I went to see a psychiatrist and he diagnosed me as a schizophrenic. Being depressed seemed like nothing in comparison with being a schizophrenic. The psychiatrist gave me another pill to keep the other drugs in check. And then he called my orthopedic specialist and told him to cut off the pain medication I took for my back because he was worried I was becoming an addict. I was never an addict—I’d make a ten-day supply of pills last a month. But now, thanks to all these doctors, I was schizophrenic and in constant pain from thirty years of cumulative bone disease. Plus, as a side effect from one of their pills, my hands started swelling and I couldn’t play the guitar.
My brother moved into my house to take care of me. And that night, my mattress started undulating under me and making serpentine movements. I thought it was my imagination again, but in the morning my brother asked what I had put in the bed to make it shake like it did. Now I had no idea what was real and what was illusion. I’ve always known that the things scientists and governments tell us are wrong, but now I was seeing proof for the first time. The drugs had opened up a window into the spirit world and there was no doubt that some of the things I was seeing really existed; but, in order to function in the everyday world, our minds have to narrow the field of perception to a small sliver of reality and exclude the rest. Unfortunately, as an inhabitant of Planet Earth, I had to go back to living in it. So I called the doc again and begged him to take me off the pills. He told me to be patient and wait to adjust.
That day, I started hearing a radio very faintly in another room. But when I plugged my ears, the music and voices grew louder. They were in my head. The final straw came when I was in bed and a marshy gray ghost pinned me to the mattress. I started yelling at him: “Let me up or I will break your fucking neck.” But he pinned me there for an hour. The next night, the gray ghost returned. But this time I grabbed him, and he disappeared. When I woke up in the morning with the usual aches in all my joints that made it so hard to even stand up, I realized that the gray ghost was my ankylosing spondylitis made flesh. That’s what had been holding me back my whole life.
That day, I called my doctor again and he assured me that these were normal side effects.
“I don’t think they are,” I said. “They feel like acid flashbacks.”
“Okay,” he sighed. “Then come in.”
As soon as I walked in the office, I could see in his eyes that he was afraid. I looked like death in boots.
I think the band always blamed Pamela for influencing me to leave. They called her motherfucking Yoko and set up a dartboard with her face on it in their dressing room. But she never told me to leave. Yeah, she could see the dysfunction in the band. But every decision I ever made musically, I always made on my own. The fact that I left the band never should have been a surprise to Nikki; I had told him reams of times, but I guess he just didn’t want to really believe it after all we’d been through.
For some reason, Nikki and Pamela never clicked, which was always fucked up to me because she introduced Nikki to Donna. She whipped out her cupid’s arrow, shot them both, and it’s been puppy love ever since. I think Vince had issues with Pamela too, because he claimed they had fucked, though she says they never did. But he was never as angry as Nikki, who to this day, hates Pamela’s guts.
I used to feel that way myself: after the divorce and sitting around helpless while she hooked up with her ex, I told myself that there was no fucking way. I accepted as gracefully as I could the fact that I had been fired. Whenever I came by for the boys, she’d have the nanny of the week bring the kids out and pretend like she wasn’t home.
But, just like with Bobbie Brown, Pamela and I couldn’t stay away from each other. First, she suddenly started calling me again when I was dating Carmen. Then, one afternoon when I went to pick up the boys, the nanny wasn’t there and Pamela came out instead. Instantly, we both felt, despite everything we’d been through, the magic, the initial attraction that had brought us together that New Year’s Eve five years before. After that, each time I went over for the kids, we’d kick it a little bit—until one day we found ourselves kicking it in her bed. Then I started staying the night, and spending more and more time with her until we were practically married again. I asked her to move back to my place, and that day she went to the court, bro, and finally withdrew my restraining order. We even planned to remarry on Valentine’s Day.
But we quickly fell into the old patterns because we had never really dealt with our issues. It was hard to get her to talk about them, which made our attempts at therapy a complete waste. Instead of working on things, she liked to give ultimatums, like, “If you drink, I can’t be with you.” The little boy that was me befor
e jail hated ultimatums, but now I tried to accept them as part of her personality. At the same time, however, there were so many mines in our relationship we hadn’t defused that we both ended up tiptoeing around each other so as not to fucking explode any.
It all fell apart for us again on New Year’s Eve. We were sitting on our asses watching TV and I said, “You know what, it’s New Year’s Eve. It’s the fifth anniversary of when we met and tomorrow is going to be another fucking millennium. Let’s have a shot of Goldschläger for old times’ sake, chill in the Jacuzzi, and have a good time.” She agreed. For a few days afterward, when we had some time alone, we’d sneak a drink together and veg out.
But afterward she freaked because by drinking we had stepped on one of those mines. “Oh my God,” she kept saying. “I can’t believe I drank with you. I’m not supposed to be doing this.” And so when the guilt came back, the drama of the past followed. Just as all this was going down, I had to split for a tour with Methods of Mayhem. When I returned home, she was out of town on a television shoot. We kept missing each other, and the distance and lack of communication were destroying us. And then, on Valentine’s Day, I was fired again. Out of the blue, she said, “I just can’t do this anymore.” And she took the kids and bolted. She completely disappeared: I called her family and friends, but no one would tell me where she was.