by Tommy Lee
In some ways, those were the days, because nothing mattered, none of us gave a fuck, and we thought we’d made it. In our little world, we had reached the top. Even so, we were still scum-ass poor most of the time, so my skills as a klepto came in handy. I usually made a run or two a week to keep all of us boys fed, and I always got the five-finger discount. I don’t recommend it unless you are really desperate, but I will say that it’s pretty easy to justify that kind of shopping when your attitude is “Dude, we gotta eat.”
The liquor store catercorner to the Whisky A Go-Go, just down the block from our house, was one of my regular targets. In 1982, I believe it was, that establishment provided us with a meal I’ll never forget. It was Thanksgiving Day and we all decided that we needed to get ourselves some form of turkey, any shitty form of turkey, to get into the spirit. Our attitude was, “Hell, we deserve turkey, dude.” So we slid into that liquor store and the dudes stuffed a few turkey potpies in another of my trusty down jackets. I was a white puffy Michelin Man in a black coat filled with turkey potpies. When we got back home, we turned to one another, all excited. We hugged and jumped up and down, just shouting, “I love you, bro! Happy Thanksgiving, bro!”
Before the money started rolling in and before we were picked up by Elektra Records,* we started to realize that there was an alternative: dating girls who would either bring us food or were rich enough to give us money for food on a regular basis. We never talked about it, but it became the unspoken rule. They were our sponsors between the day we first laid our songs on vinyl and the day we signed our name on the dotted line. It was bizarre sometimes, and maybe it was wrong, but I look at it this way: It wasn’t illegal. To all those girls: Sorry where sorry is due. And a thank you, and you, and you, you, you, and you. You know who you are. I hope you do, because I do.
Motley’s first two albums, Too Fast for Love and Shout at the Devil, came out before MTV even existed and it’s weird to think that it used to not exist. Some people think hip-hop divides the generations more than anything, but if you ask me, it’s MTV. Before MTV, you had to do more work to find your scene and learn about music. You had to interact, talk to people, and go to certain stores and certain clubs to get to the music you liked. Now you can stay inside and have it all beamed to you. Whatever.
I’ll be the first to say that Mötley profited a fucking ton from MTV. We were one of the first bands on there and we were on there constantly because those fuckers didn’t have too many other videos to show! Our image, our attitude, and our message was as antiauthority, proshock, and indulgent as you could get. It didn’t hurt that we looked insane, that we were insane, and that all of us, separately and especially together, were trouble magnets. Naturally, MTV always had editing issues with us. They were always telling us what we had to cut out of our video to get it on the air. We learned that it was best to send our videos to them in the worst format, with as many R-rated elements as possible. That way, after the edits, it would still be kick-ass. Our music was a soundtrack of pleasure-seeking, adolescent rebellion, danger, and extremism that was as fucking rock-and-roll as you could get at that time. If you go back and hear it now, it still is. Times might have changed, but maniacs still crave a theme song—and Mötley hit that shit on the head. We definitely stood out in 1983, when Shout at the Devil broadcast us into households across America.* At the time, bands like Men at Work, Hall and Oates, or Michael Jackson were at the top of the charts and people were paying money to see movies like Mr. Mom and Flashdance. Next to that, we were like a freight train from hell that tore the ass out of pop culture.
As we settled into our style and became bigger over the course of the decade, with records like Theatre of Pain in 1985, Girls, Girls, Girls in 1987, and Dr. Feelgood in 1989, we watched our effect on music and on younger bands coming up. We were always about the rebellion at the heart of America not only because we lived that way but also because rock-and-roll has always been salvation for horny, aggressive teenagers as much as it’s always been nothing but a fucking racket to their parents.
We were a group made up of very different guys and if you ask me, that’s why it worked. Each of us brought to the mix so many different influences. Nikki brought his love of punk and pop and melodic glam-rock songwriting style. Mick was a full-on blues monster, who would rather listen to classic guitar players like Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix than any new band I’d try to force-feed him. Vince, well, Vince liked Robin Zander, and since Cheap Trick is God, that was cool. He didn’t bring much to the musical table, but like David Lee Roth, he didn’t need to—he knew how to be a good front man. And me? I brought all kinds of shit: the funk, the big beats, the drum solos from hell, and a sense of musical arrangement that we needed. In the studio, I was usually the guy who figured out where all our parts should go and how we should take the pieces we worked out jamming and make them into songs. Being a drummer, I got turned on by the rhythm in all kinds of music, from George Clinton to Pantera. I was always the guy blasting some new tunes over the rehearsal PA system. I’d be shouting, “Dudes! You gotta hear this shit!” It didn’t always go over well. Whatever.
I’ve got to take a moment here to say that Mötley’s break came courtesy of the rock royal family, when we were picked up by Ozzy Osbourne as the opening act on his Bark at the Moon tour in 1983. That was a huge tour for him as a solo artist because the album kicked ass and rock-and-roll fans were going crazy for it that year. The tour was sold out everywhere and playing a sold-out gig at an arena was fucking heaven for a band at Mötley’s stage in the game. Sharon and Ozzy could have picked any band to open that tour—plenty would have done it for free, including us (I’m just glad they didn’t ask). They picked us and I’m forever indebted to them for seeing that Mötley wasn’t fuckin’ around. Sharon and Ozzy gave us the chance to rock shit every night and we earned ourselves a huge fan base in return.*
Theatre of Pain was what we made of all those days on the road and everything that happened to us after making Shout at the Devil. We’d seen friends die, seen girlfriends come and go, we’d broken shit, done everything we wanted, and had a huge success with that album too. But “Home Sweet Home” was the first song we recorded for Theatre of Pain and it says it all.† That tour was itself a Theatre of Pain. Nikki and I were at our all-time high in terms of drugs and alcohol: We’d shoot up cocaine and heroin onstage if we wanted to and we’d shoot Jack Daniel’s or gin to come down after the show. It was ridiculous. Thank God we’re alive.
The Girls, Girls, Girls record, in my opinion, brought together a huge chunk of all-American subculture: tattoos, Harley-Davidsons, strip clubs, the New York Dolls, plus a dose of English glam shit like T. Rex. It was everything we were into: We all rode Harleys and we had a riding club called the Dark Angels. We were all into strip clubs and that’s what the title track is about.* That album was Mötley and it was everything American that no one else on MTV talked about back then.†
Dr. Feelgood was when we really hit our stride. It rocked like fuck—it had melody and pop hooks you couldn’t forget. All of us were clean and sober while we recorded, after I led the charge for each of us to enter rehab, and it shows. It even hit number one the week of my twenty-seventh birthday in October 1989.‡ Still, we never won a Grammy—and that year we should have. I remember sitting in the same row with Metallica at the ceremony that year. They were nominated for And Justice for All and we were for Dr. Feelgood. As they named the nominees, we all looked at one another because we knew those were the two fucking biggest, baddest hard rock albums of the year. We knew one of our bands was going to take it home. You’ve never seen a bunch of guys more fucking shocked to lose when the Best Hard Rock Album of the Year went to... Jethro Tull. Are you fucking kidding me? The lead singer plays flute, what the fuck is that? Another example of the tired old fuckers on the Grammy committee voting for their favorite fellow old fuckers. Thank God the Grammys have gotten a little bit better. Still, every year, there’s always some big crime against music at that ceremony
where the out-of-touch board members’ choice wins over what was good and what people really loved. Whatever. After we lost, our band and Metallica looked at each other, shook our heads, got up, went straight to the bar together, and got drunk as fuck. We didn’t need the Grammys to tell us we kicked ass.
In just a few years, Mötley went from nothing to a crew of guys who had everything. We are all extremists, so in a way it makes sense that our career, once we hit, went from zero to sixty that quickly. It doesn’t mean that we were capable of dealing with any of it then. Before we got clean, we were drunk, we were crazy, we snorted mountains of cocaine, Nikki and I shot heroin and drank Jack Daniel’s like the world was ending tomorrow, and none of us, for a while there, would have cared if we were the biggest band in the world or died the next day. If anything, that to me is Mötley: four guys who were the greatest fucking rock band and the biggest fucking train wreck at the same time. From moment to moment, it was either win it all or lose it all.
It was rad and it was intense, but I look back at it now and I’m like, “Jesus, that was so... then.” The eighties were definitely incredible for us. It was raw dog, all the time.
HALLE-FUCKING-LUJAH! CONDOMS?
HATE ’EM!
Please, chicks would come backstage or up to my room and fucking boom, their clothes were off and it was on.
FUCKIN’ A, HOMIE!
Now there’s a bit of negotiation involved, where they said, “Hey, you have a condom? Can we do this?”
THAT’S WACK!
Those days were so fucking insane that I don’t remember a lot of them. I’m just glad that I left a mark and that my band made such a big-ass dent in the decade it made people copy us so much that we just had to laugh. If you check in with VH1 Classic for a minute, you’ll see hours of what pissed me off as the eighties came to an end. We watched metal bands get more theatrical and Mötley-lite acts like Great White and Warrant enjoyed their one-hit wonder success by offering up a safer alternative to the real thing. That shit was wack and all of us in Mötley just sat there and watched it all go down—downhill, that is. We’d come out with a rad new album and video and then see other bands hire the same director, work with the same producer, throw on the same style of makeup, and shop where we bought our clothes. It was ridiculous.
We did it right and I dare anyone to say we didn’t. We rocked harder and we looked better than anyone out there. And though some people tripped, I liked being as naked as I used to be on stage—no one else did that shit. Yes, I do like to be naked,
OF COURSE WE DO.
but part of it was strictly comfort: Do you have any idea how hot you get beating a drum kit for two hours? Trust me, you don’t want clothes you don’t need. It was all good, though, because when I was hidden back there behind my drum kit I got away with shit someone like a guitar player couldn’t. It was easy to get hooked up with a bottle cap full of coke as often as I wanted, which was pretty often. My roadie could come up and jam a beer cap full of it up my face without anyone knowing shit about it. Not that I’d give a fuck if they did know back then.
Playing drums and rocking the fuck out of the place—that’s as primal as it gets.
NO IT ISN’T.
You realize that you have the power to move the entire audience with every beat you play. It’s scary and amazing at the same time. You are dictating the cadence, sending out the energy to the fans. It isn’t a one-way street—that electricity goes through them and comes right back at you, amplified. It’s the World Series and the Superbowl taking place on New Year’s Eve and that night, you’re fucking your favorite porn star. Still... that’s not even close.
Let me take a minute or ten to talk about my drums. Once Mötley had some money, I was like Dr. Frankenstein creating his monster. I got into this insane tradition of retardedly large drum sets and bigger than Jesus solos. By 1987, I had a kit that I was strapped into that spun full 360s like a gyroscope at the front of the stage. Are you kidding me?
It all started innocently enough. I just wanted my minute in the spotlight during showtime to fuckin’ rock so as we got bigger, I built bigger drum risers. It got to the point where I had nowhere left to go but up in the air. And of course I was told that I couldn’t do that, so I went and did it. I don’t like “no” and “don’t”—those words have been as much of an inspiration and motivation to me as the sound of a drum. If you think about it, when you’re told you can’t do something, it’s not true. There’s always an option. Trust me.
The drum monster grew to the point where we had to fly. I met this cat, Chris Dieter, who was a former hydraulic specialist on a navy submarine and he told me, “I will make you fly and we’ll make history.” And we did.
That guy built me two rigs: the one that spun me upside down on the Girls tour and the one that flew me out above the crowd on the Dr. Feelgood tour. He was a master. That whole cage he built me for the Girls tour was welded to a fork-lift, somehow mounted on yolks from your neighborhood garbage truck, all connected with a ton of cables and pumped up into flight by some crazy hydraulic fluids. Before I met him I had a recurring dream about flying through the arena, above the crowd, playing drums. I told the band and our managers about it, and they just looked at me like, “Whatever, Tommy, party on.” But I’ve got to give props to my bandmates because once I found the maniac who could build the machine I needed, they let me do my thing. It was like eighty grand to build that rig and they were like, “Cool. Fuck it, let’s do it.”
When I’d rotate on the Girls tour, I could only make five revolutions because there was only enough slack in the microphone cables to turn that many times before we had to rotate me backwards to unwind them. If we did it today we could do the whole thing wireless. Damn, if we did it today I could turn 360s until I puked.
Thing is, my monster became a problem. The fans left our shows just saying “What the fuck!” * And that means the next tour I had to give them even more. I couldn’t let them leave saying that our last tour was better, you know?
After spinning circles on the Girls tour, it was hard to outdo myself. I figured all I could do was give the people way back there in the shitty Stevie Wonder seats a front row ticket. The only way to do that was fly the drums all the way out from the stage to the very back of the arena. So I did on the Dr. Feelgood tour. And it was rad. For a few minutes, the worst seat in the house was now a front row ticket. All those kids in the back had the best view, and I could see them every night freaking the fuck out. It made the whole thing worth it.
My real dream is to build a true roller coaster where my drums roll on a track to the back of the arena and do a loop in each direction. I want cameras mounted all over my kit so everybody can see on the big screen what I’m seeing and feel what I’m feeling. I want a seat at the back of it just like an old hot rod. I want to strap fans to it every night and take them for a ride. It can be done—I’ve checked on it. The companies that build roller coasters can hook it up. The only problem is insurance. And don’t get me started on that—paying money to cover your ass just in case something happens? That’s tight. But in a lawsuit happyland, you’re fucked if you don’t take precautions.
When Mötley was preparing the Generation Swine tour in 1997, I was told that a roller coaster wasn’t going to be part of the package, so I settled for making the drums disappear, magician style. I asked David Copperfield how he’d do it. Then I met the guys who are the real magicians in Copperfield’s show—the engineers who blow shit up and create diversions so that you don’t see them hiding that 747 right in front of your eyes. I’m not going to give away their secrets because stuff like magic and Santa Claus make the world go ’round for kids of all ages. But I will tell you that those cats fuck shit up. They make the big shit disappear into itself. They can take a truck and outfit it with hydraulic systems that make it fold up into a shoe box. It’s crazy. You should have seen them grinning with ideas of how to make a drummer vanish into thin air. And we did it. We did it big.
I had
it dialed. When it was time for my solo, I started out ripping it on the set I used throughout the show while Aborigine dancers with bones through their noses danced in dust with their titties bouncing. We got into this insane tribal drum thing that I fucking loved! As I went off, another drum kit was rolled out onstage. I went over and continued the solo on that kit. We had a full video production going, capturing the dancers and flashing pictures of atom bombs going off and roller coasters dropping as I played. When I moved to the new drum set, the video stopped and the magic began. As I was playing, a space man came out and watched me play. He walked around me a few times, and then raised a white curtain around my drum set. You could see me through the curtain, but what you didn’t know is that we could also project images onto the curtain. We had prerecorded footage of me playing that we rolled while I was behind the curtain and the drums were lowered onto the floor. The spaceman came behind the curtain, and I changed into his outfit really fast. While I was changing, the audience watched what they thought was me playing the drums. When I was done, I came out from behind the curtain as Mr. Spaceman and started watching the videotape of me playing drums. I loved that part. Then we’d start playing one of my favorite songs, Josh Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness,” which is one of the most fucked-up dance tracks I’ve ever heard. I’d start raising my arms up and the drums would start elevating, higher and higher. When they were at their peak, while the projected image of me wailed away, I raised my spaceman gun and shot myself. The gun exploded, the drums exploded, and the curtain dropped, revealing an empty drum set, hovering up by the lighting rigs. That’s when I’d turn around and peel off my space helmet. Abracadabra! It’s me! Looking out at a sea of confused faces every night was epic. For a second there, I was David Copperfield and I realized how much magic is just one big illusion.