by Vince Neil
Whenever we get together to do things now, that’s the dynamic. Who needs that kinda crap, right? Nowadays I pick my own band members. And I pick my own partners. I have partners in all my different things, you know, my business ventures. But it’s usually me and one guy, or me and two guys who are making the decisions. Like with Feelgoods, I have one partner. At my bar in West Palm Beach, I have one partner. I have two partners that I’m gonna work with to build a bunch of these in the next two years, so they’ll be all over the country. Twenty-five or forty. We’re working on the numbers. But the thing I’m trying to say is… in business, there’s no ulterior motives. But with Mötley Crüe everybody has an ulterior motive. Which sucks. And you have to just try and live with it. Because there’s a lot of dishonesty in rock ’n’ roll. And there’s a lot of money in Mötley Crüe. It’s like that movie The Perfect Storm. If you don’t watch out, you can end up on the bottom of the ocean.
You’d think with Mötley it would get better over time. You’d think as we all grew up and became older things would be different. Like maybe it was just everyone’s youth—we were all so young when we started out, and things just kerranged out of control. It sounds like a cliché now, but when you’re living it, you’re not exempt. Isn’t that why clichés exist? Because there’s truth in there? Unfortunately, I’m telling you, it’s worse now than it ever was. Like we’re all getting older and even more set in our ways. Instead of wiser and more mature, like my wife suggests we should all be. But it’s just the same old shit, over and over again. Like, we have this Canadian tour coming up that nobody told me about until the day tickets went on sale. And then of course I start getting texts and e-mails from people, like: “Oh, you’re coming to Canada!” And I’m like, What the fuck are you talking about!!!!
So I’m pissed off. I’m going on this Canada tour and I’m pissed off. I mean, I just wrote my schedule down in a calendar. You want a glimpse into my life, here it is. Right here on my iPhone. From now till the nineteenth I’ll be recording the album and working on the book with you. Then it’s Christmas. I have the first week of January off. Then I’m booked solid at least until March. I have to rehearse with Mötley; I got to go to the Grand Caymans for a tequila promotion, I got to go to Palm Beach for my two-year anniversary of Dr. Feelgoods. Then I start the Mötley thing and that’s till the fifth of February. After that I go to the Super Bowl. And then my birthday’s the next day, and then I play St. Louis and Kansas City with the Vince Neil Band, and then we’re off to Mexico and South America, where we have a huge following. It doesn’t matter if they know the language; they know the songs. I actually toured South America before Mötley did. Last year was the first time Mötley ever went down there. And I’ve played there twice already. Argentina, Brazil, Chile. All those places. It’s really cool down there. And then, you know, I’ll start, I’ll probably start the book tour.
With all that shit, I really wasn’t in the mood to go on the Mötley tour of Canada. I told them, “Fuck you, I ain’t going to go….” But then, you know, I found out I had to go because of our T-shirt deal. No show, no T-shirt deal.
And so, you know what? Fuck it.
I’m playing Canada with Mötley. It turns out Mötley would get sued if I didn’t do it. And then I would get sued. I would have to give some lawyer all kinds of money to represent me. That’s just like flushing it away; paying lawyers is like wiping your ass with hundred-dollar bills. Plus, if I didn’t do the show, I would lose a chunk of change. I was like, You know what? I’ll just go ahead and do Canada. I keep reminding myself—I’m not part of Mötley anymore. I just have to play with them. It’s a better situation than before. Especially in the beginning. Back then I just, you know, I wouldn’t… I felt like I was bullied around. For some reason I wouldn’t stick up for myself. I just kind of didn’t want to make noise. But now I’m like, fuck it, you know? I’ve got to have a voice. I was always the odd man out. (Another good subtitle for this book: Odd Man Out. That’s me when it comes to Mötley Crüe. I don’t think anybody would argue.)
Think about it. ’Cause Mick is Mick. Mick’s always just been Mick. And you know Nikki and Tommy were always… they tried to be, you know, like Tyler and Perry when they were the Toxic Twins. They even had their own nickname and stuff like that. But it was like… they’ve always tried too hard to be rock ’n’ roll people. Where me, I never really dressed to be a rock star, not offstage. I didn’t go out in the street looking like a rock star. (Not since the early days at least.) I’m just… I’m a surfer guy from LA, you know? I don’t have to wear chains around my waist and leather jackets and boots every minute for people to go, “Oh, that must be a rock star.” That’s what it was always like to be with Nikki and Tommy. They still do it today. It’s like we’ll be on an airplane or in Japan on the bullet train and they’ll come decked out like they’re going to a concert. Full rock ’n’ roll regalia. And like it’s like, Fuck, what’s up with that? Where are we going? We’re supposed to sit on a train for three hours, man; put on some sweats, lose the makeup. I mean, I’m as much for wearing eyeliner as the next guy, but only when I’m actually working. Back in the day, on tour, I’d actually try to pretend I wasn’t with Nikki and Tommy. I’d try to walk a ways behind them. I still do it today. Just so that I don’t kind of have to really be associated—which is bad, but that’s what it’s come down to.
These days I’m basically like a free agent. I have a separate deal. I got out because I just didn’t want to deal with their bullshit anymore. If we have to go on tour, the corporation hires me. I still get 25 percent of everything I do, so it’s not like, you know, I get a paycheck. But I have an option not to do stuff. This last Canadian tour is the end of this tour cycle. And what they always seem to do is piss me off about something, and then I have to renegotiate with them for the next tour and next album. Which makes me not want to fucking do it. They’re not the cool people who they want people to believe they are, who they represent themselves to be. It’s pretty sad. Nikki tries to run everything with the management, but they make a lot of wrong decisions and, you know… fuck. I just like keep my mouth shut and just like whatever. (Except for now of course.)
For me, the best thing for now is just to limit my contact with Mötley Crüe. It’s not like working with my solo band. I mean those guys—Blando and Strum especially—we’ve been together for years. These guys are my friends. With Mötley Crüe, those guys are not my friends. And they haven’t been for a long time.
But the thing is, you know, they need me to do Mötley Crüe. And unless they want to go out on their own and do their solo stuff, they’re stuck with me.
Anyway, fuck the negative. That’s not where I’m at right now. This book is about Vince Neil. It’s about taking stock of the life I’ve lived and telling the tales, dredging up the good old days, and having a good laugh, maybe a good cry, too, before it’s all over. By doing this I feel like I can move forward into the next chapters of my life, you know what I mean? Put some closure on the past. Open a door to the future. Nobody stays the same. We grow; we change. You have to find peace with what you do, with who you are, with what you’ve accomplished.
One thing I have to say, I think I’m singing better than ever. Especially the last two years. At Crüe Fest—both 1 and 2—I sang better than I’ve ever sung in my life. I think I moved better, too. I think I am healthier and have more energy. I keep telling myself that I want to be the best I can be. There have probably been a lot of years of my life that I wasted. I don’t think I want to lose that kind of time ever again. Now I hear the clock ticking. It’s easy to get older. That’s gonna happen whether you like it or not. The trick is to pick up some wisdom along the way.
The point is, you got to go with the flow. I love my life. I love where I live. Viva Las Vegas. Sin City. City of possibility. To me, Vegas is like the Wild West. That’s why I needed to have my Lambo here, you know? A Ferrari fits wine country. A Lambo is pure Vegas. You can do things here, businesswise I’m talking abou
t, that you can’t do anywhere else. Like with me opening up not one but two tattoo parlors on the Strip—you can’t do that on Rodeo Drive. You know what I mean? The most expensive real estate in the world is the Strip. And to get on that street, that’s exciting. It’s funny: When I started dating my wife I lived in Beverly Hills and she was living in Northern California. She was playing hard to get. She’d fly in on weekends. By the time I finally persuaded her to move in with me in LA, I decided I was sick of LA, that I was moving to Vegas. Hollywood is a small town. I’d had about enough. But she was disappointed. She told me, “I moved in with you so I could be in LA and now you’re taking me to Vegas?” I guess the answer to that is “Yes.”
And it is also the answer to the question of why we have another huge house not far from the place where she grew up.
So what do I do when I’m not on the road? Check my Web site. I’m all over the place all of the time; the Vince Neil Band does a lot of touring. But when I’m not on the road I like being home. I like running our foundation, the Skylar Neil Foundation. We have a huge golf tournament every year. I like playing golf. I like being normal. I like eating good food and hanging out. I like driving my cars. I like cooking shows. You know like Top Chef is one of my favorite shows. Project Runway, I like that show. I don’t like all reality shows, just the ones where people have some talent and they’re actually doing something. I haven’t seen Jersey Shore yet. I just keep reading about it—I want to watch it. It’s good entertainment ’cause the people are so weird. That’s sort of my guilty pleasure is all these kinds of shows. And I like Haunted and Ghost Hunters, and Ghost Adventures, and all those haunted shows. And I do love Survivor. I’ve loved that for a long time. Of course I was on one of the first reality shows, Surreal Life. It was just the very first year. There were like nine seasons of it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of it.
My real guilty pleasure these days is betting football. I have my own table at the sports book at the Red Rock Casino off the Strip in Las Vegas, a beautiful place. I have my own big booth right at the center in this roped-off, reserved area; it’s got a separate TV, but all the huge screens on the walls are dead center front of me. I go in there every Sunday, usually at eight o’clock in the morning till about eight o’clock at night. To have a reserved booth you’ve got to bet at least three thousand dollars a game or ten thousand dollars a day or something like that. That’s my big vice now, I guess. I like the action. Something to get your heart pumping. More healthy than a syringe full of cocaine powder like I was doing back in ’81 with my girlfriend Lovey, that’s for sure….
But you got to admit… those days are a lot more fun to talk about.
Chapter 2
NOBODY’S FAULT
I was born Vince Neil Wharton on February 8, 1961, in the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles County.
My mom, the former Shirley Ortiz, is half Mexican and half white. My dad, Clois Odell Wharton—know as Odie—is half Native American. Some people would say that makes me biracial or triracial or whatever. But I consider myself Californian. Even though I don’t actually live there anymore, I feel like that’s my home. I’ve always thought people from Cali should carry a special passport. We’re a special breed—for better or for worse. They used to call California the Land of Fruits and Nuts. I just call it home.
The hospital is still there, a short distance as the crow flies across the 101 Freeway from Hollywood, the place where the real people live, I guess you could say. Having gotten this far, I have to stop for a second to smell the roses. Do you know how many times I’ve imagined writing my autobiography? Maybe we all do it at times in our lives. But how cool is this? It’s really happening. An autobiography. Even though I’m not, by nature, overly reflective or deep, I realize how lucky I am to be in this position, writing a book about myself, thinking that people will actually want to spend their hard-earned dollars to buy it and read it. When it comes right down to the bottom line, I’m just a Heinz 57 from the other side of the freeway. Who would have thought all this was possible?
My mom grew up in New Mexico, I think. She was a stay-at-home mom for my early years, taking care of me and my sister, Valerie, who is sixteen months younger. When we got a little older my mom went to work to help make ends meet. I think she worked at a factory making cosmetics for Max Factor. I don’t know what she did. I never thought much about it. I was a kid, you know, so I mostly thought about myself.
I never knew my mom’s father, my grandfather. He passed away when my mom was little. My grandma was a Mexican woman. My aunts only spoke Spanish. Homemade tortillas are like the greatest thing in the world, especially warm on the gas burner and slathered with butter. That’s the kind of food I grew up on. Thanksgiving you had a choice: either turkey or enchiladas. That was the kind of family we had. Talk about a melting pot. As a family we were like a potluck supper—different dishes from different nationalities, all mixed up and comfortably sharing the same plate.
I used to stay a lot with my grandma. I don’t remember if she worked. I don’t think she did anything. I think she was just my grandma and that was it. She did a lot of sewing. She might’ve even sewed for other people. I remember she sewed a lot. She probably made money doing that. She lived in the area of South Central Los Angeles known as Watts, and I remember when I was little and the Watts riots were going on and I was there. I was only four years old; it was pretty scary. It happened in August 1965, a large-scale race riot that lasted six days, burn, baby, burn. Thirty-four people died; more than one thousand were injured. Nearly four thousand were arrested. Thousands of homes and businesses were burned and looted, resulting in over $200 million in damages. It would stand as the worst riot in Los Angeles history before being eclipsed by the riots of 1992—another racial conflagration touched off by alleged police brutality after a traffic stop of a black motorist, which is what caused the Watts riots, too. I remember the tanks going down the street and the army men marching. I was a little boy. I was like, “Wow! We’re saved. The good guys are coming!”
When I was little I also met my grandparents on my dad’s side. They passed away when I was probably seven or eight. They were from the Texas/Oklahoma area. My dad was born in Paris, Texas. I think we lived in… I want to say New Mexico for a while, or Utah. Something like that. And then my dad got a job with Los Angeles County as a mechanic. It was a government job with benefits, nice middle-class stuff. The LA County Mechanical Division. He repaired sheriffs’ vehicles. The same type I’d have to ride in a number of times myself—in the backseat in handcuffs.
My dad was a good-looking guy in his day. He and my mom are still alive and still together. They and my sister live in Utah, but I think they’re gonna move to Las Vegas soon. We don’t really talk—haven’t talked since my wedding, like, five years ago. Some stuff went down then, too much drinking, some ugly words said—maybe we’ll get into it later. With families there’s always drama, I guess. My dad’s up in age now, but he’s still a good-looking guy. He’s six foot something, you know, and he has the salt-and-pepper hair—he grayed when he was young—and this really cool Elvis hairdo, the combed-back style. In The Dirt they said I said he was a “ladies’ man.” I don’t know who ever said he was a ladies’ man. It says that in The Dirt in my own voice, but I don’t remember saying it. And I don’t know where that would come from. Maybe just ’cause he was good-looking. But you know my mom and my dad have been married, what, almost fifty years or so? So if he’s a ladies’ man he’s probably the sneakiest guy alive… because my mom would have never tolerated him messing her around. She’s a tough one. A blond Mexican toughie. Maybe that’s where I got it. She’s a fighter, like me.
Growing up I can’t remember doing much with my dad. There was some stuff. We had a boat at one point. A small fourteen-foot outboard boat. We’d take it out and run around on weekends at a place called Castaic Lake. We’d go up there and fish and stuff—me, my sister, mom, and dad. Once in a while we’d do that. I think when I was small h
e and I got to work together on a project rebuilding my uncle’s car engine. That was something we did together. We worked on it for a while. I think it was a sixties Nova or something like that. It was my mom’s brother actually. His car. I remember for a couple summers working on that car, my dad fixing up this car for him and me helping. I also remember going to a music shop with my dad. He bought me my first guitar. I took lessons and stuff. Later I had an electric guitar and a little amp. After a while—as a kid does—I just kind of forgot about it and it went into the closet… until much later, of course. A few chords have served me well.
Another little bit of fact checking: When my parents bought a house and moved to Compton, it was not because they were down-and-out or anything. Maybe they had bad real estate judgment, but at the time it was supposed to be nice there. Like a new beginning for the middle class. It was a nice middle-class neighborhood. Lots of those types of housing divisions went up at the time all over the country to accommodate the continuing post-war prosperity. The homes were affordable; the schools were close. It was not the gang- and drug-infested place that it would later become. You know the first rap album by the hard-core South Central rappers N.W.A. (Niggaz Wit Attitude)? It was called Straight outta Compton. That and other rap music and some films like Boyz n the Hood have put South Central on the cultural most-wanted list. But that album came out twenty years after I lived there. The part of Compton I lived in eventually incorporated into Carson. I mean it was just a new neighborhood at the time. Affordable to middle-class people like us, a lot of blue-collar working people—it was close to the oil refineries. I remember I used to ride my bike to the refineries. When we moved in, it was still very open around there. There was a lot of building going on, a lot of raw land. It had the feeling of, I don’t know, like a new settlement on the frontier. A great place for a kid to play—war, spy, army, survival, off-road bicycles. It was pretty fun.