Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock's Most Notorious Frontmen

by Vince Neil

  One of my favorite scenes was at the Rainbow. Like I remembered in The Dirt, “the place was set up like a circle, with the coolest rockers and richest deviants sitting at the center tables…. The guys would sit at their regular spots and the girls would walk around the ring until they were called over to someone’s empty chair. They would keep circling, like dick buzzards, until you filled your table with them.” That’s a great phrase, by the way, “dick buzzards.” A perfect description. Somebody out there needs to use that name for an all-girl band! I’m not sure if I said it exactly that way or if Neil Strauss did, but here’s a shout-out to him. He kicked ass with The Dirt; it was a New York Times best seller. I understand he’s gone on to become quite an expert in pussy himself with his book The Rules.

  Our first official gig was March 24, 1981.

  Though we’d never yet run though a complete set in practice, Nikki landed us two nights at the Starwood—I think he used his connections from his old band, London. Some people say he was working days at the Starwood at the time. I don’t remember that; I can’t imagine what he was doing there. When Nikki told us the news, everybody was stoked—except Mick. He didn’t think we were ready yet. The rest of us didn’t agree. We three were all cliff jumpers. Fuck it! Are you kidding? A paying gig at the fuckin’ Starwood? Two sets on a Friday night. On Saturday we would open for a well-known band from Oakland called Yesterday and Today, later known as just Y&T.

  Leading up to the evening we plastered the Strip, and what seemed like all of Los Angeles and the Valley, with flyers. If there was one flyer for another event, we’d plaster over it with our own posters, totally obliterating any competition that night. We wanted everybody in town to come. I don’t remember where we got the money for the flyers. Probably somebody was fucking some girl in a copy shop. The act wasn’t quite so well organized. We didn’t even know what the set list was going to be until Nikki taped a handwritten sheet of paper to the stage floor at the last minute.

  Our first song was “Take Me to the Top.” Nobody in the crowd knew who we were. “Motley who?” They were yelling at us and flipping us off. Then some guy spits on me and the next thing I know, I’m jumping off the stage—fifteen minutes into my new career with my new band and I was having my first fight. I grabbed the dude and put him in a headlock and started whaling on his face. Nikki followed me into the crowd. He had my back in those days—didn’t think nothing about it, didn’t hesitate. He swung his large and solidly constructed Thunderbird bass guitar over his head like Paul Bunyan and brought it down on some guy’s shoulder. Tommy wasn’t far behind. He hit some guy between the eyes with a drumstick. I didn’t even know he knew martial arts! In years since, a lot of people have said that this whole thing was a publicity tactic. You can judge for yourself if you want. To film the gig we’d hired this chick who was the girlfriend of Randy Piper from W.A.S.P. She got it all from the club’s balcony. Black-and-white videos of that night are still available in bootleg circles, or so they tell me.

  Somehow, the fight ended and we all picked ourselves back up and continued playing. And by the second set… we’d converted the crowd into fans. The next night, even more people came out to see us as the warm-up band for Y&T. In fact, more people came for us than came for them. By the end of our set, the people were screaming for more. And then, when we got off the stage, almost the entire crowd left! The next time we performed with them, it would be Y&T as the opening act for us.

  There were plenty of big names hanging out on the Strip, but the first big name to call himself a fan was David Lee Roth of Van Halen. Later David Lee would become a fixture at our apartment—known as the Mötley House—he was there all the time doing coke and trolling for an easy fuck. There’s one story about him doing blow in our bedroom and this mirrored door from our closet fucking fell off and landed on his head… and he didn’t flinch; he just kept on snorting. That reminds me of the time, years later in New Orleans I think it was, that Ozzy snorted a line of ants. It’s a well-documented story, just what you’d expect from the wizard of Oz.

  David Lee came to a lot of our shows at the Troubadour, the Whisky, wherever. He was a huge star. I think he had some ulterior motives, though. Unlike a lot of rock bands, our crowd was always, like, a majority of women. I swear it was sometimes like 90 percent girls. So he would come to the gigs and introduce the band. Clever boy: Before we’d even started playing, everybody in the club knew he was there. Then he’d just kick back and collect pussy the rest of the night. It was a good deal for everybody. We got the boost. He got the blow jobs. Of course we never suffered, either. There was a bountiful harvest of ripe fruit to be eaten at will. There was so much that sometimes you just took a bite and threw the rest away.

  One night David Lee was like, “Vince, I want to take you out to breakfast and tell you about how things are.” For somebody that was that huge to take me under his wing was really cool. It was an honor. Even to an irreverent fuck like myself.

  We met at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. When he drove up he was in his black Mercedes with a big skull and crossbones painted on the hood. I was like, That’s pretty fucking cool. He talked all about business. What I should do and not do. Who I should avoid. He was basically trying to give me tips to help me get started, so I wouldn’t get ripped off like everyone always does. It was stuff like “you have to watch out for this or that.” Or “make sure you have distribution, you know.” He was talking about national distribution and deals and things—I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. It was a little bit, at that point, like, Oh my god! I kind of got what he was saying, but I didn’t, I didn’t understand a lot of it. Obviously I do now. But back then, I mean, I knew you had to make a record and I knew it had to be distributed across the country, and he was saying, you know, make sure you go with one of the two biggest distributors, because if you’re not with them you’re not gonna have your record distributed everywhere and things wouldn’t work out well, stuff like that.

  I walked out of Canter’s with a list of managers to look at and consider, totally convinced that David Lee was right, and that I needed to get the right person to handle my affairs and the right distribution deal, all that stuff. I couldn’t wait to let the other guys know what I’d learned. I felt like a light had gone on, you know, like professionally speaking. There’s always more to shit than you’d figure.

  But then the very next day the guys told me that we were going to sign a ten-year management contract with Allan Coffman, a man who’d never even managed a band before. As it turned out, he knew even less about the industry than I did. And, as it would turn out, it was just one of many decisions I went along with because Nikki, Tommy, and Mick thought it was a good idea. If you ask me, it was a disaster.

  It had all started with this guy Stick—the one who suggested the umlaut over the o in “Mötley.” I think his real name was John Crouch. Basically, he was a nobody. Mick’s friend. A hanger-on. He used to drive Mick around and do stuff for him. Sometimes Stick also brought his sister. Her name was Barbara. She looked exactly like Stick—not an attractive package. Even Tommy wasn’t interested in fucking her, and it is well known that Tommy will fuck just about anything.

  Soon we met Barbara’s husband—Allan Coffman. He was thirty-eight years old, a rail-thin guy who owned a construction company. He and his wife lived in a place called Grass Valley in Northern California, where he served as a member of the county board of zoning administration. Barbara, it turned out, was also a local muckety-muck, a member of the Grass Valley school district board. Coffman looked like he was on acid—his eyes were always darting around the room as if he was seeing shadow people in the corners. When he got drunk, the weird would kick into high gear. He’d start obsessively searching bushes we passed on the Strip to make sure no one was hiding in them. It wasn’t until years later that we learned he had served as an MP in Vietnam. He probably had post-traumatic stress disorder. What motivated him to want to get into the rock scene is beyond me. Clearly, he was not a
ll right in the head.

  After it was decided we would sign with Coffman, we demolished five bottles of schnapps. It’s funny to think back. That night, we were so grateful to each have a bottle for ourselves. We felt like millionaires. Eventually, we entered into an exclusive management agreement with the hastily formed firm of Coffman & Coffman. Stick Crouch was named the representative on the ground in Hollywood. The ten-page agreement detailed aspects such as the duration of the agreement, upfront loans, commissions, and weekly allowances. Each band member received an advance of $250.

  Of course, we went out and spent the entire wad on cocaine and booze. A weeklong bender ensued.

  Because I didn’t have a place to live and Tommy didn’t want to live at home anymore and Nikki had just broken up with his girlfriend and had no place to live, Coffman said he’d rent us an apartment. Being an older guy, Mick already had a life. He was in Redondo Beach living with his girlfriend, so only the three of us moved in.

  Even though it’s always been called the Mötley House, it was actually a two-bedroom apartment—one unit in a small building, maybe twenty or thirty units. There was this open courtyard; we lived right on the corner on the bottom floor, which was great for easy access. Ten units downstairs and ten units upstairs, something like that. It was probably three hundred bucks a month. Coffman paid the rent in addition to twenty dollars per week per band member. It was really close to the Whisky. It was like here’s the Whisky and you go up the street, up the hill, and behind… and it was right there.

  With three of us living in two bedrooms, two had to share a room and one got the single. We flipped for it. The deal was supposed to be that we’d rotate like once a week or once a month or something, so that everybody would get the chance to have the single. Nikki won the first toss, but he never moved out; there was never another toss. So me and Tommy had to share the bedroom. One of the first things I did was go up on the roof and rewire our unit for cable TV. It was part of my training from being an electrician; I just spliced into somebody else’s service and reran it. Tommy brought his TV from home; Nikki had one, too. We were hooked up—though I really can’t remember spending a whole lot of time being a couch potato.

  Basically our apartment became like the ultimate party place; there was shit happening 24/7. Most of our neighbors were just young people. There were a couple of good-looking girls upstairs and down the hall, and a guy and his girlfriend across the way—it was pretty much the rock apartment building. There were some older people who lived in there, too. They would always be calling the cops. I think they were kind of scared of us because we were so out there, just wild and crazy and setting things on fire and wearing leather and blasting the music and doing whatever the fuck we wanted at all hours of the day and night. It was great because it was so easy. We could just walk with everybody back to our place. We’d drink, do blow, smack, Percodan, quaaludes, a little acid now and then. There was a spirit of sharing. People just brought shit to the house. I don’t remember doing a lot of buying. Liquor we had to buy. But drugs were plentiful. The crowd was funny because we were like nondiscriminatory. There were punks like the guys from 45 Grave and the Circle Jerks and new jacks like the guys from Ratt and W.A.S.P. Not to mention a constant steady supply of fresh females. There’d be girls coming in the front door and going out the back door. They’d be climbing in and out the windows—another good selling point for being on the ground floor in those days.

  No matter when it was, day or night, there were always girls. I mean, always girls. Maybe the truth is that pussy is my drug of choice. I was awash in it. There’d be girls at the club, in the bathroom, backstage, back at the apartment. It was just kind of the thing that you’d do—if you came to our place, you knew you were going to get fucked by somebody, and probably somebody who was pretty decent looking. I was choosy, you know, ’cause I could afford to be. What I didn’t have in dollars I made up in pussy. If I could have spent it (or invested it) I would have been a billionaire by now.

  The bedroom Tommy and I shared was to the left of the hallway; we each had a mattress on the floor. Nikki’s bigger room had a set of French doors that led to the living room. He nailed them shut for privacy. He had his own TV in there, too. He’d sit on the floor working on songs while everyone was partying around him—not that he didn’t do his share of big-time partying. It’s just that sometimes his concentration was amazing to me. As fucked up as he was or whatever, doing whatever drugs, he was always composing songs and coming up with ideas.

  It didn’t take long before the place was trashed. The brand-new leather couch in the living room, a Christmas gift from Tommy’s doting parents, was filthy and torn. The carpet was stained with blood and alcohol and ulcerated with cigarette burns. There were charred footprints from the time we were experimenting with setting Nikki on fire with this pyro gel we used in our act. There was construction stuff all over the place from when we built drum risers and other stuff for the stage—I helped by wiring all the electrical. All that shit lit up and blew up because of me. We liked to put on a good show. Like I keep saying, it’s all about entertainment. About having fun, you know? We’d do all kinds of theatrical shit onstage. Condoms filled with fake blood, lighting Nikki on fire, one time we even used this chain saw to cut off the head of a mannequin/nun—though that would come a little later. But we were into the theater of it all. We’d put this gel stuff on Nikki’s boots and I’d put it on this sword and we had candelabras and I’d light my sword and then light his boots. It was cool experimenting with that stuff. We were twenty, you know? It was a lot of fun. We would experiment: How long can we let Nikki burn? One time, lighting Nikki’s boots on fire, we used too much gel and we ended up lighting the back of his hair on fire. I mean, the flames jumped straight up his back!

  The walls of the apartment were blackened from our roach control efforts. We used to chase cockroaches with our hairspray—you know, we’d light the stream of hairspray with a lighter and you’d torch those suckers up. (We were known for lighting a fart now and then, too.) The ceiling was covered with broom handle and guitar head dents—whenever the upstairs tenants banged on the floor to complain about the noise, we’d bang back.

  It’s true what people say—the door had been kicked in by the police so many times that it wouldn’t shut anymore. We had to put, like, a wedge of folded-up cardboard underneath to keep it in place. The apartment was so putrid no robber would have come in, anyway, even if the door was wide open. What amazes me is that nothing was ever stolen. We had instruments, the TVs, Tommy’s stereo. (I think Tommy was a little spoiled as a child. His parents loved him and gave him everything he needed, which worked out well for me, ’cause he was always willing to share. I didn’t have shit, no possessions, usually just my clothes.) I guess a burglar would take one look at our door and walk away thinking we were less well off than he was.

  The bathroom was pretty much what you’d expect—sink black with hair die, bathtub blackened with personal dirt, toilet a disaster zone, tampons and toilet paper and magazines and socks strewn everywhere. The kitchen was even worse, if that was possible. Of course none of us could cook anyway. We’d steal food or sometimes we’d take advantage of these groupie chicks who worked at the grocery nearby. We also had this older couple who kind of adopted us. They’d bring us over big bowls of spaghetti.

  Nobody could be bothered to take out the trash. Take out the trash? Are you kidding? Every kid knows: The trash is the first big fight you have with your father. It’s always about a lot more than the trash. But it starts there. “Take out the trash!” “Fuck you!” I swear to god, if you asked ten kids in jail what they first fought with their parents about, one thing they’d all mention was the trash. It’s like not wanting to take out the trash is the gateway drug to a whole range of antisocial behaviors.

  The kitchen had a sliding glass door that led to a patio. We’d just toss our trash out there. It was like our own personal landfill—though nobody was covering it over with dirt. There
were bags full of beer cans and liquor bottles piled up to chest height. The neighbors started complaining about the smell—you could look outside and see rats and rat shit everywhere; it totally gave me the creeps. By March of 1982 it had become so bad that the LA County Department of Health Services left us a notice of official violation. It kind of cracks me up to look at the summons, reprinted in The Dirt. We were fuckin’ disgusting. Just clueless kids. The warning included instructions. The trash was supposed to be put out at least once every seven days. Thanks for the info. We’ll get right on that.

  In the beginning, everything was pure and uncomplicated. There was no fame. There was no money. It was all about rehearsing and going out and hitting the Strip, you know, advertising ourselves. We’d be hanging out; we’d be passing out flyers, we’d be picking up chicks. It was a perfect synergy. Coffman had paid to press one thousand seven-inch vinyl copies of our 45 rpm single—the A side was “Stick to Your Guns”; the B side was “Toast of the Town.” At the end of gigs we’d fly them into the crowd like Frisbees. The cover art was a Mötley Crüe logo that Nikki designed. On the back was the photo of the four of us that would eventually be used on Too Fast for Love. I had a black eye that day, but as we all know, they ended up using a different part of me for the cover when the album was eventually rereleased.

  Over time we just got really big. We became the biggest band in Los Angeles. Everything sort of sprouted from there. We played a lot of different places. Sometimes they paid us like seven hundred dollars; most of the time you just played for free. Or you’d give out tickets and however many people used the tickets you gave out, you got paid for them. Sometimes you would make fifty bucks, sometimes a hundred bucks. I mean we played this one place called Pookie’s, which was a sandwich shop in Pasadena. It probably only held forty people, but we didn’t give a shit; we’re still fully dressed and playing and stuff—we just kind of went for it, you know? We all just wanted to play. We all wanted to get up there in front of people and do what we did best. I think at Pookie’s the story goes that we drank up way more than they were paying us.