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

by Vince Neil

  But the sentiment at the time was clear. Tommy was kind of the leader of that movement. But Mick and Nikki were equally frustrated with Vince’s behavior. I asked the guys, “Can’t we stall for a few days?” But Nikki had his mind made up. He wanted to drive this thing forward. Before I knew it they had a new singer coming to rehearsal—John Corabi. And yes, being their manager, I was the one who had to call Vince and say, “Vince, these guys don’t want you in the band anymore.”

  I understand why Vince won’t talk to me anymore. But I feel like I had a really good relationship with him at one time. I think Vince felt very betrayed by me. I’m in a funny place because, if I had it to do over again, I would’ve done it a different way. I would’ve just said, “Guys, you know what? Mötley Crüe is the four of you. Period. I’m gonna suspend your contract for now; I’m gonna take a break from working with you. Let me know if you can ever work together again, and I’ll come back and manage you. If the three of you want to do something with another singer and call it something besides Mötley Crüe…”

  Well, you know what they say: woulda, shoulda, coulda.

  The truth is, I was frustrated with Vince at that point because Vince wasn’t listening to me about anything. So I felt like maybe I got a shot if I continue to manage Mötley Crüe—or whatever it’s gonna become post-Vince. Because one thing was for sure: Vince was not listening to me anymore. I don’t think Vince ever understood my frustration. I don’t really know if Vince, now or then, would’ve given a shit about my frustration. After all, he’s the one who always called me “Doc’s lackey.”

  In retrospect, it could have been handled better. But how can you handle something when nobody’s listening? Vince wouldn’t listen to me. Nikki and the other guys certainly didn’t listen to me anymore, either. They went out and hired a singer who couldn’t sing Mötley Crüe songs. And they hired him without even making him sing a single Mötley Crüe song as an audition. Corabi sang “Jailhouse Rock” and jammed with them and they hired him.

  It wasn’t until they started rehearsing for their tour that they found out the real truth: John Corabi couldn’t sing Mötley Crüe songs.

  Good luck with that, right?

  History tells all.

  The first official act by McGhee and Thaler, as our new management team, was to book us onto a tour with KISS.

  Imagine this:

  You’re twenty-two, twenty-three. You’re in a local band. You’ve played the Strip; you’ve played clubs; you’ve even played a couple of arenas. You’ve got an album out and some bucks.

  And now, suddenly, you are going on tour with KISS, one of the biggest acts around.

  Plus…

  You get to have your very own tour bus.

  It was our first. I will always remember it. There will be a zillion tour buses in the future. Everything will become a blur after a while—trains, planes, luxury chartered jets, double-decker buses, limos, three-wheeled scooters in various third world countries. You hear all about that shit, living like a rock star, touring the world. You’ve dreamed about it—even if you always say you never wanted to do it, or never thought about doing it, at some point every human being is going to dream, I won’t deny it.

  And then, suddenly, there you are.

  You’re living the dream.

  You’re on a tour bus; you’re opening for fuckin’ KISS.

  Dude!

  Thinking back on it now, I can tell you that bus was the biggest piece of shit you can rent. Just stripped and pretty low-end. I mean, some of those buses are like mansions inside, with granite and marble and crystal chandeliers, the whole nine. This was just a big black tour bus with a ratty interior. But it was our first one and we were like, Oh my god! We have a tour bus. It was the most exciting thing ever.

  The very first show or the second show, I think it was, we played Irvine Meadows. And then the next show was Phoenix. It’s not that far of a drive, six, seven hours, something like that? We left after the show. And I wake up on the bus the next day and we’re stopped somewhere; I hear all this weird noise. I look out the window and all I see is a wall.

  It turned out the bus had broken down in the middle of the night and we were at a truck stop. We’d been there for like twelve hours. I slept like a baby in that little coffin of a space, I guess. And then we ended up spending almost the whole day there, too. So that was our first tour bus. It’s just funny it was such a hunk of shit.

  The other thing I remember about the KISS tour was we had our drum riser. Most of the halls you play in are unionized, you know, and there are all these rules about who can touch stuff where and when. We had the drum riser that me and Tommy built. It was made of giant pieces of wood that were bolted together, you know; it was very hard to assemble and reassemble. This thing, it wasn’t built for touring. It was very homemade. Part of the riser had, like, all these branches mounted here and there with all these skulls hanging in them. And these union guys are going, like, “Excuse me, where do we put the skull branches at?” It was very, very funny. Just another surreal thing. Because this was KISS’s Creatures of the Night Tour, they had this giant drum riser built in the shape of a tank. I mean it was massive. It was expensive. It looked good. And we had all our homemade shit that we’d built in the Mötley House—a homemade drum riser and these skulls with branches and candelabras. Here we were and all our big crazy ideas were actually being treated with respect; all that playing with pyro gel in the living room of the Mötley House was paying off.

  One thing that wasn’t rinky-dink was our playing. We were fucking playing our asses off. I mean, we weren’t blowing KISS away, but we were definitely, like, competition. People were loving us.

  Which apparently pissed the fuck out of Gene Simmons. He did not like it one bit that these nobodies were hogging the spotlight. At least that’s what I heard. He never hung out with us. There was maybe this little, like, “Hi, how you doing?” But that was basically it. They didn’t stand around and watch us play. We were basically, you know, almost still a club band. But we were just doing really good. Every show there were a lot of people there to see us. Most times, people don’t give a shit about the opening act. They come late because all they want to see is the headliner. Which was still the same with the KISS tour, but there were a lot of people there to see us, way more than it would usually be.

  We only did like five, six shows before we were kicked off of the tour. It ended in San Francisco, I think it was. McGhee and Thaler said it was because we were upstaging the headliners. Gene Simmons said he booted us off for bad behavior. That was probably more accurate. I found out later that Tommy and Nikki had been discovered having sex with Eric Carr’s girlfriend while he was onstage. Ironically enough, years later, Gene Simmons would reportedly call up Nikki wanting to do a deal for film rights to The Dirt.

  Our first album took three days to record.

  Our second, Shout at the Devil, took more than nine months.

  The setting this time was the historic Cherokee Studios, on Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood. It was a far cry from our first studio on Pico. This one boasted a rich heritage of recording artists and platinum albums, from Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra to David Bowie, Elton John, and Rod Stewart. The producer was a guy named Tom Werman. I had no idea who he was.

  As you could imagine, it was hard telling where the recording stopped and the partying began. Girls came and went constantly; it was a fuckfest. All of us had girlfriends, or in my case I was married of course. The burrito trick was often employed. Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboardist, was in the adjoining studio recording his Carmina Burana album; he spent a lot of time doing our cocaine and fucking our chicks and regaling us with stories about Jim Morrison.

  There was the night that Nikki, Tommy, and his drum tech Clyde “the Spide” Duncan were hassled by some cops and then took turns pissing into the window of their patrol car before running off. The night that Tommy threw a brick through the control room window. The night Nikki and I lay on our backs on
the floor and chanted into microphones above our heads while a gong, suspended on a rope and spinning in circles, made a shimmering sound overhead. The night Nikki managed to convince the engineer that if he listened closely to the half-track played backwards he would hear the words “Jesus is Satan” in the mix.

  Satan was a big topic at this time. What a bunch of BS. There are some stories about guitar picks flying upward and sticking into the ceiling. Nikki was rumored to be messing around with the occult and devil worship with Lita. I don’t know if that was true, but I do know that Nikki was talking a lot about his grand vision of the album and tour looking like a cross between a Nazi rally and a Black Mass service.

  It’s probably significant to note here that during this time, while my wife, Beth, was pregnant with our first (my second) child, I had begun to dabble with heroin. Nikki was still in a lot of pain from his shoulder injury; he started doing heroin, too, partially for the high and partially for the pain—as you might know, heroin is the most powerful known analgesic. Of course, it causes a whole other set of difficult problems for some people, as well.

  Pretty soon, it got to the point that we were smoking heroin every day. We never shot; we chased the dragon, which means we used a piece of tinfoil and a lighter and a tube of some sort to chase the smoke as it rose. My shooting days had ended with Lovey. The heroin high is dreamy, numb, and comfortable, a little bit queasy for some. It kind of became a routine. We’d go to the studio, smoke up, record some music. You don’t get the heavy nod with smoking so much, unless you really smoke a lot. Even so, it’s probably an understatement to say that heroin changed the course of things quite a bit. Nikki was addicted to heroin for several years. For some reason I never got addicted. I remember being a little sick one time, but that was it. I could take it or leave it. Like I’ve said, alcohol has always been my drug of choice. That and pussy. I never even smoked a cigarette.

  In the middle of recording the album, we were signed to play this huge, three-day festival on the outskirts of Los Angeles, in San Bernardino. The vision of Apple Computers’ then–head honcho, Steve Wozniak, it was held in a regional park and broadcast live on cable. Official attendance was listed at 370,000. It was fuckin’ huge.

  We were slated for day two, Sunday, May 29, 1983; it was billed as Heavy Metal Day. We were way down on the bill, but we were there, on the same fucking stage as Ozzy, Judas Priest, the Scorpions, and headliners Van Halen, who were being paid an unbelievable $1.5 million to perform. I remember being back in high school in my truck with James, listening to Van Halen, writing down the words to songs. James’s whole thing was Van Halen—that’s why he had recruited me in the first place, ’cause I reminded him of David Lee Roth… the big-deal rock ’n’ roller who would later take me under his wing.

  Now we were playing on the same bill as all these legends.

  Holy fuckin’ shit.

  It was way too fantastic to believe.

  To get to the gig, they had to fly us in by helicopter. There were so many people, it was the only way to get in and out effectively. Of course, it was the first helicopter ride for all of us. It was amazing—like the first tour bus, you know, but a million times better. Like the difference between smoking pot and doing a shot of cocaine. Here you are, you’re young, you’re in this band, and you look down and there’s just more people than you’ve ever seen in one place at one time, and they’re all like tiny ants around this tiny dollhouse stage, and then the closer you get, the more massive everything becomes, and it spreads out before you, as far as your eye can see. You can’t fuckin’ believe it, you’re going to be playing with your idols.

  All of us brought our wives and girlfriends. Or come to think of it, Beth didn’t go. That’s right. During this time, when we were making Shout at the Devil, that’s when I started kind of, you know, falling out with Beth. She would probably say it had something to do with me doing heroin and cocaine, or fucking women or whatever. But I remember I actually chose to stay at the studios rather than go home ’cause she was developing, like, this hand-washing obsession, like some kind of germ-phobia. Later, by the time our daughter was born—Elizabeth Ashley Wharton—on April 13, 1985, contradictory to earlier published reports all over the Web, Beth had really become, you know, like totally neurotic. None of my friends were allowed to come over because they had germs. It was fuckin’ crazy. Stuff like that. I couldn’t take it. I’d rather be getting germs at the studio.

  But none of that mattered yet as we set down on the helipad in our private chopper. I remember the prop wash blowing my hair into my face as they ushered us to our, like, compound. Every band had their own area. Like Mötley had their section and Judas Priest had their section. Nobody really visited anybody else’s compound. It wasn’t like all the rock stars were at this big table and we hung out. It was in this big field, you know. It was basically trailers; big trailers were the dressing rooms. We were partying pretty hard. Later I saw this interview of myself after we went onstage. It was with MTV. I was just fucking coked out of my mind. You could tell. That and Jack Daniel’s or beer or whatever. You had to drink. It was really hot out there that day. It was funny ’cause I was talking fast. I wasn’t incoherent or anything. It was just comical. At this point I was just doing it casually. There would be a point later on where I would have coke hidden around the house and I would go around and do it secretly, you know. Or I thought it was secretly. I thought my wife didn’t know, but now I’m pretty sure she did.

  We played second, after Quiet Riot. We kicked off about twelve thirty in the afternoon, which was pretty much on time, a miracle considering that Tommy Lee passed out just before going onstage and required oxygen to revive him. We thought of the concert as a great opportunity to test some of the new material we’d been recording. We got a huge response from the crowd. By the end of “Shout at the Devil,” everybody was singing along, which was just incredible, being that it was the first time anybody heard it outside of the band.

  After leaving the stage, we headed back to our dressing room. When we arrived, Mick’s girlfriend punched him in the face for no apparent reason. Sometime around then, I started making it with Zutaut’s date, about which much has been said. I have this to say: She was blond. She was hot. She had big boobs. She was wearing a little bikini. I fucked her… as I have thousands of others. Zutaut didn’t give a shit. She wouldn’t have even been there with him if it wasn’t for his association with Mötley Crüe. Everybody knows that. I say the issue is dead.

  By the end of the third day, there were 130 arrests at the Us festival and one murder, reportedly a drug deal gone awry. Our performance there was probably the most important of our career. Five months later, Shout at the Devil would sell two hundred thousand copies in its first two weeks, eventually reaching #17 on the charts. It would go on to sell over 3 million.

  We could never have imagined what would happen next.

  Doc McGhee Co-manager of Mötley Crüe, ’83–’89

  Vince was an aggressive, over-the-top frontman. That band was just so aggressive. The abuse factor was running rampant. They thought they were above the law. They were in so many situations that they just skated out of. When you’re the biggest band in the world, there are no limits. They got whatever they wanted. And they did whatever they wanted. It was torture, because we’d be thrown out of every fucking hotel in the world. It was a daily thing. And, you know, they weren’t vicious—they aren’t vicious people. They’re fun-loving guys. But they just took no prisoners, you know what I mean? It was just… nuts.

  For years, we were enablers as well. I wasn’t putting the drugs up their noses personally. I wasn’t pouring bottles of liquor down their throats. We didn’t encourage abuse, but honestly, we certainly didn’t discourage most of the antics that were going on. The weird thing was that after the Razzle crash there was no perceptible change in Vince. He didn’t let on at all that being involved in that whole thing affected him. Same with Nikki. When he ODed on heroin, what does he do? He checks
himself out of the hospital and goes to get high. It was our job—Doug Thaler’s and mine—to be their conscience. That’s all we did. That was our job. “Let’s go apologize every day for them.” When Nikki died—for that period of time where we thought he was dead—I called Doug and I said, “I’m out. I quit.” And Doug said, “Yeah, me, too.” He said, “That’s enough; we’re not going to watch these guys just kill themselves.” So we canceled a European tour and said, “We quit.” We said, “If you guys want help, we’ll get you help. But we’re not going to sit here and watch you guys die.”

  The other drug was pussy. The shit we used to go through on behalf of pussy. Vince was by far the worst. Vince just had this thing that he had to be with some girl. I mean, it didn’t matter who she was, they all looked exactly the same, so he couldn’t get confused. You could just spot them—Vince’s type. He couldn’t go to sleep without somebody with him. It was just one of his things.

  When the band was trying to get sober at some point there was a lot of stuff that came out during their actual sessions. I don’t think those are things I can talk about. But I think, you know, I think Vince… just… you know… he loved chicks anyways. So, it wasn’t, that wasn’t, you know, the hardest thing to figure out. But, but the amount of attention he had to have from them and the way he demanded things was a little obsessive. Girls would show up on like a daily basis. It would be like, “Tiffany’s backstage at the door with her suitcase.” So I’d walk out there and go, “Yeah, Tiffany? What’s up?” And she’d be, “Well, Vince told me to come. He said he loved me. We’re going to get married.” This is like all the time. This was all the time. And then I’d walk to the dressing room and go, “Hey, Vince, Tiffany’s out there; she’s…” And he has no idea who I’m talking about. It doesn’t even ring a bell. It was kind of like a running joke. And I’m the one telling the proverbial Tiffany that she has to go home. We’d let her just go to the show; then we’d get her a ride home or something, put her on the Greyhound bus. Mitch Fisher at the time was their road manager; he had to do all that.