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

by Vince Neil

  The eighties were an aggressive time. It was very free, but you have to remember, it was all about fun. It wasn’t like the sixties: That movement had substance. The eighties weren’t about changing the world, Vietnam, all that stuff. It was about anarchy and having a great time. That’s what it all was about. There wasn’t any lesson to be had out of the eighties other than having a great time. And that’s really what it was about. Mötley Crüe served as the poster boys of that general eighties zeitgeist.

  Early eighties, all anybody had to worry about was a few STDs. There was no AIDS yet. You’d worry about catching the clap, or crabs or something. But other than that, it wasn’t too bad. Back then, the worst thing was herpes; everybody was worried about herpes. But in the early eighties sex wasn’t something that could kill you. It was like if somebody was having problems, it was penicillin time. Probably once a week somebody got some shots or got something. They’d be like, “Doc, I’m having a problem.” And they’d whip out their dick and be like, “Dude, check this out.” And I’d be, “Oh my god, that’s disgusting.” Which of course made them laugh like loons. Lemme tell you something, I’ve been doing this a long time with the biggest bands in the world. There’s no one like these guys.

  There are a million stories that we lived through. The bullet train ride where me and Nikki got arrested, which you don’t need to talk about. The fires in the hotels in Switzerland. The guns they used to carry. They used to carry starter guns through Europe. Handguns. They look just like .38 pistols, except they only shoot blanks. They even had shoulder holsters. When you shot it off, the round sounded like a real bullet. You know, the kind of thing they use for track and field. They’d have the bus slow down and open the door and shoot people on bicycles and shit. The people would crash, thinking they had just been shot for real. The guys were nuts. They’d have shoot-outs in hotel lobbies, pretending to be in a movie. SWAT teams would come. It was crazy time.

  A zillion stories. It’s like you couldn’t even… if you stayed here for literally a week—I bet you I can stay here for a week just going chronologically through the crazy shit they did all over the world… that they don’t even remember.

  With Mötley Crüe, it was low IQ, high rpm. They just went out there and turned it on. There was no dimmer switch. It was awesome.

  Chapter 6

  ANOTHER BAD DAY

  December in California has always been one of my favorite times of year. The air is crisp; the sunsets are killer. While the rest of the country is wearing a winter coat, we’re still in shorts and flip-flops, my favorite mode of dress. Say what you want about the change of seasons; I’ll take the beach.

  By December of 1984, I was twenty-three years old. I had two children (little Neil was living a lot of the time with my parents; Elle was a toddler) and one wife (Beth and I were having a lot of problems but still together). Our place was a two-bedroom apartment in a ten-story high-rise, right on the beach. I think we were on the fifth floor. It was right on the ocean; the sand was below us. It was really nice. Parked outside was my newly acquired 1972 Ford De Tomaso Pantera, the first exotic car I ever bought with my Mötley Crüe earnings. Over the next few years, the inventory would reach something like thirty different rides, each one more chill than the next.

  On December 6—I’m pretty sure it was December 6—I decided to have a party. I invited some of the neighbors from the building, including the newsman who lived next door. Tommy came, of course—he was now a semi-permanent fixture at my place; he’d recently split with Candice after being married only a few weeks or months, I can’t remember which. The guys from the Finnish band Hanoi Rocks—they’re credited with being one of the pioneer hair metal groups—also showed up. Their drummer was known as Razzle. His real name was Nicholas Dingley. He was a good buddy of mine. I didn’t expect to see them, as they were midway through their first American tour, a monthlong grind to promote their fifth album, Two Steps from the Move. I think we met actually in Europe, on the Iron Maiden tour—more about which later. I think they played some of the shows or something, too. I can’t remember. But we made friends with them and they were in our town, in LA. Their frontman, Michael Monroe, had fractured his ankle, so the band had to take time off while he healed enough to go back out. Razzle called me, you know, and I’m like, “Hey, I’m having people over if you want to come out.” And that would have been enough for Razzle. He was never one to miss out on a party.

  This was a point in time when I actually thought I was a drug dealer. No shit. I was kind of semi-trying to be a coke dealer. I wanted to be a coke dealer. I’d bought like a pound of coke. I had a shitload of fucking blow. It was funny ’cause my next-door neighbor, this TV news guy, was this real straightlaced guy when I met him. About two months after he met me, he was a fuckin’ mess. We were doing blow together all the time. And then he has to go in and anchor the shows and shit and he’s just like wired, you know? His bosses actually told him at one point that if they heard he was hanging out with me anymore he’d be fired immediately.

  The thing about me being a coke dealer was this: I didn’t actually sell much. I was a lousy dealer. I just ended up doing all of it, sharing it with my friends. I didn’t really know how to sell it, you know. What was I going to do, go out and work the curb with the homies? What happened was the opportunity arose one night. We were fucked up and somebody said, “Dude, let’s get a pound!” And it seemed like an incredibly good idea at that moment. Because the thing with coke is this: It always runs out. So it’s like a dream when you’re doing it a lot to always have enough, to never run out, you know? That’s every addict’s dream at some point. Buying a huge stash. Hunkering down and getting high with nobody to bother you (remember Lovey’s bathroom?). So what the fuck, I went out and did it. I forget how much it cost. It was cheaper than buying it in small quantities. Kind of like the same principle as Costco. I remember it was a connection through Mick. Mick always had all these weird relatives and connections. Mick knew somebody who was a drug dealer and they got me the drugs. So I had the blow for a while. It lasted a long time.

  In The Dirt it says that this party of mine was specifically held to celebrate the upcoming recording of our next album, Theatre of Pain. I don’t know about that. I remember it was just a get-together, a holiday party. People make more out of shit than they have to. You don’t need a reason for a party. It’s just a party. We had a million of them. Although since I’d been with Beth, I hadn’t really hosted many parties—she had the whole germ thing, plus we had the new baby, plus Beth was generally pissed that I was never there. But I’d been on tour for a while, so maybe we were trying to make it work. Maybe she said okay to the party because she was trying to get along with me, too. So, for the record, it wasn’t an album party, and it wasn’t, like, a secret drug party or anything. It was just a normal party, hanging out at the apartment and on the beach and all that stuff. Kind of a celebration.

  We’d come a long way since New Year’s Eve-il, 1982. The phenomenal success of Shout at the Devil meant we had finally made it. We were playing sold-out shows, our songs were constantly on the radio, and we had more women and drugs, obviously, than we knew what to do with. We’d made our debut live appearance on MTV during their Halloween Horror Special; that same night, MTV aired the video for “Looks That Kill” for the first time. They also ran a Mötley Crüe Halloween contest, and the winners—along with twenty-five of their friends—were flown in especially for the show and took up the entire front row. It was a whole Mötley-based celebration.

  Next came a twenty-three-date tour of the U.S., traveling between shows in Doc McGhee’s eight-seater plane—one hell of a big step up from a tour bus, I think you’ll agree. (Though all of us briefly thought we were dead one time when the aircraft suddenly went into a nosedive due to an electrical malfunction. The pilot managed to bring the plane out of the dive and make an emergency landing; the only damage sustained was the band’s stage makeup and facial cleansers, which exploded inside our luggage
… due to the sudden drop in cabin pressure.)

  With the release of Shout, we had moved on from the glam/punk image—and not just because every other band seemed to be copping our style. Nothing we did had to do with others. It was about ourselves: We just wanted to take things to the next level. We settled on a look something like Mad Max meets Escape from New York—the band’s two favorite movies when we were living together at the Mötley House. We had a futuristic stage set specially made for the tour, with a painted backdrop of a city skyline identical to that from Escape, which is hands-down the best flick Kurt Russell ever made. Tommy’s drum riser was constructed to look like rubble from an exploded freeway; Nikki’s and Mick’s amps were decorated with mean-looking Styrofoam spikes. Before each show, one of our roadies would walk onto the smoke-filled stage wearing a horror mask and miming to a backing tape of someone reciting Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 poem “The Conqueror Worm,” which contains the line: “That motley drama—oh, be sure / It shall not be forgot.”

  Okay, so maybe that was kind of out there. But you get the picture. We were doing whatever we wanted to do creatively and the fans were eating it up. On the basis of that, nobody could tell us no. The proof was in the sales figures. Deliver the numbers; the suits will make sure you have enough rope to hang yourselves.

  In January of 1984, during our first-ever show at the famous Madison Square Garden in New York City, we were presented with our platinum albums for Shout. We’d now sold over 1 million copies.

  Ozzy Osbourne was a fuckin’ god to us. So when our management booked us onto the first leg of Ozzy’s Bark at the Moon tour, in March of 1984, we were incredibly psyched. This was almost as good as headlining our own arena tour.

  During our first sound check, Ozzy was the first guy to come over and say, “Hi. Welcome to the tour.” He took an instant liking to us; from then on, he hardly spent a night on his own tour bus, preferring to travel with us. Ozzy was rich and Ozzy had lots of drugs. And he was kind of lonely, I think. He took his assistant with him everywhere he went. He always wanted people to party with him, so he was very generous.

  When you’re with Ozzy, all kinds of mayhem ensues. Ozzy, Tommy, and I nearly get arrested for urinating on a police car after the three of us got wasted on sake. Ozzy takes a dump in Tommy’s bathroom and wipes his shit all over the walls. Ozzy steals a car with keys in the ignition and we go joyriding; then he smashes the windows and trashes the upholstery. Ozzy strips off his pants, sticks a dollar bill in the crack of his ass, strolls into a bar, and starts offering the bill to anyone who’ll pluck it out of there. Ozzy grabs a woman’s shopping bag and takes off running, then returns a few minutes later wearing a dress he’s found in the purloined bag. Ozzy snorting a line of ants off the pavement. Ozzy licking a puddle of Nikki’s piss off the pavement…

  All of which, of course, prompts…

  (Cue up the shark theme from Jaws.)

  The arrival of Sharon Osbourne.

  Big Momma Is Watching.

  Once Sharon got there, all fun screeched to a halt. (Literally.) At the next concert, we were only allowed one case of beer backstage; bringing girls back was verboten. We couldn’t do this and we couldn’t do that. There was a whole set of rules we had to follow. We had these T-shirts made up—I wish I still had it ’cause it was a great T-shirt. It said: “No Fun Tour ’84.” It had a smiley face with bullet holes in it. On the back it had the big circle with the line through the words “sex,” “drugs,” “booze,” and “pussy.” We had everybody wearing them. Even Ozzy’s people were wearing them. And Sharon was fucking pissed. It just really sickens me today to watch everybody fawning all over Sharon Osbourne. She’s a talent judge on TV and she has her own show and this and that. This is the most evil, shittiest woman I’ve ever met in my life. She would fucking have you killed if it was to her advantage. She’s just… it’s just… if people really knew.

  I guess Sharon was gone by the time our last night on the tour came around. Ozzy ordered the crew to drop sixteen pounds of glittery flour from the lighting rigs onto our heads while we were playing. As we left the stage, Ozzy and his merry band of pranksters were waiting in the wings with custard pies.

  Not wanting to be outdone, while Ozzy was playing—dressed in fishnets and garters—I went out there in a full suit of armor that we’d found lying around backstage. I was holding a chalice in both hands, like a Knight of the Round Table presenting King Arthur with a drink to quench his thirst…

  Only the chalice was filled with flour. As Ozzy came toward me, grinning like a loon, I heaved the contents in his direction.

  And then I mooned the audience.

  Did you know you can’t be a monster of rock unless you’re pelted with animal body parts and bottles of piss?

  We found that out in August of 1984, at the legendary Donington Monsters of Rock Festival, held at the Castle Donington racetrack in England. For a rock ’n’ roller like me, it seems like Europe and especially England are maybe the birthplaces of rock ’n’ roll. I know, I know… rock ’n’ roll was born in the good old US of A. But it seems like it was grabbed up from there by the Europeans, you know? And then reexported to the states in the form of the Beatles and the Stones. We all love Elvis. I love Elvis—I’m covering one of his songs on my album. But somehow, being at Donington felt like I was making a pilgrimage to the Stonehenge of rock ’n’ roll.

  AC/DC were headlining that day. We were at the bottom of the bill—behind our old friends Y&T (argh!)—and went onstage at noon. Though the crowd would grow as the day went by, there was still something like sixty thousand people in the audience. The English fans tend to be a bit more wild and crazy than Americans; think drunk soccer fans at a concert. They pelted the stage with some weird shit—unidentified pieces of animal flesh and whatnot; the eyeball of a cow was later found lodged in Tommy’s drum riser. Then there’s the Donington Piss Baptism—the fans drink their beer and then piss into the empty bottles, then throw the bottles up onstage. Usually the first act received the piss baptism. I don’t know when we’d first heard about it—maybe from the members of Y&T. And we were like, Fuck, this is going to suck.

  But for some reason, the piss bottles were never launched. Animal parts yes, piss bottles no. Which supposedly meant that they liked us, I guess. They seemed to. The reaction was awesome. In a moment of exuberance, Nikki threw his bass guitar into the audience. It hit this guy in the head and smashed his glasses. A few members of the audience took the bass to the side of the stage and began ritualistically smashing it to pieces… whereupon enthusiastic fans fought over the bits—a string or a peg here, a piece of fretboard there—each wanting to take home some of Mötley Crüe as a souvenir.

  After Donington, we gigged around Europe. I was drinking heavily. In Stockholm, Sweden, I showed my affection to Eddie Van Halen by playfully biting his hand. His then-wife, the actress and later diet spokeswoman Valerie Bertinelli, gave me a ton of shit. In Paris, staying at the megabucks Ritz Hotel, where Princess Diana spent her last night on earth, I accidentally broke the glass panel in the front door to the place. Luckily they didn’t hold me responsible.

  In Nuremburg, Germany—which turned out to be the last Van Halen performance with David Lee Roth in the band—we were partying in Ronnie James Dio’s keyboardist Claude Schnell’s hotel room when Schnell unwisely decided to leave the room. In his absence, we threw all the furniture, including the bed, chairs, desk, TV, and dresser, out the window. Some of the furnishings landed on top of two brand-new Mercedes-Benzes parked below. Schnell returned to find his room swarming with irate German cops. He, Dio, and the rest of the band were thrown out.

  In October of 1984, as we joined Iron Maiden’s Powerslave tour for its European leg, TFFL achieved gold status, having sold five hundred thousand copies of the Elektra version in the U.S. Though we were pumped to be with Iron Maiden, the experience wasn’t like the one with Ozzy. We didn’t really socialize at all with the band. They didn’t really say two words to us, except the
drummer, Nicko McBrain. He was probably the most, you know, outgoing of the bunch. He’d say hi a lot. If we happened to be in the same hotel, he’d be the one down at the bar.

  I was pretty burned out by this stage. My voice was pretty ragged. There was a bullshit report somewhere about cortisone shots and all this. Back in those days, you’d lose your voice once in a while. I mean it happens, you know? I’d been singing (and partying) nonstop for like five years. The treatment for losing your voice can sometimes be a cortisone shot. That’s it. It’s just a shot in the arm or the butt. It’s not even a big needle. It’s just a regular needle, the same kind you get for a normal vaccination or whatever. Like the same kind of needle the doctor would use when he gave us our weekly shot of penicillin. It was preventative, you know? We’d all line up in the shower. The doctor would come in before a show, shoot us all up. Or sometimes, in case our wives or girlfriends happened to be coming in, you’d request one.

  As for the cortisone… it just takes the swelling down in the vocal cords. In theory. It helps a little bit, but it doesn’t help a lot. It’s a temporary fix. And we know now that it’s better to stay away from cortisone. Cortisone is bad for you. You can’t do it all the time. It’s a steroid and it’s just… it’s bad for you. If you take it, you gain a lot of water weight; there are a lot of bad side effects.