Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (21 page)

BLACKIE LAWLESS:
Nikki didn’t steal [our pentagram logo]; I gave it to him. That whole setting himself on fire thing—I gave
that
to him. Nikki and I had played together before. W.A.S.P. was just being put together, but we didn’t do shows together. I looked at Nikki like my brother. The pentagram came because I’d left a [Satanic] cult and afterward I didn’t want anything to do with it. He came to me after and asked if I was going to use it. I said, “Nope. You can have it.” But I warned him he’s messing with very bad stuff. Everyone I know who messes with that stuff, tragedy has fallen on them at some point in life. It’s just not something you want to be a part of.

VINCE NEIL:
We only used the pentagram for one album, and it’s called
Shout at the Devil
—so you use a pentagram! Nobody’s really into the devil. It’s showmanship, it’s whatever image you’re trying to project. It’s all a bunch of bull, really. Ronnie [Dio] was not a devil worshipper, but he loved medieval history. Same with Ozzy. He is the furthest thing from a devil worshipper I’ve ever met.

Mötley Crüe earned their bad-boy title with little effort. Even before the overdoses and near-fatal car crashes that could have ended the band’s career, they lived for the moment, throwing caution to the wind in favor of cheap, and sometimes costly, thrills.

JOEY VERA:
After an Armored Saint show at Mt. Baldy Ski Resort [outside Los Angeles], Tommy Lee’s going to a party down the mountain with his sister and another girl who owned the car. Me, in a drunken state, said, “I’ll go to the party.” That’s the last thing I remember. We went down the hill, the car crashed, I cut up both my hands and my head, was in the hospital for a week. The worst thing was that I almost lost my thumb, my right thumb. Tommy was driving. I think he felt really guilty. It wasn’t like I held it against him. We were all drunk. I knew what we were doing. It’s not like he threw me from the car. I was like, “Dude, whatever, it’s cool.” But our friendship was done after that. What came out of this was that the girl had insurance, so I got money to pay for all the bills, and there was some chunk of change left—four or six thousand dollars—and with that money, I fronted Armored Saint the money to pay for recording a demo, which turned into the EP that we put out in ’83. Our [1982]
Metal Massacre 2
track [“Lesson Well Learned”] is from that session, too. Had that accident not happened, we might not have been able to afford to go in the studio.

DON DOKKEN:
The first time I saw Mötley Crüe, we were playing with them, at the Roxy. We both were showcasing. Dokken had done
Breaking the Chains
; it was out in Europe. The whole scene had crumbled, all the rock bands had moved, the Starwood was gone, the Whisky had gone punk, everybody had moved to the Troubadour. It was the only club left. Gazzarri’s was waffling. Golden West Ballroom was gone. Clubs were falling by the wayside. I didn’t understand Mötley because they didn’t have a [major] record deal, yet they showed up in limos, brand new equipment, Marshalls, all these cool stage clothes, big-ass hair. I was like, “How the fuck did they afford that?” Mötley never did a gig with crappy gear. They came on the scene with full-on arena gear because they had [KISS manager] Doc [McGhee] backing them.

VINCE NEIL:
If you look at the Mötley Crüe progression of looks, they are all different. When we did [1981’s]
Too Fast for Love
, we just wore what we could, because we didn’t have any money. We basically shopped at the hardware store, got chains and made our own stuff. Then for [1983’s]
Shout at the Devil
, it was a theatrical leather look, not a biker leather look. Then we completely went to the other end and did the glam thing with [1985’s]
Theatre of Pain
; there was no leather at all. Then, when everybody started doing that, we changed to the motorcycle look for [1987’s]
Girls Girls Girls
. We never pigeonholed ourselves into any look. Entertainment is supposed to be an escape. It’s not supposed to let you know how miserable you are.

TOMMY LEE (Mötley Crüe):
A lot of bands recently seem to have been there to make the crowd depressed. I could never figure that out. That, to me, is like sitting down at a bar and drinking to remember.

In the early days of hair metal, new bands had to be resourceful to look good onstage even though their wallets were usually empty. For most, gigging and merch sales didn’t pay the bills, especially after pay-to-play became widespread. Girlfriends, strippers, or parents sometimes supported the rock star hopefuls. Often, however, musicians sold drugs or toiled at day jobs. One of the most common part-time gigs for aspiring rock stars was telemarketing—boiler rooms of musicians with fake names selling equally questionable goods and services. Tower Records Sunset and Aaron’s Records were other spots where Los Angeles’s long-haired and hungover could be found trying to earn a buck. The ubiquitous scenario spawned a standard joke. Q: “What do you call a musician in LA without a girlfriend?” A: “Homeless.”

JANI LANE (1964–2011) (Warrant):
[Drummer] Steven [Sweet] and I were living in Florida and had no money. We had a friend who was a bass player, Al Collins, and he talked his parents into buying him an old ’77 Cutlass. I sold my drums, and Steven and I worked at the merry-go-round to make enough money to move to LA. Another guy in Florida was trying to start his own line of children’s clothing, so we also worked in his basement making children’s T-shirts, like a sweatshop, for about two weeks to save up six hundred bucks between the three of us. We had a car and a U-Haul trailer and we broke down in every state on our trip to LA. Suddenly, we realize that we have $20 left and we’re almost out of gas. We get a room at a motel across from the Hollywood Bowl and stayed there for a week. We went down to the store every day and got a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread and put the peanut butter on the bread using a Social Security card. That’s how we lived the first week in Hollywood.

GEORGE LYNCH (Lynch Mob, ex-Dokken):
At one point, I was a liquor delivery driver in South Central LA. I did the routes no one would take [because they were in such dangerous parts of town]. My route was Martin Luther King Boulevard. In fact, on the day I signed my record deal I was in my liquor van, and I had to drive to the Elektra building in LA and sign the contract, and then I went right back on my route.

DON DOKKEN:
People had strippers taking care of them, but I really was on that Top Ramen and hot dogs lifestyle. We were way broke.

GEOFF TATE:
Living on Top Ramen was the way you survived. You only had a day job simply to keep you in rent money and pay for your musical instruments for your gig.

BLACKIE LAWLESS:
I tried telemarketing for about a month and I just couldn’t do it. You’d have to cold-call a hundred people a day. I was selling fluorescent lightbulbs over the phone for a hundred times more than you could get them in the store. My phone name was Ted James. The worst thing I ever did was around the summer of ’78. I was on my last leg at this place because I wasn’t making any sales. I had cold-called this one lady who had a pet shop in Burbank. I said, “Ma’am, let me tell you what’s going on. My dad’s really upset about what happened to my lil’ sister and if you buy a lightbulb it would really help my dad out.” She said, “What happened?” I said, “Well, have you heard about the Hillside Strangler? That was my sister.” The boss was standing next to me and I thought he’d be mad, but when I got off the phone he yelled out, “You see this? He’s genius. Everyone in the room must do that.” It’s sick, but indicative of Hollywood.

CARLOS CAVAZO:
When I was in Snow we opened up for Quiet Riot about four times when Randy [Rhoads] was still in the band. We all lived together. When we couldn’t make ends meet, we’d temp. We even lived on food stamps for about a year. We also lived off girls. They would feed us and pay our bills.

SLASH:
I got nabbed [shoplifting] at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, which was my parents’ favorite record shop. I was hired at the very same store six years later in the video division, and during every shift for the first six months I was convinced someone was going to remember that I’d been caught stealing and have me fired.

JANI LANE:
We were living nine guys in a two-bedroom apartment. I spent a month shrink-wrapping porno videos in a basement in Canoga Park. I had a paper route delivering the
LA Times
in stage clothes at three in the morning. I was stocking 7-Elevens. I did everything I could to survive. But we were literally starving. We couldn’t pay the rent. Steven [Sweet] and I were like, “Maybe we should head back to Florida and regroup. We can play in a cover band for a while there and save some money.” Two days later as we’re packing, there’s a note on the door and it says, “Hi, we’re the guys in Warrant. Our band broke up in San Diego last night and we need a singer and a drummer. Can you write music?” I played them “Down Boys,” “Heaven,” and “Dirty Rotten Filthy Stinking Rich” and they were like, “Wow, he can write.” So we formed the band and took over LA.

For ambitious young rockers, the ultimate goal was to score a label deal. Many who were talented or lucky enough to do so didn’t bother looking at the terms of the contract and found themselves in financially unfavorable situations. Even those who achieved both fame and fortune often became ensnared in interband rivalries, domestic debacles, and a myriad of other problems.

BRET MICHAELS (Poison):
For Poison’s record signing I thought there’d be some big party for us with a limo and caviar, and we ended up sitting in a warehouse in El Segundo, California, boxing and packaging and shrink-wrapping our own record,
Look What the Cat Dragged In
. I was sitting on the floor in leather pants.

DON DOKKEN:
We thought we’d get rich once we were signed and selling records, but even the Elektra contracts were garbage. For every dollar they made, we made twenty cents split four ways. In Dokken, it was a four-way split, which came back to haunt me, because I wrote most of the hits. That’s what started the war between [guitarist] George [Lynch] and I. When I signed that contract, we were at the LA airport ready to go to Japan for our first tour. The deal was still intact—that I owned 50 percent, and they divided 50 percent. They show up at the airport with a contract that says it’s a four-way split or we’re not getting on the plane. I called [our manager], Cliff [Bernstein at Q Prime] and said, “I can’t sign this.” He said, “Sign it and we’ll work it out.” But it never did happen. He just wanted us to get on the plane. I was hijacked. We spent the next five years together getting very famous, and I hated them, and they hated me.

JANI LANE:
During
Dog Eat Dog
, everybody was on vacation. I demoed the entire record myself and they showed up and I handed them cassettes and said, “Here are your parts.” The band left me alone, and I wrote. In return for leaving me alone, I offered to give them 20 percent of the publishing to split up. Then I would show up at a gig and on my wireless microphone rack it would say, “80 percent Hitler.” I’m sure it was done in fun, but it wasn’t funny.

Once groups started becoming successful, bands that were more famous began pilfering rising stars. When Black Sabbath broke up and Ozzy went solo, Randy Rhoads from Quiet Riot became Ozzy’s first—and prototypical—guitar wunderkind, oft imitated, much worshipped, never replaced.

GEORGE LYNCH:
I tried out for Ozzy three times. The initial time was before Randy got it. He and I were up for it. He came to a gig I was playing with Exciter, my band before Dokken. He came down to introduce himself. He knew he got the gig before I did, and he came down with his mom. He said, “I got good news and bad news. Bad news is that I got the job with Ozzy. The good news is you got the job teaching at my mom’s guitar teaching school, $5 an hour.”

KEVIN DuBROW:
When Randy joined Ozzy, I changed the name of the band to DuBrow, because you can’t continue to call it Quiet Riot without Randy Rhoads. I realized that Drew [Forsythe] was not the right type of drummer for what I was trying to do, and not the right drummer for me trying to get better as a singer.

FRANKIE BANALI:
I was in this three-piece band called Monarch, with Michael Monarch, the original guitarist from Steppenwolf. We were playing a show at the Valley Supper Club, and Kevin came out to see me play. Randy had told him that there was this drummer called Frankie Banali who was a combination of Cozy Powell and John Bonham. We chatted after that show—January of 1980—and about a month later at the Starwood there was a show which had all these future Quiet Riot
Metal Health
lineup members onstage at the same time, but in different bands. The opening band was Monarch with me; the middle act was DuBrow, with Kevin and [bassist] Rudy [Sarzo]. Rudy was just in town on a break from Ozzy—he was already playing with Ozzy and was just sitting in with the band. The headliner was a band called Snow, which [guitarist] Carlos [Cavazo] came out of. About two months into 1980 I started working with Kevin in DuBrow, and it was a huge turnover of musicians. It’s unimaginable how many came through that project, and a lot of them have claimed that they replaced Randy Rhoads in Quiet Riot when Randy went with Ozzy, which is clearly not the case, because it wasn’t Quiet Riot, it was DuBrow, and most of their tenures were very short-lived.