Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal (26 page)

NEIL ZLOZOWER:
When I got back to LAX from Club Med with Nikki Sixx and Robbin Crosby, my assistant told me about Vince killing Razzle. Nikki probably didn’t know yet. He got to Florida and someone said, “Aren’t you the guy in Mötley Crüe who killed someone this weekend?” He was, like, “What?” He had to fly back to LA; then all the shit hit the fan.

MICHAEL MONROE:
After Razzle’s accident, me and [lead guitarist] Andy McCoy stayed in LA for a few days. We hung out with Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee, and it was a devastating time. Then we came back to London. That was my first experience in Hollywood. The first time I saw the Hollywood sign was when I was on my way to see Razzle’s body. It was like a wax doll. For years I had the creeps whenever I saw the sign.

VINCE NEIL:
It was a very depressing time; everybody hated me. It was one of those experiences you hear about and go, “God I hope I won’t have to go through this.” I was looking at seven years in prison. It took a lot of smart people to help me through it. It was devastating to lose a friend like that. Of course [my bandmates] turned against me. It was an accident, but they thought I deliberately did it to fuck them over and they wanted me out of the band. I had no one to lean on. I was pretty much alone. We went on and did the
Theatre of Pain
tour. I was put on probation. I tried to be sober during the tour. The guys weren’t supportive at all. It was hard sitting on our airplane and having me pass cocaine and beers to somebody. There was no support there.

DON DOKKEN:
I said, “There’s a person who murdered somebody and he never quit drinking.” [Vince Neil] did, what, one day in jail? I saw him about four days before it happened. He bought the Pantera. He sold me his other car—a 240Z. And he lived in Redondo Beach, on the Esplanade, the same street that he killed Razzle on. Mick [Mars] and I were renting a house in Hermosa, about a half mile away. Vince was always driving wasted, and he’d always make it the ten blocks home. Then Razzle died. Over the years, it’s not been any secret, everybody has seen Vince completely wasted out of his mind. It didn’t shake him at all, because he didn’t have to pay any punishment. The system doesn’t work when it comes to celebrities. I was shocked when he didn’t go to jail. I remember Mick saying, “Well, the band is fucked. He just killed somebody.” But [legendary manager] Doc McGhee got him out. Then Doc got busted too [in 1988, for drug smuggling].

Skid Row was one of the more popular latter-day hair bands. The Jersey boys formed in 1987, the year Guns N’ Roses released
Appetite
. Photographer Marc Weiss had shot front man Sebastian Bach’s former band, Madam X, in Phoenix, Arizona, and was so impressed he invited Bach to his wedding in New Jersey. During the event, the singer stepped onstage and performed a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” with the wedding band. Jon Bon Jovi’s parents were there, and since they knew that their son’s friend Dave “Snake” Sabo was looking for a singer, they asked Bach for his contact information. The singer sent Sabo a tape and was invited to audition for Skid Row. Mentored by Bon Jovi and his manager, Doc McGhee, Skid Row inked a record deal with Atlantic in 1988.

“Youth Gone Wild” was an iconic anthem of the waning hair era, and Bach’s bad-boy antics were as much a part of the band’s presentation as its music. However, his words and actions—even his attire—caused major controversies and engendered several lawsuits. On one occasion, he injured a young female fan with a bottle he threw from the stage. Another time, he was excoriated for wearing a T-shirt onstage that read “AIDS Kills Fags Dead.”

SEBASTIAN BACH (Skid Row):
I’ll never forget Kurt Loder coming on MTV News and saying, “If homophobia was a restaurant, Axl Rose would be the proprietor, Ice-T would be the bellman, and Sebastian Bach would be the garbage man in the back.” That was fuckin’ ridiculous.

KURT LODER (MTV News):
I might have said something like that, but not in those words. And hey, the guy was onstage wearing a T-shirt that said “AIDS Kills Fags Dead.” I’ve always liked Sebastian, and I liked his band. The T-shirt might have been just bad judgment on his part—a bad joke he should’ve kept to himself. But I don’t think he should’ve been shocked about getting grief for it.

SEBASTIAN BACH:
I’m Mr. Homophobe!—the horrible guy that wore “the shirt.” Please! If I’m a homophobe, how could I do four fuckin’ Broadway shows? Whoops. Of course I regret anybody getting hurt.

KURT LODER:
I actually saw him perform in a Broadway show several years after that incident—he was good—and I hung out with him a little bit after the show in his dressing room. He was still miffed about the T-shirt story, but as he explained, that was mainly because MTV went on to put a lot of rappers into heavy rotation on the channel who were sometimes pretty serious about their homophobia, although maybe some of them were just judgment-impaired young kids, too.

More than most touring rockers at the time, glam bands were notorious for their destructive extracurricular activities, which were often triggered by alcohol, drugs, and the desire to reenact or one-up the antics of their peers.

BRET MICHAELS:
C. C. DeVille and I have been through three well-publicized knock-down, drag-out fistfights. Onstage at the MTV Awards was one of ’em. And in New Orleans I broke his nose. Bobby and me got in a huge fistfight in Atlanta a couple years ago onstage. He took his bass off and winged it at my leg. I ended up with twelve stitches; we were pissed off about songs in the set list.

EDDIE VAN HALEN:
We thanked the people at the Madison, Wisconsin, Sheraton Inn on our second album because we damaged the seventh floor to the point where the people on the sixth floor had to check out. We turned on the fire hose and water leaked through the floor. Alex and Dave got my room key and took the table and fucking threw it out the window. I come back to my window. There’s no screen, the table’s gone. I looked down and the fucking table’s laying seven stories down in the snow. I went down to the front desk and said, “I’m Mr. Roth, and I lost my key.” I went into Dave’s room, grabbed his table, and put it in my room. The cops come, and everyone pretends they’re asleep. I had to try so hard not to laugh. It was like two Barney Fifes. They walked into the room and I could hear them talking. “I don’t get this. There’s no screen in the window, but there’s a table. In the other room, there’s no table, but there’s a screen.” They couldn’t figure it out. In the end we had to pay something like $70,000 worth of damage. We had to pay for the people who checked out, plus the damage.

ROB HALFORD:
By the mid-eighties I was a full-on drunk and drug addict. I really was losing control, doing the classic smashing TV sets, pulling telephones out of the wall. For some reason, when I was drunk and high on cocaine, I used to have this thing about setting off fire extinguishers, whether they were in elevators, hotel rooms, or corridors. In Japan, when I came home from a night of sake, I was fumbling around trying to find all the fire extinguishers in the hotel to set them off. I had this idea to stick a tube from one of the fire extinguishers under the door of our tour manager at three or four in the morning and set it off. I ran back to my room, laughing hysterically like a complete idiot. But it wasn’t a water fire extinguisher. It was one of those extinguishers that shoots out pink powder. So I set it off and ran. People were yelling and screaming. I surreptitiously opened my hotel room door and looked down the corridor to see all these Japanese hotel employees, and this guy, who was not the tour manager, but a Japanese businessman, covered head to toe in pink powder. I’d put the hose under the wrong door. This poor guy’s room was just destroyed and he had to be moved.

GEORGE LYNCH:
Monsters of Rock [1988] could arguably be considered the height of our rock stardom, but at the same time we were all strung out on drugs and the band was breaking up, we all knew it; the end was in sight.

DON DOKKEN:
I have footage from Monsters of Rock; you hear George go into a solo, the cameras are scrambling looking for him, but he’s hiding behind his amp, sitting down at a table doing lines of coke. His roadie is holding a straw up to his nose as he’s playing.

SEBASTIAN BACH:
When we were on tour with Guns N’ Roses in the early nineties there was a lot of partying going on. Slash said to me, “Hey, Sebastian, man. You can party all fuckin’ night and drink and smoke and snort and then you can still sing the next day. I can’t fuckin’ do that. When I drink I can’t sing.” I said to Slash, “Well dude, maybe you should think about cutting out the partying so you can sing better.” He goes, “Naah. I think I’m gonna try to sing as little as fucking possible.”

ROB HALFORD:
The craziest times for Priest happened in Ibiza, where we recorded [at Ibiza Sound Studios] from 1981’s [
Point of Entry
] through 1984’s [
Defenders of the Faith
]. There, Ian [Hill] went through twenty rental cars and drove motorcycles in ponds in death-defying feats, and K.K. [Downing] got run over by a taxi and Glenn [Tipton] was on an acid trip so he plunged his hands into some boiling water while he was trying to wipe [K.K.’s] wounds. K.K. was wrapped up in so many bandages he looked like an Egyptian mummy. He couldn’t walk for a week. We had to escape from Nassau because we were literally chased out of town by the locals because I got into a fistfight after we brought some boat rentals back that had damaged propellers. I got into a scuffle with the owner. We had people chasing after us throwing bottles and bricks. In the end, we had to escape from Nassau back to Miami so we could finish
Turbo
.

EDDIE VAN HALEN:
I continued doing blow through 1984. I knew it wasn’t good for me. The last time I did some was with David [Lee Roth]. But it was just a one-off kind of thing. As soon as I did it, I went, “Aw, God, why did I do it?” That creepy feeling. It was not a problem stopping the shit because I used to end up hating it. After that first bump, it’s never the same. It just got worse and worse to the point where your skin starts to crawl and you feel uncomfortable. So that was an easy one to give up. Drinking was a lot harder.

ROB HALFORD:
There were nights when I would do so much alcohol and cocaine I literally thought I was on the verge of crossing over. Then you wake up the next day and literally feel like walking death for three or four days. And you don’t learn, do you? People still do that today. History hasn’t taught us any lessons. [What made me stop drinking] was a cataclysmic event. The boy I was dating back then had a cocaine problem. We had one of those bombastic physical attractions and there was a tremendous amount of violence. We used to beat the crap out of each other in drunken and cocaine rages. One day we were fighting, and I left for my own safety and called a cab. As I was getting into the cab, he came up to me and said, “Look, I just want to let you know I love you very much.” When he turned away, I saw that he had a gun. Moments later he put the gun to his head and killed himself.

DAVE MUSTAINE:
There is a line down the middle of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous]. There’s people who believe in God and those who don’t. The people who believe in God are the ones who get that spiritual enlightenment. Those who don’t—the ones who joke around and say God stands for “group of drunks”—well, those are the ones who are gonna continue to piss their pants on a curb for the rest of their life.

ROB HALFORD:
I finally got clean and sober in 1986 [after my boyfriend’s suicide]. For me, it was life or death. It was a simple choice, really. I was getting to that place of complete self-destruction, where if I kept going I would do something really stupid, either intentionally or unintentionally. The great people that we’ve lost in rock and roll, either deliberate suicide like Kurt Cobain, or choking on vomit like Hendrix or Bon Scott, that’s the way some of us are destined to end up. I turned to spirituality to get me out of that dark place, and that side of me is what gets me through the day and I’m always in touch with it.

Some who couldn’t clean up their acts met with tragedy. In 1984, Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen, known at the time for alcohol and substance abuse, was speeding to a New Year’s Eve party in his hometown of Sheffield, England, when he missed a sharp turn, lost control of his Corvette Stingray, and rolled his car, sustaining an injury that severed his arm below his shoulder. Seven years after Allen’s accident, Def Leppard guitarist Steve Clarke died from an overdose of codeine, valium, morphine, and alcohol; his blood alcohol level was twice that which killed Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham. The GN’R camp lost several friends. In 1987, former Jetboy bassist Todd Crew OD’ed and died in his friend Slash’s hotel room. Then, in 1997, Guns N’ Roses collaborator West Arkeen (co-writer of “Patience,” “Yesterdays,” “It’s So Easy,” and others), was found dead in his LA home from a drug overdose. And in 2002, Ratt guitarist Robbin Crosby died of a heroin overdose, after having contracted AIDS.

WARREN DeMARTINI:
Robbin definitely reached a point where he was really, really mixed up with drugs, and it was extremely difficult, because no one knew what he was going through. One quote I never forgot is he said, “Quitting heroin is like quitting breathing.” I had no idea to what extent he was struggling, because it was such a secretive thing to begin with.