The Dirt (10 page)

Fortunately, no Jehovah’s Witnesses stopped by the house when I was a kid, because I probably would be selling Bibles today. Instead, after watching dudes in a high school marching band beat on the snares at a football game, I turned back to the drums that I never should have abandoned in the first place. My father bought me my first professional snare for Christmas. This was no cardboard box, dude, no fucking paint can or upside-down pot. And if my dad hadn’t made me sit there and do my scales on the piano and learn about bars and beats and measures, I would never have picked up drumming as fast as I did.

As I write this, with my father lying on his deathbed, I don’t know how I can ever repay him. I’m watching him slowly die—he’s probably got a year left—and when he looks at me, tears bubble out of his eyes. And when I look at him—this man who did nothing but support me—I can’t help but cry. After buying me that snare, he cosigned for me so that I could buy the rest of the drum kit myself. He told me, “I won’t buy it for you because then you won’t respect it. But I’ll help you and cosign for it so that if you mess up and miss your payments, I’ll have your back.” Then he helped me build a fucking room inside the garage with insulation, carpeting, a door, doubled plywood walls, and soundproofing made from egg cartons. My parents would park their cars in the driveway just so that I could have a soundproofed practice room. And, then, when I was ready for my first car, my father came through again and cosigned on the loan. He’d never walk a mile for me, but if I fell down while walking for myself he’d pick me up.

Now that I had my own practice room, every kid at school who had ever played or seen a guitar wanted to come over and rock the fuck out, which usually meant playing Led Zeppelin songs over and over. Not a lot of parents would let their kids do that in their house. My folks’ only rule was no music after 10 P.M., and I respected that. For a while, at least.

Music was all I thought about in school: My favorite classes were music and graphic design, where I’d make rock-and-roll T-shirts with my friends. I also dug coed volleyball. And that had nothing to do with music, but everything to do with rock and roll, if you know what I mean.

Every day I’d go to my three favorite classes, then skip the rest of school and pound on my drums all afternoon while my parents were at work. Just before my mother came home, I’d take a walk, kill some time, and then come back as if I’d just returned from school. It was a good plan until I started failing eighth grade.

My teacher, Mr. Walker, would write down our grades in a little book, close it, and put it in his drawer every day. So, along with a couple other kids who were failing, I hatched a plan to steal his grade book when he left the classroom to smoke his pipe. My assigned seat was in the front of the room, so when he took a smoke break one morning, I ran to his desk, bent over the top, reached around, and pulled the black grade book out of the drawer.

I made it back to my seat just as he returned. As he discussed
To Kill a Mockingbird
, I passed the book behind me to Reggie, who raised his hand and asked to go to the bathroom. I followed him, as did another friend. We met in one of the stalls and placed the grade book on top of a closed toilet lid. Reggie took out his lighter and set the thing ablaze. We were idiots, bro: We thought that if we destroyed the book, then all our F’s would disappear and Mr. Walker would have to pass us. We were also stupid because we thought that three kids in the bathroom for ten minutes wouldn’t arouse any suspicions.

As we were trying to hurry along the fire by lighting the book from different edges, the door to the stall flew open. Standing in the entrance was Mr. Walker, and his face was as red as a fire engine. It was all bad, dude. As we were all blowing on the book trying to put out the fire, he grabbed us by the fucking ears. I swear to God, my feet didn’t touch the floor all the way to the principal’s office. The principal had a chair by the wall, and when it was my turn to see him he made me face it and grab the handles.

“Stare at that dot on the wall!” he barked.

“What dot?” I asked. Then, all of a sudden, the blows came, one after another, right on my fucking ass. He beat the shit out of me, then suspended me. My parents grounded me so hard.

I somehow graduated to South Hills High School, where I joined the drum corps of the marching band I had admired so much when I was a kid. Because we competed against other schools, I had to learn all kinds of tricks: twirling sticks, banging on the side of the drum, and other shit that went beyond drumming and into actual theater. The bass drum guys would swing the mallets from their wrist straps while all the snare drummers would flip and click their sticks in unison as they marched in time. Everything I learned in the drum corps I used in my playing with Mötley later on.

But for all everyone else in the school cared, I might as well have still been taking ballet. Everywhere I went, people called me “band fag.” It wasn’t like I played the flute: I was a fucking drummer. It pissed me off that I was the only one who thought I was cool.

The senior drum captain was a tall, dark-haired guy named Troy who had gone through puberty too early in life: his bones seemed like they were trying to burst out of his body, and his face was still flecked with acne scars. I was only a freshman, but I was excelling quickly in the band and pretty soon he felt that I was threatening his authority as drum captain. One day before practice, I was bending over to pick up my drum when he tapped me on the back. As I turned around, he knocked my nose to the other side of my face. I went to the hospital, where they anesthetized the area, stuck a pair of pliers up my nose, and—
crack
—twisted it back into place. But it never looked the same after that: It’s still crooked.

I never saw him again because afterward, my parents sold their home and moved fifteen minutes away. I started sophomore year at a school called Royal Oak High in the Covina/San Dimas area.

It was there that I formed my first band, U.S. 101. I asked my parents if we could rehearse in the garage, and they fucking let me. The band’s guitar player, Tom, was a major surfer dude and loved the Beach Boys. Even though I thought the Beach Boys were stupid sissy shit, I played along because I was so stoked just to be jamming with an actual band. (Two members even went on to form Autograph.)

From ballet to drum corps, I had always been an outsider. Being in a real rock band, though, suddenly made it cool to be a outsider. And there’s a big difference between being a lame outsider and a rad one. It didn’t matter that my band sucked. We started playing school dances and backyard parties: everywhere they needed a band, or didn’t. It was on that circuit that I first saw the coolest fucking kid in the world. He was a surfer dude with long blond hair fluffed up high on his head, just like David Lee Roth. He dressed in sharp, all-white clothes, and he was in a band. A much better band than mine. He went to Charter Oak High, about a mile away from my school. But he was kicked out during sophomore year and started coming to Royal Oak. As soon as he walked through the double doors—wearing badass, low hip-hugging bell-bottoms and a white muscle T-shirt—you would have thought the Rapture had occurred. All the girls were speechless, in puppy love with this long-haired surfing rocker. His name was Vince Wharton.

fig. 2

Tommy with father, David Lee Thomas, and mother, Vassilikki

I went up to him one day after school and said, “Hey man, what’s up? My name’s Tommy and I play drums. I hear you’re in a band.”

His band was called Rock Candy, and I started going to backyard parties so I could drink and watch them play. Vince had an amazing voice: He’d do Cheap Trick covers and sound exactly like Robin Zander. And he sang some sweet Sweet and Aerosmith.

To me, Vince was God. He was in a rad band, he was a kick-ass surfer, the girls fucking fainted with lust whenever he walked by, and there was a rumor going around that he had fathered a boy before he was even in high school. I thought I was lucky that he even talked to a skinny misfit like me. I never even imagined I’d be cool enough to actually play in a band with him.

I
t was a groundbreaking moment for Suite 19: our first gig at the Starwood. I was so psyched, because if you played the Starwood, you’d made it. Man, the first time I ever fucking came to Hollywood, I went to the Starwood to see Judas Priest. I was overwhelmed: British rock stars who flew all the way to Hollywood with their equipment and leather pants. And I was seeing them. I almost lost my mind when they played “Hell Bent for Leather.” They played the heaviest music I’d ever heard, and I imagined that they must get to bang a million chicks. Little did I know.

Unlike U.S. 101, Suite 19 played original tunes. My girlfriend, a cheerleader named Vicki Frontiere (her mother, Georgia, owned the Rams and her grandmother, Lucia Pamela, recorded an infamous album about life in outer space), had told me they were looking for a drummer. We were a perfect match: three longhaired dudes who had all failed out of high school and were going to continuation school, blowing off classes to rock out on crazy Eddie Van Halen–influenced shit. I was seventeen years old, and I couldn’t believe I was in this killer power trio.

At the time, I noticed that there were posters all over the Starwood for a band called London. A few weeks after our gig, I went to watch London play and, man, those guys were cooler than fucking Judas Priest. They looked like chicks, like the New York Dolls or something, with crazy fucking polka dots. I was just some emaciated, scraggly Alice Cooper clone with leopard-skin spandex stretched tight over my chicken legs. But they were fucking rad, and attracted tons of hot chicks. When I saw Nikki swinging his bass around on stage, I thought, “What kind of dog is that?” He had fucking crazy hair that came down to his cheekbones like some kind of expensive Beverly Hills puppy that had gone stray and fallen on hard times.

Suite 19 collapsed after we ran out of Eddie Van Halen guitar licks to copy. I played briefly with another band but that fell apart after I started dating the singer’s sister. Her name was Jessica, and I thought she was sexy because she was a small part-Mexican girl with natural little titties, a funny smile, and fat puffy cheeks. The first time we hooked up, I took her back to my van and, within minutes, started going down on her. She banged her fist on the wall and screamed, “Oh my God! I’m going to come!” I started licking her harder, and then all of a sudden she roared like some kind of desperate mountain lion and her pussy exploded. Water shot out everywhere. She was coming like a spilled tanker, and it was the coolest fucking thing I had ever seen in my life. I just thought, “Oh my God, I love this girl. This is the one!”