The Dirt (11 page)

Every day after rehearsal, I would pick her up in my van, we’d park somewhere quiet, and she’d squirt her shit everywhere. I loved to just sit there and let her cum on me. Eventually, however, my van started to stink. I drove my mom to the store one afternoon, and she kept asking what the smell was. I had to pretend like I didn’t know.

Vince later nicknamed her Bullwinkle, because he said she had a face like a moose. And maybe she did, but I didn’t care. She was opening crazy sexual doors for me. She was my first real girlfriend, and I thought that all girls came like that when they got excited. Once I discovered that I was wrong, it was hard to break up with her.

(The only other girl I ever met who could do that was the friend of a six-foot, part-Indian porn star named Debi Diamond. Years later, when Bullwinkle was just a soggy memory, I was working with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails at A&M Studios. It was his bassist Danny Lohner’s birthday, so I brought Debi and her friend over as a birthday present. After shooting grapes out of her pussy to entertain us, Debi’s friend sat on the piano while Debi ate her out. All of a sudden the girl threw her head back, moaned, and shot a stream six feet through the air, right into a fruit bowl at the other end of the room.)

So, as I was fucking Bullwinkle and looking for another band, Suite 19’s guitarist, Greg Leon, started jamming with Nikki, who had left London and was trying to put a new group together. Nikki had seen Suite 19 play that night at the Starwood and liked my style. Greg gave him my number and I went to meet him at the Denny’s at Burbank Boulevard and Lankersham in North Hollywood. I was so nervous because I was a little punk-ass kid. In my mind, because Nikki could sell out weekends at the Starwood and the Whisky, that made him a huge rock god. When he sat down across from me, I grew even more intimidated because I couldn’t see who I was talking to behind the spiky black hair. I was like, “Where is this guy?” I wanted to order him dog biscuits, but I didn’t know if he had a sense of humor. I still don’t know.

fig. 3

fig. 4

After lunch, we went to this little shitshack house that was barely standing in North Hollywood. He was freeloading off some girl named Laura Bell, a drummer in a band called the Orchids who he had met through Kim Fowley. He played me a bunch of demos he’d been working on and, instinctively, I began playing the drums on the table, just like I used to in the kitchen when I was a kid. Our energy was the same, and we instantly hit it off. It was clear that we were going to do something together really quickly. Nikki was a driven dude, and I had that same obsession. We wanted to blow up the scene, rule the Strip, and fight or fuck anything that moved.

A couple days later I drove my drum set to Nikki’s and we started jamming, just bass and drums, on the warped floor in the front room of his house. The room served as a kitchen, living room, dining room, rehearsal space, and office, with a closet that doubled as Nikki’s bedroom. Every few minutes during rehearsal, Nikki would pick up the telephone, dial a number, and try to sell somebody lightbulbs. That was his job.

The wood on the walls of the house was rotted and split, and bugs would come crawling out and attack whatever food we left laying out. If you made a sandwich, you had to keep it in your hands the whole time, otherwise some insect tribe would devour it. I was psyched to be in another band with Greg Leon, but fucking Nikki threw Greg out. Greg was a great guitarist—him and Eddie Van Halen were probably the best players on the scene—but he was a very regular guy, and Nikki didn’t like that. He said that Greg didn’t have the edge that the New York Dolls and the Stooges did. He wanted everybody to look and think exactly like he did.

We found a replacement guitar player, Robin, through an ad in
The Recycler
. Robin was pretty talented, but he was a pansy and everyone knew it. He tucked his shirt into his pants, washed his hands before touching his guitar, warmed up by playing scales, and, in general, acted as if he’d actually gone to college for a guitar degree. All he had going for him was cool hair.

We continued to look through
The Recycler
, hoping to find a second guitarist who was an ugly and crazy enough son-of-a-bitch to counterbalance Robin. One day I found the right ad: “Loud, rude, and aggressive guitarist available.” I called and left my number for the dude, and a week later there was a timid knocking on Nikki’s front door.

We opened the door, and there was this little troll standing outside with black hair down to his ass and high-stacked platform shoes with practically a whole roll of duct tape wrapped around them to hold them together. He looked like a flat-broke, painfully shy, freaky-looking relative of Cousin Itt. I was laughing so hard, I called to Nikki, “Come here! You gotta check this dude out!” When Nikki and him were standing there face-to-face, it was like the Addams Family meets Scooby Doo. Nikki pulled me aside, excited. “I can’t believe it!” he said. “Here’s another one like us!”

Trailing behind Cousin Itt, carrying a Marshall stack, was a little dude named John Crouch, or Stick, a tag-along whose chief value in life seemed to be the fact that he owned a car, a little Mazda that on this wet spring day had a speaker cabinet sticking out of one window and a guitar neck out the other. (To be fair to Stick, he also had a talent for fetching burritos.)

We set up Mick’s equipment, and Nikki showed him the opening riff of “Stick to Your Guns.” Mick watched intensely, slouching and rubbing his anxious hands together like a praying mantis, then grabbed his guitar and played the shit out of it, making the riff so distorted and insane that we couldn’t even recognize it anymore. I didn’t actually know how to judge whether someone was a good guitarist or not. I was more impressed with the sheer volume of his playing than anything else. And I liked his trippy look and sound: It was as if he’d come from another planet populated by a species so sonically advanced that they didn’t need to take baths.

When he was through, Cousin Itt turned to me, beady eyes glowing through his tangle of hair, and spoke: “Let’s go get some schnapps.” We picked up a gallon of schnapps at the liquor store, got plastered, and jammed for an hour. Then, Cousin Itt spoke again. He pulled Nikki and I aside and muttered something about Robin. Then he turned to Robin and told him, like a cranky old man, “You’re out of here. There’s only one guitar player in my band, and that’s me.” We didn’t even need to discuss whether Mick was right for the band or not: The dude was already in.

Robin looked at Nikki, then at me, and neither of us spoke a word in his defense. His face grew cloudy, then red, as he dropped his guitar and burst into tears. He really was a pansy.

After Robin took his shit home, Nikki dyed my hair black so that it would match his and Mick’s. And they encouraged me to get my first tattoo: Mighty Mouse, my all-time fucking favorite cartoon hero. He reminded me of myself: He’s little and I’m skinny, we’re both always trying to save the day, and we both always get the girl in the end. I had the artist design a tattoo of Mighty Mouse crashing through a bass drum with sticks in his hands.

Nikki, Mick, and I started rehearsing every day, and it was amazing how many new songs Nikki kept coming up with. Afterward, we’d hang out at the Starwood like we were already rock stars. All we were missing was a singer.

We auditioned a round, dumb fellow named O’Dean, who sang in a voice somewhere between the Cult and the Scorpions. He was an amazing singer, but Nikki didn’t like him because he didn’t sound like Brian Connolly from the Sweet. O’Dean’s other problem was that he was very uptight about this pair of ultraclean white gloves he always wore. He was under the impression that the gloves constituted having a look, and we tried not to say anything to the contrary because he was all we had.

We scammed our way into a studio to record some of Nikki’s songs: “Stick to Your Guns,” “Toast of the Town,” “Nobody Knows What It’s Like to Be Lonely,” and a Raspberries tune, “Tonight.” They only gave us two hours, so when we ran out of time, Nikki made me go fuck the engineer. Her teeth stuck out the side of her head like the air spout in a beach ball, but she was nice and had a decent body. She took me back to her place and she had the fucking coolest bed. It had a mosquito net around it, and I had never experienced anything like that. I was a little slut back then, trying to taste all the flavors, so I told her, “Wow, I’d love to fuck in that thing.” We had a good time, and she made sure we got free studio time until we wore out our welcome.

During the last song we recorded for our demo, “Toast of the Town,” O’Dean refused to take off his gloves to clap in the background. He thought that removing his gloves would ruin his mystique, despite the fact that the only mystique he had was the mystery of how he had such a good a voice. Nikki was enraged when O’Dean wouldn’t clap like the Sweet did in “Ballroom Blitz,” and Mick hated him anyway because he thought he was a fat fuck, a shitty singer, and a closet spiritualist.

“I don’t like that guy,” Mick kept muttering during rehearsals. “He’s a hippie. And I hate hippies.”

I told Nikki, “Mick doesn’t think O’Dean’s God.”

“Fuck no,” Mick said. “I want that skinny blond fucker I saw at the Starwood the other night in that band Rock Candy.”

“You mean Vince?!” I asked.

“Hell yeah, I mean Vince.” Cousin Itt scowled at me. “That’s the guy. I don’t even care if he can sing or not. Did you see what he was doing with that crowd? Did you see what he was doing to those girls and the way he carried himself onstage?”

“I went to school with that fucker,” I told him. “Girls love him.”

I had given Vince my number at his show, but he never called. After we fired O’Dean, I dropped by Vince’s house, gave him a demo tape, and begged him to audition with us. We waited for weeks for Vince to call or come by, but he never did. Finally, I broke down and called him again.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” Vince said. “I accidentally washed my jeans with your number in them and couldn’t get ahold of you.”

“Listen,” I told him. “This is your last chance, dude. You’ve got to check out this band I’m in. The stuff we’re working on will blow your mind. Nikki Sixx is in the band, and we’ve got this rad guitar player who looks like Cousin Itt from
The Addams Family
.”