Authors: Tommy Lee
I suppose if I wasn’t enterprising, I never would have pulled over that Thursday night on Sunset Boulevard. It was early evening, and I was cruising Sunset hoping to get a bite to eat at a coffee shop called Ben Frank’s, which was always packed with young rockers being served by seventy-year-old waitresses who had been working there since the Lana Turner days of Hollywood, when I noticed hundreds of kids trying to get into a concert at the Whisky. I looked up at the marquee to see who was playing, and it read, “Mötley Crüe Sold Out.” That same passion and obsession that led me to go to the radio convention at Loyola tugged on me, urging me to pull over when my stomach was growling with hunger. In the front window of a record store on the corner, Licorice Pizza, I saw a huge display featuring four glam-looking, leather-clad, androgynous refugees from the New York Dolls. I also noticed that they had put out an album on their own label, Leathür. For a band that didn’t even have a record deal to be creating that kind of hysteria at the Whisky was pretty rare. I had to see them.
I walked up to the front door, pulled out my Elektra business card, and bluffed my way in, telling them I was an A&R man for the label. I was always trying to get the label to sign the bands I was into, but they never listened to me. I gave them “I Love Rock and Roll,” by Joan Jett, which I found on the B-side of a European single; “Tainted Love,” by Soft Cell; the Human League; and even the Go-Go’s. And they passed on all of them. I was too shy to rub it in their faces, though. I felt lucky to even be working for a record label in Los Angeles at age twenty.
Inside the club, five hundred teenagers—the club’s capacity—were going berserk for this Mötley Crüe band. And they looked amazing. Nikki was so intense it seemed like he would be in the streets killing somebody if he wasn’t playing bass. He hit the strings so hard that he kept splitting the skin between his fingers. Watching him throttle that thing, with blood flying off his fingers, the strings seemed like razor blades.
Vince was one of the best-looking and most charismatic singers I had ever seen: women’s legs spread open just watching him sing. He was the exact opposite of the guitarist: looking at him was like seeing Satan reincarnated, though he turned out to be the nicest of the bunch (when he wasn’t drinking). Tommy looked like an overexcited kid, but at the same time he seemed like the only natural-born musician in the band. He was a high-quality drummer, a good showman, and constantly in motion. He seemed like the linchpin that held the whole thing together.
After the show, I found their manager and told him that I wanted to bring the band into a meeting at Elektra. To my surprise, he completely brushed me aside. He told me instead to talk to Greenworld, a small local distributor that was handling their album. By coincidence, there was a music trade show in town and Greenworld had a booth there. I talked to a man named Allen Niven, who put me back in touch with the band’s strange manager, an overly serious building contractor named Allan Coffman.
Before I got too serious with Mötley Crüe, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t overstepping my bounds at Elektra. I asked the A&R department if I could sign the band, and they laughed in my face. But I was persistent. I put together a file with letters from the A&R department rejecting all the bands I had brought to them that went on to have hits at other labels. At the urging of my boss in the sales department, I presented the letters to Joe Smith, the chairman of Elektra, who, to my surprise, rose to the challenge. “Okay, wise guy,” he told me. “You think you can do this? Fine. Then let’s sign this band and see how good you really are.”
I was the laughingstock of Hollywood for courting these guys. The music that was popular at the time was British new wave—Haircut 100, A Flock of Seagulls, Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Hipper kids were into Elvis Costello, the Clash, and other bands riding the tail end of the punk movement. Everyone kept laughing at me for trying to sign a metal band. They’d come up to me at work and say, “What are you thinking? This is not going to get played on the radio. You can’t reinvent Kiss.” But I believed in Mötley Crüe because that crowd at the Whisky believed in Mötley Crüe. You don’t need ears to be a talent scout; you need eyes.
So, on my tiny sales-department-assistant expense account, I began wining and dining the Crüe, who I think only came along for the free food. During each meal, Tommy fidgeted madly—just like onstage, he couldn’t keep still; Mick became more demonic with each drink, until he started hallucinating and seeing Purple People Eaters; and Vince usually fucked the waitress in the bathroom. Nikki was the only one who took the meetings seriously: He had mapped out each step for the band’s future in his head. He knew that the kids were sick of new wave, that they were angry at punk for having sold out, and that they were bored to death with Fleetwood Mac and Foreigner and light FM pop. He wanted to expand those five hundred kids at the Whisky into a national rock-and-roll revolution that Mötley Crüe was going to lead. And he did. But not without a lot of struggling.
When we were finally ready to sign a deal, Virgin Records showed up out of the blue. They met with the band and brought a briefcase filled with ten thousand dollars in cash to dangle in front of their starving faces. Virgin at that time didn’t have a label or distribution deal in America. They operated out of England and they tried to use that to seduce Mötley Crüe, telling them that they could be like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin and break into America by getting popular in England first. I think that was a romantic notion to the band—that and the aphrodisiac of a ten-thousand-dollar cash advance on a hundred-thousand-dollar deal.
In the end, although Virgin offered about twenty-five thousand dollars more than us, the band decided that it would be smarter for a Los Angeles rock band to sign with a Los Angeles rock label (none of us knew that Elektra would soon be relocating its offices to Manhattan). After we hammered out our final points and agreed to sign the deal, Coffman, the band, some Elektra staffers, and I celebrated at Casa Cugats, a Mexican restaurant owned by the rumba king Xavier Cugat. Mötley Crüe didn’t need much to start a party back then, so things got wild pretty quickly.
The odd thing, though, is that I expected crazy antics from the band, not from their uptight manager. However, he got so drunk that he ended up speaking Vietnamese as if he were a soldier back in Nam. He became convinced that there were gooks hiding behind tables and storehouses of ammunition in the kitchen. He downed another shot, then ran into the bathroom.
When he didn’t reappear after several minutes, Mick asked me to check on him. I had always thought of Coffman as a by-the-book kind of guy who served as baby-sitter for this wild band, so it came as a shock when I found him in the process of ripping a pay phone out of the bathroom wall. I pulled him away and asked someone in Elektra’s press department to keep an eye on the band and pick up the tab while I drove Coffman home in my beat-up company car.
As we were cruising north on La Cienega, he kept trying to rip the handle off the car door. Just as we reached the center divide at Santa Monica Boulevard, he pushed the door open and rolled out of the car into the middle of the intersection. I looked back and saw him between traffic lanes, crawling on his belly like a soldier with a rifle. Cars were whizzing past him, beeping and yelling, and it seemed like only a matter of seconds before someone would squash him flat. I pulled over, ran back, and grabbed him. He started swinging at me and cursing as if I were a North Vietnamese soldier trying to capture him as a prisoner of war. I really thought that he might kill me, but through some sort of adrenaline kick I managed to bring him back into the car and to his hotel room.
By the time I got back to the restaurant, the party had moved elsewhere. A week later the names on the contract were finally inked, and the band insisted on making the record label pay for another party. So we piled into our company cars and took the band to Benihana on La Cienega. It began as a very civil dinner, with the chef showing off his knife tricks. The band ate some and drank a lot. Vince, of course, was drinking the heaviest. I noticed that his margarita glass was broken, so he ordered another one. When I looked at him again, the new glass was broken and he was insisting on a replacement. The perplexed waitress brought him yet another drink, examining the glass carefully to make sure there were no chips or cracks. As soon as she walked away, Vince put the glass to his mouth and bit into it, shattering the edge of the glass. “This guy is nuts,” I thought. “He could cut his tongue out or tear his lips to shreds.”
Vince stood up, signaled the waitress, and accused her of giving him broken glasses on purpose. She swore up and down that the glass was fine when she gave it to him. Then she turned to me for explanation. I didn’t want to get her or Vince in trouble: “Maybe the dishwasher is broken,” I offered weakly.
So she brought him another margarita and retreated to the corner with the manager to spy on Vince. Unaware that she was watching, Vince sunk his teeth into the glass again. Instantly, the manager ran over and tried to kick us out of the restaurant while the waitress called the police. I quickly settled the bill and broke the party up.
Most nights were like that with the band: either something was going to get broken or someone was going to pass out. Nothing was ever easy with them. The head of A&R at Elektra, Kenny Buttice, was furious that I had gone over his head and gotten permission from Joe Smith to sign the band. So he did everything he could to make my life difficult. We were originally just going to rerelease the
Too Fast for Love
album they had put out on their own, but Buttice convinced the label that the quality wasn’t up to radio standards and the only way to put it out would be to remix it.
I was against it and the band was nervous, but if a remix was what it took to make the band a priority at Elektra, we were willing to play along. When they chose Roy Thomas Baker to rework the record, I practically wet my pants. Here I was, at age twenty, meeting the eccentric British maverick who produced Queen, Foreigner, the Cars, Journey, and all these other amazing records. And though his last-minute mixing, phasing, and production tricks took away some of the raw charm of the original Mötley album, I learned a lot by watching him work and hearing his stories. After the band spent the day in the studio, he’d usually invite them up to his house, where they’d be snorting cocaine off his Plexiglas piano while he told them about the time Freddie Mercury wrote “Bohemian Rhapsody” at that very piano while getting a blow job.
RTB, as we called him, was a man who took great pleasure in throwing the perfect party. From Thursday night until Monday, there was a never-ending parade of interesting people, beautiful women, alcohol, and other party favors at his house. It was the ultimate producer’s pad up in the hills on Sunset Drive, from the remote-control settings on his bed to the thick shag carpeting. The sky was the limit there: twenty naked people packed into the Jacuzzi, food eaten off women’s bodies, and anything else you, I, or Caligula could imagine. Mötley Crüe and RTB were a perfect match.
I always felt out of place, like a kid from Chicago who had somehow been transported into this glamorous movie where I got to meet all my favorite rock stars—Elton John, Rod Stewart, and guys from Queen, Journey, and Cheap Trick. Some parties were so besotted that RTB would push these buttons and lock everybody in. That way, if anybody wanted to leave, they’d have to get clearance with a security guard who’d make sure they weren’t too drunk to drive. RTB was a smart guy. He knew that if he was going to facilitate this kind of mayhem, he needed to minimize the potential for accidents that he’d be held responsible for. And looking at the state some guests were in, he probably saved a lot of lives.
As we were finishing the remix of
Too Fast for Love
, Coffman suddenly decided to send the band on a tour of Canada, even though there was no record to promote yet. We protested and told him it was pointless, but Coffman was adamant.
We never understood why Coffman made the band tour Canada until the truth came out in a lawsuit later: He had sold a portion of his stake in the band to a Michigan kid named Bill Larson, who had pooled his parents’ life savings—about twenty-five thousand dollars—so that he could own five percent of Mötley Crüe Inc. In order for Coffman to collect the money, he had to send the band up north to tour. So the band arrived in Canada to embark on a miserable, disastrous road trip with a comanager they had never met or heard of before. There were bomb threats, border problems, fistfights, acid-addled hockey players, broken bones (mostly Coffman’s), and cops standing on the side of the stage at some shows to make sure the audience didn’t kill the band.
Soon afterward, Coffman vanished, along with Elektra’s entire advance and the poor Michigan kid’s money. Perhaps he left because the band had started asking too many questions about where all their money was going—money he probably felt like he deserved after mortgaging his house three times to pay for all the rental cars and hotel rooms and God-knows-what-else the band had damaged. Ultimately, the person who was hurt most was Bill Larson, whose father died of a heart attack because of the stress. Larson sued, though no one was ever able to find Coffman to serve the subpoena. From what I heard, Coffman’s wife divorced him, his kids stopped speaking to him, and he became a born-again Christian.
WHEN ELEKTRA RELEASED
Too Fast for Love
, it was a disaster. The priority for the label was an Australian band called Cold Chisel, and everybody in the promotions department was intent on making them the next big thing. I happened to be listening in on a conference call when I heard a regional promotions man say to the head of the radio department, “Listen, I’ve got a station in Denver and another in Colorado Springs that just added Mötley Crüe. They’re not interested in Cold Chisel, but I’ll keep working on them.”
“I don’t give a fuck about Mötley Crüe,” the radio department head yelled back. “They’re not a priority. I don’t want those adds. You tell those stations that if they add Mötley Crüe, they can go fuck themselves.”