The Dirt (56 page)

The first thing that happened when we arrived at Warners was that they wouldn’t let Corabi up to Morris’s office. They made him wait outside in the lobby with Kovac’s secretary.

The office probably cost as much as my home. It was covered with teakwood and fine art, and there was a piano from the 1800s sitting polished and proud in the corner. Morris sat in a plush velvet couch in front of a teakwood table, smoking a cigar that cost who knows how many hundreds of dollars. We walked in and sat across from him. There were four chairs set up for us: one for Tommy, one for me, one for Kovac, and one empty one. Morris was a very smart and subtle man.

He leaned back into the velvet, looking very bald, round, and rich, then dropped his weight forward and fixed us with his eyes. “So,” he began, exhaling a cloud of poisonous cigar gas. “We were thinking about what we should do.”

He paused and looked at the end of his cigar, as if debating whether to relight it or not. We sat there, unsure if we had just been asked a question we were supposed to respond to. Then he continued: “And what we should do is get rid of the guy who’s not a star.”

He then went on to tell us about all the times he had given bands in our same situation ideas that had turned into hits. “I’ll tell you what. Call the old guy. Bring him back. Everyone will love that. We’ll put out a live record and get you guys on the road. Afterward, we’ll set you up for a new studio album.” He didn’t even have the decency to mention John or Vince by their names.

When we disagreed and tried to explain all the reasons why Vince was holding us back and how Corabi was much more in step with what was going on in rock music now, he cut us off. “We are done with this,” he said curtly. “This is bullshit.”

I was about to lose it. I stood up and was beginning my usual “Fuck you, we don’t need you” rant when Morris’s receptionist announced that Sylvia Rhone was outside. Rhone had taken Bob Krasnow’s place as head of Elektra Records. She was the highest-ranking female in the record business and, from what we could tell, did not necessarily comprehend the deep philosophical and humanistic implications of songs like “Girls, Girls, Girls.”

But, to our surprise, she stuck up for us. “They don’t need Vince, Doug,” she said. “They are great just as they are. They are very current with John. John is very current.”

“Yeah, yeah,” we all began to chime in. “John has a more organic voice. What we did in the eighties was the eighties, but this is the nineties. It’s a different time.”

“Absolutely,” Rhone parroted. “It’s a different time.”

Morris stubbed out his cigar and looked at Sylvia. “Do you really think so?”

“Absolutely,” she said, even more convincingly.

“Well, then,” he said. “I agree with Sylvia.”

I looked at Kovac excitedly. A meeting that had begun as a disaster was turning into a triumph. But Kovac didn’t share my enthusiasm. His face looked clouded and concerned, a semaphore flashing a warning back at me: “I … smell … a … rat.”

When we left the meeting, Kovac and I followed Sylvia down the hall and cornered her.

“Do you really believe this?” Kovac asked her. “Because if you put out this next Mötley record, you know that our contract obligates you to put a lot of label resources into promoting and marketing it. I think you know exactly how much money it’s going to require. So I want to make sure this is serious.”

Rhone kept nodding her head, saying, “Yeah, baby. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. We’ll do it.” It didn’t sound very convincing, especially when she kept looking at her watch. Finally, she cut him off: “Don’t worry, it’s in good hands,” she said. “Now I have to go. I’m late for a meeting.”

“Okay,” Kovac said, and we turned around, walked down the hall toward the exit, looked at each other, and both spoke the same words at the same time: “We’re fucked.”

In the lobby, Corabi was hunched in his chair, wringing his hands and practically dripping with sweat. I smiled weakly at him and said, “You’re in.”

He grinned weakly back, and we all walked outside and grabbed a cab. Kovac took the front seat and turned back to Corabi angrily: “You are not a star,” he told him. “And we are in fucking hell. You’ve got to get it together! The rest of you guys have got to make the greatest album of your entire lives right now, because if you don’t, we are dead in the water. There is no way that woman is going to promote this record. We are a tax write-off, a loss. I can smell it. She set us up.”

Doug Morris had reached out a hand to save us from drowning, and Sylvia Rhone had walked right in, kicked his hand away, and sent us tumbling back into the depths. In the weeks that followed, we kept asking her for money to start the new record. She’d give us a little and we’d start recording. But the money would suddenly dry up and we’d have to stop. It seemed like she was trying to squeeze and demoralize us, probably because she had inherited a contract from her predecessor that required her to pay huge sums to a band that, as far as she was concerned, was washed up. If we broke up, then our contract was void and the money could be redirected toward the singers and bands she supported.

What came next was the sound of a lot of pride being swallowed. Fat from the success of
Dr. Feelgood
, and with prodding from my wife Brandi (whose materialism seemed to increase in direct proportion to the waning of our love), I had bought a full-on drug-dealer mansion. My overhead expenses were forty thousand dollars a month. That’s how much it cost just to wake up and go to sleep every day between my house payments and utilities bills. It cost twenty-five hundred dollars in electricity just to cool the house each month, plus I’d insist on keeping my pool heated to ninety-five degrees year-round. When Tommy and I found ourselves paying for the album out of our own pockets (Mick was long since broke thanks to Emi), those things started to matter. At the same time, my third child was being born—every time Brandi and I came close to separating, another child would pop out to keep us together—and Vince and Sharise’s only daughter, Skylar, was dying. I suddenly became aware that everything in life didn’t always turn out okay. Life was full of traps, and my future, my happiness, and Mötley Crüe were all caught fast in them.

Tommy and I decided to coproduce the album at his house with a guy named Scott Humphrey, who had done some engineering work with Bob Rock on
Feelgood
. What we needed was someone to tell us we were fooling ourselves trying to make some sort of electro-grunge record with Corabi. But that someone wasn’t Scott Humphrey. An engineer very skilled at a computer studio program called Pro-Tools, Humphrey had never produced a band before. He would sit me down and say, “You wrote all the great Mötley Crüe songs. I don’t want Tommy writing songs. He thinks he can write, but all he does is listen to whoever is in that week and copy them. His lyrics have nothing to do with what Mötley Crüe is all about.”

Then Scott would pull Tommy aside and whisper in his ear: “Nikki is outdated. He’s still stuck in the ’80s. You need to be doing the songwriting. You need to be using drum loops and techno beats and bringing the music up-to-date. You know what’s going on.”

He was completely incapable of dealing with these two giant egos that were Tommy and me. Whoever was in the room, that’s whose ass he’d kiss. Except for Mick, who had no ego. Scott started convincing us that Mick was a bad guitarist. When Mick would leave, Scott would pull me aside and make me play something on guitar. Then he’d make a loop of it, put it through some noise filters, and replace Mick’s playing. So for the first time in our careers, we started to turn against Mick, to think that he was actually the one holding us back because he thought that the blues and classic rock were the only genres of music that mattered.

Pretty soon, Mötley Crüe was a wildly schizophrenic beast, making some monstrosity that sounded like the Beatles mixed with all these fifth and third Alice in Chains harmonies. We had no idea what we were doing. I guess that’s why we decided to call the album, our ninth,
Personality #9
. (Though the gonzo writer Hunter S. Thompson later inspired us to change it to G
eneration Swine
.)

Eventually, we moved into my drug-dealer mansion. We set up the drums in my oak-walled office, the mixing desk in the bathroom, and the Marshall stacks along the marble hallways while my three children terrorized us and Brandi screamed at me with the regularity of an alarm clock with a snooze button. I’d keep turning her off, but ten minutes later she’d be blaring in my ear again.

In the meantime, Tommy and I continued to work in two completely separate directions; Mick was being brainwashed into believing that he had nothing to contribute to the band; and Corabi was being treated like a criminal who had stolen our careers. Every day, we’d take all our frustrations out on him: we’d tell him that he needed to cut his hair or that he needed to sing in a completely different style. And every week we’d change our minds about everything. We were trying too hard to make a great album, but we had no idea what great was supposed to be anymore because we were too scared to be ourselves.

Finally, one day, Corabi told us that he’d had enough. “I’m not a singer,” he complained. “I’m a guitar player. I can’t do this anymore.”

So now we had two guitar players and no singer. We were completely turned around. And that’s when Kovac, lurking quietly in the background, sprang on us.

I
was so fucking dead set against meeting with Vince when Kovac brought it up. And so was fucking Nikki, who, little punk that he is, walked into the meeting wearing a T-shirt that had “John” written in big motherfucking letters on it.

But the lawyers and managers tricked us, and told us that if we just met with Vince, he’d drop the lawsuit. They set up a secret meeting in a suite at the Hyatt off the 405 freeway. Nikki and I walked in with two big-ass attorneys and found Vince chilling in an armchair with his manager and two other attorneys. It was like fucking millionaire divorce court or something. Their plan was not only for Vince to end the lawsuit, but for all of us to start recording together and being a band again. All these greasy fucking people wanted their money, and they didn’t give a shit about us or our happiness. It was like Mötley plus Vince equals cash; Mötley minus Vince equals no cash.

Vince had grown so fucking big since I last saw him that he looked like Roseanne Barr or something. His head was the size of a balloon and folds of fat were billowing over his watch. He was wearing blue slacks with a short-sleeved dress shirt tucked in, and his body was a weird yellowy shade of brown that was probably a combination of liver problems from alcohol and sunburn from lazing around all day in Hawaii. It was about 4
P.M.
, and I was willing to bet my fucking tits that he was plastered. I don’t think he really wanted to see us either, but he was practically broke between his daughter’s death, his leaving his deal with Warner Bros., the breakup of his solo band, his divorce, and the millions of dollars he owed on his Simi Valley home after Sharise practically destroyed the place with parties.

“I don’t want anything to do with this guy,” Nikki whispered to me. “If you want to know what uncool is, all you have to do is look at him.”

Nikki and I tried to be nice. I said something like, “Good to finally see you again, dude,” which I didn’t mean. And when he piped off like only Vince can and said something snide like, “Sure you are, buddy,” Nikki and I hit the roof.

“Fuck you, we’re out of here,” Nikki said, and grabbed my arm. All the fucking attorneys reached for us with their greasy little hands like we were million-dollar checks walking into an incinerator. “No!” they yelled. “It took too long to get you guys together.”

“I’m going,” Nikki snapped at them. “I don’t need this fat piece of shit who looks like some reject from a Florida retirement community.”

Two attorneys grabbed Nikki and brought him in another room to calm down, while the other two worked on Vince. It was like we were marionettes that had somehow rebelled and started thinking for themselves. They wanted us to be good marionettes and let them pull all the right strings.