The Dirt (66 page)

Donna encouraged me to follow through with my plan of making peace with my father. His death was not a setback, I finally decided, but an advantage, because that way he couldn’t talk back to me. So we flew to San Jose and visited his grave. Donna brought along a video camera and filmed me walking through the cemetery, finding his tombstone, and spitting on it. “Fuck you,” I yelled at him. “You fucking walk out on me when I’m three. Don’t even say good-bye. Then you come back with a sled, like that’s going to make everything okay. You don’t even stick around to see me. Why’d you even bother?”

I sat there for an hour, blaming him for my entire fucked-up life. When I rewound everything—running away from my mother, stealing a homeless girl’s clothes, fighting with the cops outside the Whisky, overdosing at the Franklin—all that misanthropy and self-destruction came down to the same thing, a massive chip I had been carrying on my shoulder my whole life because my father had abandoned me. Not only had he left me at three, but he had pushed me away when I reached out to him for help sixteen years later.

When I returned home, we were on the verge of leaving for the
Generation Swine
tour. I decided to exorcise my feelings for my father once and for all on stage. I composed a bass piece with Chris Vrenna of Nine Inch Nails in which I soloed over all these different textures and sound-scapes while a series of slides flashed in the background. The images were of an embryo, a child being born, a cute baby photo of myself, and a picture of me when I was a happy little kid in a Halloween mask. Then the music darkened and a series of words flashed across two forty-inch-wide screens: “abandonment,” “vacant,” “heroin,” “destruction.” Then the music stopped and a big question mark appeared, as if to say “Why me?” or “What next?” To close the piece, I played dark ambient noise and short minor-key melodies on the bass as the film Donna and I had made at my father’s graveside played in the background. The first night I performed the solo, my eyes brimmed with tears. Afterward, fans backstage said that they had cried too because they had also been abandoned by their fathers. Of course, other people came up and just said I was a freak and should deal with my issues. But that was my way of dealing with them.

It was through Randy that I found out about my full sister, Lisa. My mother had always told me that Lisa had left home and did not want anyone in the family to find or visit her, so I hadn’t thought much about her. Randy couldn’t believe it when I told him: Lisa wasn’t even capable of making a decision like that. She had Down’s syndrome, and had been living in a home somewhere—he wasn’t sure where exactly—for over thirty years. She was blind, mute, and unable to walk, put on her clothes, or feed herself. As I ran around the world worrying about my band and what drugs I could put in my system, she had been sitting all that time in a wheelchair in some rest home for invalids. I swore to track her down when the
Generation Swine
tour ended and do everything in my power to make sure she had the best care money could buy.

I couldn’t understand why my mother never bothered to tell the truth. My whole life I’d been blowing around the world like a sapling without roots. My parents were lost to me, and, as for my children, every day I was fighting to keep them as Brandi vilified me in court (which wasn’t a difficult feat considering my past). Now, three decades too late, I finally learned that there were others out there like me.

Eight years of sobriety, six years of marriage, and the responsibility required to raise three children had cleared my head for the first time. And as I looked around, I had a revelation: my life sucked. I became angrier than ever and I wanted to start getting high again, but we had a rule on the tour that each time someone was caught drunk or high, he had to pay twenty-five thousand dollars. We wanted to be at the top of our game live, not vomiting and passing out on the side of the stage. To make sure no one cheated, we had a guy on the road administering random urine tests. Vince, of course, was busted within the first two weeks.

The sober
Swine
tour was supposed to be our big reunion. The world was supposed to rise up and chant “Mötley Crüe” just because Vince was back. But the truth was that we still weren’t Mötley Crüe. Sure, all the members were there. But the tour was a mess. With click tracks and backing tapes and racks of effects attempting to imitate the studio experimentation of the album, we were more a computer than a band on stage. When we played “Live Wire,” I felt a rush of excitement because the song was organic. When we played “Find Myself,” it felt as cold as karaoke. Though Vince was back in the band singing, I could tell he wasn’t happy.

Part of the problem was that, as Kovac had predicted, Elektra was shafting us on publicity, promotion, and marketing. And with our morale as low as it was—Tommy wanting to modernize, Mick still pissed because we had lost faith in him, Vince in financial hell, and all my family problems—it wasn’t going to be very hard for Elektra to lay on the extra straw to break Mötley’s back. And we couldn’t let that happen because, if we broke up, we’d owe them twelve million dollars. If we stayed together, they’d owe us twelve million.

Elektra soon stopped paying us, hoping to drive us further into debt and desperation. They tried to get to us through our wives and lawyers, planting insecurities about the band’s future. They even tried to get at us through Pamela’s manager, telling her that Tommy was the star of Mötley Crüe and would be better off on his own. They came at us from every angle. So we went to war: As far as we were concerned, the
Generation Swine
tour was not just an attempt to promote an album and a band, but a way to get the label to pay attention to us, to give us our money and release us from our contract so we could be free to do what we wanted.

So, from the stage, I had the audience chant, “Fuck Elektra.” I arranged for an interview in
Spin
magazine for the sole reason of having the opportunity to call Sylvia Rhone a “cunt” in print. I was determined to be the most painful thorn in her side. After all, this was a label that made all its money from rock and roll (from us, from Metallica, from AC/DC) but had now disavowed it, a label so stupid that as they were squeezing us they were also dropping an English group called the Prodigy because they thought the band had no future. Less than a year later, the Prodigy signed a multimillion-dollar deal with Maverick Records and became the first techno band to ever have a number one record in America.

My plan was to make Elektra so sick of us that they’d do anything to let us go. Now, I realize that probably wasn’t the best tactic. I committed the mistake of making it personal with Sylvia, so that she felt she was being abused and taken advantage of. And that led her to think that I was mean and deserved everything I got, so she tightened the screws on us further, without a thought for the fact that we had children and homes, and we were all now for the first time in our lives having trouble paying for them. It was a dark period. I still didn’t know that much about the business, how it worked, and how deep and high up the chains of command went. I’d never been on the wrong side of the record label before or imagined that Mötley Crüe would be caught between the cogs of a machine that wanted to crush it.

At the same time, I was losing my grip on what Mötley represented. I was so angry at my father and my ex-wife and my record label that my dark, demented side took over. For the
Swine
show, Tommy had found some bootleg footage of people committing suicide and getting burned to death. It was gruesome stuff, and the idea was to screen these atrocities during our antisuicide song, “Flush,” to show the audience that, no matter how miserable they were, they still had it pretty good. But when I looked out at the audience during the song, they all looked terrified. I remembered too late that kids don’t go to a Mötley Crüe concert to think about their own mortality; they go to a Mötley Crüe concert to hopefully get a blow job in the backseat of a car.

And then, when our morale couldn’t have been any lower and our relationship with Elektra couldn’t have gotten any worse, Vince decided to quit the band again.

I
was fed up with Tommy, who had been a dick to me ever since I rejoined the band, and I was fed up with these stupid rules. All of a sudden, we went from the world’s most decadent, party-mad band to the world’s strictest, most sober band. We tried to be sober on the
Feelgood
tour and it didn’t work then. So I didn’t see any reason why it was going to work now. I like to have a cocktail every now and then, and I don’t like them to cost twenty-five thousand dollars each.

A buddy of mine owned a big Gulfstream jet and was nice enough to fly us to our show in San Francisco. Afterward, he was going to take us to our next stop: Boise, Idaho. We were getting close to the end of the West Coast leg of the tour, and I was thinking of quitting because I had a lot more fun on my own than playing a set that consisted almost completely of new electronica grunge songs with the sobo-police and Tommy Anderson Lee. I didn’t rejoin the band to be miserable; that’s not what Kovac had promised when he begged and pleaded and wheedled. So after the show, I had a drink, went to a strip club, and took a taxi home. Evidently, Nikki ended up in the exact same taxi the next day, heard from the driver I’d been drinking, and called my room demanding twenty-five thousand dollars. I told him that I wasn’t going to give him money every time he opened his mouth. Next thing I knew, a guy with a piss test was knocking on my hotel room door. I told him to fuck off, or I’d kick his ass.

The band was meeting in the lobby at 4
P.M.
that afternoon to head to Boise, so I went downstairs and told Tommy and Mick that I was sick of this bullshit and planning to bail out at the end of the West Coast tour. Nikki was standing with Donna and his grandfather by the front desk, so I walked over to break the news to him. “I quit,” I said. “I can’t fucking do this shit anymore.”

Nikki wheeled around and said, “Why? Because you can’t be honest?”

He made me change my mind. Instead of quitting during the tour break, I was going to quit right then. “Fuck you, I’m out of here,” I snapped. “It’s been fun getting to know you again. Have a nice trip home.”

He handed his jacket to his wife, gave his bag to his grandfather, turned to me, and said calmly, “Hey, Vince, if you’re going to leave, why don’t you take this on your trip?” Then he nailed me in the jaw with an uppercut. I couldn’t believe it: This was a reaction I expected from Tommy, not Nikki. I think he had built up a lot of anger over the course of the tour between his feud with Sylvia Rhone, the father issues he was trying to work out onstage, and the ten-million-dollar lawsuit from his ex. In that moment, he took it all out on me. He threw me down on the ground in an adrenaline rage, grabbed my neck, and dug his fingernails in, screaming that he was going to rip out my vocal cords while our tour manager, Nick Cua, looked on in horror.

I’m a bigger guy than Nikki and in much better shape, so I socked him square in the face and threw him off. I walked out of the revolving doors and went to my pilot friend’s hotel a couple blocks away.

“Let’s go back to L.A.,” I told him.

We took a cab to the airport and found the whole band in the waiting area, assuming that somehow everything was okay, that we had gotten the anger out of our system and were going to press on to Boise. The pilot and I walked past them; Nikki, Mick, and Tommy picked up their bags to follow. “Wait right here,” I told them. Then I boarded the plane, shut the door, sat down next to the window, and flipped them off. It was my greatest performance on the whole tour.

Predictably, Nick Cua came knocking on the door. I let him in.

“Is there any way we can work this out?” he asked.

“No,” I told him. “Go do whatever you want to do. Go to Boise. Go back to L.A. I don’t care. I’m going home.”

Within an hour, I was at the Peninsula Hotel having drinks. Then I went home, grabbed Heidi, threw her onto the bed, fucked her good, and went to sleep with the satisfaction of knowing that the band was still at the airport.