The Dirt (16 page)

Nikki with Lita Ford

With each new gig, our stage setup looked better and better: Mick had a dozen lights he had bought from Don Dokken and a PA he had stolen from his old Top 40 band, White Horse. We had a dirty white bloodstained bedsheet that we stripped from Tommy’s bed and painted our name on in big black letters. Inspired by Queen, Tommy and Vince built a three-tiered drum riser: a frame of two-by-fours painted white with stretched black cloth over the top, and mounted with fifteen flashing lights and skulls and drumsticks. It weighed a ton and was a pain in the ass to assemble each show. We also made small Plexiglas boxes filled with lights that we would climb on, pose from, and leap off. The whole show was a hodgepodge of whatever looked cool and cheap to us. We painted the drumheads, stuck candelabras all over the stage, mounted voodoo heads on the ends of drumsticks, tied handkerchiefs on whatever we could, decorated our guitars with colored tape, wrapped telephone cords around ourselves, and used the most evil recordings we could find to pump up the crowd before our concerts.

When we sold out a series of shows at the Whisky, I was so ecstatic I called my grandparents and said, “You’re not going to believe it! We sold out three nights at the Whisky. We fucking made it.”

“Made what?” he asked. “Nobody even knows who you are.”

And he was right: We were selling out show after show, but no label would sign us. They told us our live show was too erratic and there was no way our music would ever get on the radio or make the pop charts. Heavy metal was dead, they kept telling us; new wave was all that mattered. Unless we sounded like the Go-Go’s or the Knack, they weren’t interested. We didn’t know about charts or radio program directors or new wave. All we knew about was raw fucking Marshall stacks of rock and roll blasting in our crotches and how much fucking blow, Percodan, quaaludes, and alcohol we could get for free.

The only reason I wanted a record deal was so that I could impress girls by telling them I had one. So we solved that problem by creating our own label, Leathür Records. We booked time in the cheapest studio we could find: a sixty-dollar-an-hour outhouse on a bad stretch of Olympic Avenue. Mick liked the place because it had a Trident board and really small rooms that he said were great for natural reverb. Mick fired the house engineer and brought in Michael Wagner, a jovial, cherubic German who used to be in the metal band Accept. Together, we spit out
Too Fast for Love
in three drunken days. When we couldn’t get anyone to even agree to distribute the album, Coffman did it himself, driving around in his rented Lincoln, trying to talk record stores into carrying a couple copies. Within four months, however, we had a distributor (Greenworld) and had sold twenty thousand albums, which wasn’t bad for a record that cost six thousand dollars to make.

We celebrated the album’s release with a party at the Troubadour, which was one of my favorite clubs because there was a guy there I really enjoyed beating up. He had long hair and idolized us, but he was a pest and suffered deservedly for it. I had just finished pushing him backward over Tommy, who was positioned behind him on all fours, when I saw a girl with thick platinum blond hair, apple red cheeks, heavy blue eye shadow, tight black leather pants, a punk-rock belt, and thigh-high black boots.

She walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Lita. Lita Ford, with the Runaways. What’s your name?”

“Rick,” I said.

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m Rick.” I was pretty full of myself, and assumed that everyone knew my name.

“Sorry,” she said, “I thought you were someone else.”

“Well, you thought wrong,” I sneered, with my nose stuck in its usual place up in the air.

“That’s too bad, Rick,” she said, “because I wanted to split a quaalude with you.”

“You did?” I began to pay attention.

“I thought you were Nikki.”

“I am Nikki! I am Nikki!” I practically wet myself like a dog in pursuit of a treat.

She bit the quaalude in half and stuck it in my mouth, and that was it.

We began talking and hanging out. Prior to meeting her, I had thought of most women the way I thought of my first girlfriend, Sarah Hopper, as pests who were sometimes useful as alternatives to masturbation. But Lita was a musician, and I could relate to her. She was nice, normal, and smart. In the furious tempest that my life had become, here was someone I could cling to, someone to help keep my feet on the ground.

One night, Lita, Vince, Beth, and I were leaving the Rainbow when a biker started pushing the girls around and asking if they wanted to fuck him. The bikers had declared war on the rockers back then. We watched for a minute, and then walked up to him. We were in a good mood, so we didn’t hit him. We asked him to stop. He glared at us and told us to fuck off.

I was wearing a chain around my waist, attached to a piece of leather and a buckle. I whipped the chain off my waist and started swinging it in the air, trying to crack heads. Suddenly, a couple more people joined the fight. One of them, a hairy six-foot-four beast, charged at me like a bull, knocking the wind out of me and pushing me back into the bushes. I reached for the chain on the ground, and he grabbed my hand with his leather glove, stuck it in his mouth, and bit it through to the bone. I screamed and, in a rush of adrenaline, grabbed the chain and started whipping him across the face with it.

All of a sudden, he pushed me back, pulled out a gun, and said, “You’re under arrest, motherfucker.” In the commotion, I didn’t even realize that the two people who had joined the fight weren’t the biker’s friends, but undercover cops. They cracked me seven times across the face with their billy clubs, breaking one of my cheekbones and blackening an eye. Then they handcuffed me and tossed me into their squad car. From the backseat, I saw Vince running away like a glam chicken, probably because he’d just been arrested at the Troubadour a few weeks before for hitting a girl who didn’t like the U.S. Marines outfit he was wearing.

“Fucking punk,” the big cop yelled at me. “Hitting a cop. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The car screeched to a halt at the head of an alley. He grabbed both my elbows with one hand, dragged me out of the car, and threw me on the ground. Then he and his partner started kicking me in the stomach and face. Whenever I turned onto my stomach to try to shield myself from the blows, they’d roll me onto my side so that they could kick me where it hurt more.

I went to jail that night covered in smeared makeup, fingernail polish, and blood. They charged me with assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. I spent two nights there with the cops threatening to put me away for five years without parole. (The police, however, didn’t end up pressing charges because a scandal soon developed when dozens of people accused the cops of harassing them and beating them up on the Sunset Strip.)

Lita hocked her prized Firebird Trans Am for a thousand bucks to make my bail. We walked three miles from jail back to the Mötley House to meet the band in time for a show at the Whisky that night. Afterward, accompanied by the sounds of Tommy’s girlfriend Bullwinkle smashing everything of value we had in the house, I pulled out a lined yellow notepad and vented my anger:

A starspangled fight

Heard a steel-belted scream

Sinners in delight

Another sidewalk’s bloody dream

I heard the sirens whine

My blood turned to freeze

See the red in my eyes

Finished with you, you’ll make my disease
.

No, that last line wasn’t right. As I crossed it out, the door flew off its hinges, and Tommy crashed to the ground, his head cut open and Bullwinkle towering over him like an angry moose.

“Your blood’s coming my way,” I scribbled beneath the crossed-out line.

Better, but not perfect.

The next morning, a lawyer came by with an eviction notice. We had been in the house for nine months, constantly drinking, fighting, fucking, practicing, and partying, and we were all sick and haggard. We needed a little mothering. So I moved in with Lita on Coldwater Canyon in North Hollywood. Vince moved into Beth’s apartment. And Tommy moved in with Bullwinkle. I don’t know where Mick was: maybe we left him hanging upside down in one of our closets. We never bothered to check.

I
think that the only reason I ever succeeded was because of my passion. I always went beyond what anyone else was doing to get something I wanted. Like when I was a DJ at my high school station in Park Forest, Illinois, I heard about a radio conference at Loyola University and signed myself up. It was there that I discovered I could get free records. Our high school radio station had been operating for years, and not once had it occurred to them that they didn’t have to buy their own albums.

My first job out of school was in the mailroom of the Chicago WEA distribution branch, a position I only got because I impressed someone at the label while I was on the phone begging for free Cars records. Eventually that same passion earned me a promotion to Los Angeles, where I worked as an assistant in the sales department at Elektra Records, which at that time had acts like Jackson Browne, Queen, the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Twennynine with Lenny White.