The Dirt (19 page)

Tell me about the US Festival.

I just remember driving into the middle of nowhere and the band getting paid a lot of money by some guy from Apple to play this concert in front of all these people.

Do you remember anything else notable about that day?

Well, it was kind of weird seeing them play outside in the middle of the day.

Did you go to the festival with anybody?

I went with Doc [McGhee] and Doug [Thaler].

Anybody else?

Yeah, my girlfriend went with me.

Did anything strange happen with your girlfriend that day?

No, not that I can remember.

Because Vince said he slept with her.

He slept with my girlfriend?!?

That’s what he told me.

No, it couldn’t have been her.

He said she was wearing a leopard-skin bikini.

Okay, then it was a different girl. The real meaningful girlfriend wouldn’t have worn a leopard-skin bikini. It was probably some trashy date I was with. Nikki has probably been worried about it all these years, but she didn’t mean anything to me.

It was Vince, not Nikki.

It was Vince? Well, Vince had a never-ending stream of girls. He would do ten girls before the set and ten after. You used to look at him and say, “Man, where does he get it?” He never stops. I used to be amazed because he had a steady girlfriend. When she was around they were like married, but the minute she turned her head he’d be fucking someone else. I’m not surprised. I think if I try and go back and remember, there was a girl I used to take out on some dates every now and then for a good time and it might have been her. Her name was Amanda something from San Diego. It was before I met the girlfriend I was initially thinking about. As I think about it more, I remember her wearing some skimpy leopard-skin kind of stuff.

Were you upset?

If someone was important to me, I wouldn’t take them to a rock show like that. I definitely wouldn’t leave anyone in a trailer with any member of Mötley Crüe.

There was another time where I had another girlfriend that Nikki actually fucked. She was a party girl, and she was hanging out with me backstage. And Nikki pretty much in front of me took her and bent her over and did her. She was having her period. It was gross. She didn’t even try to stop him. I had only known her for a couple of weeks and it was our second or third time out. She didn’t become that serious of a girlfriend after that. But I didn’t blame Nikki. Part of it was that girls would use me to get backstage. So I figured it was a pretty good way to find out what someone was made of. I was like twenty-one years old. I wasn’t ready to get married or have a serious relationship. I mean, at least Nikki wasn’t hiding anything. I think he said, “That chick you’re with is really cute. Do you mind if I bend her over?” And I said, “No, I don’t mind. It’s nothing serious.”

But the Vince thing I definitely didn’t know about.

I’m sorry to have to break it to you.

Yeah, I do think that with Vince it was the girl from San Diego. And, you know, our relationship broke up shortly after that. She started acting really weird after the festival, now that I think about it, like something had happened. I remember after that weekend dumping her and never seeing her again because she was acting weird. It was probably because of Vince. At first, she probably thought, “Oh I’m going to be Vince’s new girlfriend and forget this A&R guy.” But then she realized that she was one of five girls that he did in those fifteen minutes. So probably then she felt trapped: She had nothing with him, but if I found out about it she was toast. I remember her being really weird after that, so weird that I don’t remember ever seeing her again.

fig. 2

Record contract signing at Elektra office. Clockwise from left: Joe Smith, Mick, Allan Coffman, unknown, Vince, Nikki, Tom Zutaut, Tommy

I
t was the beginning of the end as far as fun was concerned: unlimited cocaine. Tommy knew these shady characters in Simi Valley who would stop by Cherokee Studios, where we were recording
Shout at the Devil
, and bring ounces of coke. We would stay up for three days straight making music and not even think we were working hard. Vince had taped pictures from porno magazines all over the wall, and girls were streaming in and out of the studio, getting fucked with microphones in the control room, bottles in the kitchen, and broom handles in the closet because we were running out of ideas of what to do with them.

Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist from the Doors, was working next door, and he’d stop by almost every day, chug our booze, and leave us high and dry. We were never big Doors fans, so it really pissed us off. Out of respect, we didn’t say anything, but we always wondered: If Ray was that big of a fiend, how bad was Jim Morrison?

Later, cocaine would make me reclusive and paranoid. But then, it was simply a party drug, something more fun to put up my nose than air. One night, Tommy, his drum tech Spidey, and I were getting drunk in a dive bar around the corner from the studio to take off the edge the cocaine was giving us. Two cops sitting nearby started getting aggressive with us, making unoriginal comments like, “Nice hair, girls.” So after the alcohol kicked in and we popped some painkillers to even out the ride, we walked outside to their patrol car. The window was down, so we all lined up, pissed onto the seat and took off running. Back at the studio, Tommy was so amped up he threw a brick through the control room window. We didn’t really know what we were doing or how to record a professional album.

fig. 3

The next morning, we were still in the studio recording “I Will Survive.” There was a gong hanging by a rope over our heads and we wound the rope as tight as it would get and then let go, so that the gong spun in circles, producing an eerie shimmering sound. As it spun, we lay on our backs and tried to chant “Jesus is Satan” backward, which sounded like “scrambled eggs and wine” or something like that. Our engineer quit that day. He said that we were all possessed by Satan. And maybe we were.

We were experimenting with black magic, reading any kind of spell book or occult tome we could find, and recording invocations like “God Bless the Children of the Beast,” which was actually inspired by the introduction on David Bowie’s
Diamond Dogs
album. And, maybe we were imagining it, but we were starting to attract something evil.

I had ideas for the album and the tour that had to do with the mass psychology of evil behind Nazism and with the Anton LaVey books on Satanism, which was really more a personal philosophy with a shocking title than an actual religion. I had grand ideas of creating a tour that looked like a cross between a Nazi rally and a black church service, with Mötley Crüe symbols instead of swastikas everywhere. I even truly believed that Ronald Wilson Reagan, since each of his names was six letters long—666—was the Antichrist. It says in the Bible that the Antichrist will have the voice of a lion to be heard throughout the nations. I told everybody that he would be shot through the heart and recover quicker than any man could, and he did. He was the devil I wanted everybody to shout at. I was getting carried away. Then, while driving home from the Satanic “I Will Survive” session, Tommy’s car blew up. Vince kept wiping out in his car. And objects would levitate and fly around Lita’s and my house. We were starting to freak ourselves out. And then I had my accident.

I had bought my first real car, a Porsche, after landing a publishing deal with Warner/Chappell. It was my pride and joy. Tommy and I would drive down Sunset Boulevard with the pedal to the floor at 2
A.M.
, swigging off fifths of Jack. We didn’t realize how stupid drunk driving was until a year later. Even the cops, when they pulled us over for speeding, would just make us dump our drinks out and then let us go. And we didn’t think we were lucky at all: We were pissed because it was too late to buy more alcohol.

After a few months spent giving that car more attention than I’d ever lavished on a girl, I went up to one of Roy Thomas Baker’s parties. We all did lines off his glass piano, then took our clothes off and jumped in the Jacuzzi. There were about fifteen of us piled in there, including Tommy. He had finally dumped Bullwinkle and was dating a wanna-be model from Florida named Honey. All of a sudden, Tommy popped a huge erection, turned to Honey, and ordered, “All right, bitch, suck my cock.” She bent over and sucked him off in front of everybody. When she finished, he made her to do it again. She went back to work, but this time it was taking too long for Tommy and he started to get pissed. He started chewing her out for not doing a good job, telling her she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing. Eventually, she got it right, considerately swallowing so as not to contaminate the pool with Tommy’s unborn children. Five minutes later, Tommy put her to work again.