The Dirt (57 page)

“If Nikki says one more word, I’m gonna knock him out,” Vince seethed with rage.

None of us ever apologized, even after two hours of bullshitting. We told Vince that we had an album that was almost done but we didn’t have a singer. Our managers, Kovac for us and Bert Stein for Vince, kept trying to steer us closer and closer together, their collective slobber increasing as they realized that their cash cow might be producing fucking milk again.

By the end of the meeting, I began to cool off and even come around to the idea a little: when a band that’s been together for fifteen years changes the main element, some people are going to get freaked out. I used to do interviews where I said we’d fucking break up if any one of us left the band because it wouldn’t be Mötley Crüe anymore. So I understood why it was necessary, though in my heart I was happy with where we were going with John.

Before we left, we scheduled a time for Vince to stop by the studio, promising to leave our baggage outside the front door.

Though Corabi had officially stepped down from the band, we continued to work with him in the studio. On a Sunday when Corabi wasn’t scheduled to come in, Vince arrived. In my head, I kept repeating, “This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong.” But I didn’t say a word because all our crystal-clear resentments and issues were supposed to be left on the doorstep—which I doubted was big enough to hold all that baggage. I tried to accept the fact that Mötley Crüe was four people: Nikki, Mick, Vince, and Tommy. With that in mind, the first thing we did was start removing Corabi’s voice on each song so that Vince could resing them.

After Vince left the studio that night, I called Corabi and took him out for sushi. I was fully crying. “Dude,” I said as tears rolled down my cheeks. “I can’t believe this is happening. They are really going to let you go.”

Corabi had given them an excuse to bring Vince back, and they had seized the opportunity and left him in the dust. I don’t think he really wanted to leave the band. He liked singing with us, but he just couldn’t take the contradictory pressures we were putting on him in the studio. He thought that at least he’d be able to stay on as a second guitarist and singer.

“I’m sorry,” I told him for the tenth time that evening. “I’m only a quarter of this machine. Fucking majority rules, and the powers that be are making it happen. I just want you to know that this isn’t what I wanted.”

It was a heavy day, dude.

I
think I first sensed that something was up when we ended our tour in Japan. For some reason, everywhere these guys went, disaster followed them like a black cloud: I was never in trouble before I joined the band, but now it was fistfights, drama, and police practically every day. Our Japanese promoter, Mr. Udo, shook in his patent-leather shoes the minute he saw us. Evidently, he had had some experience with the band prior to me. By the end of the tour—between the destroyed hotel rooms, Nikki inviting thousands of fans to stampede the stage every night, and, worst of all, Tommy deciding to be funny by playing “You Dropped the Bomb on Me” as the intro to our Hiroshima show—Mr. Udo was ordering not one kamikaze but a whole pitcher of them for himself every night. His hands were shaking so hard I was sure that the moment we left, he was going to check himself into a sanitarium.

After our last night at Budokan, I left Mr. Udo shaking at the hotel bar with his pitcher of kamikazes, went to the Lexington Queen, and got good and rotted. There was a big board on the wall announcing the dates that different American and British bands would be in town so that all the young models would show up. I noticed that the Vince Neil Band was playing in Tokyo the following week. “Oh, shit,” I blurted. “Vince Neil is going to be here.”

I was with a tall, twig-thin Hungarian model with brown hair who I had met that night. “I know,” she replied. “I’m going to the show.”

So, jokingly, I told her, “Well, if you get to meet him, tell him I said hi.”

At about 3
A.M.
, we went back to her place. There were three rooms, twelve beds, and eleven of her model roommates running around drunk and naked. Guys they had picked up, lines of coke, and used condoms were lying around everywhere. It was one of the sickest but most exciting scenes I had ever seen. So I fucked the chick and two of her friends (I was in Mötley Crüe, after all—I had a reputation to live up to) and left the next morning to catch my plane.

A week later, I was sitting at home and my phone rang. It was the Hungarian model, and she was pissed. “Are you trying to make a dummy of me?” she asked.

“What?”

“Vince Neil came into the Lexington Queen after the show and I said, ‘Hi, how are you doing? John Corabi wanted me to say hello to you.’ And Vince said, ‘Who?’ So I said to him, ‘John Corabi, the singer from Mötley Crüe, said for me to tell you hello.’ And then he became so mad.”

“What did he do?”

“He said to me: ‘I’m the singer from Mötley Crüe.’ Then he called me a whore. Then he threw a beer bottle at me. Then he told me to get out of the club. Then he threw another beer bottle at me. I think he was drunk.”

That right there should have clued me in to the fact that Vince still considered himself the singer of Mötley Crüe and me an interloper whose time had come. When we started recording again, the plan was to return to our roots with a raw, straight-ahead rock-and-roll record. We started writing songs with Bob Rock called “The Year I Lived in a Day” and “La Dolce Vita,” and at the end of each day we’d walk around carrying our huge cocks in our hands because the music rocked so hard. But all of a sudden things started getting funny. Nikki and Tommy flipped out and fired everybody, including Bob Rock because he was too expensive and over-produced the music, they said.

So Tommy, Nikki, and Scott Humphrey decided to produce together, which was somewhat of an ego trip for Nikki and Tommy. Working with this three-headed producer, I soon started tearing my hair out. The songs would change every day: Tommy and Scott would adjust some effects on the drums, which would alter the drum pattern completely, which would require the bass and guitar parts to be changed, which would require Nikki to write new lyrics. Then I’d come in to sing the tune I’d been rehearsing off our demo tapes for a week, and it wouldn’t even be the same song anymore.

They’d stick me in the booth anyway and say, “Just see what you can come up with.”

So I’d sit in there at Nikki’s house, where half the equipment wasn’t even wired up properly, and get so flustered trying to please them. Nikki would jump on the intercom and say, “Crab, I’m kind of thinking of an old Bowie, Sisters of Mercy kind of vibe.” Then Scott would hit the button and add, “But with a little Cheap Trick, Nine Inch Nails kind of thing.” Finally, Tommy would chime in, “Yeah, but make it lush like Oasis.” So I’d start trying to figure all this out, then Tommy would interrupt again and say, “Oh yeah, dude, I forgot to add that the track’s gotta be heavy, like Pantera.”

I had no clue what these guys were saying to me. None at all. I’d beg them to sing something to give me an idea of what they were hearing but they wouldn’t. They’d just say, “It’s hard to explain, but what you just sang ain’t it.”

After weeks of this, Tommy, who’d always been my biggest supporter, said, “Dude, what the fuck do you do when you go home? You suck!”

I was devastated. Two years ago, if I farted, these guys thought it was the greatest sound they had ever heard. Now, I was the shittiest singer in the world in their eyes. It felt like a relationship in which your girlfriend knows she wants her freedom, but she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings. So instead, she just gets moody, critical, and mean, hoping to drive you away. If the time we spent recording
Mötley Crüe
in Vancouver was the best year of my life, this was fast becoming the worst. Besides not getting along with the guys at all, my mother passed away. She had been sick for two years with cancer, and her health insurance and social security weren’t coming through at all. So I sold my Harley and anything else I could to help pay her bills. In desperation, I even borrowed money from an uncle in Philadelphia, on the condition that when I received my first publishing advance for the new Mötley record I’d pay him back.

I had also just moved in with my girlfriend, a confused model named Robin who I was madly in love with. But everything started to go wrong between us. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life and would sit around at home all day, taking out her frustrations by browbeating me. In the meantime, my son was in and out of the hospital because of his diabetes. It seemed like my entire support system—my mother, my girlfriend, my son, my best friends, and my band—was collapsing. I was locked in a room watching the walls around me fall down one by one.

Every day, things kept getting weirder with Mötley: We had a meeting in New York with some big-shot guy at our label, and at the eleventh hour he wouldn’t let me in the door. So they left the meeting blaming me for not being a star, whatever that is. No one can make themselves into a star: your fans are the people who make you a star—just look at all the unlikely characters who have become sex symbols simply by being popular. Nonetheless, they said that I had to start voice training, take choreography lessons, and get a stylist, because I wasn’t on par with the rest of the band. They wanted to do just about everything short of enrolling me in the
Fame
school.

A week after the meeting, I was supposed to make an appearance with the band at the opening of the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas. Though I was broke and fighting constantly with Robin, we decided the trip would be good for us and bought new outfits for the event. But the day before, Nikki called and said not to bother. The Casino hadn’t left passes for me, he said, because they wanted only the more high-profile members of the band. Those words still sting to this day, because it wasn’t too long ago that they made sure I was included in everything and insisted that Mötley Crüe was a democracy in which everyone had equal standing.

I dreaded going into the studio every day to be reminded that I was inferior and useless, then I dreaded going home afterward to be reminded of the same thing by my girlfriend. One day, I finally snapped. After hours of being told I was singing the wrong way, I picked up a guitar and came up with some chords that helped tie the song “Confessions” together for Tommy. He was so excited. “Crab,” he beamed. “That’s amazing. It’s perfect, dude.”

I turned around and cracked, “Maybe I should just be a fucking guitar player then. At least I can do that right in your eyes.” He laughed and I laughed, and I didn’t think much about it until the next day.

I walked into the studio and the whole band was sitting there with our new manager, Allen Kovac. “Crab,” Nikki said. “I can’t believe you said that. You really want to give up singing to be a guitar player?”

I told them that the comment had been sarcastic, but I think they had been waiting for me to quit the whole time. Even if I was only kidding, it was enough.

A few weeks later, I went out to shoot some pool and drink beer with Tommy. We talked about the next album and the next tour, and how we could find the middle ground between who we were and who we wanted to be. Everything seemed normal. The next day, I went into the studio and they sprang another one of their meetings on me. After my night out with Tommy, I was ready for a discussion about what we were going to do for the album and tour. But it was Friday the thirteenth of September. Kovac broke the news: “Look, this is the deal,” he said. “The record company is not going to promote anything that this band does unless we have the original lineup. End of story. I want you to know that this has nothing to do with you and is nothing against you; I don’t give a shit if Paul McCartney is singing for this band. They want nothing to do with it. So we are going to bring Vince back into the fold.”

I was crushed but, at the same time, I was relieved. No longer would I have to face feeling inadequate and completely unwelcome at the hands of the Olympic browbeating team of Scott, Nikki, and Tommy. The nightmare was over.

Oddly, even then the band couldn’t agree. Nikki came over and said he was sorry, but they had to do it because they just couldn’t get what they needed from me in the studio. Then Tommy took me out for sushi and said that it had nothing to do with the band or the record label, but that it was Kovac’s fault. He said he wanted to see me stay in the band as a fifth member and guitar player, but I knew that wouldn’t happen.