The Dirt (41 page)

My life felt so empty without drugs that I let Brandi fill the void. It was so exciting to actually be hanging out with someone of the opposite sex and enjoying it that I leapt into a relationship. But I was a child: I needed to be in love with someone, and I needed to feel like someone loved me. Sobriety had allowed me to feel emotions again, but it hadn’t taught me how to interpret them.

Just a couple weeks after Brandi and I met, I had to move to Vancouver to record the
Dr. Feelgood
album, and the distance added more fuel to the illusion of being in love. Though I was lonely and depressed without her, at the same time, without the need to take drugs or chase pussy every night, I found myself actually doing something productive with my time and writing songs again. The experiences of the last year had given me more than enough material, with my near-death overdose inspiring the album’s first song, “Kickstart My Heart.” (I always managed to get a song out of each overdose.) This wasn’t like
Girls, Girls, Girls
, where I kicked my habit just long enough to write some album filler. I had the time and clarity to cut away the fat of my writing, get together with the band, and put the songs through the Mötley machine, discussing and changing each until we all liked them.

We had been through months of meetings where the band accused me of being a fascist about my songs and vision, so for the first time I listened to them and took their input. The friendship between Tommy and me deepened as he immersed himself in the songwriting process and started waking me up every morning to go over new ideas. Perhaps because my issues with my father had kept me from forming any real friendships, Tommy became my first and only best friend in that time. Clearheaded, we now had the patience to listen to bands besides the Sweet, Slade, T. Rex, Aerosmith, and the New York Dolls: I opened my mind to everything from Miles Davis to Whitney Houston, and I became aware of a whole universe of sound and emotion, of intricate melodies, bass lines, and rhythms, that I had missed out on all my life.

Together, we all wrote what we thought could be our best album yet. For once the studio wasn’t a place to party and bring chicks, it was a place to work. And work it was. We had brought in Bob Rock as a producer, because we liked the albums he had done with Kingdom Come, the Cult, and Ted Nugent. It was his job to get us to be Mötley Crüe again after having been decimated by a decade of drugs and deaths and marriages and rehab.

Where Tom Werman just said, “Okay, good enough,” Bob whipped us like galley slaves. His line was, “That just isn’t your best.” Nothing was good enough. Mick recorded all the guitar for
Shout at the Devil
in two weeks, but now Bob Rock would make him spend two weeks doubling a guitar part over and over until it was perfectly synchronized. And even though the process aggravated and frustrated Mick, he had it much easier than Vince, who on some days would only get a single word on tape that Bob liked. Bob was critical, demanding, and a stickler for punctuality. Six months of rigor combined with six months of sobriety tore the life out of us, and we all had to put up with each other’s violent and sudden mood swings. Before we walked in the studio each day, we never knew whether we’d leave that evening feeling like the best band in the world or four angry clowns who couldn’t even play their instruments.

In eight years together and with millions of albums sold, we had never recorded properly. No one had ever pushed us to the limits of our abilities before or kept demanding more than we thought we could give until we discovered that we actually did have more to give. We had just never tried before. Aerosmith was recording
Pump
in the studio next to us and meeting with the same counselor we were using, Bob Timmons. So after work we’d do the kinds of ridiculous things that sober rock stars do together, like drink Perrier or jog around a lake.

Of course, the whole process was the antithesis of every punk principle I had held fast to as a teenager. I still loved loud, raw, sloppy, mistake-filled rock and roll. I wanted “Same Ol’ Situation” to drip with filth, “Dr. Feelgood” to have a groove that could kick heads in, “Kickstart My Heart” to sound as frantic as a speedball, and “Don’t Go Away Mad (Just Go Away)” to have a chorus you could destroy your room to. But, at the same time, I wanted an album I was finally proud of.

In rehab, they had told me that the only way to get clean is by believing in and seeking the help of a higher power that could return sanity to my life. Most people chose God or love. I chose the only woman who hadn’t abandoned me my whole life: Music. And it was time to pay her back for her faith and perseverance.

I was running on blind faith, though. Overwhelmed with excitement about the new material we were working so hard on, we had no idea that the music industry had pretty much said that we were over after
Girls, Girls, Girls
. We had been around for an entire decade and, as far as they were concerned, that was long enough. The eighties were almost over, things were brewing in Seattle, and we were just a hairspray metal band that had gotten lucky with a couple singles. In their minds, we were dead and gone.

They wrote us off early.

J
ust before the
Girls, Girls, Girls
tour, Heather and I caused the downfall of one of the country’s biggest fucking coke dealers. And it was all because we didn’t want to go to Jamaica alone.

Our manager, Doc McGhee, had a lot of suspicious friends who lived in the Caymans. They were these crazy macked-out guys with only first names—Jerry, Leigh, Tony—and they’d bring huge fucking suitcases full of coke and cash to the island, where they’d launder their money without the IRS getting up into their shit.

Leigh, a tan, suave, filthy-rich Southerner, was one of the coolest of Doc’s friends. I had originally met him with Vince when we were chilling in the Caymans. Leigh walked into Doc’s rental house with an attaché case, and the first words we spoke to him were “Gimme, gimme, gimme!” Because we knew what was in that fucking attaché case: mountains of white powder to stuff up our noses.

Leigh opened the case and gave us a little rock.

“That’s all you’re giving us?” Vince yelled at him.

“I’ll tell you what,” Leigh said. “If you can open the case, you can have more.” And with that, he gave us a knowing wink, shut the case, dropped a lock clasp, and spun the combination dials so we couldn’t open it.

We had that entire rock in our system in ten minutes, and then, as always happens when you’re high on coke, we started fiending hardcore for more.

Vince and I grabbed the suitcase and tried every single combination. We were so coked out that we actually thought we were coming up with every single permutation of three numbers. “Wait,” Vince would yell in a flash of inspiration. “Have we tried six-six-six yet?”

Finally, I went into the kitchen, grabbed a butcher knife, and cut the top off Leigh’s thousand-dollar leather briefcase. Glittering inside like white gold were fucking dozens of huge plastic bags filled with coke. We slit them open and just dove in like we were bobbing for apples.

After an hour of white heaven, Doc walked in. “What the fuck are you doing?”

Vince looked up at him, his face white with coke and slobber. “Well, Leigh said we could have it if we opened it. And we opened it.”

Doc was fucking pissed and kicked us out of the apartment. I think we ended up paying for all the drugs we destroyed out of our royalties.

Not long after that, Leigh got busted. He used to have superhot chicks fly in to meet him in the Caymans for a few days—always different girls coming two at a time—and we just thought that he was a mack fucking daddy. But the truth is that he was using them as mules to bring drugs into the U.S. One time these killer blonds came down from New Orleans and kicked it with Doc, Leigh, and the guys from Bon Jovi, who Doc was also managing. When it came time for the girls to leave, Leigh taped drugs all over their bodies and dropped them off at the airport. It was their first time smuggling, so one of them had the bright idea of duct-taping scissors to her body. That way, if she was in danger of being caught, she could just cut the drugs loose.

Well, Einstein and her friend went through the metal detector, and of course the scissors set it off. They searched her, found the coke, then searched her friend. It’s a small island, and they knew the girls were with Leigh and the Bon Jovi guys, who had left the island on the previous flight. So they made the plane Bon Jovi was on turn around so they could search everyone’s luggage for drugs. Then they sent cops looking for Leigh, who jumped on his jet and went into hiding on another island before they could catch him.

And that’s when Heather and I came in. We wanted to go to Jamaica. But we didn’t know anybody there and Leigh, of course, was connected to fucking everyone in the Caribbean. So we had Doc get in touch with him, and he said he’d meet us in Jamaica to show us around. Unbeknownst to him, however, the feds had made a deal with the Jamaican government and the second his plane touched down in Kingston, they surrounded it, pulled him off, put him on a jet for Tampa, and arrested him there. Heather and I felt terrible: We had no one to show us around Jamaica.

Shit turned out cool for Leigh, though. He got sentenced to life in prison, sent us a couple letters, and then we didn’t hear from him. Next thing I knew, when we were in Tampa on the
Decade of Decadence
tour, Leigh was at the show decked out in fucking Armani. He wouldn’t tell me how he weasled out of a life sentence in less than ten years, but he did claim that he was keeping his nose clean. By then, I was keeping my nose clean, too.

So was our manager, Doc McGhee. Before he met us, he was living a secret life that blew up on him when he got busted for helping smuggle forty thousand fucking pounds of pot from Colombia into North Carolina. It wasn’t his only bust, because he was also being accused of associating with some well-connected madmen who had conspired to bring over a half a million pounds of blow and weed into the United States in the early eighties. So just as we were going through rehab, the law slapped Doc with a fifteen-thousand-dollar fine and a five-year suspended prison sentence, and made him set up an antidrug organization, the Make a Difference Foundation, after he pled guilty in the North Carolina case.

Doc knew that anyone else probably would have been in jail for at least ten years for that shit, so he had to do something high-profile to show the court he was doing the world some good as a free man. And his brainstorm was to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock with the Moscow Music Peace Festival, a giant spectacle of sobriety and international love that included us, Ozzy, the Scorpions, and Bon Jovi. All the money was supposed to go to antidrug and anti-alcohol charities, including the Make a Difference Foundation.

But it was all bad from the moment we stepped on the plane. We had a pact as a band that we were going to stay sober, and as a sober band we were going to take our music to the fucking top.
Dr. Feelgood
was coming out in a couple weeks, and Doc told us that a warm-up show in Moscow would be a great way to kick it off. He explained that everyone would be equal on the bill, there would be no headliners, and everyone would play a stripped-down fifty-minute show with no props or special effects. The running order would be the Scorpions, Ozzy, us, and then Bon Jovi.

But as soon as we stepped on Doc’s plane, which was covered with stupid psychedelic hippie paintings by Peter Max, memories of the
Theatre
and
Girls
tours flooded back. We were looking at a daylong plane ride with absolutely nothing to do. Then, there was a so-called doctor on board, who was plying the bands who weren’t sober with whatever medicine they needed. It was clear that this was going to be a monumental festival of hypocrisy. Even Mick was in a shitty mood the whole flight: He had been helping pay for all our drug problems for a year, and now here he was flying to Moscow to help pay his management—the guys who are supposed to be taking care of us—for their drug problems.