The Dirt (42 page)

When we arrived at the gig, it started to become clear that this was a total cluster fuck and Doc had told each band something different in order to get them to do the show. Jon Bon Jovi thought it was just another stop on his world headlining tour, while we thought it was supposed to be a small-scale, reduced set. Then the production manager broke the news to us that we’d been demoted. We were on before Ozzy and the Scorpions. I was fucking livid. Doc was supposed to be our manager, looking out for our best interests, and he was favoring one of his newer clients, Bon Jovi, over us and the Scorpions, who, in Russia, were massive.

“Fuck you, Doc,” Nikki said to him. “We didn’t fly all the way to Russia to be an opening act while Bon-fucking-Jovi gets to headline for an hour and a half. What’s up with that?”

“Dude, we are fucking going home!” I screamed at Doc. I was pissed. “This show isn’t even about us. It’s about Bon Jovi.”

“You guys can’t do that,” Doc pleaded. “That’s fucked up.”

“Hey,” Nikki said. “We’re not doing anything wrong. You told us something that wasn’t true. You said that everyone was supposed to be equal on this show, and now every band is getting more time than us. This is turning into a fucking joke.”

Finally, Doc appeased us, and, more out of respect for Ozzy (who took us on tour with him when no one knew shit about us and was now playing with our friend Randy Castillo on drums), we said we’d do it.

We played a decent show the first night, and it felt good to be busting out “Dr. Feelgood” and “Same Ol’ Situation” live for the first time. Ozzy was fucking crazy and great, as usual, and the Russians went ballistic for the Scorpions. The audience, which was about 125,000 people, started to stream out of the theater after the Scorpions. But then old Jon made his grand entrance, right through the middle of the audience, as lines of Russian police officers split the crowd in front of him like the Red Sea. As soon as he reached the front, the whole stage went
BOOM
—fireworks and flash pots and pyrotechnics exploded into the air. The crowd went apeshit while I fucking shit in my pants.

You need to get permits to get those kind of pyrotechnics into Russia, and it was clear that Doc knew all along what Bon Jovi was planning for its show. So as soon as those bombs went off, everyone in the crew and other bands looked at us. They knew that someone was about to get hurt. I hunted Doc down and found him backstage. I walked right up to him and pushed him in his fat little chest, knocking him over onto the ground like a broken Weeble. As he lay there, Nikki broke the news: “Doc, you lied to us again. This time you’re fucking fired.”

We did the honorable thing and played the next day, then had our tour manager book us a flight home on Air France. We didn’t want to have anything more to do with helping Doc pay his legal bills.

We flew back via Paris and New York, and talked with Doug Thaler about ditching Doc and helping him start his own company to take care of us. The whole ride home we felt like suckers for even going to Russia but also like dumb fucks for dumping our management on the eve of releasing the first record we ever really felt pumped about. I holed myself up with Heather, just depressed and fighting the urge every day to make a big togo order from the liquor store. I did interviews, I listened to the radio a little, and I could feel maybe a little momentum growing. But I had no idea. Then, on October 3, my twenty-seventh birthday, I received a fax. It was from Nikki.

If you could have just one thing on your birthday
,

Some way for the world to say
,

That it will all be okay
,

Then I would wish for you with all my heart
,

A number one album on the Billboard chart
.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TOMMY. YOU HAVE A NUMBER ONE ALBUM
.

I drove to the newsstand, bought
Billboard
magazine, and had the album chart shellacked and mounted. Then I called everyone I knew.

I
t was a dark time in my life, and I was trying to do something about it. I was trying to do something for everybody: for the world, for the bands, and for myself. The Moscow Music Peace Festival wasn’t like promoting a festival in Poughkeepsie or Woodstock. This was something completely new. And nobody got it. For the bands, it was all about them and who got what time slot and who got the biggest dressing room and how come someone got to shoot a firework off.

By the time the show started, I was tired of hearing all the bitches bitch. Since Nikki’s overdose, I knew that Mötley and I had to split for one simple reason: I didn’t like them. There was nothing I liked about them. I had to start dealing with my life and the bands in my life that were willing to let me help them. Mötley never let me help: instead, we just beat the shit out of each other.

It had taken me a decade to get to that point with Mötley Crüe. From the moment I first saw them at the Santa Monica Civic Center and rode home in a merchandise truck that was completely empty because the guys had sold every single item, I knew they were beginning a career that could only go up. But I had no idea that as human beings they were in such a complete downward spiral. I’ve managed Mink DeVille, James Brown, the Scorpions, Skid Row, Bon Jovi, and Kiss. I’ve been dragged through the deepest shit by all kinds of mentally ill people. But I have never been through what Mötley Crüe put me through. One day, Mick would try to jump out a window. “Why’d you do that?” I would ask.

“I dunno.”

The next day, Nikki would punch some guy in a suit off a bar stool.

“Why’d you do that?”

“I dunno.”

The next day, Tommy, the happiest kid in the second grade, would knock me on my ass.

“Why’d you do that?”

“I dunno.”

Every day was like that. It was a constant. We were thrown out of hotels in every city. That’s the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad. They weren’t like Poison, who raised hell because they thought that was what rock stars should be doing. Mötley Crüe did stupid things because they were Mötley Crüe. There was no reason for anything, just a Mötley reason. They didn’t even have to try: Their life was the rock-and-roll life.

That band was poised to be the Zeppelin of its era. But they could never get it together. Even today, I still believe that they could come out roaring again with something that’s new and meaningful and true to where they are at in their lives. But if they do accomplish that, it’s not going to be with me. I’ve already spent ten years of my life apologizing for that band. As their manager, that’s all I really did. Apologize. For years afterward, I’d walk into a hotel lobby and the receptionist would call to me, “Mr. McGhee.” And I’d run up and drop to my knees and say, “Oh, Jesus, I’m really sorry.”

They’d look at me funny and say, “No, nothing’s wrong. You have a telephone call.”

And I’d breathe a sigh of relief and thank the good Lord above that I wasn’t managing Mötley Crüe anymore.

T
harise was your average mud wrestler: blond hair, big tits, and a killer hard body. When the girls from the Tropicana came back to my house to wrestle for my friends, she was always the most vicious fighter. She won every time and looked good doing it. She was just my type.

When we started going out, she stopped dancing. Instead, she developed a twenty-thousand-dollars-a-month purse habit. And instead of wrestling other chicks she fought with me all the time. Sobriety may have been easy for the other guys, but I was being driven to drink every night.

Before the
Feelgood
album came out, I called up some of my buddies and went white-water rafting down Snake River in Idaho for ten days. It was the best way I could think of to stay sober: away from Sharise, the telephone, the band, the bars. It was just sunshine, rapids, and exercise.

As soon as we returned to civilization, I called Sharise and she was in tears.

“I was at the Cathouse,” she sobbed. “And Izzy was hitting on me.”

“Izzy Stradlin?”

“Yeah, he was all fucked up. And I told him to get his hands off me because I was your wife. Then he grabbed my shirt and pulled it down.”

“That fucking asshole!”

“But that’s not even the bad part. I slapped him across the face, of course. And then he karate-kicked me as hard as he could. In the stomach. He knocked the wind out of me. It really hurt. And everyone saw it.”

“That little shit! The next time I see his motherfucking ass, I’m going to fucking kill him!”

“Oh yeah, I almost forgot,” she added. “Your album’s number one.”

I don’t think anyone had disrespected me like that since the bikers outside the Whisky hit on Beth and Lita so many years ago. But Izzy wasn’t a biker. He was the guitarist in Guns N’ Roses. I had taken that fucking band on tour as an opening act for a few of the
Girls
shows when nobody believed in them. They were nice then: Axl was a shy, humble guy who was a lot of fun to be with. But now they were starting to believe their own press clippings, and this guy who was supposed to be my friend was disrespecting my wife.

“Did you hear me? Your record’s number one.”

Izzy had picked the wrong time to fuck with me, because the MTV Video Music Awards were just weeks away at the Universal Amphitheater. At the show, I left the band waiting in their limos outside and hung around backstage while Guns N’ Roses played with Tom Petty.

When Izzy walked offstage, looking like a cross between Eric Stoltz in
Mask
and Neil Young, I was waiting for him. “You fucking hit my wife!”

“So fucking what?” he spat.

All my blood rushed into my fist, and I decked him. I decked him good, right in the face. He fell to the ground like a tipped cow.