The Dirt (43 page)

Fred Saunders pinned my arms. “The next time you fucking touch her, I’ll fucking kill you!” I yelled at Izzy’s prone body as Fred dragged me away.

I shook myself loose and we walked toward the door to make our escape. Before we reached the exit, Axl came snarling after us like an overdressed Doberman. “Come on, motherfucker, I’m going to fucking kill you!” he yelled at our backs.

I twirled around. His face was sweaty and twisted. “Let’s fucking go!” I said to him. And I meant it. The blood was still pumping into my fists. He looked at me and squeaked like a little bitch, “Just don’t fuck with my band again, okay?” And he walked away.

Then, Axl suddenly launched a press campaign about me. If I was a record, he would have sold millions of copies of me. Every article I read, every time I turned on the TV, he was claiming that I had sucker-punched Izzy and been insulting Guns N’ Roses for years, and he pledged to put me in my place, which was six feet under the earth. It was like rock and roll had suddenly turned into the World Wrestling Federation.

It was such a betrayal. I had every right to knock Izzy on his ass, and it was none of Axl’s business. On the
Girls
tour, Axl would come to me when his throat hurt and I’d show him the tricks I’d developed for singing after a night spent destroying my vocal cords. Now he was sending little messengers to me, with instructions to meet him in the parking lot of Tower Records on Sunset or on the boardwalk of Venice Beach. Even though it was such a high school way of settling our differences, I showed up every time, because the only thing that would have given me more pleasure than a number one album on the pop charts was breaking Axl Rose’s nose.

But Axl never showed. It finally got to the point that whenever he arranged a fight somewhere, I just sent some people to the spot to call me if and when he appeared. Maybe someone else would have just let it drop after Axl chickened out a good half-dozen times. But I was pissed: He was in the press acting like he was king of the world, saying that I couldn’t fight and that he was a red belt in this and that. But in real life he was too chickenshit to back up his word. So I finally went on MTV with a message for him: I said that if Axl wanted to fight me, then he should do it in front of the whole world. I proposed Monday night—fight night—at the Forum. We’d go three rounds, and then the world would see who the pussy was.

I was ready to go. I didn’t even care about Izzy anymore. I’d dealt with him. He even called and apologized for what he did to Sharise. As for Slash and Duff McKagan, we were friends through it all—they knew what an asshole Axl was. I wanted to beat the shit out of that little punk and shut him up for good. But I never heard from him: not that day, not that month, not that year, not that century. But the offer still stands.

W
e didn’t hang out, we didn’t party, we didn’t stick our dicks where they didn’t belong. We just flew into a city, played our asses off, and got the fuck out of there. For the first time, we were operating like a machine instead of four untamed animals. But then we started getting treated like a machine.

The tour started off as this beautiful dream: we had our first number one album, which was so insanely popular that every damn song but one ended up on a single. We were on the cover of every magazine. And we had a big-ass stage show that filled dozens of trucks and went beyond anything we could have imagined when we were sitting in the Mötley house setting Nikki on fire. There were thirty-six Marshall stacks, thirty-six SVT stacks, and a kick-ass flying drum set, which I’d been fantasizing about all my life.

The crowds were fanatical. They knew every lyric, every chord, every downbeat off every album. And, for the first time, we were sober enough to appreciate it. And married enough. We all had new wives or fiancées to whom we wanted to stay faithful: I was with Heather, Mick was engaged to Emi, Vince had Sharise, and Nikki had proposed to Brandi (though he probably wasn’t looking forward to Thanksgivings at her mother’s house). Mötley Crüe was now four dudes in the best physical shape they’d been in since they were born.

But then fall faded to winter, winter turned to spring, and spring bloomed to summer, and we were still on the road with no sign of stopping. Elektra was still releasing singles from the album and Doug Thaler, who was managing us by himself, had us booked into tours and festivals for another year solid.

After a while, it didn’t matter how much bank we were making or how many weeks our album had been in the top 40, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to put those leather pants on again for another night. Maybe if we were allowed to tour with cooler opening acts like Iggy Pop or Hüsker Dü instead of being forced to bring along cheesy pop-metal posers like Warrant and Whitesnake our morale would have been better. Maybe if we had a week off sometimes, a little time in the Bahamas to veg out, we could have made it through the tour sane. But the record label was worried we’d lose our momentum. We were a money machine, and they were going to keep working us until we broke. And, dude, break we did.

The beginning of the end was a flying drum solo in New Haven, Connecticut. For me, it was always so crucial for people to see what I was doing when I played. In the early Mötley days, I tried to use mirrors, but that never really worked. Then, before the
Girls, Girls, Girls
tour, I had a crazyass dream that I was playing drums in a cage while spinning around and gyroscoping. So we rigged up this ghetto contraption where a forklift would take the drums to the front of the stage and a motor would spin the drums around while I played upside down and shit. At first, I would get really dizzy, but then I remembered something I had learned in ballet lessons as a kid and started picking a spot on the wall to stare at while spinning.

On the
Feelgood
tour, I wanted to get even closer to the bros in the audience, so we rigged up the flying drum set. And it was all good—until New Haven. To this day, I still don’t know what happened. It began like usual. During Mick’s solo, I sneaked into this long tube, stuck my feet into a strap hanging there, and wrapped my hand around a rope, which was attached to a chain motor that slowly pulled me up to the top rafters of the New Haven Coliseum. I chilled up there for a while, looking eighty feet down to scope out Mick’s solo and the audience, who couldn’t see me yet. Then, with a rigger named Norman holding on to me, I leapt into the air, grabbed the drums, and kicked my body around into the seat. Below, Mick shot some crazy shit out of his guitar, his stacks rumbled like they were about to explode—
ggttccchhhggtttccchhh
—and then the drums appeared—
whoooosssshhh
—over the heads of the audience in the midst of all this really dramatic music.

As the audience went out of their minds, I started hitting all these electronic pads—
blaowww, blammm, blammm, blaowww
—as the drums shot down toward them on a hundred or so feet of invisible track. I cruised over the heads of the people on the floor, then shot to the very back of the place, so that the dudes in the full-on Stevie Wonder section all of a sudden had front-row seats. There was one dude in a jeans jacket who I swear to God shit in his pants when all of a sudden I was inches away from his face playing drums in the air. Then I spun around, and the whole track adjusted so I could get back up to the top of the arena. I triggered a sample of a long descending sound, like someone jumping off a bridge—
Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh
—then put my foot back in the strap, grabbed the rope that originally carried me up, and prepared to jump. It was Norman’s job to pull the handbrake at the last minute, so that I’d screech to a halt like five feet over the heads of the crowd and then just bounce there on this elastic rope. I liked it to look insane. None of this fucking Gene-Simmons-fly-me-over-the-fucking-audience-like-Peter-Pan shit. I wanted to be fully dropped, freefall style.

So I sprung off the rafter—
Aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
. The air whipped past my face—
fwshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
. And then I prepared myself mentally for Norman to pull the brake. But as I neared the ground, for some reason I inexplicably lost my trust in him. I didn’t think he was going to stop me in time, so I panicked and tried to bail out. I let go of the rope and tried to get my foot out of the strap. I think the sheer exhaustion of so many back-to-back shows had dulled my senses. As soon as Norman saw me struggling to get loose, he hit the brake. Instantly, my foot, which was still in the strap, fucking stopped midair while the rest of my body continued to fall. I was just a few feet over the audience and
ccrrrrkk
. My skull fucking smacked against the head of some dude in the audience. And then, because the rope had so much elasticity, I hit the ground headfirst and blacked out. The next thing I heard was
reeahhrrrr-reeahhhrrr
. I couldn’t remember a thing other than the fact that something had gone wrong.

“What happened to me?” I asked.

“You just fell, buddy.”

“I did?”

“You fell on your head.”

“Where?”

“At the concert.”

“The concert. I need to be at my concert.” I panicked. I was making no sense. I didn’t remember having fallen. I just knew that I was supposed to be on stage. Not in a…

“Where am I?”

“You’re in an ambulance. We’re taking you to the hospital.”

“But…”

“The show’s over, buddy. Now relax.”

We ended up canceling a show or two while I recovered from my concussion. Three days later, I found myself facing arena rafters and the elastic rope again. Norman pumped the brake so that I descended really slowly, like some sort of fairy godmother instead of a rock-and-roll madman, and he stopped me twenty feet above the audience instead of five. It took me a while to get over the fear.

The rest of the band was thankful for the extra days off, but afterward, it was back to the never-ending road show. As exhaustion and insanity kicked in, our lives started to unravel. First the chicks came marching in. Before the encore, we would marinate in a little tent in the back of the stage and suck down cold mineral water. One day we were chilling back there when Nikki pointed out a cat litter box that was mysteriously sitting in the middle of the floor. As we were trying to figure out who was stupid enough to keep a cat backstage, we heard a loud meow. A girl came crawling toward the box on her hands and knees wearing a cat collar and a leash led by a roadie. Vince looked at me for an explanation, I looked at Nikki, Nikki looked at Mick, and Mick looked back at Vince. No one knew what was going on. The girl crawled into the cat box, hiked up her dress, peed in the sand, and then scratched at the litter until she had covered her mess.

Soon we were finding ways out of the drudgery by amusing ourselves with stupid human tricks and watching our road crew reach new lows. A whole cat theme began to develop, based around the line “here kitty, kitty” from “Same Ol’ Situation.” The roadies would stand in a circle and jerk off into their hands while some poor but willing girl crawled around meowing on all fours and licking it out of their hands like milk. Nikki thought it was funny, but then again Nikki has mother issues.

What began as a clean and wholesome tour had, near the end, turned into a sick sexual circus. We were sober and had nothing else to do, so the girls became our only entertainment. Once we started looking at the girls, we noticed that they were going out of their way to get our attention, sporting leather masks with ball gags, nun outfits with holes cut to expose their tits, nurse uniforms with enema bags, skintight red-devil costumes with dildos for horns, and cowboy outfits with cans of shaving cream in the holsters. The weak among us cracked under the pressure, choosing girls backstage who offered something they hadn’t tried before.

During the show, we entered the stage by being shot up in front of 25,000 to 100,000 people from a contraption underneath the stage, as if we were four giant Pop-Tarts. Those contraptions eventually became a metaphor for the tour. Whenever we wanted to rest or sleep, all of a sudden someone would pull the lever and—
pop
—there we would be, standing in front of a stadium full of cheering people ready to see the same song and dance we had been through hundreds of times already. For our whole lives, every one of us had fucking fantasized about being exactly where we were on that tour; but after two years, we came to hate and dread our jobs. Nikki liked to compare it to an erection: It feels great for a few minutes, but when it won’t go down after hours of beating off, it starts to hurt like no other pain known to man.