The Dirt (58 page)

Oddly enough, a few days afterward the guys started calling me to come into the studio, saying they couldn’t get anything out of Mick and wondering if I could lay down some guitar tracks in the morning before Vince arrived. I did that for a few days until Mick called the studio one afternoon and asked, “Crab, what are you doing there?”

“I’m just playing some guitar,” I told him. And he went ballistic: evidently they hadn’t told him they were bringing me in to redo his tracks.

At one awkward point, they even called me in to teach Vince my vocal part on a song called “Kiss the Sky.” It was a strange breakup, because I became the only guy they could turn to when they had problems with the vocals or when Vince and Tommy were fighting. One day, Tommy or Nikki (I can’t remember which) called after a blowup and told me, “I will never, ever do another album with Mick Mars or Vince Neil again.”

After a few weeks, the phone calls dwindled. Then they just stopped completely. My services weren’t needed anymore.

Coincidentally or not, shortly after Mötley let me go, my girlfriend Robin told me that it wasn’t going to work between us and moved out. Four days later, a mutual friend called and told me that he had just returned from her wedding: she married a video director, a guy I had never even heard of before. For my own sanity, I assumed and will continue to assume that she met him after we broke up.

I crawled into a dark hole in my mind. Between my girlfriend, my mother, my son, and my former band, I couldn’t figure out what I had done wrong to deserve all this. I drove to my ex-wife’s house to be with my son and collapsed on the couch, running through every moment of my life like a bad movie script. My son was watching television and, suddenly, he turned to me, jumped into my lap, and hugged me, snapping me out of my self-pity. “Thanks for coming over and watching TV with me, Dad,” he said. “I love you.”

I smiled and told him that I loved him too, then I told myself that none of this other shit mattered. My son loved me.

If I could rewind the years and relive all my experiences with Mötley Crüe, I wouldn’t change a thing about the first half: meeting them, recording the album in Vancouver, running around the country on our promo tour. But in the second half—recording that second album—I would probably do a few things differently. First of all, I would definitely fight back. Secondly, and most importantly, I would tell them what I really wanted to tell them at the time but never had the balls to. I was too scared of getting fired, so I kept my mouth shut and never spoke those five words that were burning a hole through my lips.

M
AKE YOUR FUCKING MINDS UP!

A
llen Kovac was a sneaky little bastard, and I mean that in the best sense of the word
bastard
because I am probably a father to many. I was in Manhattan with my manager, Bert Stein, doing press for what would be my last solo tour when we ran into Kovac in our hotel lobby. Kovac, who convincingly made his presence there seem like an accident, invited us up to his room to talk and order room service. He sat Bert and me down and began his sales pitch:

“Vince, you can get as angry as you want with me, but you have to ask yourself, ‘Are you a star as a solo artist?’”

I answered him with a glare that signified neither yes nor no but hatred. “I’ll go on,” he went on. “In the environment of four guys in a group called Mötley Crüe, you are a real star. And the audience that comes to see you gets its money’s worth. Is the audience that comes to see the Vince Neil Band really getting what it pays to see?”

He went on and on and on until I began to realize that he saw the big picture, and the big picture was that I wasn’t going to make it on my own as a solo artist and Mötley Crüe weren’t going to make it on their own as an alternative-rock band. I asked him if he had discussed this with Nikki or Tommy, and he said that they didn’t know a thing but that he could help make it happen.

Before the meeting, I didn’t really want to be back in Mötley Crüe. I just wanted to bury the hatchet, get the quarter-share of the brand name I deserved, and move on. But with his bullshit, Kovac fertilized a seed that just kept growing. When months later, I saw Nikki and Tommy at the Hyatt, we eventually came around to the idea that we needed to be together and that the rest of this stuff—the lawyers, the name-calling, the suing—was ridiculous. My lawyer bills alone already added up to $350,000, and they were sure to double if I continued the lawsuit. So by the end of the meeting, I told my lawyers, “We want to get this thing back together again. You guys do whatever it takes to get it done, and if you don’t, you’re fired.”

A week later, I went to Nikki’s house, where they were recording the album, and heard some of the tracks. Oddly, Nikki and I started to get very close very quickly. But Tommy, ever since he’d married Heather, thought he was a movie star. And now that he was married to Pamela Anderson, it was even worse. He thought he was better than everybody else, and he made it very clear that I was back in the band against his will. There were a few times when he was so condescending that I said, “Fuck you guys. Go ahead and make a record without me. I don’t give a shit.” Maybe he was jealous of Nikki’s friendship with me. I didn’t know what it was.

I never heard the album they did with Corabi, but a few weeks after I started recording with them again, Corabi stopped by. We drank a couple beers and bullshitted for a while. He said that he was glad I was back in the band because the last year had been rough on him. And I surprised myself, because I actually liked him. He was a pretty cool guy.

After a week of recording, most of us started feeling pretty stupid. Everything sounded right. Everything sounded like Mötley. We were a band again. And that was how it was supposed to be. Even Tommy seemed to be accepting his fate and, begrudgingly at first, liking the songs. Everyone was happy, except for Mick, who seemed ready to lay down his guitar and quit the band.

W
ho or what killed the dinosaurs? My belief is that it was the Ebola virus, a virus that we are told is as old as the earth itself. Since it is a flesh-eating virus, it could easily jump from host to host without any problem whatsoever, which would explain why the dinosaurs disappeared so suddenly and completely. The virus can consume most of a living being’s flesh, organs, blood vessels, and brain tissue within five to ten days, causing a crash and bleed out in which the organs liquefy and leak out of every orifice. This deadly virus is a more likely culprit than a meteor shower as far as wiping out the dinosaurs but leaving the earth intact for later inhabitants.

And speaking of dinosaurs, what yuppie asshole decided that they should be depicted in all these bright, brilliant colors? Was it Martha Stewart? Clearly, we have reconstructed dinosaurs from bones, so there is no evidence that they were the colors of kids’ toys. Look at the Komodo dragon. There are no colors on that particularly poisonous descendant of dinos. If dinosaurs were really colored so brightly, they wouldn’t have been able to stalk their prey effectively or hide from predators.

I think about dinosaurs a lot, ever since I was made to feel like one when Corabi left the band. But instead of the Ebola virus, I had Scott Humphrey, the Great Invalidator. He invalidated Corabi out of the group. When he was through with Corabi, he went to work on me. It felt like he was always pushing his shortcomings off on other people.

With every new song we started writing in the studio, I’d take the tape home and work up new parts until two in the morning. Then I’d come in the next day, play them, and the Great Invalidator would say, “Nope.” I’d ask him if he knew what he wanted me to play, and he’d say, “Nope.” I’d ask him if he knew what key the song was in, and he’d say, “Nope.” Every sound I ever brought in on guitar was greeted with a chorus of, “Nope, nope, nope, nope.” The Great Invalidator was making me look bad to Tommy and Nikki, making it look like I wasn’t bringing anything to the table. He had them convinced that it was me who was holding the band back with my dinosaur-rock guitar playing and my love of blues and Hendrix, which I guess were out of style or something. I wanted to remind them that I had named the band, that I had molded Nikki into a real songwriter, that I had purged the band’s weak links, and that I had handpicked Vince. But, like always, I kept my mouth shut. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that overconfidence is the same thing as arrogance. And arrogant, egotistical people are the weakest, most feeble-minded people ever. If you’ve got it, you don’t have to flaunt it. Egotistical people are, in my opinion, the most incompetent losers to walk the face of the earth since the pea-brained brontosaurus.