I was pleased and the guys handled it well, signing the record sleeves and chatting with their new found fans. Little did they know it at the time, but those folks who attended that day actually bought the first 200 Mötley Crüe records that were ever sold.
They're probably on Ebay by now.
After, we all piled into the rented Lincoln Town Car for the long ride home north to Hollywood. As Alan drove. Nikki took a rear window seat behind him, Tommy sat in the middle and Vince was on the right side. Mick and I shared the front seat.
Despite the success of the afternoon’s event, small as it was, there was a sense of tension in the car for whatever unknown reason. I could feel it, as did Alan who was trying to make small talk with the guys to no avail.
Something was brewing in the back seat.
As we pulled off the freeway to head back to the apartment, all hell broke loose.
“Nik, several kids told me today they don't like the pentagrams and devil shit.” Vince said softly.
Nikki blew. “FUCK YOU! I QUIT LONDON TO DO WHAT I WANT TO DO AND IF YOU DON'T LIKE IT YOU'RE FUCKING FIRED! GET OUTTA THE FUCKING CAR!”
Still screaming, Nikki ranted on. “I pulled you out of a fuckin’ garage band and I showed you how to fuckin’ dress and I showed you how to fuckin’ perform on stage and I bleached and cut your goddamn fuckin’ hair!”
Before Nikki's ‘I’ this and ‘I’ that’s were through, Vince threw a punch across poor Tommy who was trapped in the middle that connected with Nikki’s nose.
It wasn't a good idea.
Nikki punched back and within seconds there was an all out street fight happening in the back seat of the Lincoln. Blood was flying and the car was actually rocking from the action.
I looked at Mick, Mick looked at me. Alan was watching this scene unfold in the rear view mirror, and we all looked at Tommy who was simply caught, litterly, in the middle.
“Pull over Al. Let them take it to the sidewalk.”
Alan pulled the sedan to the curb and after a minute or so, like a stern father, yelled “OK THATS IT! OVER!”
Suddenly there was silence from the rear.
I glanced at Mick, who by this time was practically in my lap from trying to avoid any wayward knuckles and said I sarcastically, “How about that damn Nostradamus?”
Mick smiled and winked. Alan pulled away from the curb and continued the drive home.
That was the last of the ‘pentagram wars.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I soon double checked with Al on our upcoming dates as I wanted to make sure my ‘publicity machine network’ was kept current. I was becoming very good at this and I wanted every last body possible in the venues.
At that time, we had a Whiskey date with RATT in about a week, which Alan would not be able to attend (due to a business problem up North.) A Christmas night Country Club booking and the following night was the self-promoted Oxnard show.
At the Whiskey, the sold-out night basically went off without a hitch, except for Nikki breaking a bass string in the middle of the first set. Given recent events, that was nothing. I had put the roadies in the audience hawking the newly pressed ‘Too Fast for Love’ LPs as well as Mötley Crüe T-shirts and buttons. Sales were brisk.
What happened later that night in the dressing room after the show however, proved in retrospect to be the ‘beginning of the end of Mötley's beginning.’
Backstage, there were the usual hang-arounds, guys who wanted to roadie, girls who wanted to fuck the band and a mixed assortment of Hollywood types. The booze flowed and Nikki and I shared more than enough of the previously mentioned white powder. Despite the fact that I realized I was breaking my own rule; not partying with the band or socializing too much in order to ‘remain professional,’ I couldn't resist the temptation.
At some point during that night I was approached by a very overweight, yet somewhat pretty short-haired blond lady named Michelle.
“Hi! I'm a DJ on KROQ and I like Mötley Crüe very much. I understand you're the guy to talk to...”
She went on... “I'd like to give you guys some airplay on my next show, Sunday night.”
I was well aware of KROQ but understood it to be a new wave Blondie/Knack/Clash and (at best) Pretenders type station. Her show was late night immediately after Rodney Bingenheimer’s ‘Rodney On The Rocks’ feature, a very popular and well listened to radio program.
Any airplay was good airplay, especially given the simple fact was we didn’t have any.
Michelle was immediately showered with numerous copies of the ‘Too Fast for Love’ LP, introduced to the band, given a few t-shirts and some of the pleasure Nikki and I were enjoying.
Exchanging business cards, she asked me a strange question. (I was becoming used to these) “Did you ever watch ‘Emergency’ the TV show about Los Angeles Fire Department Paramedics?"
“Matter of fact, I did Michelle. It was one of my favorites. Jack Webb, right?”
“Well. he was an asshole, but anyway, I was Dixie McCall's RN on the series.”
“Uhhhh…. OK.” I replied.
“Just listen. Sunday night. I promise.”
Despite her wackiness I did believe her and sure enough, Sunday night right after Rodney, Michelle plugged Motley to the max and played four or five of the cuts off the new LP.
Michelle was the first DJ on the planet to play the Crüe. (The College radio station interview had not yet been aired.)
Alan couldn't have been happier when he heard the news. Airplay on a major L.A. radio station. It was a start, a good one, especially as reportedly the station's phone switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with listeners asking for more.
Alan wanted to meet this lady and take her to a nice dinner in thanks for the on-air promotion. I mentioned that she said it was it was almost her birthday. “Perfect, can you arrange for a birthday cake for her?” “Something really special, Mike.”
I was slightly insulted. “No, I can’t, I don’t know jack-shit about birthday cakes.”
As it so happened I had met through the ‘Mötley House’ a young girl named Tina. I was introduced to her by Nikki who was dating her sister Lynn. Unlike many of the girls that were around at the time, these seemed very different. Nice girls from fine families in the Valley. Leather mini skirts and pumps but well-scrubbed. Something more than just an after-the-Rainbow closed party at the house play toy. They were the type of girls you could take home to Mom, yet still sexy enough to attract our interest.
Tina and I hit it off immediately and started a very causal, innocent dating relationship. I asked her to do me a favor and take over the birthday cake selection duties.
Alan and Michelle, Tina and I gathered back at Carlos and Charlie's on a Thursday night, in thanks for playing Mötley on the air, and to celebrate Michelle's birthday.
Interestingly, I later learned that Carlos and Charlie’s restaurant was owned by Alice Cooper and his manager Shep Gordon, the founder of Alive Entertainment.
The next night we had a rehearsal scheduled at S.I.R. I arrived there early as I had several things to discuss with Alan, but he was nowhere to be found. I tried paging him from the studio phone with no luck.
After the rehearsal was over, Nikki and I went to the Rainbow for a few drinks, both of us wondering why Alan hadn’t shown.
Same thing happened the next night although this time he had left me a message saying he wouldn't be there giving no reason for his absence.
I had a hunch. It was pretty far out, but so was the fact that Alan had missed two straight nights of rehearsals. After the guys finished, I again went to the Rainbow to kill some time. I knew where Michelle lived as we had picked her up that first night. After the club closed, I cruised by and sure enough there was Alan’s Lincoln in the driveway. At 3am.
I decided to keep that little discovery to myself.
Valentines Day weekend we had planned to do two nights at the Whiskey, two shows each night. This was the first time the club had of
fered pre-sale tickets and all shows were sold out several weeks in advance.
Alan asked me to join he and Michelle that Thursday for a Valentines day dinner. Again with Tina, we enjoyed steaks and drinks at Michael’s in Los Feliz. I drove Tina back to her place and returned home around 2am where there were several urgent messages from Vince.
“Mike where the HELL is Alan?” "Where are YOU?"
Before I could return the call, the phone rang and it was once again Vince.
“Mike, Nikki's in jail!”
“What the hell happened? Which jail?”
Vince went on to tell the story. It seems the two of them along with Lita were leaving the Rainbow when some bikers in the parking lot made a smart-ass remark about their hair. A pretty fierce fight ensued, and Lita took off her chain belt and passed it to Nikki to use as a defensive weapon. Nikki began swinging it violently. Unfortunately for Nikki he was unaware that a Sheriffs Deputy was approaching directly behind him and the end of the chain connected with the officer’s eye. He was taken to the hospital.
(This is the incident the song "Knock'em Dead Kid" was written about.)
Both Vince and Nikki were arrested and jailed at the West Hollywood Sheriff's station, but Vince was released almost immediately. Nikki was still behind bars.
“Don't worry, Vince, I'll get a hold of Alan and we'll get down there right away. Shit, we have to play tonight.” By this time it was 3am.
I tried all the usual numbers I had for Alan, including Michelle's. No luck. Desperate, I called Alan's wife Barbara in Grass Valley.
“No, I haven't heard from him in two days. I'm worried. In fact, I was going to call you this morning to find out what's going on.”
Still trying every number I could think off, the sun was coming up. Nikki was in jail, we had two shows that night and there was still no Alan.
Around 7am, there's a knock on my door. It was him, wearing the same clothes as the previous night and reeking of alcohol. In fact, he was still buzzed.
“Al, Nikki's in jail.”
“Has my wife called?”
“Huh? Did you hear me? Nikki is in jail.”
“Has my wife called?”
“Alan, what the fuck part of ‘Nikki’s in jail’ don’t you understand?” By this point I was yelling.
“O K, but tell me if my wife has called.”
“No she has not called, but I called her trying to find you.”
Alan sighed....“Oh shit. Where's your phone at?”
This guy missed his calling in life as he should have been a screenwriter. He told his wife that he had taken some DJs out for drinks (that was sort of true) and had been pulled over on the way home by the police and detained for suspicion of drunk driving. He showed them his police ID (Coffman had been a San Jose Police Officer prior to starting his construction business.) and they said ‘out of professional courtesy, we'll drive you to a hotel where you can sleep it off.’
I'm thinking damn, that's a good one, I’ll have to remember it for my own future use.
“Alan, please get yourself together and let’s get down the Sheriffs station.” He agreed with another sigh. “OK, let's go.”
At this point I was starting to worry greatly. Although I did like Alan I was rapidly losing respect for him. I felt he meant well, but feared he was ‘losing it,’ somehow spinning out of control.
Pacing nervously, I waited in the lobby of the station while Al went inside to negotiate Nikki's release. About an hour later they both came out. It seemed that indeed there was some ‘professional courtesy’ provided by the Sheriff’s as well as a number of passes to the night's Whiskey show as well as some complimentary Too Fast for Love LPs that aided in getting our bass player freed.
I later learned that when Nikki was behind bars and couldn’t reach Alan, out of desperation he had somehow reached Lita from the jail who offered to pledge her Trans-Am for his bail. The problem with that was that it would take at least twenty-four hours for the bail-bond company to get an appraisal on the car as it was a tangible item, not simply cash.
At sound check that afternoon, I noticed the stage crew were setting up and testing a series of strobe lights. I was surprised as I recently had had a conversation with Sixx and Alan as to why we never used any pyrotechnics or special stage effects. “Anything we do now on a club level will look lame,” was Nikki’s answer. “KISS has walls of flame and we’re already getting too much ‘KISS wanna-be flack. Until we can do it right, it would just feed into that shit more.)”
I asked “So, Nikki we’re using strobes tonight? That’s new,” trying to make small talk.
His response was edged and sarcastic. “No, they're not strobes, they're flickering lights that make everything look like an old-time movie.”
I was about to ask “what the hell is the difference?” but before I could he yelled “WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU GUYS LAST NIGHT?”
I knew first hand that nobody is ever in a good mood after spending a night in jail so I ignored his fury. “Sixx, you know where we where.”
At this point I decided to let Nikki in on my recent discovery. “Look, if you haven’t figured it out by now, Alan's fucking Michelle.”
Nikki nodded and with a sigh said “I thought about that. Everything's changed since she came into the picture.” Boiling over again he yelled “SHE’S NOT THE ONLY ONE GETTING FUCKED!”
The volume of the scream was so loud that the stagehands stopped setting up the gear and looked over at us.
Sticking out his hand a few moments later he said softly “I'm sorry, Mike.... I know you have no control over this.”
“Let's go somewhere quiet and have a drink, just you and me Nik. The Rainbow should be open by now and not busy yet, let's walk up. Fresh air will do us good.”
We did, and neither of us mentioned the situation. “Let's just get through this weekends shows and see what happens”, I sighed over my first wine of the late afternoon.
“Yeah Mike, you're right as usual.” “Sometimes I wish you had the checkbook.” He was sincere and I took that it as a real compliment. Starving musician or not, Nikki was street smart and had an astute mind that I had come to admire and respect.
“Order a pizza, my treat Nik.” I figured I could just add that to Alan's rapidly growing tab. On top of everything else that happened with the last 24 hours, I received my phone bill in the mail. $3400 for the last month. I must have spoken to every club booker in America. I decided to wait until Monday to ask Al for a reimbursement. Again, I just wanted to make it through this fucking weekend.
As I expected, Michelle arrived with Alan at the Whiskey that night. Although they were discrete, it was easy to see that he was paying more attention to her than to the band. Nikki and I spent the evening exchanging looks of disgust.
The shows themselves however went off without a hitch, despite a near disaster just prior to the first set. One of the Whiskey security guys came into the dressing room holding a nicely wrapped gift box with a bow and card and asked me “Where’s Vince? Some cute blond just dropped this off for him downstairs.”
I remembered the ‘cute blond’ that we had to shimmy down a rope to avoid at the Roxy a few months before and a red light went off in my head.
“Vince is in the bathroom putting on his stage clothes and make-up. Let me see that” I told him. Although the box wasn’t ticking, it had a strange odor to it. Not being one to read other peoples private correspondence, I had a band to protect so I opened the card which read ‘Vince Dear, I baked these brownies for you myself as a token of good luck on stage tonight, Love, Lea.’
I opened the box and sure enough it contained freshly baked yet smelly brownies. My first thought was they were laced with marijuana, or worse yet, PCP.
I asked the bouncer. “Take a whiff of this and tell me what you think,” which he did and paused for a moment then said, “Man, that’s an Ex-Lax smell.”
Ex-Lax brownies, that’s just great. I instructed him to take them into the rear alley
and put them into the Whiskey dumpster saying “What Vince doesn’t know won’t hurt him;” adding “Put them in the bottom of the bin. I don’t want some poor homeless bastard thinking he just found his evening dinner and getting the rabid shits.”
It was only a few minutes after the toxic package was well on its way to the garbage that Vince emerged from the bathroom and called out for me.
“Hey Mike, check these. Alan bought them for me this afternoon,” pointing to the bright white pair of skin-tight Spandex he was wearing.
“They look great Vince, the girls will love’em.”
He didn’t know how close he came to an on-stage disaster, unprecedented in rock history.
Between sets yet another one of the security guys approached me and said there was someone who wanted to see me. “Says he's Vince Gilbert.” “Vince? Cool, let him in.”
Vince was brought backstage and we hung out for the rest of the night. At the after-show party back at the house, I introduced Vince to Nikki who said that he would like to keep in touch and maybe have him sit-in on some future Mötley sessions as he had several ideas for a Hammond signature in some new songs he'd written.
He added: “You're in the same band with my buddy Rik Fox? I've heard a lot about you guys, maybe we can do the Oxnard show together. And tell Fox I said hi and to drop by.”
The Saturday night shows were equally successful. After another post-show party back at ‘the house’, I decided to spend Sunday in my own bed sweating out the coke and wine. It had been a hell of a seventy-two hour period.
I called Al early Monday. Still suffering under the weight of the financial albatross which was the Benedict Canyon property around my neck, I needed cash for the expenses I had incurred on behalf of the Crüe.
“Can I get a check from you Al?”
Metal, Madness & Mayhem - An Insiders Journey Through The Hollywood 80s Page 8
