Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock's Most Notorious Frontmen

by Vince Neil

  In our sessions together, Vince was always courteous; he reminded me of a schoolkid with a tutor—he didn’t really want to do it, but someone had convinced him he should. On several occasions during our window, Sunday football took precedence over interview time. Occupying his usual reserved table at the sports book at the Red Rock Casino, Resort & Spa was clearly a higher priority than this autobiography. Often, as I tried to pin him down—three middle schools or two? What year did you marry Sharise?—he would become annoyed with me. I wondered if the emotion he was really feeling was embarrassment or some kind of shame. What person doesn’t remember why he moved out of his parents’ house for good at seventeen? A lot of clarity is lost in a haze of years and booze. Obviously there are painful truths that haunt him to this day… things we will learn a little bit about as we slog through his history and his murky depths.

  Trying to chronicle such a life is difficult: Even Vince can’t keep straight how many stints in rehab he’s done or how many times he’s been arrested. For this reason we have enlisted the voices of others. We hear from Vince’s current wife, Lia, and all three of his ex-wives: Beth Neil, Sharise Neil, and Heidi Mark. We hear from his children, Neil Wharton and Elle Neil; from his parents, Clois Odell and Shirley Wharton; from his sister, Valerie Saucer; from the members of his first band, formed in high school, Rockandi. Other interviews done in preparation of this book include: Poison’s Bret Michaels, rapper MC Hammer, porn star Ron Jeremy, LA Lakers owner Jerry Buss, Night Ranger Jack Blades. Making a special guest appearance is Nikki Sixx, along with a score of behind-the-scenes managers and other close confidants who’ve been there throughout Vince’s career.

  Onstage, Vince was and is undeniably the center of the Mötley Crüe circus—no longer clad in bright spandex or built like a Greek god, he still rips his signature piercing-yet-clean wail on lead vocals. Nikki Sixx, the main writer and musical force behind the group, who’s never gone out of his way to compliment Vince about anything, once called him “the quarterback of Mötley Crüe.” Though Vince isn’t well known as a songwriter, he co-wrote some of Motley’s biggest hits, including “Home Sweet Home,” “Wild Side,” and “Same Ol’ Situation.” That he has always been a multifaceted entertainer is sometimes lost in his seemingly effortless work onstage; what looks like wild abandon is really the product of decades of effort and experience. He has always been the consumate showman.

  Offstage, for all their drama—Mick with his crippling ankylosing spondylitis and female troubles; Nikki with his well-publicized addictions; Tommy with his trials with fame, actresses, hairstyles, and anger management issues—none of the other Crüe members would live a life characterized by the monumental highs and lows experienced by their frontman. In 1984, Vince would be found guilty of vehicular manslaughter. Left dead on the street that rainy night, after a three-day drug party, was his good friend Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley from the Hanoi Rocks. The driver and a passenger of another car were also permanently maimed in the drunk-driving incident; Vince would pay $2.5 million in restitution and serve time in jail. Some years later, having been fired/or having quit Mötley Crüe, he would sit helplessly by the hospital bedside of his four-year-old daughter as she fought and lost a wrenching battle against cancer. The time period immediately afterwards was lost in a bottle; today there is a charity, the Skylar Neil Foundation.

  Vince is still haunted by many demons, some of which I don’t think he can even explain himself. He is, in his own words, “an entertainer.” He needs others to write, score, arrange, and organize. “I get out there and sell the songs,” he will later tell me. Like many a diva before him, he has often felt himself mute offstage, in the cold, unscripted, and unforgiving light of real life. Alone, without an audience, without anyone to keep him company, he becomes lost and uncertain. This much we know. It is the explanation for many things.

  As he arrives in his Lambo, I spy on him through a door that’s been left open to air out the stink of beer and pheromones from the night before. Feelgoods is a prototype for a chain. They hope to have forty places like it someday, scattered all around the country. Vince owns 30 percent. They send him a check. He can sign for food. The place is decorated with purple velvet and leather and faux leopard skin. A huge bank of Marshall amps dwarfs the moderately sized stage, where live acts hold forth several nights a week. Glass display cases hold authentic heirloom guitars, gold albums, his old auto-racing fire suit; there is a fully chromed and tricked-out chopper on the way to the bathrooms. TV screens play a greatest-hits assortment of rock videos, giving the place the feeling of a sports bar, only instead of sports, the theme is rock—a museum masquerading as a dive bar. An older couple—he with a gray ponytail, her hair dyed jet-black, both wearing leathers—dine in a booth to one side. The center of the room is dominated by a large round table full of men in identical work shirts, their names authentically in bubbles over breast pockets, some of them no doubt enjoying the $6.95 lunch special the place has recently added to the menu in order to combat the economic downturn.

  Of course I was early for the meeting. (I was early the first day, too.) My mission: to climb inside a rock star’s mind and bring out what I can—the memories, the sensations, the collected experiences; the sex and drugs, the exhilaration and the heartache. A chronicle of a lifetime spent in the bunghole of unbridled self-indulgence. It might be hot and tight in there, but the smell is not so good sometimes.

  And so it is that I gather up my clipboard and my digital recorder (and my cute little flip cam, which will prove to be a piece of shit) and move to meet him at the hostess stand. Up close he is still a handsome man, his face maintained by a number of cosmetic procedures, some of which were famously (and excruciatingly) documented on the 2005 VH1 series Remaking Vince Neil. He is enveloped in a pleasant cloud of Lagerfield cologne, a discontinued scent he has stockpiled from sources around the country. He shakes my hand warmly and leads me inside.

  Beyond a velvet rope there is a small VIP area. Vince proudly points out the four tables he had designed specially for the club. Taken together, the pieces form the shape of a giant guitar. Around the rounded bottom part is a leather banquette. We take a seat at the next four-top, a rectangle like the rest, this one representing the lowest part of the neck, where the highest-register notes are fretted.

  “You ready?” I ask.

  “Ask whatever you want,” he says. His face is blank. His voice is thin and a little bit hoarse. There is a tonal uptick at the end of his sentence; his loopy Cali dialect makes many of his statements sound like questions.

  Mike Sager

  La Jolla, CA

  3/1/2010

  Chapter 1

  TATTOOS & TEQUILA

  Hey—sorry about yesterday, dude.

  I had my Lamborghini brought down from my house in Danville, in Northern California, to my house here in Las Vegas. I had it swapped out for my Ferrari—he took it back to Danville. It’s good to keep the mileage balanced on cars like that. They’re collector’s items—an investment and whatnot. And the Lambo is much more fun in Vegas; they got long, flat roads out here where you can turn it out—not that I would ever break the speed limit or anything.

  The driver was supposed to be here at noon, and then I guess there was all this rain and shit—he says there were fourteen different accidents driving from there to here; he didn’t even get here till almost 6:00 P.M. And of course my assistant, who lives here in Vegas and is supposed to have my back on stuff like this, she was out Christmas shopping with my wife and my mother-in-law, who is here spending time with us because my father-in-law died not that long ago. So what can you do? You know how that goes, right? The glamorous life of a rock star. You get to have an assistant, but the chances are she’s busy helping your wife when you need assistance doing something and you end up stuck doing what needs to be done, like fuckin’ waiting at home for this guy to show up with my car so I can let him in the garage. And I was waiting like a long time. I couldn’t leave. I actually ended up scr
eaming at her, too. I was like, “Kelly? Why am I sitting here waiting for this guy to come when I’m supposed to be starting the interviews for my book!” And then she tells me, I couldn’t believe it… it turns out she knew the whole time that the driver was going to be late. She knew it but didn’t bother to tell me. Nobody told me! She was like, “I told you the guy was going to be late.” And I was like, “You did not!”

  Nobody tells me anything. I swear to you. When I have my tombstone they can put that on the B side. “Nobody Told Him Anything.” I’m not sure yet what I want on the front. That line hasn’t been written yet. You know when the new Mötley Crüe album came out, the new Greatest Hits? I had no fuckin’ idea that was coming out. It was funny. I was doing this interview with some reporter and they go, “So tell us about the new Mötley’s Greatest Hits album.” And I go, “What are you talking about?” Nobody told me I had an album coming out. It happens that way all the time. ’Cause we could have, like… I told my assistant, I said, “Kelly, I could’ve gotten together with the writer earlier than we’d first planned and then I could have been back in time to get the car,” or to be here for the car, whatever, because there was nobody to punch in the code on the garage door so he could swap out the cars.

  The funny thing is, I really do take pride in being early. I am usually always early. I’ve always been early to everything I’ve ever done. Seriously. That’s why I thought it was pretty hilarious when Mötley said they fired me that first time ’cause I was chronically late for rehearsals. Dude, I am never late for shit. It’s like I have OCD or something, obsessive-compulsive disorder. I’m always early. Like even going to an airport, I’ll be sitting there for over an hour because I don’t want to be late. When people are late I can’t stand waiting for them. I fuckin’ hate that. I’ve left people behind on my solo gigs. Band members. Left ’em back at the fuckin’ hotel. Like one guy was constantly late and I just said, “Fuck it,” and I left. And we just pulled out and drove to the next city. The bus pulled away from the curb without him. People should be on time—if they say they’re going to be there on time, you know, they should be on time. If they can’t, they should call and tell you they’ll be late. But don’t show up an hour late, two hours late. Or even fifteen minutes late. You know that drives me up the fuckin’ wall.

  So where do we start? I remember when we did The Dirt—the best-selling book about Mötley Crüe written by Neil Strauss—I got interviewed at the Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills. A lot of people say I didn’t get to say much in that book. It’s probably true. I didn’t read it. When I was young I was diagnosed with dyslexia. I never really enjoyed reading too much. It’s difficult for me. I see printed stuff backwards and out of whack. It’s just a struggle. I’m sure that killed my education before it even got started. If I could read better maybe I’d have been a doctor or a lawyer. You wouldn’t even be reading this book. If you see me after you’ve read this, lemme know what you think. I probably won’t read it myself.

  I was pretty much done with school and out in the world by age fifteen, sixteen, seventeen—already a father, out of my parents’ house for good, living in Tommy Lee’s smelly van, sweeping up this rehearsal studio in exchange for time, working as an electrician, trying to make it in Rockandi, my first band. I guess another reason there might not be that much from me in The Dirt is because, you know, I’m not that big a talker. Nikki and Tommy—those guys can fuckin’ talk. They can eat up all the oxygen in a room in no time flat. I don’t tend to run my mouth. I don’t like to talk about stuff—how I feel and shit. It’s bullshit. All those years in rehab and counseling—the talking cure? I can’t say I really got that much out of it. All that cure and I should be cured by now, don’t you think? All this talking. I’d rather just go out and live, you know? Some people have lots to say. Other people just shut up and do what they gotta do. I guess I’m the second. So forgive me if it’s a bit hard for me to slice open a vein and let my blood run red all over this page for you. Somebody thinks it’s a good idea for me to tell my story, so I’m gonna tell it. But remember this: I’m a singer. I let my emotions out through demonstration. I’m demonstrative, isn’t that the word? I’ll fight you or I’ll fuck you, but chances are I’ll be hard-pressed to sit there and talk to you. I’m one of those people who are more comfortable in front of an arena full of screaming fans than I am at a small dinner party. Call it socially inept. Call it quiet and shy. I am kind of shy. Women can sense that. They always want to take care of me. They like that about me. I let them do all the talking. Women love to be heard. I do listen. And I know how to look like I’m listening to a woman even when I’m not. Maybe that’s the secret—listening. It probably doesn’t hurt when they like the way you look and carry yourself. I’ve never really been the kind of guy who had to work it real hard. I never had any lines. I never needed any. From an early age, they’ve just come to me, a flood tide of women, all shapes and colors and nationalities, but most of them blondes, long-haired blondes with big tits and long legs and little round butts and… maybe we’ll get into all that later.

  Thinking about the Dirt interviews makes me nostalgic for the Havana Room. Man, we had some epic nights there. It’s this high-end, members-only cigar club. Lots of expensive wines and scotches, and good cigars, and big swinging Hollywood dicks. You could even have your own, like, humidor/safe-deposit box where you kept a stash of Cubans or whatever. I always got a kick out of being there, living the high life, suckin’ on a fat Cuban cigar, doing shit that’s not readily available to the common man—and me, this mixed-breed mechanic’s son from Nowhereville, CA. I remember one night in January 2000 I bumped into the comedian Tom Arnold at an LA Kings hockey game. You know the dude. He used to be married to Roseanne. Another crazy motherfucker—some time when you’ve got nothing else to do, take the time to Google their photo shoot in Vanity Fair back in the day, when the couple was hot and heavy, literally. Wow. I didn’t know they allowed that kinda shit in family magazines. You know I’ve lived in the LA area all my life. I know people all over. Tom is the kind of people I know in Hollywood. It’s small; it’s basically my hometown. You get to be friends with the fun people. Like attract like, I guess. And what can I say? I love a good party. I love fun people. I love crazy motherfuckers like Arnold who have no public filter. Something about them makes it like they just don’t give a shit. And they know other crazy fun people, too. After the game, we went to the Havana Room and we met up with the actor Mel Gibson. Mel is a cool guy, no matter what anybody says. Some people drink and a switch goes off. I know it does for me. They don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Believe me, they’re telling the truth. I got to know Mel a little bit during my years living in Malibu—I think we drank together a few times at Moonshadows, which was like my hangout for years, I used to drink there with all kinds of people—Kelsey Grammer, David Duchovny. All the Malibu partiers went there, all the heavy drinkers. It was there, in Moonshadows, that I rode out the dark and stormy seas of my daughter’s death. I would go directly from Skylar’s bedside at the hospital, out Sunset Boulevard, hang a right on the PCH to Moonshadows. There I would meet my good friend oblivion.

  At this time I was with the actress and Playboy centerfold Heidi Mark—an amazing woman, an amazing piece of ass. I met her in her prime, twenty-four years old. When she was twenty she’d dated Prince a few times; she was with O.J. for a while after his whole deal with the murder of his wife. This was after that. We were together for a number of years before we got married. This was right before we got married, I think. My third time down the aisle. After Tom left the Havana Room, Heidi, Mel, and I kept going. Since we were regulars, the staff went home at like 3:00 A.M., leaving us to finish our cigars. We ended up at our house in Malibu. We were up all night drinking and playing pool and taking goofy Polaroids—somewhere there is a picture of Heidi riding on Mel’s shoulders around our living room. It was just a howling good time, pretty much PG rated. Finally, around dawn, I passed out. Heidi put Mel in a cab.
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br />   The next day on the news we see a story about how the Havana Room had burned down overnight… after two gentlemen threw their lit cigar butts in a trash can that caught a light, setting the club ablaze.

  For some reason, they never came after us for that. I’ve been sued so many times by so many people… assholes trying to make a buck just by fucking with me. I don’t know why, but I am grateful. To somebody I owe a debt of thanks. Probably there’s a lot of people I could say that about. I owe a lot of debts of thanks, I am sure. There’s so much I don’t remember….

  So how do you like the place? Feelgoods Rock Bar & Grill. There’s another one sort of like it in West Palm Beach, Florida. It’s called Dr. Feelgoods. That was the first one. That’s more of a club. It’s got five bars; it’s huge. But it only serves, like, finger food. This place has the full-on kitchen. Check out the menu. Order whatever you want. The food is great. They have these great homemade tortilla chips, I already ordered some. They serve ’em hot. Amazing. I tasted most of the stuff before we opened.

  This is like a flagship store. We spent a lot of money on getting it together, on decorating, on organizing the concept. There are going to be like twenty-five or forty of these around the country before we’re through. A lot of work has gone into all this stuff. I mean the kitchen was open for three weeks before we even opened the place. While the workmen were still working, everybody would have lunch here. They call it a “trial feed” in the business. It gave the chefs a chance to really work on their dishes and tweak the menu and stuff. See here on the menu? This thing above the tuna melt—Pete’s Plate. Pete was my father-in-law, Lia’s father, who passed away. That was his favorite meal—two hot dogs with a sixteen-ounce Budweiser. So we called it a Pete’s Plate. There’s also a Vince Platter. It’s just a really good burger with a secret sauce—Thousand Island dressing. They make it real good; it’s pretty amazing.