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

by Vince Neil

  The Starwood wasn’t on the Strip. It was on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was just down the hill. The Strip back then was full of cars and crowded with foot traffic. It was like American Graffiti, you know, except everybody looked like rock stars. There were a million posers roaming the streets, all of them dressed like they were in a metal hair band. And there were a million hot girls, each one trying to hook up with somebody in a band.

  Gazzari’s was, like, at the top of the Strip, the farthest west on Sunset Boulevard, closest to Beverly Hills. And then, moving eastward along the north side of the street, came the Rainbow Bar and Grill, the Roxy Theatre, the Whisky a Go Go. That was the main part of the Strip, all on the same side of the street. And then the Starwood was around the corner. The Troubadour was around the corner. There were also a few Valley clubs. Filthy McNasty’s was a big one to play; the Country Club was one of the better places. Those were kind of the main clubs back then. If you go into the Rainbow today, when you first walk in there’s a big wall—right before the cash register—and it’s full of pictures. Those photos have been there for thirty, forty years. There are still pictures of me, you know—probably five, six, seven, pictures of me mounted on the wall. It’s like a time warp. It’s fun to kind of revisit sometimes. Some of the same guys still work there. Like Michael and Mario at the Rainbow. They used to let me in, even though I wasn’t twenty-one. Good dudes. You should look them up. Many of those places are still there.

  There were a lot of great bands playing everywhere back then. Randy Rhoads was known as a great guitar player on the Strip. A lot of people have heard of him of course. But a lot of people you never heard of. Who knows what happened to these people? A lot of bands that I kind of looked up to never even made it. It’s weird. Like there was a band called Yankee Rose; this guy named Donnie Simmons was the guitar player. He was amazing. I actually lived at his house for a little while, too, I remember. I slept in the bathtub, which was the only available space. Then there was this other band Blue Beard. Who knows what happened to them? A lot of these bands actually had record deals, but they were small things; they never went anywhere. Another band called Smile I thought was a great band back then. And Rockandi was right up there. We were just as good as anybody else, absolutely.

  The Starwood was great. I remember you’d walk in and to the left was the bar and then the disco. And then to the right was the live venue, where the stage was. The Starwood was where everybody played and everybody wanted to play. You’d made it when you played the Starwood. At the time Rockandi was a well-known local band. But at that point nobody was really worried about being well known or not. Nobody was thinking about becoming famous. At least not me. Maybe James was. But I wasn’t trying to be a rock star. I wasn’t trying to be anything. I didn’t care. It was just fun. That’s all it was. Just like high school, it was just having fun; it was girls and booze. I was good at it and it was fun. We were getting popular—which made it even more fun. But we were never on the verge of doing anything. There was no record deal; there was nothing but what it was—we were a local name on the scene.

  With every band, I was learning, there are problems. It was kind of weird. Like girlfriends, I guess. You have your honeymoon period. Then you have your problems. You have to start “working” on stuff. With Rockandi I’d be in for a while and we’d fight and I’d leave and then I’d come back and we’d do it again. And then I’d leave again. At one point I think I was even going to change bands and go sing for Tommy’s band, US 101. Or maybe it was Suite 19 by then, I can’t remember.

  After the set at the Starwood, Tommy, like, corners me in the bathroom. He’s like, “What’s up, you blond-haired bitch?” I hadn’t seen him in a while—he was fucking with me. He hadn’t seen the platinum—it was the first time he’d seen me so white blond. He was lucky I didn’t kick his ass. Because I hardly recognized him, either. In fact, I didn’t recognize him at first. He was totally glammed out, in bright leather pants, stiletto heels, dyed black hair, a ribbon around his neck. I swear I almost went after him before I realized who it was.

  Thinking back now, I probably looked just as freakish as Tommy. I was wearing all white, like always. I had my shirt open to my waist, a bandana around my neck, and this belt with all these studs and chains hanging off of it. That was cutting-edge in 1981, what can I say? All I had to do was wear one thing onstage one night and every poseur on the Strip would be rockin’ the same look. It seems embarrassing now, but I guess the eighties are really in right now. That’s what they tell me. To me, the eighties were like, well, if somebody tells you they remember everything that happened during the eighties, they weren’t really there.

  We go out of the bathroom and Tommy walks me over to these two guys. They were like, “Hey, nice to meet you.” I recognized the tall one as the loser bassist from London. The other guy looked, like, old. He was kind of frail looking and crooked. He seemed to be appraising me from behind his spectacles. That was pretty much it.

  Tommy called me I think the next day or two days later. He was like, “What do you think? Would you want to join the band? We’re looking for a singer.”

  I didn’t even think about it. I told him no.

  I didn’t know these guys as a band. I didn’t want to start all over again with something new. Rockandi was fun already. It was together and we were having a good time—most of the time. And we were playing on the Strip, you know, which everybody wanted to play. I felt like I’d have to start over with these guys…. In my mind, joining them was kind of taking a step down.

  At the time I still had my day job, working as an electrician; we were doing a McDonald’s retrofit in Baldwin Park. I was still living with Leah. By now, I’d stopped snorting cocaine with her; I’d graduated to the needle. One morning I was headed to work at 7:00 A.M. It was probably a Monday morning; I’d been up shooting coke with Leah for three or four days straight. On the ride down the hill, I vomited all over the car. I was there but not there, you know what I mean? Shaky. Anyone who has ever been on a drug binge for a few days knows what I mean—it’s just this terrible edgy, uncomfortable feeling where you don’t feel right in your own skin. They don’t call it coming down for nothing.

  Once I got to the job site, it only got worse, I started hallucinating. From what I’ve learned, after about two and a half days without sleep you generally start to hallucinate. I was hearing voices clear as you can hear me right now. I was seeing, like, trails and the ghostly images of people who weren’t there. Imaginary dogs ran past; shadows lurked on the walls. I don’t know how, but I made it through work that day.

  I came home that night and slept for nearly an entire day. Then I woke up and shot up some coke. That’s when Tommy stopped by.

  He had a tape of songs for me to learn. My eyes were bugging out of my head. As I listened, I didn’t know whether to vomit or laugh. There was no way I was going to play with this lame band, if you could call them a band. Just to get rid of him—when you’re shooting coke you need a hit, like, every fifteen minutes—I told Tommy I’d come over to Nikki’s for the next rehearsal.

  A week later, when Tommy called to see why I didn’t bother coming, I didn’t know what to say. I mean, this is my old friend, my bro. Even though we weren’t hanging out together every night anymore we were still brothers under the skin, so I felt bad. I told Tommy I’d accidentally washed the pair of jeans that had his number in them. (Not that I couldn’t have driven over to his house and asked him. I knew exactly where Tommy lived. Fucksake, I’d lived there myself.)

  Another week or so passed. I got into another fight with the guys in Rockandi when they didn’t fuckin’ show up for a gig. We were scheduled to play at a house party in Hollywood. I showed up (early like always) in my full white satin costume. But James and Joe Marks didn’t show up. There I am standing like a fuckin’ overdressed idiot, along with the drummer, while a whole houseful of pissed-off partiers got drunker and madder, waiting for a band that was never going to play. When I called Ja
mes that night, he told me he was done playing rock ’n’ roll—he’d already cut all his hair off. “Rock is finished,” he said. “I’m going into New Wave.”

  The next day I called Tommy and asked, “Do you still need a singer?” And Tommy was like, “No, we already found somebody.”

  I was, like, Fuck, you know? For the first time in like three years, I didn’t have a band.

  And then Tommy called me back and said they’d gotten rid of their singer. Would I come audition?

  For a moment I almost said no.

  Audition? Wasn’t it them who had come to see me singing? Wasn’t it them asking me to sing for them? I had to audition?

  For once I held my tongue.

  Chapter 4

  NO FEELINGS

  Tommy, Nikki, Mick, and I started practicing every afternoon at a rehearsal studio in the Valley.

  Needing a handle for this lofty enterprise, we started throwing names around almost immediately—the idea was to find a commonly used word or phrase, something we could kind of turn upside down, you know, something that would have some shock value, or so Nikki conceived, another one of his high-concept ideas.

  We considered XMAS, Trouble, Bad Blood, Holiday, Suicidal Tendencies, a zillion more. Then I remember one time we were drinking Löwenbräu beer; the more lubricated we got, the raunchier and more hilarious the suggestions became. At some point, Mick suggested Mottley Cru. He’d been saving the name for, like, five years; it had come to him one night like a vision as he was rehearsing with his old band Whitehorse. We were a motley crew, there was no doubt about it, a foursome of high school dropouts dedicated only to partying and music. Nikki took to the name immediately, but he hated Mick’s spelling. Instead he made it “Motley Crue,” which he felt was more symmetrical or something. Inspired by the typography on the logo of the beer we were drinking, this friend of Mick’s, a guy named Stick, suggested adding an umlaut over the o to give it a militant, German feel. Nikki took it one step further and added the umlaut over the u as well.

  Mötley Crüe was launched.

  To celebrate, instead of breaking bottles over the bow, we emptied them down our faces.

  At this point, Nikki was living with his girlfriend in Hollywood. Mick was living in Redondo Beach with his girlfriend. Tommy was still living at home. At first I was living with Leah, but she was really stressing me out. Shooting coke was not my scene. I mean, it was my scene for a while. People do some wild shit on coke. There were some dark times, some of it painful, some of it fun—in the way that the people in the movie Caligula are having fun. Cocaine is the devil’s playground. It affects the sexual part of the brain—it can get pretty wild. I’m not sure Leah would have been bisexual if she’d never done the white lady. But before you know it you cross that line and you end up like one of the rats in an experiment, pushing the lever all day and all night for your reward. I’ve done every drug you could think of, but my basic drug of choice has always been alcohol. I mean, over the years, I’ve done pot and coke and pills and heroin and everything else, whatever was generally available, but usually it started with some kind of alcoholic beverage as a foundation.

  After a while, the whole junkie scene with Leah was getting kind of heavy for me. Plus, the guys in Mötley were giving me limitless amounts of shit about her. They called her Lovey because she was starting to look old. (To tell you the truth, I don’t know where Tommy had the room to give me shit at this point. The guys had nicknamed his girlfriend Bullwinkle, which was not a tribute to her good looks. It is well documented that Tommy loved Bullwinkle like crazy, partly [if not totally] because of her extreme sexual sensitivity. Today, with the luxury of the Internet, we know her type. They call them squirters. Hypersensitive, they come multiple times and with extreme force, making you feel like a superman. The gusher is pretty novel—I’ve been with squirters myself, though never at my own home, way too messy. The truth is [how to say this gently?]… the whole squirting thing yields a solution that kind of smells like piss. After Tommy had been dating Bullwinkle some months, his van began to smell like a urinal.)

  Eventually I met this girl who was a cute surfer chick. She was the complete opposite of Leah. Just wholesome and outdoorsy and athletic, with a killer little body. And I really… I really liked this girl. I can’t remember her name. While I was with Leah, I kind of started seeing her on the side. It’s always been like that. I’ve always gone from one main girlfriend or wife to the other, kind of like swinging vine to vine—at some point, you’ve got hold of both vines at once. Tricky. I’ve never been alone in my life; I’ve always had somebody. Since I was young, I’ve always had a girlfriend or a wife, someone to ground me a little bit. I’ve been married four times—I think being married is my way of always knowing that I’m not going to go home to an empty house, that there’s going to be somebody there. It’s a structure that in my mind I need. Some people don’t need that structure, but I do. I’m really a romantic. I like being in a relationship. I love it. If I have strong feelings, I want to marry this woman. And then, you know, then I get… maybe not bored easily… it’s just kind of… sometimes something happens and it’s just kind of time to move on.

  Finally, I’d just had enough with Leah. I was sick of the whole scene and I wanted out. She’d done a lot of great stuff for me, so I felt bad. It was just over, you know? There was only one problem. I couldn’t leave. At the time I didn’t have my own car. It was like I was stuck up on the side of the mountain in this big house where she lived.

  So I made a big plan with Tommy to escape.

  One day I packed up all my clothes and I secretly left everything out on the driveway, behind some bushes. I had two boxes of belongings; it was not a whole lot of stuff. Probably people thought I was putting it out in the driveway for Goodwill. Tommy met me at a certain time. I told Leah I had to go outside or some shit, and I left her in the bathroom and just went out… outside into the light. Tommy pulled up and I put the shit in his van. And that was it; I got the fuck outta there. I remember the feeling of giddiness as we pulled away. Like this uncontrollable laughter that used to bubble up when I’d snatch something out of a warehouse and run like hell—just pure evil joy. I never saw her again.

  From there I think I went back to Tommy’s house—back sleeping on the floor of his room. The van was out of the question. It was too putrid with the scent of eau de Bullwinkle. Just riding in it was difficult enough—luckily the smell in the front was not as bad as in the back, where the action generally took place.

  We didn’t have any money. That’s why I always preferred rich chicks. I basically always had a chick with a nice place and a nice car and a little money. Chicks always had friends with drugs and alcohol. As for the cover charge at the various clubs, we got in for free ’cause we were Mötley Crüe—or not Mötley Crüe; nobody knew who we were yet as a band, but they knew me from Rockandi and Nikki from London, and so forth, we’d all been playing these venues for two or three years now; we were sort of the local royalty, maybe a second tier behind guys like Randy Rhoads, who of course was most famous for being Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist.

  I was still only twenty years old, one year under the legal age to drink in the state of California. Sometimes I used Nikki’s birth certificate, which said “Frank Feranna.” Unfortunately, free admission did not include free drinks. There was no way we could afford the pricey booze inside. Instead, we would put our money together and go to, I think the place was called University Stereo and Liquor Store. It was right by Turner’s Liquor, and we’d buy like, you know, fifths of schnapps and then sit and drink with the bums out of paper bags. Then we’d just walk across the street and go to the Whisky or whichever club we’d decided on. Sometimes when you were inside, people would buy you drinks. I can’t ever say I spent much time sober.

  As for our wardrobe, we got our look from the hardware store. We were big into the fuckin’ hardware store. I would have a leather jacket or something and you’d cut the sleeves and you’d put chains on it.
You know, stuff like that. After Rockandi, I started to get away a little bit from the white, but I still stood out because I was the platinum blond guy in the middle of all the jet-black dye. Nikki was always into the big hair and the heels in his band London, so when we got together it just happened to fit that we were into that, too. I still had my leather pants from when Leah bought them. I wore those all the time. And I had a white pair, too. But it’s not like we ever sat down and said, you know, “This is going to be our look.” Nobody said, like, “You’re going to wear this, and you’re going wear that.” It was not like KISS or some shit, though that definitely influenced us. Everybody just got dressed how they felt comfortable and it worked. So it was everybody’s instinct to just be who we were. I think it was kind of organic. We were who we were and it went together well.

  When we weren’t practicing, we were making our presence known on the Strip. It was an amazing place, more entertaining than anything you could imagine, like going to a countercultural zoo. In the years I was there, the general atmosphere took a dark, downward turn, moving from hippie to glam/punk, from pot and quaaludes to cocaine and speed and junk. The coke in those days was rocky and crystalline, fresh from Bolivia and places like that. It wasn’t like the milled-up, manufactured stuff you’d start seeing by the late eighties and nineties. This shit was rocks. You had to use a razor blade to slice it. Like that scene in Goodfellas? Where the mobster in prison slices the garlic with a razor blade? That’s what you had to do with the rocks at that time. You’d slice off these pieces that looked like quartz crystal. And then you could begin chopping it up with your driver’s license or whatever.

  Drunk and stumbling in our stiletto heels, we paraded the street with everyone else. I wore red nail polish, hot pink pants, and full makeup. Everybody in the band, as you know, had their kind of signature look. The sidewalks were crowded with spandex prostitutes and clusters of punks, New Wave hipsters, hair metal poseurs, a few retro hippies—that scraggly look would eventually come back at the end of the decade with grunge. The lines outside the clubs could be a block long, sometimes around a corner. All kinds of celebrities and quasi celebrities were hanging out to see and be seen.