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

by Vince Neil

  Little by little, you start having ambitions. I still wasn’t thinking about being a rock star. I just wanted to, like, keep going up the ladder. First you want to play the Starwood—and then you play the Starwood. Then you want to play the Whisky a Go Go—and you get that gig. And then it’s not just enough to play there—you want to headline… for a whole weekend. And then it happens and that’s huge. And then once you accomplish that, you know, then you want to play the Civic Center, and we did, and then you want to go on a national tour, and we opened for KISS. And then you want to headline a tour, and of course we did that, too. So it was just all steps, you know. It was steps that we just wanted to conquer, rungs on the ladder. But it all started out just wanting to play in the band, in front of people. Like when we went from practicing in the garage to playing in people’s backyards. It’s a long road. One step at a time. That was our only goal—to go to the next step. Because it’s such a rush to get up there in front of as many people as possible and do what you do best.

  Onstage might be where I am happiest. That is where I am the happiest. It’s definitely where I am the most comfortable. Some people are great one-on-one-type people. They make small talk and jokes; they like meeting people. They say stuff like, “Oh, I’m a people person.” Not me. When I’m in a small group, I’m just no good. It’s not my thing. I’ve always been pretty shy. I’m not that comfortable around people—unless I’m drunk. Then I don’t care. But I basically like to keep my thoughts to myself, to keep my own counsel, I think they say.

  But being onstage is something different. It’s like an arena of ten thousand is just perfect for me. Intimate strangers. I don’t really have to deal with anyone’s specific responses or emotions. I just have to entertain. Of course, not every show is a great show. Drunk people throw stuff on the stage. Weird shit happens. Sometimes, when you’re having a bad show, it can be merciless. I mean, maybe the monitors aren’t right and you’re struggling to hear yourself and every note you’re singing is registering and it seems like you’re up there forever—you want to throw your microphone at the sound guy because you can’t get it right, you’re so frustrated; I’ve thrown my guitar at a guy before because I held him responsible for me not being able to do my best. I don’t like when people are just irresponsible. If you’re hired to do something, do what you’re hired to do, you know? Do your job like I’m doing my job. It’s their job to make it easy for me, you know? Don’t tell me why you can’t do something. Don’t tell me your dog ate your homework. I don’t fucking care. Do your job. Make it right. ’Cause I’m doing my job as best as I can do. I’m standing up there in front of a shitload of people. The spotlight is on me.

  On the good shows—and there are many more good shows than bad ones—when the sound is right and you’re just powering through the set… you feel like you’ve only been onstage for five minutes. If I’m singing great and having a great time, I’m thinking about my laundry, I’m thinking about the pussy I’m gonna have later, I’m thinking about anything but singing. It’s like you’re on some kind of trip—an out-of-body experience. You’re there, but you’re not there. The people are roaring and then they’re gone. You’re in a state of suspended animation. It’s bliss.

  And then you look up and you just did two hours. They’re hustling you offstage.

  Chapter 5

  HE’S A WHORE

  At the end of 1981, we started to record our debut album, Too Fast for Love. Because we still hadn’t been signed by a major label, we decided to create our own: Leathür Records.

  It was cool to say we had a label—with a cool name and a cool umlaut—but what we didn’t have was a distribution deal. Just like David Lee Roth had warned, no one was gonna hear the fucking thing!

  D’oh!

  Coffman drove around town in his big rented Lincoln, going to record stores and trying to talk managers into buying a couple of copies. Luckily I was pretty oblivious to all this at the time… if I’d given a shit about anything besides music, pussy, and getting high I would have been totally pissed that this was the marketing plan for our debut album—an expensive rental car and a Vietnam vet who sometimes found himself, in his mind at least, back in the steamy jungles, facing invisible foes.

  But there was no denying our shit was good; like they say, the cream rises. Eventually we got a distribution deal through Greenworld. Too Fast for Love has since gone platinum—which isn’t bad when you consider it only took three days and six thousand dollars to record at Hit City West Studios on the corner of Pico and La Cienega Boulevards in LA. If you know LA, you know the neighborhood. Pico is kind of a line of demarcation, where glitzy Hollywood stops and the gritty real world of South Los Angeles begins, a place some people call Soweto South of Pico, making reference to the shantytowns and the race and class separations in South Africa. Like everywhere, there’s always the castle here, and the wall here, and the peasants over there, outside. That’s LA for you.

  The studio was a dump. Just a total dive, with all these tiny rooms. Funny to think that later, with all the rising egos, politics, demands, and intervening circumstances, it would take us almost a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars to make most of the rest of our albums. Life was simpler then, to be sure. There were no real distractions. No demons to elude. We couldn’t afford a lot of studio time. We just got right down to the music and did it. We were purer then, I suppose. Things were so much less complicated. We were motivated only by the music.

  When the album was released, we threw a party at the Troubadour; that’s where Nikki hooked up with Lita Ford from the Runaways. A beautiful long-legged British-born blonde, she could chop up a guitar solo with the best. We sold twenty thousand copies pretty quickly. That’s why Greenworld stepped up. They pretty much realized it was a no-brainer. We were good at what we did. And we had the groupies to prove it. You know how a football team says its fans are like the twelfth man? Well, females were our fifth man. Everybody knew that if Mötley was going to be playing somewhere, all the hot chicks would be there, too. I know that had no small impact on our draw.

  All of a sudden there were several major labels interested in signing us. An A and R guy from Richard Branson’s Virgin Records showed up at our show at the Glendale Civic Center with a suitcase full of one-hundred-dollar bills—Branson was offering ten thousand dollars to sign the band. We’d never seen so much fucking money. For a moment there we almost caved. But then somebody told Coffman that Virgin didn’t have a distribution deal in America—most of their UK artists at the time had full-blown USA deals with Warner. David Lee couldn’t have been more right. Distribution was the gold standard.

  Tom Zutaut, Elektra’s top A and R guy, caught one of our sellout shows at the Whisky; he liked what he saw; he was determined to land us. His pitch was that even though Elektra couldn’t match Virgin’s offer, it would make more sense for us to sign with an LA label. (Little did we know the label was in the process of relocating to New York. One truth stands now and forever: All these record company motherfuckers are manipulative liars.)

  Zutaut tells the story of his boss laughing him out of his office when he declared his intention to sign Mötley Crüe—at the time, Elektra was only interested in signing New Wave bands. But Zutaut stuck to his guns. He said he just knew from watching the kids inside the Whisky going mental that we had a tremendous upside. He was supposed to be interviewed for this book, but I think the whole thing about me fucking his date at the Us festival (well documented in The Dirt) has sort of put a damper on our relationship.

  To celebrate our agreement, Zutaut took the band, and Coffman, to Casa Cugat in West Hollywood, one in a chain of popular Mexican restaurants owned by the rumba king Xavier Cugat. We’d just inked a recording contract with the label that had been home to the Doors and the Stooges; it’s hard to explain how that felt. Like the first hit of some drug, maybe, just pure, with no comedown. The margaritas were flowing freely. I guess Zutaut and his people were kind of expecting us to go pretty wild, but nobo
dy was expecting our manager to flip out.

  Usually, we didn’t hang out with Coffman. Not ever. I don’t think anybody in the band did. He was just the guy with the money that was taking us on our first steps, not somebody you wanted to hang out with. Having a manager is like a necessary evil. In the business world, nobody will do business with you as an artist unless you have a manager. It doesn’t matter who you are, you could be Mick Jagger or fuckin’ Paul McCartney and they’re like, “Yes, you’re the greatest, I love you, now lemme talk to your manager.” They don’t take us seriously. I don’t know if it’s a good ole boy system or what it is, but that’s the way it is.

  As it happened, on this night at Cugat, our esteemed manager, the owner of 10 percent of our souls, drank one or two or five too many margaritas or shots of tequila or whatever the fuck had gotten him totally shit faced. He started running around jabbering in Vietnamese, convinced, I guess, that he was back in Nam and that we were under attack by the North Vietnamese army. It was weird. Too weird. I mean, we didn’t feel like taking care of the fuckin’ guy—he was supposed to be taking care of us, you know? Not the other way around.

  Since Zutaut was the suit, we let him take control of the situation. That was his job, right? The suits take care of shit. He took Coffman home. We kept partying.

  On the way back to Coffman’s hotel, at a stoplight on Santa Monica Boulevard, Coffman leapt out of Zutaut’s car in the middle of traffic and started low-crawling along the asphalt like he was on recon.

  Even we never got that fucked up.

  You don’t know this at first, but no matter what, life always becomes a fuckin’ movie. Or a soap opera. Or an E! True Hollywood Story.

  In other words: The other shoe always drops.

  You just don’t expect it to happen quite so fast.

  No sooner did we have the amazing exhilaration of signing with fuckin’ Electra and getting an advance and having our first album… the next thing we knew we had to stand by and watch our baby get royally fucked in the ass.

  At first we thought—I don’t know what we thought. I guess we thought they’d simply rerelease Too Fast for Love as we’d recorded it. We thought it was perfect. Everybody loved it. That shitty little studio had given it just the right amount of reverb and rawness to make the sound unique.

  Then we heard that Electra wanted to bring in the well-known producer Roy Thomas Baker. When I first heard about it, I couldn’t fuckin’ believe it. None of us could. I was, like, what, twenty, twenty-one years old. And I was going to be working with Roy Thomas Baker, the guy who’d produced classic albums with Journey, Foreigner, the Cars, and Queen. Wow. That seemed sooo amazing.

  But nobody really worked it through—if we already did the album, why would we need RTB? What could he possibly add? The album didn’t need a thing… did it?

  It turned out the answer to that was complicated. We were caught in a cross fire of politics. Annoyed that Zutaut had gone over his head to sign the band, Elektra’s head of A and R, Kenny Buttice, complained that our album was not up to radio-play standards and demanded it be remixed before release. From the jump, all of us were against any remix. We thought it was a waste. I mean, remix? What the fuck is that? Redo the songs, maybe. But remix? When you get right down to it, I don’t even know exactly what RTB did to the album—other than make me rerecord every one of my vocals. Half the time he wasn’t even there in the studio when he was supposed to be there. I mean, he’d show up, listen to what the engineer did, and then leave, go take a nap or some shit, or go fuck some girl, because he was always partying.

  That was part of the problem. The studio was at his house.

  As you would imagine, based on all the big hits he’d produced, and all the money he made, the word “house” was an understatement. He had a fuckin’ palatial spread. And the party was ongoing. We’d go up there anytime, day or night. We’d do blow with him and his girlfriend and whoever else was there. They had this, like, snow cone machine and we’d make these whiskey snow cones. Being there, you really felt like a rock star. We’d been partying our ass off for years on the Strip but had always been pretty low-rent, brown paper bags on the curb. Not that anybody was complaining at the time. We were young; we didn’t care about living in all that filth. But you could sure get used to the other side in a hurry. There is nothing wrong with luxury, we were quick to learn. There was no end to the coke and the girls and the name-brand booze. Fuck the schnapps. Hand me that bottle of Jack. The party was always first-class with RTB.

  We had enough rope to hang ourselves. Things got pretty crazy. We partied at RTB’s during the entire remix and then on and off afterwards. The stories are pretty well known by now: Nikki doing lines of cocaine off a glass-top grand piano. Tommy getting blow jobs in the Jacuzzi from his new girlfriend, a Penthouse Pet named Candice Starrek, as a dozen others looked on. Tommy offering Candice, his future wife, to others—a display of his true spirit of sharing.

  One night at a party people got so fucked up that RTB locked down the house and demanded everyone’s keys. He actually wouldn’t let anybody leave. Of course, nobody can tell Nikki what to do. In his highly intoxicated state, he decided he had to see Lita. After looking unsuccessfully for his clothes, he climbed naked over the wall of RTB’s acreage and drove off in his Porsche—he’d left his keys in the ignition. Spotting the naked bassist, two groupies, who hadn’t been allowed into the party, jumped into their own car and gave chase. A high-speed pursuit ensued, with speeds hitting 90 mph. At one point, Nikki looked back to see if he had lost the girls—and promptly slammed his Porsche into a telephone pole.

  The girls fled the scene. Naked and bleeding, with a dislocated shoulder, Nikki extracted himself from his car and hitched a ride to a hospital. He was in a lot of pain. They gave him lots of Percodan. It was the shoulder injury, I think, that would eventually lead to his heroin use.

  The partying at RTB’s was obviously great. The problem was the album. He fucked it up. It sucks.

  When you listen to Queen or the Cars, the sound is very polished. But Mötley Crüe didn’t need to be polished. You polish it up too much and it loses the rawness. I think I can honestly say that we made up for not having the greatest talent in the world with having great attitude and delivery. It’s that entertainment thing again. A lot of the critics say—and I agree—that the first album we did ourselves was better. It had real emotion to it; RTB took all that out of it. I just felt his production techniques were way too polished for how a Mötley Crüe record should sound. And I still think it sounds terrible to this day. Sorry, Roy. Fact is fact, man.

  On top of that, I don’t think Elektra went to any great lengths to promote the album. Maybe that was an omen, too, because we’ve always sort of had to swim upstream to get the proper attention from our record companies, if you ask me. Zutaut told us that he was in the office one day and overheard the head of the radio department telling one of the other guys how he didn’t give a fuck about any radio stations that were showing interest in our album. At the time, the label was really pushing this Australian band called Cold Chisel. Zutaut blew a fuse and went to tell his boss what was going on. The radio asshole got fired. And as for Cold Chisel… if you hear anything about them and their shining career, please feel free to drop me a line.

  Mostly by word of mouth, Too Fast for Love entered the Billboard chart at #157. It sold over one hundred thousand copies right out of the gate. The record company fat cats might not know what fucking day it is half the time, but the fans vote with their wallets.

  In Tommy’s bio, somebody once told me, he spends the entire first chapter talking to his dick.

  I’d like to spend a few moments addressing my own crotch, if you don’t mind.

  As we’ve well established, it’s my leather-encased junk adorning the front cover of Too Fast for Love. I am wearing the black lace-ups that Leah/Lovey had bought me a couple years before. (A few years later she would be killed in an alleged drug deal gone awry, stabbed sixty-six tim
es, according to police reports.) I have signed many copies of the album over the years. Everybody always asks me about the “double meaning” of how my right hand is positioned.

  Some people say I’m making the sign of the devil, aka the sign of rock ’n’ roll. The truth is, I don’t even know what the so-called devil sign even means. Ronnie James Dio is the one who started it. Everyone always throws the devil sign, but I don’t know what the fuck it means, you know. Does it mean I’m giving you the evil eye or something? Am I casting a spell or whatever?

  Other people insist I’m forming the American Sign Language symbol for “I love you.”

  In Texas, the same sign stands for “Hook ’em Horns!” the slogan and hand signal employed by fans at UT, Austin.

  To tell you the truth, I’m more interested to hear what you think about the songs. You can interpret the hand signal however you want. Maybe my finger was itching at that moment and I went to scratch it on my belt, thus making it curl under in a weird way. Maybe I had a bet going on the UT game that day? (A lot less likely back then, though a good possibility today.)

  And all I can say is this:

  Why doesn’t anyone ever think to ask me about what my other hand is doing?

  Some more trivia for collectors: The first pressing of TFFL was two thousand copies. The album cover had white lettering. The second pressing was four thousand copies. It had red lettering on the cover and a white label on the vinyl. Five thousand copies were also produced on cassette. The third pressing was twenty thousand copies, with red lettering on the cover and a black label on the vinyl. (The distributor, Greenworld, went bankrupt in 1986; out of the ashes grew Enigma Records.) When Elektra reissued the album—we got a $28,500 advance, split four ways, minus Coffman’s cut—a few changes to the album cover were made. The front photo and logo were enlarged and the rear album photo was reduced. A new band picture was included on the lyric sheet inside, and the song “Stick to Your Guns” was omitted. For some reason, Elektra released the original Leathür version of the album only in Canada.