by Vince Neil
And he just said, “Okay, I’m going to go home and tell Nikki that you’re my girl and that’s it.”
And I’m like, “Is that really the smartest move? It might break up your band.”
In my opinion, Nikki was always kind of jealous of Vince. Vince just did everything so effortlessly and Nikki worked so hard to grasp everything. It was just two different personalities working toward the same end really, but they were very different. And you know Vince was the lead singer and Nikki was just the bass player and blah blah blah. And I just felt like it was maybe not a good idea. So I said to Vince, “We don’t have to go through with any kind of relationship. I mean it’s been great, whatever, but we could just call it a day.”
But he was like, “No, I’m going to go tell him.”
Pretty much from that point on we were together.
On March 12, 1982, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services issued an official notice of violation to Nikki Sixx (he was the leaseholder), for the “non-removal of trash from the premises” at the Mötley House. Pretty soon after that we were evicted.
Honestly, we could have cared less. We were ready to get the fuck outta Dodge. It was so dirty in there, even we thought it was disgusting. Half the time we didn’t even know the people who were hanging out there.
Nikki moved into Lita Ford’s place in Coldwater Canyon. My roomie Tommy Lee, having finally dropped his former girl, Bullwinkle—after she smashed a window with a fire extinguisher—moved with his girlfriend into a small house with a pool in the backyard. Mick was still living with his girlfriend Linda in Redondo Beach.
After a month or two in her apartment in Hollywood, Beth and I moved to Redondo also. She had very wealthy parents and grandparents. She had a 280Z. I don’t know what it was about that model car. Zs have followed me through my life. Leah/Lovey had one, too. She used to drive me to practice and gigs in it. And I actually owned one before that, when I was like seventeen or eighteen, when I was working at the Kasler Corporation. This was after my truck had died. I had the 280Z in blue I think it was. Or maybe it was a 240? 260? I can’t remember. I do remember I was making good money at the time. And that I financed it and my dad cosigned on it and stuff. And when I lost my job, when I quit, you know, they repossessed it.
Beth and I loved Redondo. We both did a lot of drugs together. It was just a nonstop party. We married pretty soon after that. I don’t remember why, exactly, we decided to get married then. I loved her. I think maybe like I cheated on her and she found out and then to, like, apologize, you know, I said let’s get married. I can’t really remember exactly the situation. That was three wives ago!
The ceremony was this big deal at the Crystal Cathedral in Orange County. You pass it on the I-5. During Christmastime it’s lit up like heaven’s gates. Lord knows what their electric bill must be, dude. I don’t remember what time of year it was when we got married. I don’t remember why we picked the Cathedral, the home base for the international Crystal Cathedral Ministries, which includes a congregation of over ten thousand members and the internationally televised Hour of Power, according to the Web site. It’s a beautiful place, though; it was the whole fairy-tale wedding. All the guys from Mötley were there. We played a few songs.
Meanwhile, we were getting so fucking well known on the Strip that we were selling out everywhere we played. The Troubadour, the Whisky, the Country Club. You name it, we were selling it out.
Record stores couldn’t keep our album in stock. One place put a painting of me, like this big mural, on their wall outside. We even had some merchandise available through mail order—there was no Web in those days, of course. We sold these rockin’ Mötley Crüe leather gloves and T-shirts and other stuff by mail. You called a number and they sent it out.
Right about that time, the British rock magazine Kerrang! published the first glossy magazine photo of a Mötley Crüe member—a full-page, full-color picture of… me. Though it didn’t occur to me at the time, this might have been the first nail in my coffin as far as those other guys were concerned. Nikki and Tommy were the ones who’d always wanted to be famous. They’d formed the band; they needed a singer, so they went out and got me. Now I was getting known as the frontman. I was more famous than them. Nobody said anything to my face, but I knew what they were thinking. If you ask me, a lot of shit between us started right there, with the Kerrang! story. You build a wall one brick at a time. I really feel like that was one of the first bricks.
Since nobody at Elektra was gonna put any money into promotion, the only thing to do was go out and play. So that’s what we did.
Coffman booked us on our first tour.
In Canada.
I was like, Canada? Why Canada? What the fuck? But it was a tour, so I didn’t complain. We called it the Crüesing through Canada Tour, but we hardly cruised—a lot of it was a fucking nightmare of mistakes and naïve fuckups.
Before we even got into the country, we were arrested at Edmonton International Airport for trying to walk through customs in our stage gear. I don’t know why we were dressed for the stage. It was somebody’s idea. I think we wanted to like get off the airplane in Canada like the Beatles coming to America. So we had to be dressed for it. But I don’t think any of us had too much experience with flying at this point; maybe we just didn’t know what to expect. They confiscated all our chains, studded belts, and wristbands; they also took exception to my trying to carry through some Playboy and Hustler magazines I bought in the LA airport to read on the plane.
The first night we played, at Scandals Disco in Edmonton, there was a bomb threat made against the band—some people say that might have been generated by management. I don’t know. On the day of our second Edmonton show, we arrived at the venue to find the manager of our hotel waiting for us, demanding $260 for some damage we’d caused. He’d brought along two bodyguards to make sure he got paid. What can I say? We’d been bored and someone came up with the idea of throwing our television sets out of our hotel room windows at the same time to see whose would hit the pavement first. Tommy won the bet, but I still think he cheated.
Along the way there was a fight with a group of dudes still dressed up in their ice-hockey gear and wielding hockey sticks—more glam haters. I felt like I was in a scene from Warriors. At another show we had cops lined along either side of the stage after an anonymous caller threatened to attack us during the performance. We found out later that Coffman had engineered that fraud as well—it did get good press back home, however. The guy was way too good at lying. That should have been a tip-off.
By the time we got to British Columbia, our reputation had preceded us. Nobody wanted to rent us a hotel room. The remaining dozen or so shows ended up getting canceled. I don’t really know what was up exactly, but some of it had to do with Coffman. He was struggling financially. He’d apparently re-mortgaged his house three times to keep the band on the road—food, hotel, the whole nine.
Rather than come clean to the band, or ask Elektra for help, Coffman sold 5 percent of his stake in the band to a young guy named Bill Larson, who’d paid with twenty-five thousand dollars he’d stolen from his parents, their entire life savings. The Canada tour had something to do with the deal.
Long story short: Coffman ended up with Larson’s twenty-five thousand dollars and whatever was left of our Elektra advance. After we severed ties with him, his wife, Barbara, came home to find him pacing their backyard with a gun in his hand, contemplating suicide. He later divorced her and became a born-again Christian. Having learned the news of Coffman’s swindle, the money lost, Larson’s father suffered a heart attack; he died six months later. Upon his father’s death, Larson himself suffered clinical depression; he eventually filed a lawsuit in hopes of recovering his money. The case was thrown out of court when it was discovered that Coffman had disappeared without a trace. Larson continued to work in the music industry; eventually he became a co-founder of HardRadio. I feel sorry for all these guys, but then on the other hand I don
’t. They were all vultures, trying to make a buck off people who loved to play music. Sometimes they die. They are eaten by the others in the clan.
In the middle of all this incredible bullshit, in August of 1982, our first single dropped.
“Live Wire” was followed, four days later, by the Electra rerelease of Too Fast for Love. It entered the charts at #157.
I remember the first time I heard myself on the radio.
Yes, I do. Absolutely. It was right about this time. I was living in Redondo Beach and I was driving to my apartment. It was just a beautiful summer day, like always near the beach. Amazing waves, amazing blue sky, that great cool breeze. And then “Live Wire” came on the radio.
I stopped the car.
I was like, Oh my god.
But I didn’t… there was nobody… I couldn’t… There were no cell phones then. I was all by myself and there was nobody to call and nothing to do. I was just sitting there by myself, you know, thinking, Holy shit, that’s me on the radio. Yeah. Yeah! I was sitting in Beth’s orange 240Z. Or maybe it was a 260. I always get those confused. But yeah, man. I heard it come on and it was just greater than anything you could describe. It was a pretty proud moment. It was very surreal.
It’s no accident this chapter carries the title it does. It’s from a Cheap Trick song, “He’s a Whore.” ’Cause every musician needs his pimp. They call them managers, agents, what have you. Like I said earlier, it’s a necessary evil.
After Coffman left, we needed management… and fast. There was no way Mötley Crüe could run itself. Maybe Nikki thought for a minute we could do it, but there was no way. If we were going to go anywhere, we had to find some suits we could trust.
Because we had an album and a deal, we had a little bit of leverage, but we were still the ones who were putting ourselves out there—we were the ones with our hats in hand, asking to be taken on as clients. (It’s kind of weird that you have to beg people to take 10 percent of your income, but that’s another fucked-up part of the whole industry.) We set up a showcase at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and invited as many potential managers as we could find. The concert was billed as “New Year’s Eveil.” I don’t remember whose brilliant title that was, but we filled the thirty-five-hundred-seat arena with no problem at all. People were being turned away at the door. In the audience was booking agent Doug Thaler. He’d been invited by our good friend Ronnie James Dio. Back in the late sixties, Thaler had played with Ronnie Dio and the Prophets. He almost lost his leg when their tour van was involved in a head-on collision.
As it happened, a guy named Doc McGhee was also coming. He was known as a dude with a pot full of money who wanted to start up his own management company. Doc has since gone down in rock ’n’ roll folklore for having discovered Bon Jovi. And although Doc had no previous experience in the music industry, aside from managing Pat Travers, he believed he could turn Mötley Crüe into the biggest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. Not only that—he didn’t even care whether Elektra was willing to put any money into the venture. He was willing to throw in as much money as it took. What a sweet guy, right?
(What we didn’t know yet: In 1988 McGhee would be arrested for his involvement in a 1982 conspiracy to smuggle forty thousand pounds of Colombian marijuana. He received a suspended sentence, paid a fifteen-thousand-dollar fine, and was required to start a foundation, which he dubbed Make a Difference.)
McGhee was interested in hiring Thaler to help him run his management company. They traveled together from Florida to hear us play.
Our show was an unbelievable success. Packed to the rafters, people going crazy; fire marshals issued us a one-thousand-dollar fine for using these twenty-foot mortars. McGhee would later say that after he saw that show, taking us on was pretty much a no-brainer.
Doug Thaler Co-manager and Later Manager of Mötley Crüe
I co-managed Mötley Crüe with Doc McGhee from the beginning of January 1983 until mid-August of 1989. Then I managed them myself for the next five and a half years, till the end of 1994. I haven’t spoken with Vince in fifteen years. Vince doesn’t speak to me anymore.
Basically, I graduated from school in 1967 and I was invited to join Ronnie Dio and the Prophets. That became the Electric Elves. Then it became the Elves, then Elf. I stopped playing for a living in 1972 and became an agent. I signed AC/DC and brought them to the United States. I booked them right through Highway to Hell; that was the last thing I booked on them. Same thing with Judas Priest. I started them as a five-hundred-dollar band and booked their tours right through the end of 1979. Pat Travers was a client of mine. Be Bop Deluxe, Thin Lizzy.
After that, I went over into music publishing for a couple years, which was boring as shit; then I joined Contemporary Communications Corporation—they had Ted Nugent, Aerosmith, the Scorpions, Def Leppard. In the summer of ’82 I was handling an Aerosmith tour.
Tom Zutaut was Mötley Crüe’s A and R man from Elektra; he called me to see if I’d put Mötley Crüe on the bill, at least on the West Coast. I didn’t ’cause we had already committed the spot. But right about that time, in the early fall of ’82, I went out to California to visit Ronnie Dio and other friends. Ronnie spoke highly of Mötley Crüe, so I went out to see them perform at the Santa Monica Civic Center on December 31, 1982. I went with Pat Travers’s manager, Doc McGhee. Doc was new in the business and he wanted me to come in with him.
The show was sold out. They had god-awful merchandise that all sold anyway. It was an amazing, amazing show. They looked phenomenal; they were great onstage. I thought the songs were great; I thought the look was great. There were some amateurish elements—they had, like, propane jets as part of the pyro show, which are totally illegal. I mean, they’re good for starting fires, but that’s about it. And Nikki had a thing where he wore thigh-high boots and he figured out how much water to mix with isopropyl alcohol and he used a torch and he’d set himself on fire; his legs would be burning. He figured he could take it for about ten seconds. I saw them and said, “Wow, all we gotta do is make a record with these guys.” They had all the songs from their first album. And they already had all the songs written for Shout at the Devil—they played them in their set. And so I got to hear “Too Young to Fall in Love” and “Looks That Kill.” The only thing left for them was making a record with a real producer who makes records that get on the radio.
About the second week of January we sat down with Nikki and Tommy. I said, “Look, here’s what I want to do. Basically I don’t want you to change much of anything. I think you got great songs; I think you got a great look.” I thought they needed to get a real pyrotechnician involved. I told them they needed to make a legit record. I told them, “It’ll get on the radio because you got the songs. We’ll just take what you do here in Los Angeles and we’ll send it all over the world.” I knew it would work. And that’s basically what we did.
My first impression of Vince? I loved how he sang. It’s not that he had such a great voice; it’s just that he had a great sound. And he had a great look. He was only just turning twenty-two. He looked great and he moved great. He was just a great frontman. There wasn’t much of anything we had to do with Vince. We took him for voice lessons—really more to try to teach him proper breathing techniques so that he would be able to sing a lot of shows in a week without losing his voice. We had to teach him a few fundamentals. He would do this vocal warm-up. It was shit like Tarzan would do.
I probably spent more physical time on the road with them and in rehearsal halls and things like that than Doc did. Back in those days, neither Doc nor myself really understood addictive behavior syndrome. We didn’t really understand alcoholism and drug addiction and stuff like that. People were getting high all over the place. It was the times. We hired a head of security—one of his jobs was to monitor what the band was doing. We knew they were going to get shit; we didn’t want them running around strange towns trying to score blow or whatever. So, we just tried to keep as much of a lid on it as pos
sible, and keep everybody together. It really started getting bad in November of ’83, the Shout at the Devil tour. Of course it wasn’t long after that Vince had the, ah, automobile mishap—you know, Razzle was killed. All the guys were like equally wild, equally irresponsible. Equally into drugs and alcohol and debauchery and whatever. Don’t get me wrong—there were a lot of fun times, too. But of course managing them was a 24/7 job because you knew somebody was going to be doing something all the time—you just didn’t know who it would be and what it would be, but it was almost certain that something was just around the corner. I mean, Vince crashed the car in December of ’84 with Razzle. But just before that, Nikki crashed a car in a stupor—that was the summer of 1983 when they were in the studio making Shout at the Devil. Luckily nobody but Nikki was in the car and nobody got hurt but Nikki. He injured his shoulder.
With Vince, he did what he did. I wouldn’t say there were usually any apologies for it. Vince has a proclivity to do what it is he wants to do. He didn’t really think about, say, what are the consequences to other people, what are the consequences to the band, what are the consequences to the band’s business, what are the consequences to me—that kind of thing. I mean, he did what he did and he pretty much… he did things that he wanted to do. I don’t think there was ever any thought of: If I do this, what are the consequences to the other people in the band? What are the consequences to me going to be? I don’t think he thought things out like that. He just sort of lived in the moment. World be damned, full steam ahead.
I wasn’t happy being the one who had to call Vince and tell him he was out of the group. At first I tried to just stall the process. I mean, between myself and their business manager and their attorney, we all just said, “Guys, I understand that you guys are frustrated with Vince’s behavior. And that he’s done things in the past that have made you frustrated. I understand that even after we called this behavior to his attention, it really doesn’t seem to change anything.” And we also told them, you know, that “Mötley Crüe is you four guys. It’s not three guys.” I had just redone this record deal for them. I told them, “The label might not go for this at all. If you throw Vince out of the band, you might not have a record deal anymore.”
