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

by Vince Neil

  At some point, I had to meet with my lawyer in the district attorney’s office. The families of the victims were there, too. It was tough. It’s hard to remember…. I mean, I kind of remember. It’s very hard to think about it, you know, because, I mean… these people were injured for the rest of their lives. Like, when I saw them, you could tell they were very fucked up. That was probably more emotional than going to jail. Not probably; definitely.

  As I said in The Dirt, in order to avoid a trial, my lawyer advised me to plead guilty to vehicular manslaughter and strike a compromise. He figured that since the people drinking at my apartment were mostly in Mötley Crüe and Hanoi Rocks, the party could be explained as a business meeting and we would be able to pay damages to the families through the band’s liability insurance, because there was no way I could afford them on my own. This was why the families of the victims agreed to what everyone saw as such a light sentence: thirty days in jail, $2.6 million in restitution, and two hundred hours of community service, which I’d already been chipping away at on the road, doing high school talks and radio interviews around the country on the evils of drinking and driving. A newspaper headline touting the settlement read: “Drunk Killer Vince Neil Sentenced to Touring World with Rock Band.”

  My lawyer managed to keep me out of jail for more than a year.

  In August of 1985, Theatre of Pain hit #6 on the charts, the highest of any of our albums. By November, “Home Sweet Home” became MTV’s most-requested video. Also in November, a U.S. Senate committee condemned Mötley for our lyrics, which they said degraded women and glorified violence. In response we designed a giant, spread-legged woman as a backdrop for our show. Naturally, we entered the stage through her pussy. In May of 1986, Tommy married his first television actress, Heather Locklear, of Melrose Place and Dynasty. Nikki, we would later learn, was struggling with a full-blown heroin addiction. I toured America and the world with Crüe on a big private jet, socked away some money (most of which went to my lawyer), did my community service, and somehow managed to stay sober, even as the rest of the band debauched their way through the days and nights. (Part of that time I was assisted in my efforts by a pair of thugs hired by Doc McGhee to oversee my sobriety.) I will say that at this time I redoubled my efforts with the ladies. Unable to drink or drug, I had to pass my time doing something. I fucked my way across the world with a vengeance.

  Literally one day after moving Beth and Little Beth into a new $1.5 million mansion in a gated community in Northridge, CA—I wanted to make sure they were safe and well taken care of—I took a cab to the nearest police station and turned myself in.

  The date was June 15, 1986. They brought me to a quiet rinky-dink jail in Torrance to serve my thirty-day sentence. The Gardena City jail.

  The first thing that happened when I got to jail was I was made a trustee—a privileged position. My job was to bring food to the other prisoners, clean cells, wash squad cars and other vehicles. People got a kick out of being served by a rock star. The sergeant on the night shift was a hard-ass, but everyone else was constantly asking for photos and autographs. You gotta understand that a jail is not like a prison. A prison is made for long-term stays, so they have recreation, classes, things to do inside. A jail is usually just a holding tank. Cinder-block walls. Not much in the way of activities. As luck would have it, being a trustee qualified me for extra privileges: TV and visitors. On the weekends the guards would bring in burgers and six-packs of beer. In the real world my sobriety had been monitored by the courts. I’d actually managed to stay sober for over a year. Here in jail, I was chugging down brews.

  One afternoon, a blond fan found her way to the jail. The sergeant on duty gave me permission to bring her back to my cell for an hour. I don’t know how many prisoners get to have the experience of fucking a beautiful girl, in Daisy Duke shorts and a Lycra halter top, on the metal bunk in their cell.

  I will tell you this. It was kinky. I’m not sure I ever saw a girl that turned on.

  With the standard time off for good behavior, I walked out the doors of the jail after eighteen days. That’s what Razzle’s life, and the permanent health of those other two kids, was worth, according to the judicial system.

  Thinking back on it today, I have a lot of different thoughts.

  When it first happened I kind of shut it out of my mind, you know; I didn’t really comprehend exactly what I had done. I mean, I knew somebody died. I knew two people got seriously injured… but it was weird, psychologically, I just kind of tried to, not forget about it, but just maybe I tried to minimize it. Like on the computer, when you click on the little symbol and you minimize the screen. It doesn’t make it go away entirely, but it’s off your main screen, if you know what I mean.

  But then it was very strange, because as time went on I really had hard times dealing with it. And I think that’s because I really didn’t get punished, you know? It was kind of hard to deal with the fact that I caused so much damage in a lot of people’s lives and basically all I got was a slap on the wrist. I mean, I paid a big restitution, $2.6 million. I paid a lot of money. But it’s only money, you know?

  I went to jail for thirty days, but I only served fifteen. And while I was there I drank and got laid and got a nice suntan. Putting me in jail didn’t, it didn’t do anything.

  The only people that punished me over the whole thing were the band members. They treated me like shit by not supporting me. And the truth is, they did it out of their own selfishness—not because they thought it might teach me a lesson or anything. They were just being themselves, just assholes. They couldn’t be bothered to go out of their way for somebody else.

  I think if the court had punished me more, in the long run, it would’ve saved me from the demons that I still have. You know maybe if I was punished harder I would maybe have stopped drinking like twenty years sooner. I mean this is how fucked up this was. I was looking at going to jail for seven years, losing my whole career. And the court tells me, you know, that to stay out of jail I can’t drink, I have to stay sober and be in a program, all that. So my reaction is that I’m pissed off, right? Instead of being motivated to stay out of jail by doing something so easy—not drinking—I’m pissed off that the court is telling me what to do. I hate when people tell me what to do. I hate it so much it sometimes clouds the big picture.

  To try and make things better, my manager, Doc McGhee, promised me that if I didn’t drink, he would buy me a Rolex watch.

  And that would be my motivation for not drinking.

  Not because I just killed somebody and hurt two people. Not because I was facing jail and might lose everything, including my future. But because my fucking lecherous, co-dependent, enabling manager offered me a fucking Rolex watch.

  I took the deal.

  On the day I left my new Northridge house to head to jail, I removed said diamond Rolex and placed it carefully in the drawer of the bedside table, on my side of the bed.

  I figured I’d get it when I got back.

  Beth Neil Vince’s First Wife

  We got married on January 3, 1983, about two years after we started dating.

  During that time, things started to escalate for them professionally. They had a lot of opportunities; they started going on tour; our life started to change. I went with him sometimes, but it was really kind of a thing—at certain points Vince was the only guy who had a significant other. Some came and went, but it was kind of like there’s a girlfriend time and there’s non-girlfriend time. Which was fine. I mean I sort of made a conscious decision, you know: If he wants to be a rock star more than anything in the world, I can’t nag him and fly around and follow him around and do the things that some of the other girls did from time to time. I had to just let him live his dream and make the point that as long as our relationship is good between us, at home, in our little world, I’m not going to get bent out of shape about jealousy and stuff. I really wanted him to live his dream.

  You have to understand how much things
changed. It went from nobody caring about Mötley Crüe to like a lot of people caring, a lot of people showing up for shows. I mean, I saw him first on probably their third or fourth gig. Now it was like famous people were calling and hanging out with the guys, blah blah blah.

  Over time, what happened was, whenever he would go away on tour, I’d go out partying with like Lita Ford, who Tommy was seeing. We’d go backstage to concerts, we’d fly out to concerts, we were sort of living the life when the guys were gone, we wanted to have fun, too. Vince didn’t like it. He’d go have fun and it’s two in the morning and he calls me and I’m not home. And then he’s all freaked out. He’s like, “Where are you? What are you doing?” It wasn’t like big fights; it was just like little, little things like that.

  So he started talking a lot about “I want to have a baby; let’s have a baby.” And he even named her before she was ever even conceived. He said, “I want to have a little baby; I want to name her Little Beth.” He had her all picked out. “She’s going to have this kind of hair and these kind of eyes” and blah blah blah. He’d talk about it. It was pillow talk or whatever. Finally it happened. I was pregnant.

  I remember it was August; Vince was getting ready to go over to Europe for a European tour. That’s when I found out I was pregnant; I didn’t go on the tour because I was like two and a half months pregnant. So he went off to do the tour; that’s when they met Hanoi Rocks.

  While they were gone, you have to think of the time period. Right about that time, the whole HIV thing got really, really big. Before, I never cared if he was getting a blow job from some girl in Amsterdam, or if he took some groupie home drunk and screwed in Berlin. I mean, what did that have to do with my life, you know? I wasn’t going to go call him at two in the morning asking, “Where are you? What are you doing? Did you sleep with anybody?” I just wasn’t going to do it. I knew he was going to. It may sound like rationalization, but it really was a conscious decision. It’s like what he does when he’s there I’m not going to try and govern, I’m not going to get torn up about. I’m just going to know that he’s exploring his life as a twenty-one-, twenty-two-year-old man, as a rock star, and he’ll be able to value this and put it in perspective. He knows what we have and he knows what that is. And I’m just not going to worry about it. The thing was, I knew they were all trying to craft this wild party persona. I knew that if it came down to choosing between me and the band he was going to choose the band first. So I just wanted to preserve what we had. If that meant that I had to look the other way to a certain extent, then that was okay; I’d look the other way. The good times we had were justification enough.

  Then, when I became pregnant, my attitude shifted. I told him, “You cannot sleep around anymore.” And he goes, “What are you talking about? I don’t sleep around.” I look at him. I’m like, “Vince, I’m pregnant. You can’t come home with all kinds of diseases.” Plus, they were all really starting to get into drugs at that point, coke and heroin. And the whole HIV thing was just blowing up at that moment. I’m like, “Vince, come on. I know you’ve slept around, I’ve never said a word about it, I’ve always looked the other way, but I’m pregnant now. You can’t come home off a tour and sleep with me and hurt our baby. You have to be careful now. You have to not share needles.” Like there were times when they’d have a tattoo guy come backstage at the show and he’d give everyone tattoos with the same needle.

  I guess that’s why I got the rap as a germaphobe. Call me names if you want, but I’m not sure anybody in their right mind would disagree.

  When they came home from the European tour, I was five months pregnant. We were living in Redondo, in a building on the beach. We were on the fourth floor. It was a cool place, with a sliding glass door across the front. You could see the beach. Vince had spent a couple months in Europe and he had made really good friends with Razzle. He’d been home for a day or two and Razzle and the guys were in town. I cooked a lot and stuff; he wanted to have the guys over to the beach.

  It was pretty early in the evening and Tommy was there. It was like six o’clock; they wanted to go do a beer run. Vince had the Pantera. I don’t remember the coke thing. As far as the coke goes, I think he’s mixing that up with a different time period. When we first lived in the apartment, before I was pregnant, we did do a lot of coke. There were times when we stayed up a couple of days straight. There was a time when he thought the best way not to spend money on coke would be to buy a whole bunch and to deal it. There was this girl and her boyfriend who we knew; they dealt coke and we bought a lot of coke from them at one point.

  Now, what he’d been doing in Europe when he was away from me I have no idea. But I can tell you when those boys came over it was not a three-day party. They had come over at two in the afternoon. We were just going to show them the beach. I wasn’t partying of course because I was pregnant. Nobody was that fucked up. This wasn’t the Mötley House; this was a married guy and his pregnant wife having a cookout. Honestly I would tell you, but Vince wasn’t… I wouldn’t… I was very protective of him. I wouldn’t let him go drive if he was really messed up or something. He said, “Razzle and I are going to go get a beer.” They maybe had like four beers in a couple hours or something that I was aware of. And I looked at him right in the eyes, ’cause he used to get a look in his eyes, when he was wasted. Kind of a blank, belligerent stare. And I kind of looked at him and thought, Nah, he’s okay; he can go; he’s not too fucked up to drive. Because I could’ve easily driven, you know? And I said, “Okay, all right. See you in a bit.”

  And then they left… and I just started feeling really sick.

  I’m like, Something’s wrong. I turn to Tommy and I go, “I’m afraid something’s wrong.”

  And Tommy’s like, “Nothing’s wrong; relax. They’re fine; don’t worry about it.” But I kept getting more and more nervous. Finally, I’m like, “Tommy, you have to take me to find Vince.” It hadn’t been very long, maybe twenty minutes. But the store was only four blocks away. And I just had this terrible feeling. “I’m afraid, Tommy,” I said. And he’s like, “No, he’s fine, don’t worry about it, they’re probably just at the beach, he’s probably just showing Razzle around.” But I made Tommy take me anyway. I’m like: “Take me in the car, we’re going to go find him.”

  We only went a couple of blocks before we got stuck in traffic. I jumped out of the car and ran toward the flickering lights of the police cars. It was dark. It was winter; it gets dark like five thirty. I remember seeing Razzle’s tennis shoe in the roadway; they were putting him in the ambulance. Vince was sitting on the curb.

  What happened basically was, on the way home from the liquor store—a small mom-and-pop shop a block from the beach—there’s this blind hill. The road is slanted, and you’re kind of coming up a blind hill and there’s a stop sign there. And so what Vince did was he came that block down toward the beach, made the left-hand turn, accelerated in the Pantera, which is a mid-engine car. There was water that was draining across the street from where they were building a condominium; it wasn’t raining. The car’s back end went out, and he went into the oncoming lane. Then the Volkswagen and another car came over the hill not knowing that there was anybody in the lane. And then, you know, the accident happened.

  When Vince got out of jail, he was still wearing the clothes covered in Razzle’s blood. He was in shock. He turned to me and he said, “His head was in my lap. He died in my lap.” He was freaked out and heartbroken. He literally went into like hibernation. He wouldn’t answer the phone, he didn’t want to talk to anybody. Like everybody’s calling him. It’s a big story. Everybody on TV is talking about him. And literally, if he could’ve run away and hid he would’ve. I mean he did hide to the best of his ability—he just stayed home.

  The whole argument for getting him out of going to jail for very long had to do with money. “If Vince is going to pay restitution to the victims, you’re going to have to let him go on tour and make money—he does no good to anybody i
n jail, right?” So that was his whole like little chip to get off—that was his Get-out-of-Jail-Free card. Like they would all agree to let him off and without any serious punishment so he could go out and make this money so that he could pay off all the victims and their families for their wrongful deaths and lawsuits and things. And so that’s why he didn’t get severely punished. That was the deal his lawyers made. First we went to the superlawyer Robert Shapiro. But he was like, “Listen, I have a big name; if I’m attached they’re just going to see that it’s a celebrity lawyer case, so let’s give him somebody that just looks like a regular everyday guy who practices law.” And he was a good lawyer, a really nice guy, and he went in and pleaded the case and they all signed off on it. They could’ve done a lot more to him, but really in the end all anybody wanted from him was the money,

  Jail or not, he was punished for what he did. You can’t say he wasn’t. You could see a change in him after that. He kind of spiraled out of control a little bit. In the beginning, he just liked to party. But later, it was more like he was medicating pain. Things took on a different cast. Razzle’s death really changed Vince’s life. I’m not sure he knew that or that he knows it, but it did. Before Razzle died, Vince was a happy drunk. After that, he turned dark. I don’t think he’s ever recovered.

  Chapter 7

  AC/DC

  At first it seemed as though things were improving between Beth and me. But as with the girl in the old song by The Sweet, sometimes luck, like sexual preference, runs in both directions. That would be the story of my life over the next few years, high highs and low lows. Somehow, I was never prepared for either.

  The first week I was in jail, Beth came to visit every day and whenever I could use the phone I would call. It was a communal telephone that everybody had to share, but sometimes the guards would let me use their phone to call out.