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

by Vince Neil

  I moved into the Bel Age hotel in West Hollywood. The people at Bel Age were great. They let me keep all my cars there—my Ferraris, my Rolls-Royce—my custom chopper, a bunch of vehicles. I even had a phone line put in so I didn’t have to go through the operator. Plus, they had that great restaurant, the Diaghilev. They’d let me come in after hours and order anything I wanted. The Bel Age is where I first actually met Anna Nicole Smith. She was staying there when she’d just become Playmate of the Year. They gave me a deal to live there, but it still cost a shitload of money. I paid by the month rather than the day.

  I guess you could say this was the beginning of my Hollywood phase. I hadn’t really spent much time there since the early days of Mötley. Of course, now that I had a lot of money, it was like a different part of town had opened up to me.

  My favorite new spot was this place called Bar One. I was always hanging out there. It had a five-star restaurant on one side of the room and a bar and dance floor on the other. All the celebs used to come in; there were always paparazzi waiting outside. One night one of the owners asked me if I wanted to buy in; that was pretty much it. It seemed like a good idea. It worked for me for a while; without the band, maybe I was a little untethered. It gave me a sort of home base.

  Appropriately enough, Bar One was at the fork of Sunset Boulevard—just west of the Strip, closer to Beverly Hills. There’s a big bank there on the corner, across from where the trendy restaurant BOA is now. I met so many famous people there. It turned out that having a club was sort of like being in the band. You owned the joint, one way or another. It was a great way to meet chicks, many of whom I went on to date. You’re the host. You can approach anyone.

  Remember Ann Turkel, remember that name? According to her Web site, she had one of the most interesting and diverse careers in the entertainment industry. A six-foot former Vogue cover girl who has been around TV and film for years, she is the original cougar—she actually went with me to Europe. I had dinner at Bar One with Sly Stallone. I made out with Tori Spelling and Shannen Doherty in the private back room, though not at the same time. After Shannen married Ashley Hamilton, George Hamilton’s handsome son, I let the kid’s band play at the club.

  There was Vanessa Marcil, from General Hospital, and supermodel Christy Turlington. I dated Pam Anderson before she married Tommy. This was way before she was even on Baywatch, when she was the Tool Time Girl on Home Improvement. On our first date we went to see Tim Allen do stand-up. She’d come to the club or she’d hang out at the hotel. At one point I was shooting a video for one of the songs on my album, “Can’t Have Your Cake.” I asked Pamela to be in it, along with my daughter Skylar, who was now about three. There were some other girls in the shoot; I was also dating them—though none of them knew. (At least that’s what I thought at the time!)

  As you probably know, Pamela is close friends with the whole Playboy organization. She’s been in the magazine a million times; they kind of take credit for her. She’s great friends with founder Hugh Hefner. After she introduced me to that world, I went on a little run of dating Playmates. Let’s face it. Playmates are a lot more beautiful than most porn stars. Plus, they don’t fuck for a living. They seem sort of more wholesome, if you know what I mean, even though they’re posing nude. It’s tasteful nudity, like everyone says.

  Carrie Westcott was Playmate of the Month, Miss September, 1993. A beautiful wholesome blonde with a big smile and red lips. She was a really funny girl. She had personality. In her centerfold she was wearing one of those yachting hats with the gold filigree on the bill. What happened was, I was reading her spread, her centerfold thing. And you know how they have the write-up with their turn-ons and stuff? It said that her dream was… to date a rock star.

  This girl was smoking hot and beautiful. I called the Playboy Mansion. I said, “Can I speak to Carrie? I’m the rock star she’s been looking for.” And that was it. We started hanging out together.

  One night Carrie and I went to the mansion for the Midsummer Night’s Dream party, where everyone wears lingerie and stuff. After that we went to Bar One, still wearing our pajamas. Carrie got pretty drunk; she started dancing on the pool table. I’d been driving my Ferrari Testarossa that night. She was like, “One of my fantasies has always been to drive a Ferrari.” I was pretty drunk, too, I guess. I’m like, “Let’s do it!”

  She gunned it down the Strip, made a right on one of those streets that are perpendicular, then made a right on Fountain. As she made this last turn, there was water on the street, a big wet spot—here we go again, right?

  She downshifted….

  The car spun out.

  My two-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari slammed rear-end first into a parked car. And then, because Carrie was out of it and still had her foot on the gas, my car proceeded to bounce off the first car—and hit another car, this time with the front end. At this point, my Testarossa was totally crunched.

  Finally it was over. We clambered out of the car, sat on the curb. Neither of us was hurt. Here’s this beautiful girl, sitting on the curb in her lingerie, crying. Her makeup was all over her face. “I’m sorry. I’m soooo sorry,” she kept repeating.

  I’m wearing my boxers and a robe. In my mind I’m cursing a blue streak. You stupid fucking bitch! What the fuck is wrong with you, you fucking asshole! Externally, I remained calm. I tried not to show it. I put one arm around her to keep her warm.

  Then the cops came. They handcuffed her and took her to jail. Do you think they really needed the handcuffs? They got a Playmate in their car in a nightie and they need to put her in handcuffs?

  I’m like, Fuck it. That was an expensive evening. One of the cops called a tow truck and offered to take me back to the hotel.

  About an hour later, I started thinking about Carrie, you know, and how hot she looked in her nightie with the cuffs and stuff. Damn, you know, she was pretty amazingly gorgeous.

  I got another of my Ferraris out of valet parking. I went and bailed her out of jail. Then I brought her back to the hotel. I at least deserved a little sex out of this whole deal, don’t you think? We kept dating for a little while after that. Situations like that tend to bring people closer.

  Not long after, Carrie and I were in my suite at the Bel Age listening to some tracks with the son of a major music industry executive. Along with Carrie we were hanging with another Playboy girl, who went on to do some minor acting.

  What happened was, the guy was listening to the music. It seemed like he was drunk or high or something—he’d be listening, and then all of a sudden he’d start to kind of nod out, and then he’d wake up and listen some more, then he’d nod out again.

  At one point, he went into the bathroom and stayed there for a long time. When he came out he started to twitch; his head was twitching and his eyes rolled back in his head, and then he fell over and started foaming at the mouth.

  I’m like, Holy fuck!

  I told the girls, “Call 911 now!”

  I got him kind of propped up, so he didn’t choke and stuff, and then I got him on his side, trying to clear his throat. When we heard the sirens I told the girls to get the fuck outta there because they didn’t need to be involved in this.

  They rushed him to the hospital; he’d ODed on something, I can’t remember what it was—he was in a coma for a few days and then he came out of it; he was okay.

  A few days later I got a call from his mom and I was like, Shit! Why is she calling me? I thought I was going to get yelled at—“You piece of shit! What did you do to my son?”

  But instead she thanked me. She goes, “Thank you so much for being there for my son.”

  It brings tears to my eyes now thinking about it. It was just like wow.

  Believe it or not, during this time, I wasn’t just partying. During the second half of 1992, I was working on my first solo album. After years of being the guy nobody heard, this was like a dream. For once I was basically in control. Everybody was sort of kowtowing to me, asking me what I thought
. That was a first, for sure. The album was called Exposed. Because I was exposing myself, coming out into the light I guess you could say, coming out from under the shadow of Mötley.

  We did it at the Record Plant with Billy Idol guitarist Steve Stevens, Vikki Foxx of Enuff Z’Nuff on drums, Dave Marshall on rhythm guitar, and Robbie Crane on bass. Foxx didn’t last long; she was replaced by my old buddy Randy Castillo. The album included a cover of “Set Me Free” from Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard album; “Forever” is a ballad about Sharise, who had just formally filed for divorce. The first single, “Sister of Pain,” features a space-age-clad porn star named Janine Lindemulder in the video.

  While I was working on the album, my new manager, Bruce Bird, was stricken with a brain aneurysm. It was weird. That afternoon we were working with him in the studio. By that evening he was gone. I hustled over to the hospital, but I was too late to say good-bye. It was like, Whoa, you know? That kind of thing really made you think. In the short time we were together, we had become close; I thought of him as a father figure. For a while after that I worked with Bruce’s brother, Gary. Let’s just say they were not cut from the same cloth. When you think of slimy people, you think of Gary. If you look it up in the dictionary, there’s his picture. He was unbelievable.

  I ended up with a mutual friend, Burt Stein. The idea was that Stein would step in to help out until I found a new manager—he ended up staying with me for the next sixteen years. It’s only recently that we parted company; I still consider him a friend. He declined to be interviewed for this book.

  As soon as the album was finished, I grabbed up Janine and went to Maui to celebrate. For fun, we brought along a friend of mine, a Penthouse Pet named Brandy.

  Like many vacationers, one of the girls brought a video camera. One thing led to another; we shot a bunch of footage. We had a lot of fun together. A lot of fun. It was not a big drug binge like with Savannah. It wasn’t an overindulgence thing at all. It was more like a little coke and some drinking and the girls would smoke some pot. It was more of a fun sex thing. Not dark at all, just innocent fun between three healthy and consenting adults. We’d flown there with my bodyguard; he would stand guard at a stretch of beach while we filmed. We had so much fun that we decided we all wanted to get married. So I went and bought three identical diamond rings and we gave them to each other. We were not a couple but a triple. For a little while I think we were serious. We were like, This could work. I was genuinely excited about it. And then… I don’t know. Something happened. Toward the end of the trip things got a little weird.

  After that we went our separate ways—until a little later we ran into each other in Palm Springs.

  I’d gone out there for this annual party these guys throw. They call it the DASK party because those are the initials of the hosts. It’s what you’d expect—wealthy people, hot women, rock stars, plenty of drugs, all of it in Palm Springs. So I’m somewhere around town the day before the party, I don’t remember where, and I run into Janine and Brandy. They’re together, vacationing in Palm Springs. Which is weird because before our little trip to Maui they didn’t even know each other.

  I was a few minutes into the conversation with them when it hit me: These bitches are a couple! They’re in love! Suddenly their weirdness at the end of the trip made perfect sense… they’d fallen in love and they didn’t want to tell me. (Or maybe they just wanted to be alone????)

  The girls and I decided that we’d meet at the DASK party the next night. I was like, See you at the party. Then we went our separate ways.

  During that same time, I also was seeing this girl named Shauna. She was a Penthouse Pet of the Month, a killer brunette(!). Me and Shauna always had fun together. That night, in Palm Springs, we ran into each other. We ended up going home together.

  The next night we all met at the DASK party. It was a great party. Me, Shauna, Brandy, and Janine left together. We went back to my suite and had a foursome.

  You might ask, just technically speaking, how does one man service three girls in a foursome? Could one man possibly even be up to that task?

  I’ll tell you this: It’s fun trying. There’s a lot of switching off. You’re with one of the girls while the other two girls go at it; then you change up. There are periods of resting and hanging out in between, I suppose, which makes it as much fun as the actual fucking. There’s lots of laughter and talking. I mean, look: I had genuine feelings for Janine. I still look at her picture and go, Wow, you know? The thing I find about porn stars is that they’re just more open. There are no hang-ups. You can kind of say anything; you’re not going to offend anybody. They’re still like other girls, though. They still want to couple up and square up and get married. They’re still kind of clingy and jealous. Maybe even more so because all of them are damaged in some way or another. It’s just the nature of the beast.

  Things were going along well when Shauna casually mentioned to the group, during an interlude, that she had just fucked me the night before.

  Hearing that, Brandy and Janine freaked out.

  It was like I cheated on them, even though we’d all just had sex. I didn’t get it at all. Nobody was married here (well, I guess we’d play-married each other in Hawaii, but the girls had obviously dumped me for each other). I thought we were all just fuck buddies.

  Brandy and Janine dressed in a huff and left, leaving me alone with Shauna.

  I did my best to make do.

  (You could imagine my surprise, a couple years later, when a Vince Neil sex tape surfaced for sale on the Internet. It turned out Brandy sold the tape for a lot of money to a distributor. I was pissed, kind of. But on the other hand, I didn’t really care. There was nothing you could do to my reputation. What? I fuck women? Big surprise, right? That’s what you expect from a rock star. The only thing that pissed me off is I didn’t collect any of the profits.)

  Exposed entered the Billboard charts at #13. After a warm-up gig at the Roxy, under the name Five Guys from Van Nuys, we went out on the road. At first there was some talk of a stadium tour, but that fizzled out. I ended up settling for second billing on the latest Van Halen tour—the first for their new lead singer, Sammy Hagar.

  Opening for Van Halen was very humbling for me. I hadn’t opened for anybody in a long time. It was tough because when you go see Van Halen it’s like date night. That’s who goes to see Van Halen—you’re with your girlfriend. It’s not like rockers coming out to hear you; it’s more like yuppies. Plus, when I got onstage there was fucking nobody there. The hall was like less than half-full. Because nobody comes to hear the backup band, right? It was like playing with Y&T again at the Starwood. As I’m doing the last two songs, people start filing in. That’s what they mean by starting over, man. I wasn’t really starting over, but I was. But I didn’t care. It was cool. I was just having a good time not hassling with those other guys, just making the music. It was like, Wow, you know, this is a dream.

  For the first time in my life I started getting more involved in my own work. Now that I was a solo act, I had to do all the interviews, make all the creative decisions, write songs, approve concepts and artwork, deal with my manager and accountant and all that stuff. In other words, for the first time in my life, the buck stopped here. It was about time; I was well into my fourth decade.

  I also started making more of an effort to be a father. I saw Neil on and off; my parents always made sure he was around. When I wasn’t touring, I was seeing Skylar for my visitation rights. At some point, I decided it would be better for her if I had a house. Visiting me at the hotel was never much fun for a three-year-old. There was nowhere to run or play, and you felt like you had to keep her quiet, which is no fun for a little kid. After two previous ruined attempts at fatherhood, I was getting really close with Skylar.

  I found a great place in Malibu, right on the beach. It even had a name: Sea Manor. This was probably the sickest house I’d had so far. It had a spiral staircase, a stained-glass dome, marble floors; the beach was j
ust down the steps. I set up a room for Skylar with a little desk and a computer. We’d spend a lot of our time together on the beach. There is something so healing about the waves and the water. I have always been a big surfer; both of us just loved being there. There was a certain simple joy in fatherhood that I’d never understood. This time, I felt like I could appreciate things more; having a child was like a haven from everything bad. It was like a drug that was legal—you could escape the big bad world and go into the fanciful world of your beautiful daughter. Learning this helped me become a more balanced person.

  When Skylar wasn’t around, I liked to rent out my house to porn companies to shoot films there, and also to Penthouse magazine to shoot photo spreads. Because it was such a beautiful setting, on the beach and stuff, I kept it rented out all the time. There were always people in and out. I’d come downstairs from the master bedroom and there would be people fucking on my spiral staircase. It was fun. In some of the movies I’d be in little cameos. Usually it was Ron Jeremy’s movies. We’ve been friends forever.

  One time I went upstairs to go take a nap. All of a sudden I hear this boom! The whole house shook. I was like, What the fuck was that? I jumped up; I went downstairs, opened the front door. Now remember, my front door is basically on the Pacific Coast Highway, also known as Route 1. It’s four lanes, with a small shoulder on either side—the cars whip by. When I opened the door I find this car. It’s crashed into the pillars in the front. It had lost control and spun out. Another couple of feet and it would have been inside my house… on the fuckin’ beach. I mean the car was literally—another couple of feet it would’ve probably killed somebody. I remember this girl, they were taking pictures of her for Penthouse. And she’s standing at the front door, near this crashed car. She’s naked, wrapped in a red towel. And she’s like freaking out. Oh my god!