The Dirt (18 page)

When I heard that, I hit the ceiling. It was bad enough that the label wasn’t helping Mötley Crüe, but now they were actually trying to hurt them. So I blew the whistle to Joe Smith. Because of that incident and several similar ones, the head of promotions was replaced. Around the same time, Tom Werman came to the label as the new head of A&R. Werman had produced the first Ted Nugent album and some of Cheap Trick’s best music, and he was so excited about Mötley Crüe that he insisted on producing their next record. He and Nikki were very much in tune: Nikki wanted a bad-boy image, but at the same time had a pop sense and wanted his music to cross over into the mainstream, which is what Werman tried to do with the bands he produced.

Despite the best efforts of the promotions department to sabotage the record for some mysterious reason,
Too Fast for Love
ended up selling more than one hundred thousand copies, all through word of mouth. I didn’t know what to do because the band had a major-label record deal, had sold a respectable amount of albums, could sell out any club in L.A., were getting a buzz in the industry, and were beginning to write their second album, but they had no manager and were all broke and starving. I tried to take care of them the best I could.

When I was sixteen, Lita Ford was the girl that I dreamed about: a total rock fox. I had posters of the Runaways all over the bedroom in my parents’ house. Now, just five years later, I’d signed Mötley Crüe, and Nikki Sixx was living with one of the Runaways. And not only was I hanging out with them, but I was also giving them food and money. I’d stop by Nikki and Lita’s house when I could and bring them Häagen-Dazs ice cream or a Subway sandwich. People always said that the pair of them fought like cats and dogs, but they were always fun to be with. As time passed, however, the house kept getting creepier. I’d drop in and see
The Necronomicon
, a black-magic spell book, lying on the table. Nikki was getting heavily into satanic stuff and wanted to call the record
Shout with the Devil
. It was upsetting to the label, and it was upsetting to me. I knew the promotions department would use the title as an excuse to completely ignore the album.

I went over one night to have a discussion with Nikki about changing the title. When I walked in, he and Lita were huddled on the couch. “I’m kind of freaked out,” Lita said. “Weird things are happening in the apartment.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, looking around at the freshly painted pentagrams and Gothic paintings that Nikki had on the walls and floor.

“Weird things just happen,” she said. “Cabinet doors keep opening and shutting, there are weird noises, and things keep flying around the apartment for no reason.”

“Listen, Nikki,” I said. “You have to stop fooling around with this satanic black magic shit. It’s powerful stuff, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t mess with it.”

But Nikki didn’t care for grandstanding. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It just looks cool. It’s meaningless symbols and shit. I’m just doing it to piss people off. It’s not like I fucking worship Satan or something.”

I knew I couldn’t change his mind, so I left. When I returned two nights later, there were forks and knives sticking in the walls and ceiling, and Nikki and Lita looked much paler and sicker than usual.

“What the hell have you guys been doing?” I asked.

“We aren’t doing anything, man,” Lita said. “I tried to tell you: Stuff is just flying around here on its own.”

As she said that, and I swear to God I saw this with my own eyes, a knife and a fork rose off the table and stuck into the ceiling just above where I was sitting. I looked at Nikki and freaked out. “There is no more ‘Shout with the Devil.’ If you keep shouting with the devil, you’re going to get killed.”

You can believe what you want, but I truly believe that Nikki had unknowingly tapped into something evil, something more dangerous than he could control that was on the verge of seriously hurting him. Nikki must have realized the same thing, because he decided on his own to change the album title to
Shout at the Devil
. To this day, that incident remains one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Fortunately, I soon met a booking agent named Doug Thaler, and he knew a guy, Doc McGhee, who had a lot of money and wanted to start a management company. Doc was a charming little guy who knew how to say all the right things. “We’re going to make Mötley Crüe the biggest rock-and-roll band in the world,” he said. “And whatever money Elektra won’t put up to make this happen, I will.”

Everything seemed perfect: Mötley Crüe had money, they had a guy named Barry Levine helping them with their image, and they became a record-company priority. Thanks to Doc’s masterful manipulation, generous imagination, and under-the-table gifts, Nikki was finally on the verge of moving his rebellion from the Whisky to the stadiums. But, of course, nothing happens for those guys without a struggle.

I woke up a few weeks later to find out that Joe Smith had been fired and a guy named Bob Krasnow was running the company. He fired Tom Werman and replaced him with Roy Thomas Baker, which was fine because now there were even more reasons to go to RTB’s parties and Werman still wanted to produce the record. But just as we were getting ready to record, Krasnow flew to Los Angeles and called Werman and me into a meeting.

“Rock and roll isn’t happening,” he told us. “I’ve decided that I don’t want any rock bands on the label. I wouldn’t take Ozzy Osbourne if you gave him to me for free on a silver platter.”

“Why would you drop a group who are selling lots of records? That doesn’t make any sense, Bob!”

“This is Elektra Records, Tom,” he said. “We have a tradition of fine, talented acts like Linda Ronstadt, the Doors, and Jackson Browne. I’m not in the circus business. And I’m not giving them a penny.”

“Their managers are willing to take care of some of the promotion and touring costs.”

“Listen,” he said. “The group is just awful. I saw their video and it’s embarrassing. I had it taken off MTV.”

“What?! We just lined up a tour for the band with Kiss. You can’t do that.”

“I heard about that, and I’ve canceled the dates.”

I called Doug Thaler and Doc McGhee in to meet with Krasnow, and he told them the same thing. They responded by asking him what they needed to do to release Mötley Crüe from their contract with Elektra.

“I’ll tell you what,” Krasnow relented. “You make the best record that you can make. Don’t worry about money, but keep the budget reasonable. I won’t promise you that I’ll put it out, but I will promise you that I’ll make it easy for you to take it someplace else.”

If they had been dropped then and lost the momentum they had built up, it probably would have been the end of Mötley Crüe. But fortunately something happened to change Bob’s mind. And that something was the US Festival. Less than a year later, Krasnow would be dressed in a Mötley Crüe bandanna at Madison Square Garden, presenting the band with awards for gold and platinum album sales.

I
t was the day that new wave died and rock and roll took over: May 29, 1983. Day two of the three-day US Festival.

Circling above hundreds of thousands of kids in a helicopter—the first helicopter we’d ever been in—it seemed as if the scene on Sunset Strip on Friday and Saturday nights had suddenly been transported to a field in the middle of nowhere on a sweltering hot spring afternoon. Ozzy Osbourne, Judas Priest, the Scorpions, and Van Halen were performing in front of three hundred thousand kids. And so were we.

Every city in America must have sprouted its own equivalent of the Sunset Strip. This wasn’t an underground thing anymore. It was a mass movement, and finally we were all meeting to put a new nation on the map. Looking down on it all from the helicopter, with a bottle of Jack in my left hand, a bag of pills in my right hand, and a blond head bobbing up and down in my lap, I felt like the king of the world. That lasted for about a second. Then I got scared shitless.

We only had one album out, and it had just grazed the pop charts at number 157. Most of these kids probably didn’t even know us. They’d been in the heat all day, and would probably hate us because they were impatient for Ozzy and Van Halen.

I took another swig of Jack as we landed and met our new managers, Doc McGhee, who was basically a drug dealer with good business sense, and Doug Thaler, his yes man. The guy who had signed us to Elektra, Tom Zutaut, was there with his girlfriend, a surprisingly hot chick considering Tom’s luck with women. I went to the dressing room to put on my makeup and costume, and see what I could do for the line of girls and reporters waiting outside. After what seemed like just a few minutes, there was a frantic knocking on the door.

“You were supposed to be onstage ten minutes ago,” Doc yelled. “Get the fuck out there.”

From the moment we played “Shout at the Devil,” I knew that we had made it. I had nothing to worry about. These people had never heard the song before: We had hardly even begun recording the album. But by the end, they were singing along, pumping their fists into the air. I looked out and with every word I sang, with every guitar lick Mick played, the crowd rippled in response. I understood then why rock stars have such big egos: from the stage, the world is just one faceless, shirtless, obedient mass, as far as the eye can see.

Mick left the stage first and walked back to the trailer that doubled as our dressing room. Waiting for him inside was his girlfriend, who we called The Thing, a big mean brunette whose sleeves were rolled above her elbows. As soon as he walked in the door, after having played the biggest concert of his life, she hauled off and punched him square in the face without a word of explanation. (Back in Manhattan Beach, she would sometimes get drunk, beat him up, and kick him out of the house, after which Nikki or I would get a desperate phone call from Mick asking us to pick him up at his doorstep.)

Afterward for me was a blur of alcohol, drugs, interviews, and chicks. I remember walking offstage and seeing Tom Zutaut’s girlfriend, who had stripped down to a leopard-skin bikini because it was so hot outside. I grabbed her, pressed my sweaty face against hers, and stuck my tongue down her throat. She pressed her body against me and bit my lip.

I brought her back to the trailer—past Mick, who was sitting on the steps holding his head in his hands—and buried my face in the girl’s tits. Just then, there was a knock on the door and a squeaky voice said, “Hey, it’s Tom. Can I come in?”

“What do you want?” I asked, worried that he had seen me.

“I just wanted to tell you that you were a-a-amazing. That was the best show I’ve ever seen you play.”

“Thanks, dude,” I said. “Listen, I’ll be out in a minute. I just need a little while to chill out.”

Then I tore off his girlfriend’s bikini and fucked the shit out of her while he waited outside.

Nikki turned red when I told him what I had done. “You fucking asshole!” he screamed. “Can’t you keep your dick to yourself ? That dude signed us. If he finds out, he’s going to hold it against us and seriously fuck up our new album.”

“Sorry,” I replied. “But that’s only if he finds out.”