Twilight of the Gods

"Tommy seems to be having a hard time understanding this, but we will tour, even if I have to get my fucking wife out there on drums,” says Nikki Sixx, glowering darkly. Everyone checks his watch once more. But despite longing looks at the open doorway of the Hollywood photo studio, there is still no sign of a tall, swarthy, multiply-tattooed drummer with a world-renowned trouser bulge.

Mötley Crüe are supposed to have kissed, made up and readied themselves for a globe-trouncing comeback tour. Unfortunately, the depressing math is inescapable: After a five-hour wait, there are only three sulking rock legends on the sofa, not four.
A fight between singer Vince Neil and Tommy Lee at a Las Vegas airport six years ago ended the last Mötley Crüe peace accord. Lee claimed Neil was being rude to the band’s publicist. Neil didn’t agree and pushed Lee to the floor.

But now — with a two–year world tour planned and new tracks for a greatest hits package, Red White & Crüe, recorded — they say their differences have been forgotten. Unfortunately, Tommy Lee seems to have also forgotten something else: the schedule. “Tommy’s just not taking this band seriously,” mutters bass player Sixx. “Oh, this is pretty unusual,” sniffs Neil sarcastically — perhaps still smarting from Lee’s comments in his autobiography, Tommyland, that one aspect of being in Mötley Crüe he did not miss was seeing Neil’s “bloated, disrespectful ass” every day. Only the dignity and diplomacy of guitarist Mick Mars offer any hope: “People got lives to lead. Tommy’s got a lot to deal with,” he says reasonably. From a man battling the progressive spine-fusing disease ankylosing spondylitis — and who has only recently been able to walk again, following hip-replacement surgery — this seems little short of saintly.

Lee eventually breezes in at 6 P.M. He takes a tin of blue slime out of his knapsack, wipes it in his hair and says, “Let’s do this.” The rest of the Crüe amble up the stairs onto the studio roof, where their photo will be taken. No one says hello until they are standing shoulder to shoulder; then there are nods and smiles. Remarkably, Tommy offers a hand to Vince, which evolves into a back-slap. It looks like the reunion is on, after all.

Mötley Crüe have a special place in the canon of American metal: Their 40 million record sales weren’t driven by a knack for stripper-friendly glam-rock hits alone. When they first got together as teenagers in L.A. in 1981, they saw the reign of REO Speedwagon, Styx and the Eagles as an affront to real rock values. Distilling the best of glam theatrics, punk and metal, they aimed to redress the balance with all the power chords, hairspray and anticlerical special effects they could muster. “I’m not claiming we split the fucking atom,” says Sixx, “but ‘Girls Girls Girls,’ or maybe just seeing us chainsaw the head off a nun onstage, made you feel there was a ‘them’ and an ‘us’ again.”

Off stage, that was certainly the case. The Crüe set themselves a rigorous lifestyle challenge: to get the coroner’s pen as near to signing their death certificates as possible before sitting up and partying again. “It wasn’t conscious,” says Sixx. “That would be so lame. But you come after the Who, the Stones, the New York Dolls and Iggy — and there’s a sense that ‘We’re going to go places no one has before.’”

Those “places” were vividly described in pointillist detail in the band’s classic 2001 sex-and-drugs-and-more-sex-and-even-more-drugs tell-all tome, The Dirt. By airing their own soiled laundry, the Crüe cemented their place in rock history as a Sunset Strip Led Zeppelin minus the mystical woo-woo, and their utter shamelessness won them a legion of new fans starved for Homeric tales of rock debauchery. Now, amazingly, despite a combined life experience that includes overdose, manslaughter, rehab, jail, divorce, devil worship, child death, rape and degenerative illness, Mötley Crüe have largely taken up where they left off. Neil plays Blender a few freshly recorded tracks: “Liar,” “Sick Love Song” and “If I Die Tomorrow.” The new music from Red White & Crüe sounds unapologetically boisterous — a remarkable feat, given that the new songs were recorded tag-team style at Cello studios in L.A. so band members didn’t have to be in the same room with one another.

But the will-they-won’t-they reunion and this latest album — which follows two years’ worth of compilations and box sets — is just the latest test endured by a group seemingly as addicted to celebrity as they once were to gobbling drugs. While Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx have remained relatively dignified since their 1998 split, Tommy Lee has become a celebrity wedding DJ, allowed his penis to co-narrate his autobiography and joined a college marching band for his NBC reality show; meanwhile, Vince Neil appeared in the first season of The Surreal Life (living with such Z-listers as Corey Feldman and Emmanuel Lewis) and recently underwent $80,000 worth of plastic surgery for his reality show. Good times. Neil, though, says that having fat sucked out of your face on national television is fun compared to the psychological torture of playing with certain ex-bandmates.

“There’s been no reason to go through the brain damage of re-forming Mötley Crüe,” says Neil. “It’s not easy to be in Mötley Crüe.”

So why reunite? For the same reason “best friends” from the Eagles to the Who board Gulfstreams together every couple of years: cash. Recently Nikki Sixx — very much the group’s businessman — managed to win ownership of their master tapes from their record company, Elektra, in a deal the details of which are still covered by a nondisclosure agreement. And this litigation brought Crüe members first to the telephone and finally to the studio. “It got to the point where, without being a band, we’re not potent,” says Sixx. But last summer, when Sixx called Vince Neil and suggested the first meeting, Neil was hesitant. Mick Mars was too unwell to attend. Besides, Tommy would be there.

“It was kinda strained,” says Neil. “I hadn’t talked to Tommy Lee in years. Everyone was really guarded and had their managers there. It was very strange. Mick was home, I guess. Either there or the hospital.”

Producer Bob Rock has known the band since recording the Dr. Feelgood album with them in 1989. Last year he was immortalized as the indulgent, mulleted patriarch helping Metallica survive band implosion in the film Some Kind of Monster. But he says Mötley Crüe are the ultimate challenge.

“With Metallica, I consider myself a fan and a friend.” Says Rock. “[With Mötley Crüe] you got four L.A. badasses who used to drink a bottle of wine and want to kill each other. Of course there are issues. But I got them to play separately, so their minds were on work. As long as they’re apart, they’re still a great band.”

These days, only Mars and Sixx still dress like glam-rocking ghouls — manicured beards, fat rings, pendants and boots. Neil opts for sports casual, while Lee — in shabby khaki pants and jacket — looks as if he’d gladly take $10 to check your oil and wipe your windshield. “It would be contrived to pretend we’re still 20,” says 46-year-old Sixx. “The excitement of seeing this tour is like seeing Mike Tyson fight. He probably won’t bite anyone’s ear off — but you’re there in case he does.”

In the video for the new single, “If I Die Tomorrow,” each member of the band gets to draw a line under his Mötley past by choosing his darkest hour and reliving it on film. There’s Sixx overdosing on heroin; Neil killing his friend, Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas “Razzle” Dingley, in a drunk-driving smash in December 1984; Lee in prison for spousal assault on former wife Pamela Anderson in 1998; and then there’s Mars’s ongoing torment: He languishes on a hospital stretcher, close to death.

For Sixx, the video reminded him where his old life ended and the new one began. “I haven’t touched heroin since 1988 — which is incredible to me, because I never believed I could live without it. When you’re shitting and vomiting blood and you still want your fix, you know you’re in serious trouble. At that time, [Aerosmith’s] Steven Tyler tried to help me. He said ‘Nikki, you’re going to die. You must see it.’ And I was like, ‘What the fuck do you know?’”


When Vince Neil, 43, answers the front door of his enormous, Spanish-style home in a gated community in Las Vegas — Andre Agassi and Denzel Washington are neighbors — he looks tanned and almost buff. Certainly there’s no evidence of the “bloated, disrespectful ass” Tommy Lee describes with such feeling. But then again, as a result of VH1’s new reality show, Remaking: Vince Neil, he has just had cheek implants, eyelid lifts and brow lifts done. “I didn’t want the plastic surgery to make me look like Axl Rose — your face pulled up like this,” he says. He’s still wrenching his face upward to illustrate an inferior surgery outcome — an Axl-alike zombie — when fourth-wife-to-be Lia Gerardini walks into the room to wrangle their crazy spaniels, Cakes and Crackers. “It’s fucked up when you have to count, but yeah, Lia’ll be number four. I got it right this time.” Their January wedding will kick off a busy year for Neil. The rehab veteran — who was once fined $25,000 by his own band for breaking a no-alcohol-on-tour rule by drinking a cocktail — will soon inaugurate a range of fine wines from his own Napa Valley vineyard. Then he’ll launch his own burger chain, Wild Side Cafe. And he’s also a prime investor in the infamous anti-hangover pill RU-21. “Who better than me?” he laughs, downing a glass of white wine. “You take a pill between drinks and you don’t feel like shit the next day.”

But Neil is less gung ho about the Mötley Crüe reunion. He was quite happy touring with his own band, but Sixx convinced him the reunion was a good idea. It’ll be a challenge. And never one to be unnecessarily diplomatic, Neil plans to release a solo single in direct competition to the Mötley Crüe one. “It’s less in your face…more soulful,” he says. “But don’t tell them that.”

Of everyone in the band, you and Tommy seem to have the most issues.

“Don’t be polite. I don’t like Tommy and Tommy doesn’t like me.”

Why not sit down and talk?

“Tommy doesn’t want to resolve things. I don’t care. I have no feelings about it either way. You go to work, and I bet there’s a guy in the office you don’t like. You still do your job, huh?”

Neil thinks band relations were first seriously damaged when he went to jail after the 1984 car crash that killed Razzle. Neil served 30 days in jail in Torrance, California. But he was allowed beer, and visiting groupies could have sex with him.

“I wrote a $2.5 million check for vehicular manslaughter when Razzle died,” he says. “I should have gone to prison. I definitely deserved to go to prison. But I did 30 days in jail and got laid and drank beer, because that’s the power of cash. That’s fucked up. It’s changed now. But you’re 20 years old and you’ve got a million dollars in your pocket and drugs and drink and women and fame and there are lawyers to protect you. We just thought we could do anything.”


Bounding into L.A.’s Chop Shop studios, Tommy Lee, 42, couldn’t be happier: He’s just been kissing Pamela Anderson. Having hot-footed it from a parents evening at his son’s school with his ex-wife, he chugs a beer and blurts with enthusiasm.

“You know what? You go through divorce and custody and then realize you have children, so you’re stuck with each other for life. Pam and I, we hug, and our relationship is better than it’s ever been.” A scruffy, sunken-eyed bundle of energy, Lee is the unlikely cornerstone of an array of industries. In the studio, the reasons for his hesitation about the Mötley reunion are clear. Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger is here, the latest in a line of visitors contributing to Lee’s most recent solo album, which will also include Dave Navarro, Dave Grohl and Lenny Kravitz. Plus he’s got his book, Tommyland, to promote, and then there’s his NBC reality show, Tommy Lee Goes to College, in which the ironies of a well-endowed ex-felon rock drummer entering higher education are explored at the University of Nebraska. (“The tutor was hot,” he says, “so I was kinda distracted.”)

Tommy Lee — a drummer, for crying out loud — is still a celebrity. He makes out with Pink, he chats with Regis and Kelly, he has a Starbucks machine in his home. So does he really need a Mötley reunion? “A part of me is like, ‘Why?’ We fucking kicked ass and sold 40 million records. We did it. What else is there to do? But as you go around doing book signings, people ask, ‘Why don’t you play one more time?’ So, fuck it — we are.”

Things are better between Lee and Neil now. Neil’s being quite respectful. And yesterday’s hug on the rooftop was nice. “Maybe he realizes he’s been a bit of a fucking asshole,” says Tommy. “He hasn’t treated us so fairly. Maybe he’s read my book. All I know from this last week is that things are different.”

The sad part is, he says, people forget that it was he who recruited Neil to Mötley Crüe in the first place. Back then, in high-school, they were buddies who were going to form a band and “fuck the world up its ass.” “He was a good-looking dude who could sing amazing Cheap Trick covers, and so I took him to Nikki and said, ‘He’s our frontman.’”

But Lee feels betrayed. For example, when they both fell off the wagon while on a Crüe tour in Hawaii in 1999, Lee owned up to the band, but Neil let him squirm alone. “He fucking left me high and dry, the fucker.” And he says that kind of thing happened over and over again. “And then you think, ‘This guy has no love for me — why would I want to play music with him?’” Back in October 2003, Sammy Hagar tried to get Mötley Crüe to re-form for a jam at Tommy’s birthday party. All of the band agreed, except one. “It woulda happened but…” Lee trails off with theatrical sadness. “I heard that Vince wanted to get paid.”

Of this Lee is now sure: If Vince is disrespectful, he’ll walk in a minute. But there will be no violence. He’s never going back to jail. He was charged with spousal assault on Pamela Anderson after he lost his temper trying to find a frying pan in the kitchen, and spent four months in jail. It changed him. He didn’t get burgers or groupies. He got 300-lb. gangbangers wanting to kick his ass. “My anger-management classes have taught me there’s always a way out. I don’t like to make too much of a big deal about this because it sounds gay, but if I feel angry, I like to go for a walk and look at trees.”

“Tommy’s the big question,” sighs Bob Rock. “I’ve sat down and explained to him that, besides a sex tape, he has still to surpass being the drummer in Mötley Crüe. He wants to erase his past. But he should embrace it. I’ve told him they have new songs to be proud of. But still…he’s the one you worry won’t show up.”

What if I said I’m going to bet my granny’s life savings on your finishing the Mötley Crüe tour?

“Oh fuck, dude, I dunno. I just don’t know. It’s tough. OK, maybe half.”

Back in L.A., an army of smart people with cellphones and laptops are planning the Mötley assault. When rehearsal dates are raised, everyone looks at Tommy. He doesn’t seem to be writing them down. And there are other hurdles too. Like Mick Mars’s onstage mobility.

This tour is important to Mars. It might be his last one. “It’s what I’ve been working towards for three years,” he says. “Time is precious, and I’ve learned to appreciate everything I’ve got left.” Mars is a shrunken, stooping figure with a marionette walk that makes him seem much older than his 48 years. Today his doctor has visited to congratulate him on his latest progress: faltering steps across a room. A week ago he couldn’t walk unaided at all. Six months ago he almost died. “I was really ill then,” he says. “The doctor gave me two days to live.” That was due to a bout of pneumonia followed by an infection caused by mold growing in his house. Mars’s condition is treatable, but incurable. Ankylosing spondylitis is a progressive disorder of the joints that spreads from the hips up the spine. From the middle of his back to his brain stem he’s in constant pain. “It hasn’t touched my hands, and I give thanks for that. Playing guitar in a rock band is what I chose to do with my life, and that hasn’t been taken away from me yet.”

“Mick never wanted money or a clothing line or a solo deal or to race cars,” says Bob Rock. “He just wanted to play guitar in Mötley Crüe. When they split it was a huge loss to him. Seeing him back onstage will be truly awesome.”
No one in the band wants to go back to the bad old days of drug testing and $25,000 fines for drinking a cocktail. No one envisions roadies jerking off into their own hands while groupies dressed as cats lick it up. “Did that happen?” asks Mars. “I think,” says Sixx, “it did.”

And, to enhance the prospects of finishing this time, each member of the band will have his own tour bus. “Mine will be a 16-wheeled hospital,” smiles Mars. “Mine will be a recording studio,” says Sixx, who will write a new album on the road. “I’m old school. I want a fucking brass pole right in the middle of my king-sized bed in the back,” says Neil — despite his plans to marry on January 9.

And Tommy Lee? He doesn’t know what his bus will be like yet. “Long as he fucking gets on one,” growls Nikki Sixx. Patient, committed and mature, Sixx has mastered the nonconfrontational management-speak that may yet see Mötley Crüe through their first successful tour in seven years. “The secret is to focus on the process, to be in the present and not to try and force the better outcome,” he says, jiggling his ringed hands in a new-agey way. Vince Neil has a much more simple strategy: “The secret is to think of the Eagles. They toured forever,” he says. “And they fucking hated each other’s guts.”