The Dirt Read online

  DEDICATION

  THE DIRT

  DEDICATION

  PART 1: THE MÖTLEY HOUSE

  CHAPTER 1: VINCE

  CHAPTER 2: MICK

  PART 2: BORN TOO LOOSE

  CHAPTER 1: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 2: MICK

  CHAPTER 3: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 4: MICK

  PART 3: TOAST OF THE TOWN

  CHAPTER 1: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 2: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 3: VINCE

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5: NIKKI

  PART 4: SHOUT AT THE DEVIL

  CHAPTER 1: TOM ZUTAUT

  CHAPTER 2: VINCE

  CHAPTER 3: TOM ZUTAUT

  CHAPTER 4: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 5: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 6: NIKKI

  PART 5: SAVE OUR SOULS

  CHAPTER 1: MICK

  CHAPTER 2: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 3: VINCE

  CHAPTER 4: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 5: MICK

  CHAPTER 6: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 7: VINCE

  CHAPTER 8: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 9: VINCE

  CHAPTER 10: TOMMY

  PART 6: GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS

  CHAPTER 1: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 2: NIKKI

  PART 7: SOME OF OUR BEST FRIENDS ARE DRUG DEALERS

  CHAPTER 1: MICK

  CHAPTER 2: MICK

  CHAPTER 3: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 4: MICK

  CHAPTER 5: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 6: VINCE

  CHAPTER 7: NIKKI

  PART 8: SOME OF OUR BEST FRIENDS WERE DRUG DEALERS

  CHAPTER 1: DOC McGHEE

  CHAPTER 2: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 3: MICK

  CHAPTER 4: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 5: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 6: DOC MCGHEE

  CHAPTER 7: VINCE

  CHAPTER 8: TOMMY

  PART 9: DON’T GO AWAY MAD

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2: DOUG THALER

  CHAPTER 3: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 4: DOUG THALER

  CHAPTER 5: MICK

  CHAPTER 6: JOHN CORABI

  CHAPTER 7: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 8: JOHN CORABI

  CHAPTER 9: VINCE

  CHAPTER 10: DOUG THALER

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12: NIKKI

  PART 10: WITHOUT YOU

  CHAPTER 1: VINCE

  CHAPTER 2: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 3: VINCE

  CHAPTER 4: MIKE AMATO

  CHAPTER 5: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 6: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 7: JOHN CORABI

  CHAPTER 8: JOHN CORABI

  CHAPTER 9: VINCE

  CHAPTER 10: MICK

  CHAPTER 11: SCOTT HUMPHREY

  PART 11: THE GUNS, THE WOMEN, THE EGO

  CHAPTER 1: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 2: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 3: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 4: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 5: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 6: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 7: VINCE

  CHAPTER 8: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 9: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 10: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 11: TOMMY

  PART 12: HOLLYWOOD ENDING

  CHAPTER 1: SYLVIA RHONE

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 4: VINCE

  CHAPTER 5: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 6: MICK

  CHAPTER 7: TOMMY

  CHAPTER 8: NIKKI

  CHAPTER 9: MICK

  CHAPTER 10: VINCE

  CHAPTER 11: TOMMY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  PHOTO CREDITS

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  fig. 1

  Her name was Bullwinkle. We called her that because she had a face like a moose. But Tommy, even though he could get any girl he wanted on the Sunset Strip, would not break up with her. He loved her and wanted to marry her, he kept telling us, because she could spray her cum across the room.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t just cum she sent flying around the house. It was dishes, clothes, chairs, fists—basically anything within reach of her temper. Up until then, and I’d lived in Compton, I’d never seen anyone get that violent. One wrong word or look would cause her to explode in a jealous rage. One night, Tommy tried to keep her away by jamming the door to the house shut—the lock was long since broken from being repeatedly kicked in by the police—and she grabbed a fire extinguisher and threw it through the plate-glass window to get inside. The police returned later that night and drew their guns on Tommy while Nikki and I hid in the bathroom. I’m not sure which we were more scared of: Bullwinkle or the cops.

  We never repaired the window. That would have been too much work. People would pour into the house, located near the Whisky A Go-Go, for after-hours parties, either through the broken window or the warped, rotting brown front door, which would only stay closed if we folded a piece of cardboard and wedged it underneath. I shared a room with Tommy while Nikki, that fucker, got the big room to himself. When we moved in, we agreed to rotate and every month a different person would get the solo room. But it never happened. It was too much work.

  It was 1981, and we were broke, with one thousand seven-inch singles that our manager had pressed for us and a few decimated possessions to our name. In the front room sat one leather couch and a stereo that Tommy’s parents had given him for Christmas. The ceiling was covered with small round dents because every time the neighbors complained about the noise, we’d retaliate by pounding on the ceiling with broom handles and guitar necks. The carpet was filthy with alcohol, blood, and cigarette burns, and the walls were scorched black.

  The place was crawling with vermin. If we ever wanted to use the oven, we had to leave it on high for a good ten minutes to kill the regiments of roaches crawling around inside. We couldn’t afford pesticides, so to exterminate the roaches on the walls we would take hair spray, hold a lighter to the nozzle, and torch the bastards. Of course, we could afford (or afford to steal) important things like hair spray, because you had to have your hair jacked up if you wanted to make the rounds at the clubs.

  The kitchen was smaller than a bathroom, and just as putrid. In the fridge there’d usually be some old tuna fish, beer, Oscar Mayer bologna, expired mayonnaise, and maybe hot dogs if it was the beginning of the week and we’d either stolen them from the liquor store downstairs or bought them with spare money. Usually, though, Big Bill, a 450-pound biker and bouncer from the Troubadour (who died a year later from a cocaine overdose), would come over and eat all the hot dogs. We’d be too scared to tell him it was all we had.

  There was a couple who lived down the street and felt sorry for us, so every now and then they’d bring over a big bowl of spaghetti. When we were really hard up, Nikki and I would date girls who worked in grocery stores just for the free food. But we always bought our own booze. It was a matter of pride.

  In the kitchen sink festered the only dishes we owned: two drinking glasses and one plate, which we’d rinse off now and then. Sometimes there was enough crud caked on the plate to scrape a full meal from, and Tommy wasn’t above doing that. Whenever the trash piled up, we’d open the small sliding door in the kitchen and throw it onto the patio. In theory, the patio would have been a nice place, the size of a barbecue and a chair, but instead there were bags of beer cans and booze bottles piled up so high that we’d have to hold back the trash to keep it from spilling into the house every time we opened the door. The neighbors complained about the smell and the rats that had started swarming all over our patio, but there was no way we were touching it, even after the Los Angeles Department of Health Services showed up at our door with legal papers requiring us to clean the environmental disaster we had created.

  Our bathroom made the kitchen look
immaculate in comparison. In the nine or so months we lived there, we never once cleaned the toilet. Tommy and I were still teenagers: We didn’t know how. There would be tampons in the shower from girls the night before, and the sink and mirror were black with Nikki’s hair dye. We couldn’t afford—or were too lazy to afford—toilet paper, so there’d be shit-stained socks, band flyers, and pages from magazines scattered across the floor. On the back of the door was a poster of Slim Whitman. I’m not sure why.

  Outside the bathroom, a hallway led to two bedrooms. The hall carpet was spotted with charred footprints because we’d rehearse for our live shows by setting Nikki on fire, and the lighter fluid always ended up running down his legs.

  The bedroom Tommy and I shared was to the left of the hallway, full of empty bottles and dirty clothes. We each slept on a mattress on the floor draped with one formerly white sheet that had turned the color of squashed roach. But we thought we were pretty suave because we had a mirrored door on our closet. Or we did. One night, David Lee Roth came over and was sitting on the floor with a big pile of blow, keeping it all to himself as usual, when the door fell off the hinges and cracked across the back of his head. Dave halted his monologue for a half-second, and then continued. He didn’t seem to be aware that anything out of the ordinary had happened—and he didn’t lose a single flake of his drugs.

  Nikki had a TV in his room, and a set of doors that opened into the living room. But he had nailed them shut for some reason. He’d sit there on the floor, writing “Shout at the Devil” while everyone was partying around him. Every night after we played the Whisky, half the crowd would come back to our house and drink and do blow, smack, Percodan, quaaludes, and whatever else we could get for free. I was the only one shooting up back then because a spoiled-rich, bisexual, ménage-à-trois-loving, 280Zowning blonde named Lovey had taught me how to inject coke.

  There would be members of punk-scene remnants like 45 Grave and the Circle Jerks coming to our almost nightly parties while guys in metal newborns like Ratt and W.A.S.P. spilled out into the courtyard and the street. Girls would arrive in shifts. One would be climbing out the window while another was coming in the door. Me and Tommy had our window, and Nikki had his. All we’d have to say is, “Somebody’s here. You have to go.” And they’d go—although sometimes they’d only go as far as the room across the hall.

  One chick who used to come over was an obnoxiously overweight red-head who couldn’t even fit through the window. But she had a Jaguar XJS, which was Tommy’s favorite car. He wanted to drive that car more than anything. Finally, she told him that if he fucked her she’d let him drive the Jaguar. That night, Nikki and I walked into the house to find Tommy with his spindly legs flat on the floor and this big naked quivering mass bouncing mercilessly up and down on top of him. We just stepped over him, grabbed a rum and Coke, and sat on our decimated couch to watch the spectacle: they looked like a red Volkswagen with four whitewall tires sticking out the bottom and getting flatter by the second. The second Tommy finished, he buttoned up his pants and looked at us.

  “I gotta go, man.” He beamed, proud. “I’m gonna drive her car.”

  Then he was off—through the living room crud, out the busted front door, past the cinder blocks, and in the car, pleased with himself. It would not be the last time we found those two embraced in the devil’s bargain.

  We lived in that pigsty as long as a child stays in the womb before scattering to move in with girls we had met. The whole time we lived there all we wanted was a record deal. But all we ended up with was booze, drugs, chicks, squalor, and court orders. Mick, who was living with his girlfriend in Manhattan Beach, kept telling us that was no way to go about getting a deal. But I guess he was wrong. That place gave birth to Mötley Crüe, and like a pack of mad dogs, we abandoned the bitch, leaving with enough reckless, aggravated testosterone to spawn a million bastard embryo metal bands.

  I used to tell them, “You know what your problem is? When you do stuff you get caught. This is the way you do stuff.” Then I took a shot glass and threw it across the room and nobody knew what the fuck was going on. I’ve always been the one who knows how to do things like that and not get caught. I guess I was the outsider.

  I had this place in Manhattan Beach with my girlfriend. I was never into hanging out at that house. I had done that, seen it. I’d been over twenty-one for a long time and they were still like eighteen. I came over once for Christmas, and they had a small tree they’d stolen and decorated with beer cans, panties, snot, needles, and shit. Before we left for a gig at the Country Club that night, they put the tree in the courtyard, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire. They thought it was real funny, but to me it just stank. That kind of stuff bored me really quickly, you know. It was always so filthy over there that you could wipe your finger on any surface and get dirt under your nails. I’d rather stay home and drink and bang on my guitar.

  Nikki was going out with some kind of witch who he’d have sex with in the closet, or in a coffin in her house. Tommy was going out with—I can’t remember her name but we called her Bullwinkle. And a moose isn’t a very pretty animal. She’d go crazy and rip fire extinguishers off the walls and bust through windows to get into the house. To me, she was a dumb, young, possessive personality that was crazy or something. I could never get as violent as that, shatter a window and run the risk of hurting myself.

  What’s on the inside of people like that is stuff that’s a little too much for me. Everyone likes to look for aliens, but I think we are the aliens. We’re the descendants of the troublemakers on other planets. Just like Australia was a prison to England, where they sent all their criminals and so on, it’s the same thing on Earth. This is where they dropped us off. We’re the insane fucking people from somewhere else, just a bunch of trash.

  My back hurts.

  fig. 1

  From upper left: Rob Hemphill, Frank Feranna (a.k.a. Nikki Sixx), and friends in front of Roosevelt High School, Seattle

  I was fourteen years old when I had my mother arrested.

  She was mad at me over something—staying out late, not doing homework, playing music too loud, dressing like a slob, I can’t remember—and I couldn’t take it anymore. I smashed my bass against the wall, threw my stereo across the room, tore my MC5 and Blue Cheer posters off the wall, and kicked a hole in the black-and-white television downstairs before slamming the front door open. Outside, I systematically threw a rock through every window in the town house.

  But that was just the beginning. I’d been planning what came next for some time. I ran to a nearby house filled with degenerates I liked to get stoned with and asked for a knife. Someone tossed me a stiletto. I popped out the blade, extended my bracelet-covered left arm, and plunged the knife in directly above the elbow, sliding it downward about four inches and deep enough in some places to see bone. I didn’t feel a thing. In fact, I thought it looked pretty cool.

  Then I called the police and said my mother had attacked me.

  I wanted them to lock her away so I could live alone. But my plan backfired: The police said that if, as a minor living in her custody, I pressed charges, they’d have to put me in a juvenile home until I was eighteen. That meant I wouldn’t be able to play guitar for four years. And if I couldn’t play guitar for four years, that meant I’d never make it. And I was going to make it. There was no doubt about that—at least in my mind.

  So I struck a plea bargain with my mother. I told her I wouldn’t press assault charges if she’d back off, leave me alone, let me be me. “You haven’t been there for me,” I told her, “so just let me go.” And she did.

  I never came back. It was an overdue ending to a quest for escape and independence that had been set in motion a long time ago. It began like Richard Hell’s punk classic “Blank Generation”: “I was saying let me out of here before I was even born.”

  I was born December 11, 1958, at 7:11 A.M., in San Jose. I was as early as I could be, and, even back then, probably still u
p from the night before. My mother had about as much luck with names as she had with men. She was born Deana Haight—an Idaho farm girl with stars in her eyes. She was witty, strong-willed, motivated, and extremely gorgeous—like a fifties movie star, with stylishly short hair, an angelic face, and a figure that inspired double takes in the street. But she was the black sheep of the family, the exact opposite of her perfect, pampered sister, Sharon. She had an untamable wild streak: completely capricious, prone to random adventure, and constitutionally unable to create any pattern of stability. She was definitely my mother.

  She wanted to name me either Michael or Russell, but before she could the nurse asked my father, Frank Carlton Feranna—who was just a few years away from leaving her and me for good—what I should be called. He betrayed my mother on the spot and named me Frank Feranna, after himself. And that’s what they wrote on the birth certificate. From the first day, my life was a cluster fuck. At that point, I should have crawled right back in and begged my maker, “Can we start over?”

  My father stuck around long enough to give me a sister who, like my father, I have no memories of. My mother always told me that my sister had gone to live somewhere else when she was young and I wasn’t allowed to see her. It wasn’t until thirty years later that I discovered the truth. For my mother, pregnancy and children were warning signs telling her to slow down—advice she heeded for only a short time until she started dating Richard Pryor.

  fig. 2

  Nikki’s mother, Deana

  fig. 3

  For most of my childhood, the idea of a sister and a father was beyond my comprehension. I never thought of myself as coming from a broken home, because I had no memories of home being anything other than my mother and me. We lived on the ninth floor of the St. James Club—then known as the Sunset Towers—on Sunset Boulevard. And whenever I got in the way of her lifestyle, she’d ship me to stay with my grandparents, who were constantly on the move, living in a cornfield in Pocatello, Idaho, or a rock park in Southern California, or a hog farm in New Mexico. My grandparents constantly threatened to take legal custody of me if my mother didn’t stop partying. But she would neither relinquish me completely nor slow down. The situation took a turn for the worse when she joined Frank Sinatra’s band as a backup singer and started dating the bassist, Vinny. I’d watch them rehearse all the time, with stars of the era like Mitzi Gaynor, Count Basie, and Nelson Riddle passing through.