Tommyland Read online

  Oh, fuck, I wasn’t supposed to tell you how we did that. Sorry. While we’re at it, there is no Santa Claus, there is no magic, and there is no fucking Easter Bunny. The Tooth Fairy was your goddamned mom, storks don’t deliver babies, Pop Rocks and Coke won’t kill you, there is no Middle Earth, Mikey never liked Life cereal, you can’t get pregnant from kissing, you won’t go blind from jerking off, and when Jack and Jill tumbled down that hill, they was definitely fuckin’.*

  * * *

  Mötley was always about intensity and indulgence, and we were always a band living on the edge. I’m fearless, but there were more than a few situations that I got into in my Mötley days that scared the fuck out of me. Here’s one of many. We had a pilot I nicknamed Dick Danger and a private jet service I nicknamed Dangerous Airways during the Shout at the Devil tour (I think).* Dick Danger nearly destroyed us several times. Ol’ Dick was flying a tiny, tiny plane—a twin-engine prop plane, which is the kind of plane that goes down all the time if you check the obituaries. Anyway, Dick was this older guy, in his fifties at least, with white hair and a suitcase full of Hawaiian shirts. I liked to keep an eye on Ol’ Dick, not because I thought I’d be able to do anything if some shit went wrong, more because he was like a trippy math problem: I needed to know what made this motherfucker tick. So I’m sitting up there in the cockpit next to Dick Danger one day, and I’m definitely toasted and I’m like, “Dude, could I fly this? Is it hard to do?” Dick’s all, “Take the wheel. Go ahead.” Our manager at the time heard this and completely freaked. “Do NOT let Tommy fly,” he said. “No, no, NO.” I look back at him and of course I take the wheel. I guess I thought it would be like a car or a video game, so I’m not even fully realizing that I have my entire band’s future at risk. I’m just thinking, “Fuck... I’m flying!” I’m glad Ol’ Dick didn’t tell me how to do a barrel roll—because you know I would have.

  There we are: me, piloting this two-engine tin can, while next to me, Ol’ Dick has his hands free. I watch as he reaches into that Hawaiian shirt pocket, pulls out a vial, and pours himself a huge cap of cocaine. Woah … he does blow? That’s fucked up. Pass the cap, dude. I thought it was amazing to sit up there in the cockpit while the pilot did gaggers and I flew the plane. (I’ve grown up a bit since then.)

  Eventually, we had to complain to the company we chartered our planes from because we realized that it wasn’t just Ol’ Dick—all their pilots were on drugs all the time. Our managers stood for a lot but they wouldn’t stand for that: We were enough of a problem, they didn’t want to deal with coked-out captains. Think about it, when you’re cruising in a plane with a coked-up pilot, you really start to freak when he gets on the speaker system and tells you to brace yourself for turbulence. You’re sitting there, thinking, “Fuck. I don’t want to be Lynyrd Skynyrd right now.”

  On one of our tours we had a security guard named Vinny who beat up a fan. The kid got lippy with him and since Vinny was a crazy New York fucker, he lost his mind all of a sudden and started pounding away. This kid was probably sixteen and his blood flew everywhere. We were like, “Dude! What the fuck? You can’t do that.” I’ve got a picture of Vinny sitting on the curb afterwards. He’s covered with blood, he’s finally realized what he’s just done, and he’s bumming out, because he almost beat that kid to death.

  Recently, I had a security guy who should have been with Mötley back in the day. He’d pop out his glass eye with a knife. That was a little much, especially when he would flick it into girls’ drinks. The guy had no peripheral vision on one side. He did the rest of the job well, but I figured that anyone could sneak up on him. I always made sure to stand on the good side—his left—where I’d be safe.* Who is hiring these people? I should have found myself a blind bus driver while I was at it. Back in the Mötley days we would have been into that. We probably would have gotten him really great sonar and a navigation system that talked to him. He would have fit right in.

  We did ridiculous things in Mötley, many that worked and some that really didn’t. One of those bunk ideas, the kind you realize you should have thought through a little better, was a photo shoot we did on the top of a glacier when John Corabi was in the band. When Corabi came in the band, Mötley was a different monster. It was 1994, and bands like Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana had changed rock-and-roll. When the rest of us felt that Vince wasn’t taking the music or his duties as a singer seriously, we parted ways and Corabi stepped in to replace him. Corabi’s singing style was different—grittier, harsher, and more where the rest of us wanted to be at the time. Poor guy, he had enough to deal with stepping into Vince’s shoes, he didn’t need to be dragged onto a glacier outside Vancouver, Canada. But he was, and it was an act of sheer dumbassedness. We just jumped in a helicopter in our street clothes. Idiots! I was wearing jeans, a leather jacket, a T-shirt, and sneakers. I had a hat, because the night before, Phil, the singer from Pantera, had shaved my head, so I knew I’d be cold as fuck. My hat put me leagues ahead of the other guys. None of us had gloves and there we are, freezing to the bone at the top of this chunk of ice with hundred-foot crevaces all around us. Corabi didn’t even have a jacket. He had to be sitting there thinking, “What is wrong with these people? Why am I up here?” Corabi and I did have some fun making the one album and tour that we did in 1994–95. But we should ask him about that. Lucky for you, my readers, John stopped by one day while I was writing this book. He posted up at my bar, grabbed himself a beer, and reminded me of all the nasty good times we had. John tells a pretty good story, so without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I’m going to let him tell you all about it, in his own words.

  JOHN CORABI

  Tommy and I got into a lot of trouble on that tour. We were the only two in the band who were single, drinking, and partying at the time, so we had our own bus while Nikki and Mick, the sober, mellow cats kept to themselves. Man, where should I start? One night this chick came up to me backstage, so I took her to the bus and fucked her. We’re just about done when all of a sudden our security guard comes back in the lounge of the bus and tells me that she’s got to go—NOW. Her husband was at the door of the bus and was pissed. I come out of the lounge tucking my dick in my pants and I see this guy through the windshield and he’s steaming. His lady gets her clothes on and as soon as she steps out of the bus, without a word, her husband decks her, just like that. All I could think was, “Welcome to the world of Mötley Crüe.”

  Here’s how much of a stud Tommy is: We’re in Salt Lake City and I bring these two girls on the bus, hoping to get something going. One of them sees Nikki and she’s off to the other bus, chasing him around. Her friend is still with me, and she says, as soon as we’re alone, “I’m going to fuck you.” I say, “Okay. Do you want a drink?” I hop off the bus to get a mixer and I see Tommy go up in there. I’m gone from the bus for maybe three minutes and by the time I get back in there, no one is around, but I hear something going down in the back room. I walk back there and the chick is standing on the couch holding on to the roof of the bus while Tommy is behind her just bangin’ her. He was going so hard that the chick ripped a lighted panel out of the ceiling in the lounge. Mormon chicks are fucking insane.

  I THINK EVERY STATE SHOULD BE DRY.

  One time we were rolling down the highway while in the other bus, Nikki is sitting going over figures with the business manager. Our bus is full of girls and the music, the lava lamps, and the disco-light system we have are bumpin’—it’s a full-on party in the middle of the day. Nikki looks up from his meeting as we pass them, and he sees all of these girls hanging out of the windows. The look on his face is priceless: He gets on our bus the next day and tells us he fucking hates us.

  Change “while” to “whilst”?

  “Whilst”? This isn’t Shakespeare, Sherlock. Don’t you at least need to be a knight to use a word like that? Should we change all the “comes” to “comeths” whilst we’re at it? Save that shit for Sir Elton John’s and Sir Paul McCartney’s autobiographies, Squ
ire.

  I won’t say what city we were in because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but at one stop some cops from the bomb squad paid us a visit because they heard that Tommy likes explosives. They just hand him a brown bag full of these things that are bigger than M80s—they’re like a half stick of dynamite each. It didn’t take Tommy long to get into those. We’re in Chicago and I’m fucking the shit out of this chick when I hear the biggest fucking boom, and then another one, and then another one. The next day, I’m hanging out with some of our crew outside, checking out the divots those bombs took out of the street. Right then, Tommy’s in our bus about half a block away when boom!, he drops another one. The bus driver, who is one of the guys standing next to me, suddenly screams and falls to the ground because a piece of the street has just blown a huge hole in his arm. Poor fucker.

  Tommy was definitely crazy for fireworks—he blew like $2,000 bucks on them in Virginia Beach. Our back lounge was like a fort—every cabinet stuffed with mortar rockets, Roman candles, firecrackers. We had it all.

  The biggest bomb he dropped on that tour wasn’t even an explosive. We get to Hiroshima, Japan, and T-Bone gets a genius idea that he keeps to himself. He talks to the sound guy and changes the intro music. As we come onstage—and I couldn’t fucking believe this—the Gap Band’s “You Dropped a Bomb on Me” is pumping through the PA. I turn around and he’s just sitting back there behind the drums laughing his ass off. I’m standing in front of eight thousand Japanese fans thinking, “This is not going to be a good night.” Somehow though, it was.

  After the show, I ended up hanging out at some club with this American model who was living over there and after I liquored her up, we’re leaving when I see on the club’s board that the Vince Neil Band is playing the following week. I say something about it and she says to me, “Oh, I’m going to see that show.” So I tell her to say hi to Vince for me and that Vince and I go way back. A week later I get a call from her and she’s pissed. “You’re an asshole,” she says. “I went up to Vince Neil and told him ‘John Corabi says hi.’ He said to me, ‘Who?’ I said, ‘John Corabi, the singer for Mötley Crüe. He says hello.’ “ When she said that to Vince, he said, “Fuck you, I’m the singer for Mötley Crüe!” He flipped a table over, threw a bottle at her, cut his hand open, and went completely insane.

  * * *

  Thanks John, you’re a good man and a very talented musician. Thank you for the music, for being my accomplice, and for remembering the details that I forgot. And good luck.

  That tour was called Anywhere There’s Electricity and it happened in 1994. It was the last tour I did with Mötley in my full-on debaucherous single-guy mode, after I ended the year of complete sobriety that followed our recording Dr. Feelgood in 1988. In 1995, I met Pamela Anderson, the woman who became my wife and with whom I share two beautiful sons. But that’s a story that deserves its own chapter, if not its own book.

  Mötley was a powerful force from beginning to end and I can’t explain how rad it is to hear from fans that our music was the soundtrack to some of the highest points of their lives. We had the power to move people, and onstage you could feel it—on our best nights, it felt like we might lose control of the energy we were sending out. And sometimes we did. We have been charged several times by the authorities for inciting a riot, two of which in particular happened in Charlotte, North Carolina, and in Las Vegas at the Aladdin Hotel.

  In Charlotte, in 1997, during the show, we noticed that this one black security guard was punching a girl in the face in the front row. Nikki decided to stop the show and call that motherfucker out. He said, “Anybody who hits a girl is a nigger.” Uh-oh, here we go. It was on. The guard jumped up onstage and went after Nikki. Vince and Mick bailed, but I hopped over the drums and got my boy’s back because shit was about to get ugly. Nikki had his bass by the neck like a baseball bat, looking like he wanted to hit a homerun with the guy’s melon. I jump in and start throwing my drink at the security guy to let him know that Nikki wasn’t alone and that he’d better chill out. By that time, our security had grabbed the guy and calmed him down. They got him offstage and off the premises real quick. A couple of days later we were served with a lawsuit. We spent a lot of money to make it go away.

  The Las Vegas incident happened in 1999 during Mötley’s Greatest Hits tour. That ruckus was as loud and as gaudy as Vegas can be, and let me tell you, what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas. We were told before the show that we would be the last band to ever play the original Aladdin Hotel before it was torn down and remodeled. That’s why we agreed to play. Being the nice guys that we are, we figured we and our fans should lend a hand in the remodeling. Nikki gets on the mike and, of course, announces that the building we’re all standing in will be torn down. “We’re the last band that will ever play here,” he says. “So I want you all to help tear this motherfucker up.” And they did. Our fans went crazy—they ripped seats out of the floor and pay phones off the wall, basically destroying the fucking place. The next day, we found out that the Aladdin was remodeling everything BUT the arena we’d just played in. Oh damn. You should have seen the shopping list of destruction that showed up at our office: clean-up charges, union expenses, phones, walls, seats, and personal injuries out the ass. If Mötley did a residence at the Aladdin Hotel, Celine Dion style, starting now... maybe we’d break even in 2010.

  The Greatest Hits tour was the last I’d do with Mötley Crüe and that night in Vegas was the end of the line for me. The tour was booked while I was in jail that summer for violating my probation and pleading no contest to spousal abuse (to avoid a serious gun rap). To be honest, I didn’t want to do the tour, but I felt like I couldn’t let my brothers down. “Fuck it,” I thought, “one last rip playing the greatest hits would be good for me.” You have no idea how bad and how hard I wanted to hit those drums after being locked up.

  Speaking of hitting, that’s why I left the tour early. After the Aladdin demolition derby, we were shuttled to the airport to go home for a day or two. We’re sitting in the airport because we’re flying a commercial airline home. Ashley from our management office came up and gave me my tickets. Vince starts yelling at her, saying, “Why are you kissing Tommy’s ass? Why are his tickets ready before mine?” He is going off on Ashley, who works for us, and I tell him to relax. I say, “Who gives a shit whose tickets are ready first? We’re all getting on the same plane, dude.” Vince is not having it and he tells me to fuck off. Uh-oh. I say, “Do NOT tell me to fuck off, dude.” And what does he say to that? “Fuck off. What are you gonna do, hit me?” I said, “No, I’m not gonna hit you. You just need to fucking calm down.”

  Blam! He cracked me right in the face, right there in front of the ticket counter at the gate while the passengers waiting to board freaked out. That was it, I was done, I couldn’t deal with him or this situation anymore. I tackled him, put him in a headlock, jacked my fist back, and thought, “This is worth going back to jail for.” Before I could send Vince off to the land of emergency rooms and white coats, my security guy Hawk—thank God—grabbed me by the neck and the shirt and while he’s carrying me onto the plane, I’m watching Vince standing there, all puffed up, screaming at the top of his lungs. “Police!” he shouts, with his wife/chick du jour he flew in for the night/whatever standing there next to him. “I’ve been assaulted!” he says over and over. “I’ve been assaulted! Police!” The last thing I saw before he fell out of view was him standing there with no one coming to his rescue—not even an airport rent-a-cop.

  Everyone knew damn well that since I was on probation, if I got into any kind of trouble at all on that tour, I was going back to the Gray Bar Motel. Vince and I had had our run-ins before when our egos clashed. I had known him since high school and I had never approved of how he treated people. The more money and fame we got, the worse he was to anyone and everyone. He yelled at everybody and I never dug that, but trying to send me back to jail was it for me. Right there in the terminal that day
, it was clear to me that Vince did not give a flying fuck about me. I sat down in my seat and was steaming when Nikki came on the plane. He took one look at me and he knew the tour was over, that was it, my ass was goin’ home—and staying there. Nikki tried to play referee, coaxing me to bite the bullet and finish the dates, but this wasn’t one I was willing to take for the team. “I quit,” I said. “I don’t need this shit anymore.”

  I got home and the phone started ringing off the hook as my band members and management tried to reach out to me to talk me into finishing up the last twelve dates on our tour. I didn’t answer the phone and when I did, I just said, over and over, “There’s no way. I’m done.”