The Dirt (47 page)

To break the ice, I told them that I had considered taking off my clothes and walking into the audition naked. It was a stupid comment, but Tommy laughed. “Dude, you should have done that! That would have been amazing!”

I exhaled and relaxed. I liked these guys. I wasn’t that familiar with their songs, but I had been in more than fifty cover bands in my hometown of Philadelphia, so I knew all the covers they did. We started with “Helter Skelter.” I grabbed the mic, started singing, and after the first verse they suddenly stopped playing.

My lungs froze, and I waited for them to kick me out of the room.

“Dude, it’s just insane,” Tommy said and laughed in disbelief. He liked it.

We finished “Helter Skelter,” then plunged into more covers—“Jailhouse Rock” and “Smokin’ in the Boys Room.” They handed me the lyrics to “Dr. Feelgood” and “Don’t Go Away Mad.” Tommy was giddy with excitement because it sounded so much heavier with a raspier voice and a second guitar, but Nikki and Mick stayed quiet. They said that they were rehearsing some other singers the next day and I should come back then.

When I returned for the second audition, Doug Thaler, Chuck Shapiro, and David Rudich were there. Rudich, the band’s lawyer, sat me down and recited some legal mumbo-jumbo that I didn’t understand, and then we powered through the same songs again. Afterward, the suits shook my hand and thanked me for coming down and acted all dry and businesslike, careful not to reveal any emotion, whether positive or negative.

“Fuck,” I said to the band after the suits left. “We’ve only been here for forty-five minutes. Do you guys want to jam or something?”

Mick and I traded blues phrases for a while, and then I showed them a riff I had been working on. By the end of the rehearsal, we had already written the foundation of one song, “Hammered,” and the acoustic portion of another, “Misunderstood.” Nikki had some new lyrics, so I sang them and then took a break to go to the bathroom. When I returned, the three of them were sitting on the drum riser.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out,” Tommy stood up and told me. “You are the guy!”

“But you can’t let anyone know yet,” Nikki said. “Because there’s going to be a lot of legal stuff to work out.”

“Can I tell my wife?” I asked them.

They smiled. “Yes, of course you can tell your wife.”

At home, Valerie was waiting for me with some friends: Robert, the drummer in my first real band, Angora, was there with his girlfriend, Gina; and Neil Zlozower, who was actually a friend of Nikki’s as well, was hanging out with his wife, Denise. They had two bottles of Dom Perignon waiting. “I’ve got good news and bad news,” I told Valerie. “The good news is that I did the audition and it was cool. The bad news is that you’re looking at the new singer of Mötley Crüe.”

Though I was joking, it actually turned out to be bad news for her. I was standing in the mouth of a lion, and we both knew it. Everything started out fine. The band sent a beautiful crystal vase with two dozen roses in it to Valerie the next day, with a note that said, “Welcome to the family.” But as rehearsals continued, I was home less and less, which was especially hard on Valerie because our son had just been diagnosed with diabetes. Nikki would show up at our one-bedroom house shitfaced after fighting with Brandi and slur, “Alright, Crab, you’re coming with me or you’re fired.” Or Tommy would pick me up in a limo in the middle of the night, and we’d get tattooed together. I decided to have the name of the album,
Till Death Do Us Part
, carved into my arm, though soon afterward they changed the name of the album to just
Mötley Crüe
.

One night, I took Valerie out with us, and she wasn’t too happy when she saw all the chicks swarming around us like flies on shit. We ended up at the Mondrian Hotel, and Nikki got a room for himself because he didn’t want to go home. I waited in the Sky Bar downstairs with Valerie, who was so drunk she fell asleep. While I was in the bathroom, she woke up and thought I had gone to Nikki’s room, so she went up to find me. When I returned from the bathroom, someone at the bar told me she had gone upstairs. So we chased each other all over the hotel for an hour until, finally, I was in Nikki’s room and there was a knock at the door. The hotel security guard was standing in the hallway holding my wife. “This woman says she’s married to John,” he said, holding her by the neck as if she were a drunk hooker. “Should I throw her out?”

“Valerie!” I yelled, and the guard released her. She flew across the room and sucker-punched me in the face. I turned scarlet with anger, grabbed her and threw her in the car downstairs. We fought all the way home.

We lived in a bad neighborhood, and people like Tommy were scared to visit because they’d hear gunfire. One evening, I went to 7-Eleven to get some milk. On the way home, three Mexicans jumped me. One smashed me in the back of the head with his gun, and another kept stabbing me in the hand and the back with a big screwdriver. Strangely, they snatched the jewelry off my neck, but left my wallet alone. I stumbled home a bloody mess and collapsed on the living room floor. I was upset: after all that trouble, I had left the milk lying in the street.

When the band heard what had happened, they loaned Valerie and me money to move to Thousand Oaks, which had much better schools for the kids. The guys also threw in a brand-new Harley-Davidson Heritage Softtail Classic, so that we could all go riding together. But for Valerie and me, it was already too late.

I had met Valerie when I was eighteen and playing in a cover band with her brother. Two years later, we were married with a son. I spent the next fourteen years being a husband and a father while moonlighting in rock bands. But standing in the mouth of the lion that was Mötley, I looked into the black, yawning pit and saw a lot of crazy, decadent shit that I had been missing out on during all those years of marriage. On top of that, as the new frontman for this beast, I had to be bigger, louder, and more vicious than the rest of the guys. Neither Valerie nor I knew how to cope with what was going on and, after so many years of weathering all kinds of poverty and bad luck, we let good fortune break us up.

For some reason, everyone’s marriages were falling apart: Mick’s, Nikki’s, Tommy’s, mine, and even Vince’s. Just before Valerie and I broke up, we were hanging out in Catalina with the band. Within earshot of Mick, his wife, Emi, walked over to me, grabbed my arm, and whispered something about a condominium she and Mick had in Marina del Rey. I wasn’t sure if she was trying to sublet it to me, get me to buy it for her, or invite me to spend the night there.

I thanked her for the kind offer and turned away. I had only been in the band for a month, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want anyone to think I was hitting on one of their wives. But, after that, every time I saw Emi when she was drunk, she’d start talking about how her psychic had told her a handsome man with curly dark hair was going to come into her life. The next time I saw Tommy and Nikki, I told them, “Look, this is the opportunity of a lifetime for me, and I don’t want to blow it. But I think Mick’s wife is hitting on me. And I just want you to know so that if this ever becomes a problem between Mick and me, you’ll know that I’m innocent as far as his wife is concerned.”

Mick’s marriage didn’t last long after that. He is one of the sweetest people I have ever met in the music business; but because he’s so nice and never wants to make trouble, he usually ends up getting fucked over. In the case of Emi, she had a band called Alice in Thunderland, and Mick bought them Marshall stacks, bass cabinets, a new drum kit, a Flying V for the guitarist, and plenty of studio time. Then, while he was in Vancouver working on the Mötley record, he started to suspect that his wife was sleeping with the guitarist he had just bought the Flying V for.

Mick was so passive that when his wife asked if she could permanently move into that condo by the beach in Marina del Rey, he gave it to her. But he stayed in his old place, and I moved into the guest house because I had finally separated from Valerie. Emi seemed to want everything Mick had to give but his most valuable possession, himself.

Ready to begin the new album, we flew Bob Rock down to L.A. to start talking about ideas. On the day of the meeting, however, I couldn’t reach anyone in the band. I drove to Tommy’s house with my son and saw Nikki’s car in the driveway, so I figured the meeting was going on without me. When no one answered the buzzer, I climbed over the fence and pounded on the door. Finally, Tommy and Nikki appeared—and they were hammered. All you could see on Nikki was black hair and a row of grinning white teeth. “Fuck, bro, what are you doing here?” Tommy asked.

“What’s going on with the meeting?” I asked.

“Aw, dude, we’re just like waiting for Bob Rock to get here.”

It turned out that the night before, Nikki and Tommy were out with their wives. They had a glass of wine together, then decided to smoke some pot. One thing led to another, and they ended up sending their wives away while they called up their old dealer for two eightballs and fiended all night, cooking up cocaine in Nikki’s closet until they passed out.

When Rock showed up around one in the afternoon, his eyes bulged out of his head in horror. When he had last seen Tommy and Nikki they were sober, but now they reeked of alcohol, their noses were runny from cocaine, and they couldn’t even form a sentence. When Nikki left the meeting and passed out on the couch in the next room, Rock threw up his hands: there was no way he was going to do this record, he said, unless the band got its act together. When he left, he blew the whistle to Thaler and Bob Timmons, who came running to the rescue. But, fortunately, it was just a one-day binge—a planned slip. Nikki and Tommy just needed to get it out of their systems, though I don’t know if their wives ever really forgave them.

I
t fucking happens every time. A chick starts dating me because she sees this tattooed rocker dude leading a wild, crazy, unpredictable existence and she falls in love with that lifestyle. But, over time, she starts to disapprove of what I am and tries to change it.

Anyone who falls in love with me needs to realize that music is fucking number one. When you say that to a girl, she wonders if that means that she is number two. No, man, Heather was number one also. I had two number ones, and any girl I meet has to get used to riding shotgun with me and the music. Because I need a partner, not a leader. So hang with me and my music and we will be all lovely.

But that’s not what happened with Heather. It was the typical celebrity marriage: At first, we thought that it was perfect because we were both experiencing fame and pressure, and thought that we could only settle down with someone who understood our jobs and was as busy as we were. But by the end, our narcissism and obsession with our careers got in the way.

It was hard for me to get her to relax in public. When we cruised around the Greek islands, the first thing I wanted to do was chill on a nude beach. So we go there, and I stripped down and plunged into the water. I ran back and she was still standing there with her swimsuit on on this beautiful island full of naked people. She was so worried there’d be a photographer hiding in the rocks, and maybe she was right, but at the time I didn’t give a fuck if there was. In many ways, I felt inhibited around her: She threw a fit whenever I fell off the wagon, which maybe made sense too, and she absolutely refused to let me get a big tattoo backpiece that I wanted.

I felt especially trapped, because she wanted me to settle down but at the same time didn’t want to go through with the other obligations of settling down. Nikki had a baby with a second on the way; Vince had three kids with three separate women; and Mick was already a fucking grandfather. I loved kids. I wanted to have one so badly with Heather. But every time, she said no. She was concerned about her career, and couldn’t afford to be pregnant. Besides, she didn’t seem to be that into kids: whenever they came by, she’d get worked up because they were jumping on the furniture or had chocolate on their hands.

Maybe she was too young or not at the right point in her life, or maybe she didn’t want to have kids with someone like me (a theory that really nagged at me when she got pregnant right after hooking up with Richie Sambora), but I started to get bummed. I’d invested a lot of years in the relationship, and if there wasn’t any chance of it moving forward, it was best to cut my losses. When I was born, my dad was already so old that he could hardly play ball with me. I wanted to be young enough to run around with my kids, have the same interests, keep up with them, and be a part of their lives until they grew up.

When I’m in love, I have fucking blinders on. I don’t even look at other women. But once I started reassessing my marriage with Heather—just as I’m sure she was reassessing me—my eyes started drifting. And after your eyes start drifting, your mind starts drifting. And after your mind starts drifting, your hands start drifting. And after your hands start drifting, it’s all bad forever after. We lasted through seven years of craziness—through the ups and downs of both our careers, through my mad drug and alcohol abuse and the fucking torture of rehab, through the crazy-ass success of
Dr. Feelgood
—and there’s something to be said for that. We made it pretty long, considering.