For those of you not local to Los Angeles, you may or may not have heard of The Sunset Strip Music Festival – but you should. Every August, they close off the iconic 1.6 mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard, erect two massive stages, repeal the open container laws, and throw one of the city’s best street parties. This year, they have invited me to speak at the opening ceremony, honoring this year’s legendary headliners: Motley Crue.
The odd thing is that part of the honors include a proclamation from the Mayor naming an official Motley Crue Day. This is like Chicago having an Al Capone Day. These guys were public enemy number one, terrorizing the city and its population for years.
But time evidently heals all wounds.
The ceremony that I’m speaking at tonight at the House of Blues is a private event, but you can see Vince, Mick, Tommy, and Nikki perform together at the headlining show on Saturday night. The festival leading up to their performance takes place between Doheny and San Vicente Boulevard, and will include performances from over 70 bands. For more info, check out sunsetstripmusicfestival.com, or just show up at 10:00am, pay your $55, and experience it yourself. If you need help killing time until then, or just to get your Motley fix, here’s the first chapter of the book I wrote with them, The Dirt.
Chapter 1: “Vince”
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OF AND CONCERNING THE FIRST HOUSE; WHEREIN TOMMY IS CAUGHT WITH THIS KNICKERS DOWN AND HIS BAUBLES IN A HOLE; NIKKI IS SET ON FIRE TO THE EMINENT DISPLEASURE OF THE CARPET; VINCE COVETS NARCOTICS ON THE PERSON OF DAVID LEE ROTH’ AND MICK MAINTAINS A RIGHTEOUS AND BEMUSED DISTANCE
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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 on 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 form, and Tommy wasn’t above doing that. Whenever the trash piled up, we’d open he 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 over cleaned the toilet. Tommy and I were still teenagers: We didn’t know how. There would be tampons in the shower form 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-a-trois-loving, 280Z-owning 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 new-borns 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 redhead 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 ut.
“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 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.