Tommy Lee interview: ‘Back then, there were no consequences – excess was a daily thing’

In the summer of 1987, Mötley Crüe embarked on a tour of the largest indoors venues in North America. Traveling aboard a private jet, the band were followed by an Excalibur car – license plate: “Dealer” – driven by a drug kingpin with a Rolex on his arm and two working girls by his side. With flourish and fanfare, in each city the unnamed provider would dispense bindles of cocaine to every member of the travelling party. Even by the garish standards of the age, these were not subtle people.

In their endlessly compelling, multi-million-selling, tell-all memoir The Dirt (2001), drummer and founding member Tommy Lee recounts a typical day on the road with America’s most notorious band:

“Back then, I was scared,” Lee tells me now, on a Zoom call from his Malibu home. “I was scared that one of us wasn’t going to wake up in the morning. It got to the point where security guards were beating down doors, getting hotel room-keys and going into people’s rooms – because nobody was answering or picking up the phone. We were flat out, and they were thinking, ‘F---, are they alive?’”

Recalling his group’s litany of jinxes and jeopardies, Lee doesn’t sound like the kind of man who is scared, or even marginally perturbed, by anything at all. Sporting a tasteful rabbit-skin trilby, the 58-year-old radiates laughter and the wide-eyed wonder of a perpetual adolescent. Even the news, announced minutes earlier, of the death of Eddie Van Halen – the godhead of an LA scene that Mötley Crüe would themselves come to dominate – isn’t enough to disturb his beaming demeanor.

“You ask leading questions, man,” he tells me with such pleasantness that it takes me two days to realise that he might have been telling me off. Prior to our 50-minute conversation, I receive a written warning informing me that our interview will be terminated should I ask about any of Lee’s four marriages (divorcées include the actresses Heather Locklear and Pamela Anderson). He will, I’m told, be happy to talk about the equipment he uses on stage. Good to know.

Lee is on the stump to promote Andro, his third solo album, released today. A capable collection of rock, hip hop and funk, the 14-song set features collaborations with (among others) Post Malone, British rapper Shotty Horroh and the Canadian singer Lukas Rossi. Bob Rock, the (unbeatably-named) producer responsible for Mötley Crüe’s finest moments, oversees a cover version of the Prince song When You Were Mine.

“I’ve always been inspired by funk music,” Lee says. “Way back when I was listening to Led Zeppelin, I was also listening to The Gap Band, and to Prince, and George Clinton, and Parliament-Funkadelic. Being a drummer, I always listened to the funkier stuff along with the heavier s---. I don’t know if I’d have told you [when I was younger] that one day I’d be making a record like the one we’re talking about now, but in my DNA it was already starting to happen.”

All well and good. But Tommy Lee understands that all interviews inevitably return to the mayhem of Mötley Crüe. Since the publication of The Dirt, no band has been as successful at marketing and monetising a culture of chaos. In 2019, the book was adapted into a successful Netflix feature film. In an ideal world, next summer the group will re-unite for the first time in six years, for a tour of the largest outdoor venues in North America. On Ticketmaster, top-tier entry is priced at a purse-busting $4,250 (£3,300).

A refusal to airbrush the grisly details clears the band of the charge of shilling dangerous pursuits to the most gullible members of their vast constituency. Half of the band have been to jail, while bassist Nikki Sixx was revivified by an adrenaline shot to the heart following a heroin overdose. “Last night I was shooting up with my last syringe and it broke,” he wrote in his startlingly degraded 2007 memoir, The Heroin Diaries. “The needle snapped right in two.

“I was dying for the hit, so I was just trying to cram the broken stub into my f-----g vein… gouging and ripping at my skin, trying to force it in. The blood was spurting all over the closet, and I was just slamming the drugs any place under my skin, praying they would take the pain away.”

Anyone who thinks “well, this band look like they’re having fun” has bigger problems than a fondness for leather strides.

Like rats after an apocalypse, Mötley Crüe emerged in 1981, feral contenders in a cannibalistically competitive LA scene. Centered around Hollywood clubs such as the Roxy, the Whisky A Go Go and the Rainbow Bar & Grill, by the middle of the decade the Sunset Strip was lousy with bands that all sounded the same. With fire-hazard hair and distinctly limited chops, they set about defining “heavy” rock.

“It was a fun time, and it’ll never be like that again,” Lee says. “It was before Instagram and cellphones, so we could get away with murder without anybody knowing about it. We got into a whole lot of stuff. Anything went. There were no consequences. Excess seemed to be just a daily thing. It was just a f-----g wild time.”

Back then, I was a teenager, with a taste for the heavier and weirder end of the LA market – Fishbone, Jane’s Addiction, Slayer – and the pop-metal spasms of bands such as Warrant and Ratt struck me as a personal insult. It was like a civil war, and personally, I can’t emphasise enough how much I hated the hair bands, who seemed determined to make loud music appear as gormless as possible.

Even so, try as I might, I couldn’t deny that Mötley Crüe had something about them. Sixx’s lyrics – “East LA at midnight/Papa won’t be home tonight/Found dead with his best friend’s wife” – spoke of an alluring yet terrible danger. No one was safe, least of all the band themselves. On a bullet train in Japan, during a tour in 1987, a bottle of Jack Daniels was launched at a startled commuter’s head. The quartet were more out-of-control than any since the New York Dolls. A subsequent tour of British arenas was hurriedly cancelled.

“How did we function?” Lee muses. “I honestly do not know. I really don’t. There came a really serious time – I think it was late ’88, or early ’89 – when everybody, including myself, looked at each other and said, ‘We all need to pump the brakes, because if we don’t, somebody’s going to die.’ And that’s when we all decided, as a group, to go to rehab.”

Emerging in 1989, clean and somewhat serene, Mötley Crüe proved that they could rock and roll without the aid of hypodermic needles and wraps of uncut cocaine. Released in 1989, the career-defining album Dr Feelgood sold seven million copies, in what would prove to be the last hurrah of the Hollywood scene. It was nice while it lasted, but an extinction event was coming.

The film version of The Dirt contains a fleeting but well-judged moment that explains the trouble in which Mötley Crüe found themselves. As the band squabble and fracture, the camera glances at a roadside billboard advertising the 1991 album Ten, by Pearl Jam. Along with the blockbusting Nevermind, by Nirvana, which was released a few months later, this 15-million selling debut LP helped to shift the world’s attention to a different kind of rock music, and one that was emanating from Seattle. Just like that – click your fingers, that’s how quickly it happened – the LA scene was dead.

“I welcomed it when Nirvana and Pearl Jam came along,” Lee protests. “I was like, ‘This is dope! I dig this!’ Thank God that somebody was finally mixing it up and changing it up. Because what else was there? Just 50 bands who were doing a terrible job of sounding like us.”

But by this point, even Mötley Crüe were doing a terrible job of sounding like Mötley Crüe. They jettisoned beach-blonde singer Vince Neil in favour of the unknown John Corabi, and by 1994 their commercial standing appeared to be tethered to an anvil. On the road, the group now appeared in theatres and clubs, not sports arenas. Unusually for a hard rock act, their audience was proving fickle.

It was The Dirt that saved them. Arriving at the exact point at which bands were becoming brands, the book contained plenty of sex, even more drugs, and just enough good rock ’n’ roll for its authors to prosper in a brand-new century. It even came with its own Hollywood ending: somehow, miraculously, everyone involved lives to tell the tale.

“I pinch myself on a daily basis that no one in the band is dead,” Lee tells me. “Well, Nikki did die for a couple of minutes, but even he’s still alive, and so are the rest of us. How that’s even possible, I do not know. I think we must have a lucky horseshoe stuck in our asses.”

Today, Mötley Crüe offer a safe space for an audience hungry for songs about the wild side written by a band no longer in mortal danger. Though profitable and surprisingly durable, the package is very much of its time. In 2020, no young band on earth would carry on like “the Crüe” once did. For reasons both good and bad, no young audience would put up with it.

In 2018, I asked Sixx if his group had anything to fear from the #MeToo movement. Against the wishes of a PR keen to strike the question from the record, he answered the query. “No. Here’s the thing: if anybody was abusing power, that’s one thing. But it was a time when everyone was living a life that is very different from today’s… That was then and this is now. We don’t have anything to worry about.”

“I was talking to someone the other day about how no rock stars have come along in a while,” Lee says. “Are there any? I can’t think of any. Maybe Post Malone, whom I love, is out there living some rock-star s---, but apart from him, I’m not sure there’s any out there right now – sad to say. There used to be handfuls of them, but not any more.”

True enough. On Boxing Day last year, I took my (frankly uninterested) fiancée to the Rainbow Bar & Grill in Hollywood for the 400th tedious instalment of rock history. This is where a load of rubbish hair-metal bands used to hang out, I told her. Before that, Alice Cooper, Keith Moon, John Lennon, John McVie and Harry Nilsson drank in a room upstairs. They called themselves the Hollywood Vampires, because none of them were ever seen out in daylight.

Outside, a sheltered patio trades under the name Lemmy’s Bar. The Motörhead mainstay lived across the street and would spend his afternoons at the Rainbow drinking Jim Beam and coke, while ratcheting up high scores on its electronic quiz machine. Garlanded by a single rose, today his memory is marked by a life-size statue at the rear of the room.

At the jukebox, I inserted a dollar and punched up Ace of Spades. The sound filled a room renowned for more than half a century as a firmament of rock ’n’ roll, and as the place at which Mötley Crüe made their bones. Then, behind the bar, an unseen hand dialled the song down, to the point at which it could barely be heard.

Andro by Tommy Lee is available now from Better Noise Music