The Dirt by Tommy Lee Read Free Book Online

Highland Avenue, where I sold it for a hundred dollars.
    Angie let me move in with her in Beachwood Canyon, where I hung around all day listening to her records and dyeing my hair different colors while she earned money for us working as a secretary. I never thought about the piano again until six months later, when two policemen pulled up and pounded on the door, looking for a guy named Frank Feranna who had stolen a piano. I told them I knew of no one by that name.
    When Lizzie and I weren’t trying to get our own band together, I tagged along with Angie to Redondo Beach, where she rehearsed with her band. I hated them because they were into Rush and had lots of guitar pedals and talked about hammer-ons and, most egregious of all, had curly hair. If there’s one genetic trait that automatically disqualifies a man from being able to rock, it’s curly hair. Nobody cool has curly hair; people like Richard Simmons, the guy from Greatest American Hero , and the singer from REO Speedwagon have curls. The only exceptions are Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople, whose hair is more tangled than curly, and Slash, but his hair is fuzzy and that’s cool.
    For women, the equivalent of curly hair is being cockeyed. If there’s one genetic trait in women that predisposes them to hate me, it’s having a cockeye. I always fail with cockeyed women, one of whom happened to be Angie’s roommate. One night I got drunk and tried to climb in her bed, and she told Angie all about it the next day. I tried to convince Angie that I thought it was her bed, but she knew me too well and kicked me out of the house. I moved into a drug-infested, prostitute-riddled Hollywood slum, and concentrated on staying in my own bed and getting my band with Lizzie together.
    We found a dog collar–wearing, bronze giant of a drummer named Dane Rage; a keyboard player named John St. John, who hauled a giant Hammond B3 organ from gig to gig; and a singer named Michael White, whose claim to fame was that he had recorded something for a Led Zeppelin tribute album once. That, right there, should have let me know that he was not the man we were looking for. That, and the fact that he had curly hair. And was kind of cockeyed.
    We tramped around Hollywood in high heels and tube tops and anything else we could muster up to shock Rush fans and Led Zeppelin dinosaurs. It was 1979 and, as far as we were concerned, rock and roll was dead. We were Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols; we were everything that no one else was into. In our alcoholic minds, we were the coolest fucking band ever, and our confidence (and alcoholism) attracted fanatic groupies after just a few shows at the Starwood. We called ourselves London, but what we really were was Mötley Crüe before Mötley Crüe.
    Except for Michael White. Everything that I despised, he worshiped. If I liked the Stones, he liked the Beatles. If I liked creamy peanut butter, he liked chunky. So we fired him for having curly hair, placed an ad in The Recycler , and met Nigel Benjamin, who was a real rock-and-roll star in our minds not just because he had straight hair but because he had played in Mott the Hoople as Ian Hunter’s replacement. He wrote great lyrics, and when he stepped up to the mic he fucking wailed. He could really sing, like no one I’d been in a band with before. We had an insane keyboard player who had his own Hammond, a drummer with a big North trap set, and a British lead singer. We were on fire.
    I was so excited that I called my uncle at Capitol and demanded, “I want to get ahold of Brian Connolly from the Sweet!”
    “What?!” he asked, incredulous.
    “I have this amazing band, you know, and I want to send him some pictures.”
    I sent Connolly the photos and, as a favor to my uncle, he agreed to accept my call the next week. I spent the entire day at home, rehearsing what I’d say in my head. I picked up the phone and started to dial, then hung up.
    Finally, I worked up the