The Dirt by Tommy Lee Read Free Book Online Page B

notebook the words duck and cover , with quotation marks around them and a giant question mark. What a joke. That little turtle was bullshit.
    I used to save stacks of notebooks and sheets of paper with stuff I had written down since I was a kid. Over time, a lot of what I’ve written has become true. In 1976, when my Top 40 band White Horse was on its last legs and ready to be shot, we were rehearsing in the living room of the house where we all lived when the bass player walked in and said, “Well, this certainly is a motley-looking crew.” After rehearsal, I went upstairs to my room and wrote those words down in my notebook— Motley Crew , then below it, in bigger letters, MOTTLEY CRU —and said to myself that I had to have a band called Mottley Cru. I wanted White Horse, who were actually a good band, to start playing originals and become Mottley Cru. “Why not try originals? We’re starving anyway,” I told them. They answered by voting me out of the band. So I left with everything: the PA, the lights, the van.
    I placed an ad in that classified paper, The Recycler , that read: “Extraterrestrial guitarist available for any other aliens that want to conquer the Earth.” I was calling myself Zorky Charlemagne at the time, so I used that name in the paper and received some real bizarre phone calls, but not from anybody who seemed sane. I ended up in a Top 40 band called Vendetta, which made me enough money to buy a Marshall stack and a Les Paul. I bought another Marshall stack and Les Paul when I returned from a tour of Alaska, and placed another ad in The Recycler . Usually people will write an ad that begins with the letter A, like “A righteous guitar player seeks band,” just so they can be at the top of the listing. I didn’t care, because I knew my ad would jump no matter where it was. It read: “Loud, rude, and aggressive guitarist available.”
    The guy with the Hitler mustache from Sparks responded. But I told him that I didn’t like his music and I’d be wasting his time and mine if I tried out for him. I think he respected me for that. Some cheesy band in Redondo Beach that went on to become Poison or Warrant or some other name that wrecked the eighties called because they’d seen me play at Pier 52. I didn’t call them back. To quote Andy Warhol, “Everybody has fifteen minutes of fame.” To quote myself, “I wish they didn’t.”
    I think Nikki finally found the ad and phoned. We talked for a little while and arranged a day to meet. I crammed my guitar and Marshall stacks into a tiny Mazda that belonged to my friend Stick and drove to North Hollywood. Nikki and I said hello like two complete strangers: neither of us remembered having met the other before. He had changed his name and his hair was all blown out, jet-black, and hanging over his face; I wouldn’t have been able to recognize him if he was my own father. It took another week or two before he asked, “Hey, aren’t you that weird guy who came in the liquor store one day and…” I couldn’t believe it: He had really grown into himself.
    Nikki said he’d left his old band, London, because there were too many people trying to tug the group in too many different directions. Now he was trying to put together his own project and realize his own vision. I pretended like I agreed, but I knew that he was still young and musically naive, and I could influence him to evolve my way. At that rehearsal, we played a few of the songs Nikki had written—“Stick to Your Guns,” “Toast of the Town,” “Public Enemy #1.” They had this sissy guy, whose name I won’t mention, playing guitar. The first thing I did when I walked in was say, “He ain’t gonna make it.” So they told me that if I wanted him out, I had to tell him. It was day one and they already had me doing their dirty work.
    There was also a real bony little kid there, with a giant growth on his chin that looked like a Chicken McNugget. He said he’d been pushed or