Digging Deep

The contentious autobiography by American rock band Motley Crue has just been adapted for the small screen.

Motley Crue on stage in 1989. Picture: Mark Weiss

In the beginning they agreed on three rules. One: everything had to go into the book — good, bad and ugly. There was to be no holding back or worrying about what other people would think. Each of the musicians had to live up to the book’s title, which was determined early in the process.

Two: they weren’t allowed to read anybody else’s chapters until the first draft was finished. And three: after reading what the others had written, they couldn’t change a word. So if the drummer didn’t like reading about the fact that the singer had once slept with his wife, for instance, he could respond only in his own chapter rather than editing the words that were already on the page.

Published in 2001, The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band was authored by all four Motley Crue band members — drummer Tommy Lee, guitarist Mick Mars, singer Vince Neil and bassist Nikki Sixx — alongside Neil Strauss, then a journalist for The New York Times and Rolling Stone, who was charged with wrangling interviews and collating what were often conflicting accounts of events.

The result was one of the rawest and most honest accounts of a life in popular music, and next week Netflix will release a highly anticipated film adaptation of the book.

During the 1980s, Motley Crue’s name was as synonymous with excess and debauchery as it was with hair spray and leather pants. With global hits such as Dr Feelgood, Kickstart My Heart, Shout at the Devil and Girls, Girls, Girls, the Los Angeles-born band came to embody every cliche of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

The challenge, then, was finding a way to fit three huge personalities — and a much smaller one in Mars — between the covers of a book without allowing any of their voices to talk over the others.

Strauss couldn’t find any ideal models for band autobiographies, so he turned to literary fiction and found inspiration in the likes of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Rashomon and Wilkie Collins’s 1860 novel The Woman in White. A quote from the work by Collins opens the book: “The story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in court by more than one witness.”

Strauss’s interest in the band began with an assignment for Spin magazine in late 1997, when he accompanied the group between Phoenix and Albuquerque for the two final dates of its Generation Swine tour. By then, the quartet’s cultural downswing was in full effect, with Lee’s marriage to Baywatch star Pamela Anderson — and the leaking of their famous sex tape — attracting far more interest than the band’s sixth or seventh albums.

“Perhaps the fundamental problem facing Motley Crue in the 90s is that more people have seen their drummer’s substantial penis than heard a single song they have recorded in the last seven years,” wrote Strauss.

He noted that arenas on this tour had been only 63 per cent full — in stark contrast to the commercial and arguably creative peak of the band’s 1989 album Dr Feelgood, which sold more than six million copies in the US and led to a 154-date tour that filled arenas worldwide.

In his four-page feature article in the March 1998 issue of Spin, Strauss wrote, “Nowadays, the Crue on the road is a sober, even sometimes mundane, affair. All alcohol is cleared out of mini-bars and hospitality areas, and there are no women in sight backstage or in the hotels … Most free time is occupied by talk of wives and the internet. Girls, girls, girls has become family, computers and sobriety.”

Speaking by phone from Los Angeles last week, Strauss says he hasn’t seen that Spin story in a long time. “The main thing I remember is afterwards, the editors packaged the piece in a very snide way,” he tells Review.

“They made it a little more snide than I wanted or intended, so I wrote to Tommy Lee afterwards and said, ‘Hey, I’m sorry about this, man, I really wanted a piece that was more nuanced and objective.’ And he said, ‘Don’t worry about it — we’re used to being misunderstood.’ That kind of broke my heart.”

While reporting that magazine story, Strauss was finishing his first book — an autobiography of headline-grabbing American rock musician Marilyn Manson titled The Long Hard Road Out of Hell. Yet as he was reading its typeset pages while in transit, he heard Motley Crue throwing around so many eye-popping stories that when his editor asked about his next book project, the answer was right in front of him.

Strauss was attracted to this idea for a couple of reasons: chiefly originality, since the band’s story had never been told in full, but he also admits to feeling the lure of the lifestyle they once projected. “I thought it’d be really interesting to hang out with them,” he says. “They’re all larger than life, in a sense, and iconic in their own way. With my insecurity and lack of social comfort, and feeling like I didn’t fit in, I thought, ‘Sure, who doesn’t want to be in that world and experience it themselves for a little bit, and then get to leave?’ I just didn’t get to leave so soon.”

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Split into 12 parts — beginning with The Motley House and concluding with Hollywood Ending — and with each part containing multiple chapters told from each band member’s recollection of events, The Dirt remains a compelling read today primarily because of the first rule that the four musicians and the author agreed on. As a result, Sixx, Lee and Neil come across as unlikeable if not outright villainous at various points — yet for all their faults, their honesty is ­undeniable.

Throughout much of its history to that point, Mars — the guitarist who named the band and added so much to its signature sound — had been marginalised to the point of near invisibility. Where his bandmates had been blown up into caricatures, he had been shrunken into a question mark. With The Dirt, all that changed.

“I would argue that his presence in the book is stronger than his presence in the pantheon of Motley Crue prior to the book, in the sense that he didn’t have a voice before it, and people didn’t know what he was about,” says Strauss. “I think he is the heart of the book, and without Mick, we wouldn’t be here talking about the book, because he was older, a little more jaded, and a little less caught up in things.

“He provided distance to see a perspective on the rest of the band.”

Mars had also been diagnosed with a debilitating disease which he compared to the sensation of “hot, quick-drying cement growing on the inside of your spine, becoming so heavy over the years that it starts to pull you down”. After seeing a back specialist and getting the bad news at the age of 17, Mars writes midway through the book, “that was when I first heard the two words that would make me a freak and misfit for the rest of my life: ankylosing spondylitis. What struck me most about the diagnosis was that the disease contained the word ‘losing’. I had lost.”

It wasn’t just fans that learned a lot about the guitarist when the book was finished: his bandmates, too, came to realise the enormous difficulties of the hand that Mars had been dealt, and they better understood why he attempted to mask the pain of daily life through alcohol abuse.

Yet all four of them got caught up in excess at various times. “I was used to stuffing everything in sight into my system, because I had come to discover that my favourite form of entertainment was just mixing everything and then seeing what happened to my body,” writes Sixx, whose heroin addiction led to several overdoses and near-death experiences.

There are parts of the New York Times best-selling book, however, that go well beyond debauchery. On page 282, for instance, Sixx writes, “For ten years solid, we had been invincible. No one could touch us. Tommy and I had raped a drunk girl in the closet, and she had forgotten about it. Vince had killed someone in a car accident, and gotten away with it. We had released two albums we hardly even remembered recording, and they still sold like crazy. I had overdosed and forced the cancellation of our European tour, and our popularity only increased.”

When revisited in 2019, the third sentence of that paragraph has sent alarm bells ringing across a culture much more attuned to the damage wrought by sexual abuse and assault.

The story in question involved Sixx having consensual sex with a woman at a party, before leaving the room and replacing himself with Lee, thereby essentially tricking her into sex with a stranger. The next morning, she called Sixx and told him she had been raped by a man while hitchhiking home.

“At first, I was relieved, because it meant I hadn’t raped her,” wrote Sixx in the book. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that I pretty much had. I was in a zone, though, and in that zone, consequences did not exist.”

When reminded of this passage in a recent interview with Rolling Stone ahead of the Netflix film release, Sixx demurred. “Yeah, well, yeah. There was a little embellishment here and there with Neil Strauss,” he told journalist Kory Grow.

Later, Sixx shared a written statement. “The book was written in 2000 during a really low point in my life. I had lost my sobriety and was using drugs and alcohol to deal with a disintegrating relationship which I still to this day regret how I handled. I honestly don’t recall a lot of the interviews with Neil. I went into rehab in 2001 and really wish I would’ve done my interviews after I was clean and sober like I am today.” (Strauss declined to respond, saying his contract prevented him from commenting.)

“I don’t actually recall that story in the book beyond reading it,” Sixx wrote in his statement. “I have no clue why it’s in there other than I was outta my head and it’s possibly greatly embellished or [I] made it up. Those words were irresponsible on my part. I am sorry. There is a lot of horrible behaviour in the book.”

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Five pages in the middle of The Dirt are compulsory reading for any musician seeking fame and fortune. Written as a brief dissertation on “the application of cog theory to the development and maturation of a common rock group”, this section is “an attempt to pull back the curtain of the popular music business and examine the mechanics of success”.

In sparkling prose Strauss describes an artist’s pathway through the music machine, which begins with a platform that leads to a conveyor belt, followed by a first and second cog representing minor success. What comes next is out of a band’s control, but it is what Motley Crue caught with Dr Feelgood: the “big cog”, which has only been reached by the likes of Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Mariah Carey and Eminem.

“The big cog is exciting but overwhelming,” he wrote. “Where the second cog can dig under the skin of artists, this one can tear them apart limb by limb. The cog gives artists everything they have ever dreamed of, everything they could ever want except for privacy, solitude, friendship, stability, love (both familial and romantic), and peace of mind.

“When the band first caught the big cog, it rolled along with the cog. But people get tired; The Machine never stops moving. When the band could no longer keep pace, the big cog tore them apart, destroyed their marriages, and wrecked any chance of them leading a normal life … when not playing The Machine game of recording and touring.”

This section came out of a side riff that Sixx went on with his wife, which Strauss overheard and asked the songwriter to expand upon. “A book is only as good as what you get from the people you’re writing about — it can’t be any better,” says the author, who has since published titles such as The Game, Emergency and The Truth.

While Motley Crue retired from The Machine after a final 158-date world tour in 2014-15, next week sees the release of the film version of The Dirt, which has been in development for more than 15 years. Directed by Jeff Tremaine, who is best known for his work on the Jackass franchise, it comes across as a gritty and unapologetic portrait of the life and times of a singular rock band — especially when compared with Bohemian Rhapsody, which, for all its pop sheen and acting brilliance, contained no small amount of airbrushing of Queen’s history.

While the abundant needle use and explicit language in The Dirt are both far from shocking in 2019, the #MeToo cultural movement means that depictions of the musicians’ attitudes towards women are often troubling, to say the least. In one scene, Tommy Lee punches his fiancee in the face after she continually bad-mouths his mother. The aforementioned rape scene is not included, and it is Mick Mars who is the lone voice speaking in opposition to his bandmates’ behaviour. “I happen to have respect for myself and the females of our species — unlike you animals,” he says at one point.

Before the film came the book, and at the heart of that project was a desire to tell the truth — good, bad and ugly. Since it is based on a true story, none of them can change what actually happened. While there’s every possibility the film will come to be seen as a rollicking how-to manual for the rock bands of tomorrow, one alternative is that it’ll also be viewed as a cautionary tale to be learned from, and never repeated.

The Dirt screens on Netflix from Friday.