Hella Nation - Evan Wright [127]
The owner of the breast, an amphetamine-thin brunette with a feathered biker-chick hairdo, solemnly thanks them and declares that she is heading straight to the tattoo parlor to have their signatures gone over in indelible skin ink.
AFTER THEY TUMBLE into the van taking them to the sound check at the Agora, Mötley Crüe’s thoughts turn to their radio interview.
“What a slut!” blurts Tommy, recalling the antics of the blond DJ.
“Dude, all she wanted was some pipe,” Nikki adds.
“If she’d do Alex [Van Halen],” Tommy considers, with a grim shake of his head, “she’d do anybody.”
“And you know,” Vince joins in, “it would be all over the radio the next day.”
“Doing interviews is like combat,” Nikki states. “Mötley Crüe doesn’t want to be the spokesman for rock. We’re not here to say that heavy metal is back to kick alternative music’s ass. There’s a lot of good music out there.”
“Billy Corrigan [of Smashing Pumpkins] told me he used to play ‘Shout at the Devil’ and ‘Live Wire’ in his cover band,” Tommy enthuses. “How cool is that?”
“Mötley Crüe is about having fun,” Nikki explains. “You put on an R.E.M. record and you feel like ‘Okay, I’m politically correct.’ You put on a Mötley Crüe record and you feel like licking your girlfriend’s pussy in the backseat of a car.”
THEIR DRESSING ROOM at the Agora resembles all the others they have been in over the past week and a half, thanks to the efforts of their wardrobe woman, Karen, who brings leopard-print throw rugs to drape over the ratty backstage furniture, a black “Theater of Pain” flag (from the 1985 tour) and incense candles to every show. Karen is somewhere in her forties and has almost faded blue eyes and a tiny mouth that is usually shaped in a worried pucker. She is sprinkling talcum powder into Tommy’s entire stage wardrobe, a pair of black rubber G-thong ball-hugger briefs the size of a wadded- up ball of rubber bands.
“Make sure you put the talc all over,” tour manager Dave Callums reminds her, as he walks in with a case of three hundred CDs to be signed by the band for a promotion at an area record store. “Tommy said he pulled off a bunch of hairs when he took his shorts off after Detroit.”
“Managing a tour is easy,” states Callums, “if you’re good at putting socks on an octopus.” A veteran tour manager whose thirty-year career began with Jerry and the Pacemakers and included Coolio last year, Callums has a clipped gray beard, a matching fringe of white around his bald dome and a sturdy, rounded physique that has earned him the nickname “Frosty” from three members of Mötley Crüe. Tommy is the lone dissenter on the Frosty the Snowman moniker, believing instead that “if we put him in one of Mick’s hats, he’d be full-on Mr. French.”
Mick Mars enters the room, walking with a stooped, crooked gait that suggests the physique of a Halloween skeleton. He picks up the pair of knee-high, six-inch-heel platform boots that Karen has laid out for him. “Time to get tall,” he mutters. When Mick’s leather pants abut the leather seat cushion of the chair, they make a loud farting sound. “Excuse me,” he deadpans.
This is the only conversation he will make for the next several hours.
“If they ever made a Mick Mars doll,” Vince says, “you’d pull the string, and it wouldn’t say anything.”
THE CATERED FOOD provided for the band consists of little more than deli meats, tuna salad, bread and sodas. Wisely, they are all on the wagon after well-publicized troubles with booze and chemicals. Vince has a vehicular homicide under his belt. Nikki wins bragging rights for being draped under a sheet and pronounced dead after a 1988 heroin overdose. Tommy can cite a long list of alcoholic calamities that includes the singular achievement of once running himself over with his own car.
“I pulled over to pee after drinking tons of beers,” Tommy relates. “I left my Corvette in neutral, and it ran over both my legs. And dude,