The Dirt by Tommy Lee Page A

We had a dirty white bloodstained bedsheet that we stripped from Tommy’s bed and painted our name on in big black letters. Inspired by Queen, Tommy and Vince built a three-tiered drum riser: a frame of two-by-fours painted white with stretched black cloth over the top, and mounted with fifteen flashing lights and skulls and drumsticks. It weighed a ton and was a pain in the ass to assemble each show. We also made small Plexiglas boxes filled with lights that we would climb on, pose from, and leap off. The whole show was a hodgepodge of whatever looked cool and cheap to us. We painted the drumheads, stuck candelabras all over the stage, mounted voodoo heads on the ends of drumsticks, tied handkerchiefs on whatever we could, decorated our guitars with colored tape, wrapped telephone cords around ourselves, and used the most evil recordings we could find to pump up the crowd before our concerts.
    When we sold out a series of shows at the Whisky, I was so ecstatic I called my grandparents and said, “You’re not going to believe it! We sold out three nights at the Whisky. We fucking made it.”
    “Made what?” he asked. “Nobody even knows who you are.”
    And he was right: We were selling out show after show, but no label would sign us. They told us our live show was too erratic and there was no way our music would ever get on the radio or make the pop charts. Heavy metal was dead, they kept telling us; new wave was all that mattered. Unless we sounded like the Go-Go’s or the Knack, they weren’t interested. We didn’t know about charts or radio program directors or new wave. All we knew about was raw fucking Marshall stacks of rock and roll blasting in our crotches and how much fucking blow, Percodan, quaaludes, and alcohol we could get for free.
    The only reason I wanted a record deal was so that I could impress girls by telling them I had one. So we solved that problem by creating our own label, Leathür Records. We booked time in the cheapest studio we could find: a sixty-dollar-an-hour outhouse on a bad stretch of Olympic Avenue. Mick liked the place because it had a Trident board and really small rooms that he said were great for natural reverb. Mick fired the house engineer and brought in Michael Wagner, a jovial, cherubic German who used to be in the metal band Accept. Together, we spit out Too Fast for Love in three drunken days. When we couldn’t get anyone to even agree to distribute the album, Coffman did it himself, driving around in his rented Lincoln, trying to talk record stores into carrying a couple copies. Within four months, however, we had a distributor (Greenworld) and had sold twenty thousand albums, which wasn’t bad for a record that cost six thousand dollars to make.
    We celebrated the album’s release with a party at the Troubadour, which was one of my favorite clubs because there was a guy there I really enjoyed beating up. He had long hair and idolized us, but he was a pest and suffered deservedly for it. I had just finished pushing him backward over Tommy, who was positioned behind him on all fours, when I saw a girl with thick platinum blond hair, apple red cheeks, heavy blue eye shadow, tight black leather pants, a punk-rock belt, and thigh-high black boots.
    She walked up and said, “Hi, I’m Lita. Lita Ford, with the Runaways. What’s your name?”
    “Rick,” I said.
    “Really?” she asked.
    “Yeah, I’m Rick.” I was pretty full of myself, and assumed that everyone knew my name.
    “Sorry,” she said, “I thought you were someone else.”
    “Well, you thought wrong,” I sneered, with my nose stuck in its usual place up in the air.
    “That’s too bad, Rick,” she said, “because I wanted to split a quaalude with you.”
    “You did?” I began to pay attention.
    “I thought you were Nikki.”
    “I am Nikki! I am Nikki!” I practically wet myself like a dog in pursuit of a treat.
    She bit the quaalude in half and stuck it in my mouth, and that was it.
    We began