Multi-platinum L.A. rockers Motley Crue rose to fame with their debauchery-fueled brand
of heavy metal then enthralled readers around the world with The Dirt, a hit memoir that
made its way to Netflix in 2019.
Here's all the dirt behind The Dirt on the page and on the screen.
Compared to other rock biography books, The Dirt just has a lot… more.
It's got more stories of illegal activity and heavy metal debauchery, and it's also
got a lot of authors.
Five guys are credited on the cover: Mötley Crüe band members Vince Neil, Nikki Sixx,
Mick Mars, and Tommy Lee, along with Neil Strauss.
He's the guy who did all the interviewing and assembled a coherent narrative out of
what must have been stacks of tapes and copious notes culled from following around four guys
for months.
Strauss first hooked up with Mötley Crüe in 1998, when he briefly toured with the band
for a profile in Spin.
At the time, he was finalizing his Marilyn Manson book, The Long Hard Road Out of Hell,
and the Crüe members that read it loved it.
When publisher HarperCollins contracted the group for a book later on, they immediately
asked Strauss to helm the project.
Once more, he went on tour with Mötley Crüe and visited each musician at home.
Probably the hardest part for him to write: Vince Neil's account of his four-year-old
daughter's ultimately tragic battle with cancer.
Strauss told MTV:
"He was crying, I was crying.
It tore me apart.
When I gave him the book, I said, 'You might not want to read this."
The Dirt manages to top most every other rock biography with its sheer volume of nauseating
and unbelievable tall tales.
While Hammer of the Gods breathlessly describes every despicable and disgusting act ever committed
by the members of Led Zeppelin, it can't compete with Vince Neil's egg burrito story from The
Dirt.
The Mötley Crüe singer discusses the band's good ol' days, its early years as a band playing
L.A.'s Rainbow club by night, and using drummer Tommy Lee's Chevy van as a "party truck" later
at night.
"Whoo, so this is the party truck, huh?
You found it."
Said Vince Neil:
"After the Rainbow each night, we'd walk to Santa Monica Boulevard, where all the young
rockers and actors who never made it were pimping themselves."
And then, even if they had girlfriends at the time, they'd entertain any girls who wanted
to get into Tommy's van.
Afterwards, the Crüe would scrounge up enough money to buy a breakfast burrito from a local
establishment.
Then, each member of the band would place themselves, quote, "into the warm meat to
cover up the smell" of the women who had been there earlier.
Why?
In their words: "So that our girlfriends didn't know."
Oh.
That...makes sense.
Uh...kinda.
While The Dirt reveals one brazen display of Caligula-like excess after another, the
book goes a bit beyond the drug-taking and exploits.
For instance, in the mid-1980s, the band's reps sought to protect its investment and
made every member of the drink-and-drug-addled group get clean.
Guitarist Mick Mars recounted:
"Our management was trying to do some kind of extensive plastic surgery on the band,
and we had to see all these doctors who would try to brainwash us into behaving differently.
Once a week we'd have to go to relationship counseling like an old bitter married couple.
There, we'd learn how to talk to each other instead of fighting or we'd discuss our feelings
and whatever was going on that week."
Mars resented all that, especially since he'd kicked his habits without any formal help,
but it was the waterworks that really irked him.
He said:
"Every therapist wanted us to let loose and cry, and I hate crybabies.
I became so sick of seeing everyone in the band bawling their eyes out."
"You wanna know what rehab was really like?
Feelings and crying and apologies."
December 8, 1984 looms dark in rock history.
That's when an intoxicated Vince Neil drove himself and Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas "Razzle"
Dingley to a liquor store to get more booze for a multi-day party.
Neil lost control on a winding road and smashed into another car, instantly killing his passenger.
The Dirt tells this horrific story, but it also reveals that a few hours before that
tragedy, another sad and shocking event nearly befell the group.
Neil says that he woke up that afternoon to see something on the beach, which he described
as "a small black whale."
Upon examination, it was Mick Mars, "passed out in the sand" in black leather from head
to toe.
What did Neil do?
Nothing.
Neil wrote:
"He mumbled something about just wanting to be left lying there.
so I left him there, looking like E.T. when he was sick."
After dark, Mars regained consciousness… but he was sure he was dead and was now a
ghost, and instinctively headed toward a "glow of light coming from the distance."
It was Neil's house, where the party had turned sad and silent.
Mars explained:
"I figured that they were crying for me: that I had drowned in the water and they had discovered
my body."
According to band manager Doug Thaler in The Dirt, Vince Neil's self-sabotaging behavior
in the early '90s threatened his position in Mötley Crüe.
By February 1992, bassist Nikki Sixx was over it.
During a major rainstorm that flooded large parts of L.A., each member made the treacherous
journey to the studio.
But not Neil.
After waiting for Neil for hours, the band's tour manager faxed the singer, telling him
to show up ASAP.
Neil then called, explaining that he hadn't done so already because the phone lines were
down.
According to Sixx:
"By the time he arrived the seed was already planted in our minds that he was holding us
back."
Neil finally arrived, "soaked and sulking."
Sixx casually mentioned that the band was considering "new lead singer talks," while
Neil retorted that the reason he skipped rehearsals was because he thought the album was dumb.
After more bickering, Neil left in a huff.
Sixx wrote:
"He says he was fired.
I say he quit."
After the huge sales of the 1989 album Dr. Feelgood, Elektra Records was eager to stay
in the Mötley Crüe business, and in 1991 gave the band a $25 million contract… but
the band's future remained shaky.
With Neil gone, the group recruited singer John Corabi.
According to Thaler, the record the new Crüe recorded took up "14 months and $2 million"
in studio costs.
All that for a relative dud.
Released in March 1994, Mötley Crüe debuted at #7 on the Billboard 200.
Then the album fell to 28 in its second week.
The supporting tour was a similar disaster.
Nikki Sixx recalled that at the first stop in Tucson, Arizona, "only 4,000 tickets had
been sold for a 15,000 seat amphitheater."
He even tried to give away tickets at a radio station, and only two people showed up.
What happened?
Rock drastically changed between Dr. Feelgood and 1994.
The L.A. hair metal sound was out; grunge and alternative rock were in.
Mötley Crüe was old news in the '90s, with the low sales of Mötley Crüe surpassed by
even lower sales of its 1997 follow-up, the Vince Neil reunion record Generation Swine.
There was nowhere to go but up, and rather than chase trends, Mötley Crüe embraced
what fans wanted them to be degenerate party monsters.
And they did it not with an album, or tour, or even a reality show they did it with The
Dirt.
Not only did literate music fans come to expect a certain amount of sordid detail in rock
memoirs in the wake of The Dirt, but it spawned a cottage industry in Mötley Crüe books.
The success of The Dirt inspired Tommy Lee and Vince Neil to go solo with their own individual
memoirs, Tommyland and Tattoos & Tequila, respectively, while Nikki Sixx cleaned up
the journals he wrote during the depths of his drug addiction to create The Heroin Diaries.
Musicians take inspiration from wherever they can.
Nikki Sixx, always Mötley Crüe's most dominant and prolific songwriter, took that idea to
heart… even if things got a little too Inception-ey along the way.
The Dirt dredged up so many memories for Sixx and his bandmates some bad, mostly good that
they got back together with departed drummer Tommy Lee to record a brand new album with
the original lineup for the first time in more than a decade.
That record: 2008's Saints of Los Angeles.
And while many Mötley Crüe songs are based on actual experiences in Sixx's life, Saints
is loosely based on The Dirt.
In other words, it's the musical version of a book that's about… himself and the other
members of Mötley Crüe.
In fact, the LP was almost actually named The Dirt.
"If that makes any sense.
It probably doesn't, but that's 'cuz I'm half nuts anyway, so it's okay."
The Dirt first thrilled readers and rocked its way to the New York Times bestseller list
back in 2001… and the film version didn't make its Netflix debut until 2019.
That's a long time between source material and adaptation, but it's not because nobody
was trying.
A film version of The Dirt could have hit movie screens in late 2006 or early 2007.
That's when Paramount Classics forged an agreement to make the movie with MTV Films.
Things got as far as a table read of the script in 2014, but then Focus Features brought the
project back from the dead in 2015, with Jackass veteran Jeff Tremaine already attached as
a director.
Even once Netflix acquired the rights to the movie version of The Dirt, it took a full
two years to get the thing finished.
Playing a rock star must be fun for actors.
They get to live out their wildest rock star fantasies, and awards consideration is often
part of the conversation.
In the past two decades, a number of acclaimed actors have won Oscars for portraying real-life
musical icons.
But when The Dirt finally got made, filmmakers went with a cast made up largely of performers
who aren't quite household names, such as Games of Thrones star Iwan Rheon as Mick Mars
and Douglas Booth as Nikki Sixx.
Over the years, a number of much bigger stars were pursued or attached to the project.
In 2007, Vince Neil announced at the opening of his Las Vegas tattoo parlor that the legendary
Christopher Walken had signed on to play the legendary Ozzy Osbourne, while Val Kilmer
was a go for a cameo as David Lee Roth.
None of those choices worked out, obviously.
In both the book and film adaptations of The Dirt, cheating death is a major, recurring
theme.
Vince Neil walked away from a drunk driving accident that killed his passenger, Mick Mars
thought he died on a beach one day, and Nikki Sixx recalled the time he actually was dead
for a few minutes.
It would seem that the theme extended to the making of the film adaptation of The Dirt.
During production in New Orleans in March 2018, a member of the film's crew was de-rigging
a set when one of the electrical components delivered a nasty shock.
A rep for the film told The Hollywood Reporter:
"Even though all of our safety protocols were in place, an accident did occur and a crewmember
was injured by electricity."
Filming wasn't interrupted, because the cast was off shooting somewhere else while this
ill-fated de-rigger was tearing down a set that was no longer needed.
EMTs took him to a nearby hospital, where he was listed in stable condition and recovered.
No word on who'll be the next victim of the Curse of the Crue...but you should probably
stay far, far away from Tommy Lee just in case.
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