The Dirt

I like the way this review came out. I wrote it while living in three-quarters housing, 211 Francis Ave.
After interviewing Nikki Sixx in 1994, days before Kurt Cobain's body was discovered, and interviewing the newly (and briefly) reformed original lineup in 1997, the review below was my definitive statement about one of the most important bands in my lexicon.


Previously published in the New York Press, July 2001

The Dirt

The special-thanks blurb on the inner sleeve of Mötley Crüe’s 1999 Live: Entertainment or Death was the first sign of real trouble. It’s always bad news when rock stars thank God and a sobriety counselor on an album, but Mötley Crüe’s live CD, released when the band was going through one of its shambling, broken-up phases, had a special-thanks list that stank of Crüe death. As in, Do Not Resuscitate. For real, this time.

Never mind that the wives are referred to as "soul mates" and are imbued with the power to put "love in live," or that estranged drummer Tommy Lee (who performed on every track of this fairly amazing live album) doesn’t thank anyone. It was this nugget, in boldface, that was the true kick in my ghost sac:

"NONE OF THIS WOULD EVER HAVE HAPPENED WITHOUT ROCK N ROLL FANS. THANK YOU FOR LETTING US BE A MOTLEY CRUE FOR YOU."

No. Wrong. Wrong! Brothers, we didn’t let you be anything. You just were, whether we wanted you or not. You just kept coming back to town and we had to see you, because you were a spectacle unlike anything we had ever seen before or since. And now the men in this band were asking us for permission to be one of the sleaziest, most screwed up, most rabidly unlucky and loved rock acts in the hard rock pantheon? Keep in mind this was a band that thanked their favorite boozes on the sleeve of 1983’s Shout at the Devil.

So I tried to forget about this nice incarnation of Mötley Crüe, and, just in time, they released a book–The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx with Neil Strauss (ReganBooks, 431 pages, $27.95). Which of course I read like a slavering fool. While devouring The Dirt, I was pleased to learn that my hard-earned allowance money, which I invariably spent on Mötley Crüe LPs the day they were shipped to my local record store, went straight into Nikki Sixx’s thirsty arm.

The Dirt is dedicated to their wives and children, "in the hope that they may forgive us for what we’ve done." Each chapter begins with a brief summary written in archaic prose ("More on a gentleman who uses his fists for purposes of communication..."), which is meant to be silly-scientific and mock-refined, but really doesn’t help the Crüe in its now fervent quest to beat the dinosaur rock jibe. I can picture the guys stuffed and presented under dusty glass, or embalmed. Mostly embalmed. But, as The Dirt details, it’s the Crüe’s hangers-on and family who tend to get dead. This is the case with every great and dangerous rock group–anyone from the Stones to the Unband can name many, many people who tried to hang out and ended up getting toe-tagged.

All the stories I read about in Hit Parader and Circus are here, in wincing, queerly eloquent first-person detail, only now they’re achy with guilt and chewed through by another sort of publicity machine, the likes of which I’ve had nightmares about. It’s the glossy, empathetic whine of recoveryspeak, humorless and heavy on hindsight. Combined with the topic of maximum rock celebrity and jammed between hardcover, we’ve got a genre that the tabloids can only scrape at.

In Crazy from the Heat, David Lee Roth’s breakneck memoir, the tap-tap-tapping of a razor on a mirror can be heard as you read. It was funny and unrepentant, and I could tell that Dave kept most of the tastiest vignettes to himself. Meanwhile, The Dirt is an attempt at a karma purge, R-rated Oprah style. Check Nikki, sober and self-examined, reflecting on his clumsy first date with his soon-to-be second wife: "She didn’t even look at me. She just nodded and walked to her trailer. I guess the last thing she wanted to do was get involved with a tattooed heroin-shooting womanizer with three kids who was clearly still on the rebound from a messy marriage." After a stilted dinner, he drops her off at her door, and "[b]ack at my big, isolated house, however, I felt so lonely and empty that I called her... [M]arriage had drained away all my self-esteem."

If this reads like a depressive flipside to Joe Walsh’s "Life’s Been Good," sit tight, because The Dirt gets even more gorgeous. Tommy Lee, who is not the brightest bottle in the pile of empties to be sure, morphs into an ash-covered sadhu crossed with Leo Buscaglia in his revelations about what must have happened in his wounded psyche the night he kicked Pamela during a domestic dispute: "So, unable to step back and see the situation from any reasonable perspective, I turned into a whiny, needy little brat. Maybe it was my way of becoming Pamela’s third child, so I’d get the attention I needed too." Later, in his solitary cell, he would learn how to light a cigarette using a razor blade and pencil lead.

No, not the brightest, but certainly the sweetest. During an interview I conducted with the band in 1997, Tommy seemed content to repeat everything everyone else was saying and giggle about how he routinely pooped on the roadies’ food spread during the supposedly sober Dr. Feelgood tour. In The Dirt, Tommy reveals that he was the dude in the Crüe who cried in group therapy during the first dry-out session in the mid-80s while the other guys made fun of him.

When Vince Neil, the perpetually blond and tipsy lead vocalist, uses the term "nacreous" to describe the 6-pound malignant tumor that was removed from his dying daughter’s body, it could seem like the ghostwriter got a little too handsy in the edit. There isn’t a better word out there for the pearlescent slime of a tumor, and whether or not Vince could pull "nacreous" out of the ether and into his surfer lexicon is anyone’s guess. If that word was a gift from his publisher, all the better. It makes the narrative even more fascinating, actually, and The Dirt becomes almost completely airless–like music in five-dimensional sound. Totally unreal and even better than the real thing.

So it’s all here. The guilt over the sister with severe Down’s syndrome who was in an institution while her brother Nikki stuck a phone receiver up a girl’s snatch and ordered room service (in that order); guitarist Mick Mars’ ramblings about aliens, and his degenerative bone disease that caused him to look like a frozen, ghoulish granny onstage; the ODs; the American Dream of getting away with murder realized by Vince when he killed and maimed a few people via his bitchin’ Pantera and his kinda high blood-alcohol content (community service and a world tour, dude, plus a brief stint in a nice jail); Demi Moore whispering "A.A." for the first time, like the Kiss of Judas, in Nikki’s junk-deafened ear; the squabbling Tommy and Nikki reunited, by the book’s end, at their sons’ first day of school; plus plenty of killer photos showing the Crüe in various stages of fame, bloat, emaciation and health.

Yeah, everything’s here, save for the music. And some of the music is so crazy good, it managed to hurdle hideous drug habits, bad management and ambition that surpassed their musicianship. But I don’t know if the songs can surpass this book. Soon, no one is going to remember why Mötley Crüe is famous in the first place. Twenty-one years have passed since Vince walked into the first rehearsal and Nikki wrote "Live Wire" for him, and the dramatis personae have o’erleaped the tuneage, bro.

This can only mean that Mötley Crüe is going to tour soon. Perhaps in support of The Dirt, yes? The tour can be called Soiled: 01-02. Will there be a meeting after the show? Will we hold hands and cry? Will we talk about what it was like for us?

evening

taken by Patrick

I'm so tired

She don't have a kung fu grip. But she has legs made for runway kick turns.

Price Rite parking lot

You/You've got a pretty car/I think I wanna drive it drive it/You drive a little dangerous/Take you to your Crib/Rip you off/Junque amor

ou es-tu?

Pat the spoon on the blood and stir it in the hot coffee; he will drink it and become yours until death, Wilma said.
This is not blood; this is the blight of noon in November; the eternal leaning at the sink where truth comes while halving and then quartering a seedy fruit almost gone by.

Onota Lake, Moragh

Edie

From the New York Press, April 2002

Remembering Edie

In 1982, 11 years after her death by booze, barbiturates and boredom at the age of 28, Edie Sedgwick finally got the sympathy she needed and the biography she deserved. It was the big, glam and smartly lurid biography we deserved, too–a titanic tale of a troubled, beautiful heiress on a whirlwind tour of closeted Harvard boys and their vicious groupies, the California desert, psychiatric wards both swish and vile, and the New York art land, post-Eisenhower, pre-Velvets, pre-Rubell. These were both the uncharted frontiers and the loci for elitists with all kinds of IQs and tax brackets in the early 60s, and all of these scenes (especially the last) were moments from being chewed up and cordoned off completely. Edie, with her picture hats, naivete, mental illness and charisma, was the undisputed playground queen and the rich girl with a heart of gold until the drugs and the blue-collar heroes like Dylan and Warhol chewed her up too. Why? Well, to paraphrase "Just Like a Woman," "they were hungry and it was her world."

Edie was the last heroine in kid gloves who stayed too long at the artist’s dirty studio and was repaid with a young death and posthumous cult fame. She is also the first modern slash-actress. Oh yes, Edie: An American Biography, edited by Jean Stein with George Plimpton and originally published by Knopf in 1982, is high tragedy, Grand Guignol, the refined blame game, all this and more, sans the schmaltz.

Edie’s prime as Warholian icon lasted for barely 15 minutes and her crash was slow and cruel, but when I read Edie for the first time in the summer of ’82, I became certain of two contradictory facts. One, Edie’s world, where Garland could do the twist with Nureyev at a Factory party while everyone coolly ignored them and artist bums were treated like VIPs at places like Max’s Kansas City–this scene no longer existed. Two, ignoring the fact that Edie might be a cautionary tale, I knew I was going to move to the city nonetheless, lose weight and have short, bleached hair like hers. I was going to be singularly fabulous and accepted. What I didn’t know at the time was that every other teen changeling who wanted out of the suburbs was studying Edie and dreaming the same dream: the birth of Edie Nation.

The multiple-narrator method of storytelling has been used (and abused) to chorus the lives and times of tabloid-friendly enfants terribles such as Axl Rose (in a smirky, excellent Spin feature) and Truman Capote (an un-smirky, weepy and kind of desperate bio, also by Plimpton), but Edie: An American Biography, now 20 years old, was the inspiration and the best of them all. The rich, the famous, the insane, the has-been, the homeless, the high-born, the talented, the wasted, the beautiful and (of course) the damned all stepped up to the plate and me, me, me, I, I, I’d their stories about Edie to great effect. It’s a group grope of epic proportions–our heroine didn’t live very long, but she lorded over so many separate, compartmentalized scenes that her story couldn’t be anything but a looking glass, elaborately glued back together.

"She’d be off to a jet-set party here and an underground party there, and also rapping to the guy from the deli," said Chuck Wein, one of her gurus from the Warhol era. "And everybody on each level believed that her life on that level was her real trip." How many Social Register/psych patient/sculptor/cult film star/fashion model/biker bitch wannabe speedfreak junkie housewives do you know? Okay, there are several of them living in your building, but the lineage starts with Edie.

The photo collection in the book is also unforgettable, and Edie Nation has burned many of the images into its collective brain: a John Singer Sargent painting of Edie’s great-aunt and namesake Edith Minturn, a shot of a very young and uncomfortable Bob Dylan, Edie in her trustfund crib on the Upper East Side, arabesquing for Vogue, Edie elegantly going down the tubes, zonked out on a couch after she set fire to her room at the Chelsea. She even made bandages look glamorous.

Edie also includes a Sedgwick family tree and a poem by Patti Smith, written shortly after she learned Edie had died. My treasured first edition is autographed by Crispin Glover (he played Andy in the Doors movie, remember?), Viva, Taylor Mead and curiously enough, Keanu Reeves, who knew of the book and thought it was "pretty cool."

•

There’s another photo in here of a soiled man standing on the sidewalk with a scruffy beard and hollow cheeks. A beggar, but he doesn’t have his hand out. The caption reads "Billy Name leaving the Factory." Billy was the self-described "Factory Fotographer," as well as its foreman, manager, electrician and designer. It was Billy who covered the entire space in silver paint and foil. He was also responsible for Edie’s choppy platinum hair. Billy converted one of the Factory toilets into a darkroom and lived in there for about five years.

"In that picture of you on the sidewalk you look completely burnt out," I told Billy when we spoke on the phone recently. Billy now lives in Poughkeepsie, his hometown.

"Like I came out of the trunk of a tree or something," he giggles. "I didn’t eat. Before I got on the methamphetamine I was macrobiotic. I hardly ate anything except rice crackers and miso soup."

"But why did you live in the toilet? In Edie you’re described as being covered with sores like a leper because you never got any sun."

"I was a hermit. I’m still like that." Running water tinkles in the background. "I live alone, and I order everything I need over the Internet. The grocer delivers, the pharmacy delivers."

"Are you peeing?"

Billy laughs delightedly. "Yeah!" And he lights up another Lucky straight. "I was just looking through my original copy of Edie this morning," he says. "I never really read the whole thing. I don’t know what kind of impact the book had when it came out, but now whenever I give lectures at colleges, the first question is always about Edie. College-aged women, young women in the arts...they’re enthralled by her."

It’s obvious why a coed with clean hair, clean urine and a major in art would live vicariously through Edie, and the way Billy describes her–as a poised, sympathetic, intelligent creation ("She was potent. It was beyond beautiful girl. It was beyond hip girl.") who, unlike many of the others in the Factory crowd, knew how to listen and could converse cleverly on any number of esoteric topics. "Maybe it was her good breeding, that’s probably a part of it," says Billy. "But when we were together, we’d sit down and start talking about things. She was just this sincere, angelically divine person you could have a conversation with. I was very shy. Edie knew all about cosmological theory. I mean, Nico...she would practically speak to no one. With Viva, you couldn’t get a word in edgewise."

In Edie’s collection of voices, Warhol often comes through as a shy, sadistic Svengali, licking his chops as the hangers-on begged for his favors; a consummate artist who treated Edie and others, literally, like disposable objects. According to Billy, Andy was incensed by Jean Stein, who compiled the interviews that make up the Edie narrative. "I mean he really hated [her]," he says. "After the book came out, Andy felt that [Stein] was using Edie’s story to make him out to be this evil person." In reality, according to Billy, Edie was the director, and she couldn’t be bossed around. "She called her own shots."

In truth, it is the negative, beautiful loser Edie who compels us–the Edie who, by 1966, had bitterly ditched the Factory with the nebulous hope of a mainstream film career or at least a full-time gig as Dylan’s muse and Albert Grossman’s client, and who was mortally burned as a result of these hopes. The Edie of the absurd boob job and long, dark hair who went into a fast, final tailspin of more psych wards, pennilessness and now unglamorous drug abuse, only to die asleep in her modest bed next to her modest husband, a man she met in a Santa Barbara nuthouse (he was a virgin until La Sedgwick nailed him)–this is the Edie who seems to clutch us most fiercely, and the version, unfortunately, that seems to be deified by Edie Nation.

Do the college girls, with their dog-eared copies of Edie: American Girl (Edie’s most recent editions were given this new, dumbed-down title, presumably to attract some more impressionable American girls to Edie Nation), know what they’re getting into? Billy and the rest of the Factory had the best of her, but a little more than halfway into Edie, her fame is gone, along with her amphetamines and pearls, and she’s passed out on a stranger’s bed as "Just Like a Woman" plays on the radio.

After Edie left the Factory, she cut off contact with everyone in the New York scene and moved back to Southern California, where she was raised. Even the local biker crowd she was stumbling around with had to let her go; she was too much of a helpless burden. "She’d ball half the dudes in town for a snort of junk," remembers one of her biker friends. Ouch! "But she was always very ladylike about the whole thing."

Billy didn’t learn of her death until 1977, when he phoned Andy after returning to Poughkeepsie from California. "Andy was constantly saying, ‘What did I do? I gave her the opportunity to be a film star.’" Billy pauses, and then relents. "All right, they were just art movies, but she could have gotten a good manager and gone on to a greater film career. But Edie’s fate was to be fucked up. The whole amphetamine thing will just throw your timing totally off and you can’t correspond to a civilized schedule."

•

"Billy Name!" George Plimpton exclaims. "How did you find him? Now that’s a person I haven’t thought of in a while."

Plimpton seems surprised that Edie has turned 20 years old, and pleased that it is attracting a new generation of fans. He recalls that the response to Edie in 1982 was sensational. He was promoting the book on The Tonight Show, and Carson’s other guest (Plimpton can’t remember who it was) did all the gushing for him.

"Well, it was a wonderful portrait of a curious time," he says. "I knew [Edie and her family] quite well, and I couldn’t quite understand what happened to her." He likens Edie to a detective story, or a puzzle. "It was a glamorous business she was in, but if you read it carefully, you’ll see it was about a girl who killed herself at age 28. Astonishing girl."

•

Where is she now?" I ask Billy Name. "Oh, up in the silver clouds," he sighs. "She’s just an angel."

"Is she bored?"

"Nah, she had a life within her."

"How do you remember her?"

"I picture her sitting on the sofa with her legs crossed, being delightful and chatting about pretty things."

in bed

My day: I'll be saving that for myself but let's just say windshield wipers and M.I.A. and her war whoop that reminds me I am still young. I sing with her on the way to work: 20 dollarsthey shoot at you but that's how much they are...
there's soap in my eye...I hate the way my antenna...

and I drift in and out of the lyrics and at least once on 7 south there's some kind of a near hit and i imagine being slammed against the wheel, cheap metal crumpling into my lap and the airbag deploying, puncturing my breasts and crushing my sternum into my lungs.

There are other songs and other mixed CDs. Songs from summers ago, Blue Bird, Summer Breeze, Lost Inside of You. They remind me of the girl I am in the cable knit and Brooklyn Dodgers cap, say, 1976. At the lake, August, the fireplace working. The sound of mum and nan playing Scribbage in the other room; wooden dice with letters not dots being shaken in a cup.

Yesterday the line was from Delillo: he wanted desperately to be forgotten.

which is somehow related to the desperation of not wanting to forget, or the desperation to keep remembering.

I'm writing about Alzheimer's disease for the paper. what I want to express is my curiosity about memory, and is it some kind of sluicing cocktail that pulses through every time you remember. Is it a synaptic connection.
Or is it what Prince bleats--memories like tears, like grit

Every time I comb my hair/Thoughts of you get in my eyes

center pond, afternoon

In the shallows
under the bow
dappled bass fled
thick as your wrist

this was the rhyme
burned in the brine
cooed to the tune of the song of the dove
the masoch melody Nan recoiled from:

wee little fishes in the sea
who are ye ye ye?