Book Review: The Dirt by shoutingatco.ws
Not a fan of Mötley Crüe? Don’t worry, a staggering amount of people aren’t.
Not a fan of heavy metal? That’s fine, it’s not for everyone.
Don’t like music at all? Actually, that’s a bit weird.
The Crüe
The story of three degenerate fuck-ups, and one self-confessed ugly motherfucker that loves to play the guitar, The Dirt follows Crüe through their formative years to the heights of fame, and back down with a crash. Lots of crashes; both literally and metaphorically. It’s like an instructional manual showing in horrific details what happens when four young fuck-ups are given whatever the want, with seemingly no consequences.
Below are some of our favourite stories from the book. Honestly, every page is filled with one of these bizarre stories – throwaway pages about Nikki Sixx living with some hookers, one of them getting married, evicted, arrested or punched.
The band inevitably tour with other groups, leading to situations where two groups of fuck-ups are left to amuse themselves. Notably, they meet a Mr. Osbourne…
We were hanging out, us in T-shirts and leather, Ozzy in the dress, when all of a sudden Ozzy nudged me. “Hey, mate, I fancy a bump.”
“Dude,” I told him, “we’re out of blow. Maybe I can send the bus driver out for some.”
“Give me the straw,” he said, unfazed.
“But, dude, there’s no blow.”
“Give me the straw. I’m having a bump.”
I handed him the straw, and he walked over to a crack in the sidewalk and bent over it. I saw a long column of ants, marching to a little sand dugout where the pavement met the dirt. And as I thought, “No, he wouldn’t,” he did. He put the straw to his nose and, with his bare white ass peeking out from under the dress like a sliced honeydew, sent the entire line of ants tickling up his nose with a single, monstrous snort.
(This gets more disgusting, and concludes with Sharon Osbourne turning up to kick arses.)
It’s not just drugs that are available on tap for the band. Girls, too, are drawn towards the band, like young, innocent flies around shit. It almost becomes a competition to perform the most depraved acts.
One day we were chilling back[stage] when Nikki pointed out a cat litter box that was mysteriously sitting in the middle of the floor. As we were tying to figure out who was stupid enough to keep a cat backstage, we heard a loud meow. A girl came crawling toward the box on her hands and knees wearing a cat collar and leash. The girl crawled into the cat box, hiked up her dress, peed in the sand, and then scratched at the litter until she had covered her mess.
In the early days, the band lived together. For some reason, this didn’t last.
Our bathroom made the kitchen look immaculate in comparison. In the nine or so months that we lived there, we never once cleaned the toilet. Tommy and I were still teenagers: We didn’t know how. There would be tampons in the shower from girls the night before, and the sink and mirror were black with Nikki’s hair dye. We couldn’t afford – or were too lazy to afford – toilet paper, so there’d be shit-stained socks, band flyers and pages from magazines scattered across the floor. On the back of the door was a poster of Slim Whitman. I’m not sure why.
One of the more sobering stories features singer Vince Neil getting drunk at a party, and driving off with the drummer from Hanoi Rocks, “Razzle”, to get more booze. They crash.
Then a police officer walked up to me. “How fast were you going? The speed limit’s twenty-five.” I told him that I didn’t remember, which was true. He gave me a Breathalyser test, and I measured .17. Then he read me my rights and led me into the back of his squad car. At the police station, the officers glared at me. They kept asking me to tell them what happened, but all I could say was, “Where’s Razzle?” I figured that they had put him in another room to give a separate statement.
The phone rang, and the commanding officer left the room. He came back and said, coldly, “Your friend is dead.”
While each part of the book is jaw-dropping in itself – if you quoted every interesting bit, you’d just be reading the book aloud – the overall arc follows four boys that are forced to grow up after they royally fuck things up – very publicly.
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Christ I love that book.