Available in the Motley Crue book - Vol. 2 The Nineties

14/1/93
Mötley Crüe finally officially announces that John Corabi is their new front-man. After eight months of legal arm-wrestling, John’s contractual ties with Hollywood Records from his days with The Scream are finalised. They compromise on one million dollars for a solo album to be recorded at some time in the future. A further component of the deal is having The Scream, with a new vocalist, play in support of Mötley Crüe on tour, provided they have their next album out in time.

early ‘93
Recording in Vancouver continues as Mick Mars finds it refreshing to work with a second guitarist. Nikki Sixx also finds having a second lyricist to be a great change as well. Until this album, the band has never written songs by jamming on riffs together. Miss Babykills is recorded, having originally been called My Way Or The Highway. Sixty-three members of two Vancouver symphony orchestras are brought in to perform the arrangements on Misunderstood after one of their conductors was hired and worked on the music until the Crüe were happy with the sound. They're given sheet music to the song upon arrival as none of them had heard the song before. It marks the first time the band has worked with an orchestra.

Tommy Lee’s wife Heather Locklear joins the TV soap Melrose Place for a limited run to see if she might have an impact on its low ratings. At home though, Tommy and Heather’s marriage struggles. Heather refuses to let Tommy get a large tattoo back piece and she doesn’t want to have any children, choosing to focus on her acting career instead, much to the annoyance of Tommy whose Mötley band members all have children.

3/93
Crüe manager Doug Thaler holds a band meeting in Vancouver and passes around some financial reports that Chuck Shapiro has prepared to show them where the one million dollars spent to date on the album’s recording has gone. In trying to show them that they have spent more money on this album than all of their others combined, Nikki throws the papers back at Doug and storms out of the room, feeling he is just being negative.

After working in the recording studio every day except Sundays, Mötley Crüe takes a break at the end of the month when producer Bob Rock tours with his band Rockhead as opening act on Bon Jovi’s European tour. The Crüe heads back to Los Angeles, where they write five more songs at A&M Studios. They like John’s voice so much on the old Crüe songs they consider re-recording a couple of them, like City Boy Blues, to be released as B-sides on forthcoming singles.

23/4/93
Mick files for divorce from Emi Canyn, fuming that her relationship with guitarist Chet Thompson in her Alice ‘N Thunderland project went deeper than just band activities. Mick had helped the band a lot, including producing their recordings. Matt Sullivan soon replaces Jeff Dennis on drums, while Danny Wilder replaces Mitch Laney on bass after the two members quit, unhappy with Chet and Emi’s actions. When the Alice ‘N Thunderland CD is eventually released, three different recording sessions can be heard: one produced by Mick and recorded at Chatsworth Studios, a second recorded at Talon and produced by Mikey Davis, and a third session of four songs featuring the new rhythm section of Matt and Danny.

27/4/93
Vince Neil’s album Exposed is released on the Warner Brothers label and enters the Billboard charts at number thirteen. The album includes a cover version of Set Me Free from the Sweet’s Desolation Boulevard album, as well as a ballad titled Forever about his wife Sharise, who filed for divorce earlier in the year. Sister of Pain is released as the first single, and features a space-age-clad porn star Janine Lindemulder in the video, who is now dating Vince. The album debuts at number one in Japan. Two additional tracks, Blondes (Have More Fun) and a cover of The Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated are included as bonus tracks on the Japanese release. The Exposed CD booklet says Vince is now managed by Camel Management Inc., comprising of Gary Bird and former Mötley Tour Manager Rich Fischer.

The hiring of bassist Phil Soussan didn’t work out, so Robbie Crane went back to playing bass in January for his first record by re-cutting Phil’s bass tracks. Vince suggests they call twenty-eight-year-old Dave Marshall, who was briefly up for the guitar position before Steve Stevens joined. He and Robbie have been friends since Dave was eighteen, when he first moved to Los Angeles from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and they were in a band together. Having played violin for eight years, the son of a Doctor and Psychiatrist took up guitar at age thirteen. He joined the Vince Neil Band in time to play a few parts on the record and sing back-up vocals. He was most recently a member of Fiona’s back-up band, and was also previously in Los Angeles bands Pair-A-Dice and the last line-up of Brunette.

5/93
The Vince Neil Band plays their first-ever show at the Roxy in Hollywood, under the name Five Guys From Van Nuys. A proposed headlining U.S. stadium tour with Coverdale-Page in support falls apart, so a support on the Van Halen tour with their new lead singer Sammy Hagar is secured instead.

Tommy uses Ahead aluminum drumsticks with a plastic shaft and tips that screw and lock in, made by the softball bat company Easton. This reduces the amount of sticks he breaks while the shock-vibration dampener inside the sticks helps prevent carpal tunnel syndrome. Tommy has previously played shows with sticks literally taped to him because he has lost feeling in his hands, as the condition choked the nerves from his wrist to his fingers.

21/5/93
Vince has a vacation in Hawaii with his girlfriend Janine Lindemulder and another friend, 1991 Penthouse Pet of the Year Brandy Ledford, aka Brandy Sanders (Jisel), to celebrate the completion and release of his solo album, before he heads out on tour. One of the girls brings a video camera along and captures a lot of footage, including their three-way sex action. Vince gets his Vince Neil Racing team’s logo tattooed on his left arm above his Mötley Crüe tattoo at Skin Deep in Hawaii.

11/6/93
Mick and John meet a couple of strippers and take them shooting in the desert north of Los Angeles; Mick being with Kelly and John with Rebecca Mettling. They meet two local sheriffs who have been shooting there all day and one of them sets up a plate of steel to shoot at. Mick hits the target in the centre and a piece of bullet shrapnel ricochets off and hits Rebecca in the side of her stomach. After she complains of a bee sting initially, they see a small bleeding cut a couple of millimetres wide that Mick cleans up before driving her to hospital to get checked out as a precaution. He tells her on the way that he will pay for any medical expenses including plastic surgery to prevent any scarring, but he is soon forced to pay around ten thousand dollars to the twenty-four-year-old as an out-of-court settlement after she claims her promising career as an exotic dancer has been ruined. She also falsely claims John and Mick had been drinking and smoking marijuana as well. The press reports that Mick purposely shot his girlfriend.

Meanwhile, porn actor Ron Jeremy calls Tommy to visit the nearby house where his new feature movie was being shot. Tommy watches the action and asks the name of a blonde actress. Ron instead tells him to go into the bathroom where the blondes comes in two minutes later and drops Tommy’s pants without saying a word. She leaves after performing oral sex and Tommy soon returns to A&M studios for work on Mötley’s music. Less than an hour later, Heather calls to ask what Tommy has been up to, after her makeup artist called her, telling her that Tommy has been there. It turns out that the makeup artist on the set was a friend of her makeup artist and had informed her. Heather separates from Tommy on grounds he is violent and unfaithful. A few days later Tommy moves out and rents a house right on the sand in Malibu for seven thousand dollars per month.

25/6/93
The Vince Neil Band commences a two-month, forty-two-date U.S. stadium tour in support of Van Halen in Michigan. Vince’s former brother-in-law Gary Ruddell is Assistant Tour Manager. Vince becomes friends with new Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar and together they down Kamikaze cocktails before Vince hits the stage every night and then scull Margaritas before Van Halen perform.

Vince’s song The Edge is released as a single to radio, which is soon followed by Can’t Have Your Cake as the third single to be released commercially. The video clip for Cake features Playboy Playmate and Home Improvement actress Pamela Anderson, with whom Vince is dating after meeting her at his Bar One club, before going to see Tim Allen’s stand-up comedy show on their first date. Vince’s son Neil Wharton also features in the video, cast in the role of a young Vince, acting out flashbacks from his life. The video is shot soon after the band’s first show at the Roxy and just days before the Van Halen tour begins. The song was written by Steve Stevens and recorded in his Manhattan apartment as a demo in his previous band Jerusalem Slim, with former Hanoi Rock’s front-man Mike Monroe on vocals. Stevens suggested the Can’t Have Your Cake title to Monroe, who opted for the name Downwardly Mobile instead. It didn’t make the final Jerusalem Slim record so Stevens presented it to Vince who wrote all new lyrics for his new version.

7/93
Dave ‘Snake’ Sabo from Skid Row visits Mötley in Vancouver and they fall off their sobriety wagon. At a strip club, Nikki orders nine trays of Kamikaze cocktails before they head into Richards Street to pick up four hookers to party with. After the hookers leave their room when the money runs out, Nikki and Tommy sneak into the hotel’s kitchen and steal a fifty-gallon container of tomato sauce and tip it all in John’s bed. John sleeps in it so they don’t get the better of him and he leaves a dozen cream puffs outside Nikki’s door in the morning and laughs as he tries to explain to their trainer why he is struggling with his morning workout. This commences a run of pranks between John and Nikki that includes Nikki filling John’s room keyhole with glue so the door has to be removed from its hinges before he can enter, and John retaliating by putting a blow-up doll on Nikki’s door and inviting single men to his room. Nikki soon douses John’s door with hairspray before igniting it.

mid ‘93
John sings back-up vocals on his former The Scream band-mates’ second album titled Takin’ It To The Next Level. Advance copies of the twelve-song CD are shipped to press and radio, and a video for the first single is made, however two weeks before the release date they are dropped by Hollywood Records.

After finding out Tommy’s first wife Candice is stripping at a near-by club, Tommy and Nikki dress up like lumberjacks with false moustaches to go see her. At the strip club, they down shooters and score a pile of cocaine. The next morning Nikki wakes up next to a stranger and a huge pile of cocaine on a table. He takes a flight home to California not wanting to ever go back to Vancouver.

Former Deep Purple and Tommy Bolin bassist Glenn Hughes releases an album titled Blues that features the slide guitar of Mick Mars.

5/8/93
Heather D. Locklear files a petition for Dissolution of Marriage in the Los Angeles Superior Court, citing irreconcilable differences after six years and eleven months of marriage to Tommy Lee. This follows their separation less than two months ago.

28/8/93
The Vince Neil Band plays their final Van Halen support show at the Pacific Amphitheater in Costa Mesa, California.

9/93
The Vince Neil Band plays a string of concerts in Japan. They plan to play Australia and Europe next before a headlining U.S. tour, but the shows never eventuate. Vince plays another two legs of a North American solo tour instead in clubs; the first time he has played venues this small since his pre-Mötley days in Rockandi. He finds it to be a most humbling time, but a huge learning experience for him as he is now responsible for many aspects of his band’s business operations that he previously had no exposure to when in the Crüe.

late ‘93
While on vacation in Hawaii, Nikki writes a song called Hangin’ By A Thread and records the riff on a ghetto blaster. Bringing it back to the studio, it gets worked on further by Bob Rock and John and it turns into Poison Apples. Tommy plays honky-tonk piano on the new song. During the final mixes of the song, Bob runs the opening through an effect that makes it sound compressed and quiet. The band likes it and as an inside joke, think fans will turn their stereo up when they hear it, only to have the rest of the song kick in and blow their speakers.

10/93
When Tommy brings in a new riff, they write the last song for the album – a story about John’s Uncle Jack who sexually molested his brothers and sisters. He was arrested and charged with statutory rape and sexual assault of twenty children as Mötley were beginning to record the album, but he was released two months later after wardens feared the inmates were going to kill him. After finding a job at a Catholic elementary school, he moved in with a woman and her two young boys before she was killed in a car accident a few months later. After moving back in to the house following her death, her ex-husband discovers John’s uncle had sodomised the young boys and Jack is subsequently arrested and incarcerated again. John hopes to release the Uncle Jack song as a single and donate the money to organisations benefiting abused children.

Recording for the new Mötley album is now complete with the band having twenty-three songs ready for mixing, after each band member threw all their contributions into the creative ‘Mötley Stew.’ Tommy even came up with some of the guitar riffs on the songs for the first time. Some further titles of songs include Roller Coaster, Backwash, Song With No Name, Wrong From Right, and a joke song with crude lyrics called Ditch That Bitch that features an amazing double-kick drum track by Tommy.

Tommy uses shredded newspaper inside his kick drum and wooden beaters that help his sound on the album. He plans a new indoor rollercoaster spectacle for his drum solo, envisaging high mock-speaker cabinets as doors that open to let his drum kit blaze down over and around the outer edge of the crowd on rails, before banking and looping back to front of stage. Mounted video cameras would capture the rollercoaster action and show it on giant video screens. The idea doesn’t eventuate due to logistics, financing and insurance requirements.

Vince releases Can’t Change Me as the fourth single from his Exposed album. Its black and white styled video shot in August at The Record Plant recording studio in Hollywood features four Playboy playmates as backup singers.

11/93
Vince moves out of the Bel Age Hotel and buys an opulent, gothic-styled mansion in Malibu called Sea Manor. He feels he needs a home that his young daughter Skylar will enjoy coming to stay at, and is aware that he needs to move out of Hollywood where he has become too out of control on liquor. When his daughter is not around, he rents his home out for the shooting of porn movies and Penthouse centrefold shoots, getting to date the girls afterwards. Vince often hosts big beach parties attended by the film crews and his neighbours in Jon Lovitz and Charlie Minor.

17/11/93
Tommy and Heather are now officially divorced.

10/12/93
The Nikki Sixx impostor Matthew Trippe finally drops his lawsuit against the Crüe, following his claim that he was hired to replace Nikki in Mötley Crüe a decade ago.

12/93
During a Penthouse shoot at his house, Vince looks through some Polaroid photos belonging to the make-up artist Alexis, who also works on Playboy shoots. He asks her to introduce him to one of the models on a Playboy cover that features Hooters girls. He soon receives a call from the girl, Heidi Mark, who is staying at the Playboy mansion while in town from her home of Palm Beach, Florida. Vince picks her up from the mansion and they go to his friend’s birthday party as a blind date, where they throw hundred dollar bills at the strippers entertaining the guests. After the party they return to his Malibu home and Heidi stays for a week before leaving for Orlando to tape a show called Thunder In Paradise.

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