Chronological Crue - The History of Motley Crue in 1986

18/1/86
MötleyCrüe holds a press conference called New Year's Evil at Frankenstein Castle near Frankfurt to promote their first European tour. The event doubles as a meet and greet for fifty German competition winners and fifty American soldiers stationed in Germany. 

22/1/86
Mötley's first European headlining tour gets underway, with Cheap Trick as special guests on nine U.K. dates. The bands jam together on stage to the AC/DC classic Highway to Hell, but changing the lyrics to Highway to Krell.

14/2/86
Mötley plays the first of two concerts at London’s Hammersmith Odeon on Valentine’s Day and the guys from Hanoi Rocks watch the performance, as does Brian Connolly from the Sweet. After the show, Nikki Sixx grabs a taxi with Andy McCoy from Hanoi Rocks in search of scoring some heroin. They find a dealer on the street that shoots Nikki up inside a house, as he is already feeling too wasted to inject. Nikki passes out while Andy tries to wake him up by putting ice in his pants, followed by the dealer attempting to revive him by hitting him all over with a baseball bat. When that doesn’t work, the dealer carries him outside on his shoulder to throw him into a trash dumpster. Nikki vomits on his shoes and comes back to life.

16/2/86
Cheap Trick’s Rick Nielson introduces Tommy Lee and Nikki to one of Tommy’s favourite drummers, Roger Taylor of Queen. Roger takes them and Cheap Trick singer Robin Zander to a Russian restaurant in London where they drink infused vodka and dine. As seven large lines of cocaine are presented to the guests on silver platters for desert, Nikki snorts them all. Back at their hotel bar, Nikki urinates on Rick Nielson’s black rubber coat.

6/3/86
Mötley completes their European tour in France. On their days off, the band and crew often played golf, went go-kart racing or ten-pin bowling - promoters would hire out the entire bowling alley for their exclusive use. During the last show in Paris, Warren DeMartini from Ratt and Phil Collen from Def Leppard jam with the Crüe on stage. French TV show footage from the concert includes Nikki exposing himself as they enter the backstage area after the show.

13/3/86
Vince Neil announces Mötley Crüe’s participation in Live Aid II during a press conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. They don’t end up playing at the concert though.

4/86
Back in Los Angeles, Nikki meets his girlfriend Nicole who picked out a house for Nikki to buy while he was on tour. She shows him around the house at 14432 Valley Vista Boulevard in Sherman Oaks and he hardly leaves; shooting up to $1,000 worth of drugs a day with her as his veins start to collapse and dry out. Izzy Stradlin’ from Guns N’ Roses often comes over, as does Britt Eckland and various porn stars, until paranoia sets into Nikki and he becomes a recluse. He often patrols his house for intruders with his .357 magnum and pulls his loaded gun on employees of his home security provider West Tech Security. The single-level home was built in 1940 and has three bedrooms and two bathrooms in the contained 2,289 sqft on a 0.34 acre lot. The house is interior decorated with red velvet hangings, gothic furniture, antiques and gargoyles that loom at you out of the darkness.

10/5/86
Tommy’s second marriage begins as he marries TV star Heather Locklear in the palmy courtyard of the Santa Barbara Biltmore hotel bedecked with gardenias and tulips. Heather currently acts as Sammy Jo in Dynasty and cop Stacey Sheridan in TJ Hooker. Tommy wears a white leather tuxedo made by Mötley's stage clothing designer Ray Brown, while Heather wears a skintight white strapless mermaid-style dress. The nondenominational forty-minute ceremony takes place in front of five hundred guests. Nikki is Tommy’s best man but he lets him down as he is too wasted on heroin to fulfill his duties properly, even shooting up in the bathroom with syringes he hides in his cowboy boots. Skydivers drop in to the lavish ceremony carrying magnums of Cristal champagne. Once pronounced, twelve white doves are released, following a lengthy kiss. Guests include members of Ratt, Autograph, Quiet Riot, and Night Ranger, while Rikki Rachtman is the DJ for the event. Prenuptial revels included a lingerie-and-sex-toy shower for Heather and a bachelor party with fifteen bikinied mud wrestlers for Tommy.

The couple honeymoons on Grand Cayman Island for three weeks, and police are soon called when a late-night fight breaks out between the newlyweds at the luxurious Colonial Club. Tommy shouts obscenities, while glasses smash and furniture gets overturned as the couple argues for over half-an-hour to the sounds of someone getting slapped. Residents outside their third-floor room tell them to be quiet and are soon faced with Tommy challenging them, before threatening to kill Heather. A police car turns up and asks Heather if she wants to press charges but she says no. The fight continues inside their room until two more police cars arrive with five officers. The holiday club soon throws them out of their hotel for the disturbance.

Nikki spends the wedding weekend at the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara with Nicole, determined to give up drugs, to no avail. Trying to come up with a way to kick drugs without going to rehab, he decides that he and Nicole should detox for five days at Doc McGhee’s home. His manager later says, “Those five days felt like a year. Nikki was just so sick – I had to keep carrying him from the house to the hot tub because he was cramping up so bad.”

11/5/86
Nikki receives a letter from Mötley Crüe’s accountant explaining that he’s been spending $3,500 per day on drugs and in sixteen months he will be broke, if not dead.

5/86
After not responding to his accountant’s letter, Nikki is intervened on by band management and rehab specialist, Bob Timmons, as he and girlfriend Nicole agree to check into the same detox hospital on Van Nuys Boulevard that Vince went to last year. Nikki escapes after three days when they try and brainwash him with religion. Bob Timmons says he will work with Nikki using other methods to get him clean. When Nicole comes home after another two weeks in rehab, they find they are not compatible now they are trying to live sober, so they break up.

Nikki writes an ode to his sick grandmother Nona for the soundtrack to the film Out of Bounds. It remains incomplete when Nikki begins his heroin detox program. With Tommy also on his honeymoon at the time, Nikki prefers not to use studio musicians on the track.

A six-foot-six personal assistant named Billy Kid moves in with Nikki to help keep him sober but it doesn’t take long before they are drinking and shooting cocaine together. They pick girls out on their TV and imagine different dating scenarios. One day Nikki sees the video for the song Nasty Girl by Vanity 6 and he has his management company hook him up with the singer–Prince protégé and actress, Vanity. Her band was originally called Hookers and she played a hooker on stage wearing underwear. A week later he heads to her Beverly Hills apartment for his first date and when she opens the door naked they are soon a couple and freebase cocaine together. She was born Denise Katrina Matthews on 4 January 1959 in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada to a German mother and African-American father.

6/86
Nikki writes music for the film Never Too Young To Die with Gene Simmons from Kiss, including the title track and a song called Boom Boom Boom Goes The Beat Of My Heart. Nikki’s new girlfriend Vanity stars in the movie with Gene Simmons. Nikki also writes the lyrics to a song Girls, Girls, Girls that Gene says are too radical and won’t get played on the radio, so Nikki pulls all the songs and keeps them for work on the next Mötley album.

14/6/86
Vince moves into a $1.5 million house in the Porter Ranch estate in upper Northridge with his wife Beth and young daughter Elizabeth, as he prepares to turn himself into authorities to start his jail sentence. Vince wants to make sure his wife and daughter are safe and well taken care of.

15/6/86
Vince enters Gardena City Jail to fulfill his thirty-day jail sentence. Immediately granted the privileged position of a trustee, he works by delivering food to inmates, cleaning cells and washing police cars to earn time off his sentence as credit. Vince shares his prison cell with two guys, one who was inside for stealing exotic sports cars like Ferraris and Porches. After spending months on the road trying to stay sober, the prison guards reward his good behaviour with privileges of burgers and six-packs of beer. He signs many autographs and has photos taken with the guards, and is even allowed to take a female fan visitor into his cell for an hour one day, where they have sex. Beth only visits him every day for the first week.

1/7/86
Vince is released from jail, having his sentence reduced to eighteen days for good behaviour. Unable to contact his wife, his AA sponsor friend Keith picks him up from prison and they drive around Northridge for an hour looking for his new house, since he'd only slept there one night after moving in. After finding it, he breaks in through the back door and sees that Beth has left him, taking everything in the house except for his gold Rolex and his new 1983 model red Chevrolet Camaro Z28 car (although she did take its keys).

15/7/86
Nikki’s grandfather calls to tell him that his grandmother Nona has passed away. He gives directions for him to attend her funeral the following Saturday, to which Nikki promises, but his drug problem prevents him from attending. He also avoids having to confront his past, confront his mother and spend time with his family, whom he ran away from as a teenager; they had abandoned him and he had abandoned them. He shoots some cocaine and watches Gilligan’s Island on TV instead, feeling immense feelings of guilt but being too wasted to face his reality. He had a very close relationship with her, as she virtually brought him up when he was a child, and Nikki often has nightmares for many years following this day, about not being there for his grandparents at this time.

20/7/86
The day following his grandmother’s funeral, Nikki resolves to clean up his act so he can write for the Mötley album. He finishes his ode called Nona and plays it to his friend and former Mötley A&R man Tom Zutaut, who is now at Geffen Records, recently signing a new band called Guns N’ Roses. He loves the tune, and asks Nikki if he can produce the debut album for Guns N’ Roses. After much goading from Zutaut, he eventually declines as he has his hands full trying to reduce his level of drug intake, but it encourages Nikki with his own song writing.

22/8/86
Mötley performs at an all-star jam at The Roxy in Los Angeles, along with members of Autograph, Kiss, Dio and King Kobra. They jam on Smokin’ In The Boys Room, Highway To Hell and Jailhouse Rock.

8/86
Filming finishes for a forthcoming Mötley Crüe home-video, as Tommy tears the ligaments on both sides of his ankle when he goes over backwards on his dirt bike doing a wheelie out the front of his house. After having his leg in a cast for some time, he cuts it off at the beach with a steak knife.

At his Porter Ranch home, Vince has a mud pit installed next to his swimming pool for female wrestling entertainment. He hosts many parties, often bringing back a dozen girls from the Tropicana strip club to wrestle nude for him and his friends. The most vicious fighter of the mud wrestlers is a girl named Sharise, who always wins the bouts. Randy Castillo frequents Vince’s place, after being introduced to him by a drug dealer attending many of the parties.

Ozzy Osborne phones Randy and asks him to join his band on the spot, since his broken leg has now fully recovered. Randy flies to Scotland the next day and joins Ozzy’s band. Later that day, he gets a call from Steve Vai asking him to join David Lee Roth’s solo band and another call from David Coverdale asking if he would be interested in joining Whitesnake.

5/9/86
At the MTV Video Music Awards held at Universal Amphitheatre in Los Angeles, Tommy and Vince present the Most Experimental Video award on stage, which is won by a-ha for their Take on Me video - the night's biggest winner overall. Tommy and Vince both wear animal print suits made by the Crüe’s clothing designer Ray Brown.

9/86
Mötley signs a new deal with Elektra Records for a minimum of six albums.

10/86
The Crüe is back in the studio working on the next album with Tom Werman, due to be released next January. Songs are being recorded at One on One, Rumbo Recorders and Conway Recording Studios, but Nikki finds himself shooting heroin again, as well as freebasing cocaine. He also gets hooked on methadone when he tries to withdraw, which considerably slows the writing and recording process of the album.

During the recordings, Tommy reinforces the ambient kick sound of his drums with a more open, sub-sonic kick from a sample. It’s the first sample used in the band’s music.

11/86
Vince is offered the role of the Prince in a rock musical version of Cinderella, but declines due to a conflict with the tour scheduling for next year. He also turned down a cameo role as a security guard in the movie Trick Or Treat earlier in the year.

Vince has Kevin Brady tattoo him a design of a naked woman kneeling on a bed of skulls on his forearm with a banner underneath reading Girls, Girls, Girls to show his preference for the title of the new album. Tommy has a very large tattoo of a peacock sitting on a bonsai tree inked on his right upper leg. It’s his second tattoo on his right leg, as he already has a grinning devil drinking a Budweiser beer and holding a pitch fork on his ankle. Vince has a tattoo of Thumper the rabbit on his right ankle which was inked by Robert Benedetti, while Nikki sports a banner with a girl’s name on his right ankle.

A forty-four-minute home-video called Uncensored is released, which includes videos clips and interviews with the band. One scene shows Vince living it up on Sunset Boulevard in a $1,000-per-day limo with girls lifting their tops, as the song Breakout by Shooting Star plays in the background. Rare live footage of the Take Me To The Top and Public Enemy #1 videos being watched by the Crüe at Cherokee Studios is also included. Other footage shows Nikki getting a chest tattoo at Sunset Strip Tattoos, Mick driving his red 1976 Chevrolet Corvette L82 from his Redondo Beach apartment, and Tommy riding his Harley Davidson bike around Hollywood. The video is directed by Wayne Isham with Robin Sloan being the Executive Producer of the project.

12/86
Nikki co-writes a song called Falling In and Out Of Love with his former girlfriend Lita Ford for her self-titled album. Working in the studio next to her, Lita comes in one day and they sit at a piano together and start playing and humming the tune. Nikki snorts drugs off the piano as they try to write. Lita is shocked at how much Nikki has let himself go but she doesn’t say anything to him about his state.

25/12/86
Spending his Christmas Day alone in his mansion near Van Nuys, Nikki crouches naked under his Christmas tree with a needle in his arm. He often spends time high in his bedroom closet surrounded by his drug paraphernalia and guns, convinced that people are in his house and coming to get him. He is often too scared to move from this refuge until he comes down with heroin, usually scored from his dealer Jason.

31/12/86
Nikki’s girlfriend Vanity comes over to his home and they take drugs all day before arguing. Nikki kicks her out and ends up in his closet with his grandfather’s gun pointed at the door.

On with the show