Mötley Crüe‘s Tommy Lee is opening up about one of the darkest parts of his history.
Appearing on the Wednesday (July 22) episode of Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard, the drummer looked back on his struggles with heroin addiction during the band’s late-’80s heyday, recalling the moment he realized how dangerous his substance use had become.
Lee remembered running out of heroin while spending the night with his “bass player” — the rocker doesn’t name the band’s bassist, Nikki Sixx — and how the pair decided to inject Jack Daniel’s whiskey.
“‘What are we gonna do,’” he recalled thinking after running out of drugs around 3 or 4 a.m. The rocker then told Shepard how the two men unscrewed the cap off a fifth of Jack, filled the cap with some alcohol, then filled a few syringes with the whiskey. “We were shooting Jack Daniels.”
“It was at that moment where I went, ‘OK! We could just drink this, but we’re shooting it,’” Lee reflected. “‘This is f–king wrong, and somebody’s gonna die.”
The members of Mötley Crüe entered rehab and group therapy in the late 1980s as they prepared to record their fifth studio album, 1989’s Dr. Feelgood, which hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and remained on the list for 109 weeks. “We all decided we needed to go to rehab or someone was going to die,” Lee said. “People were eating handfuls of [sleeping pills] and then go out for the night. We were zombies and people weren’t waking up. We’re like, ‘Someone’s going to die soon.’” Looking back on that period, Lee said that the band relocated to Vancouver, B.C., in order to make the album while working on staying sober together.
“We’d all get together and talk about how everybody’s dealing with this new arrangement,” he said. “Once you start getting into therapy with the people that you work with and that are also going through the same thing, you’re learning all these other things about them, and all of a sudden it’s becoming really complicated at the same time.”
Lee also acknowledged that sobriety has remained an ongoing journey. He told Shepard: “I think three years is the longest I’ve done.”
The conversation adds another chapter to the band’s well-documented history with addiction, which Sixx discussed in his 2007 memoir, The Heroin Diaries.
Listen to the Tommy Lee’s interview on Armchair Expert below:
If you or anyone you know is facing substance use disorders, visit the website for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s website, or call its helpline — which is available 24/7, 365 days a year — at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for free, confidential treatment referral and resources.
