Free The Dirt by Tommy Lee

painfully shy, freaky-looking relative of Cousin Itt. I was laughing so hard, I called to Nikki, “Come here! You gotta check this dude out!” When Nikki and him were standing there face-to-face, it was like the Addams Family meets Scooby Doo. Nikki pulled me aside, excited. “I can’t believe it!” he said. “Here’s another one like us!”
    Trailing behind Cousin Itt, carrying a Marshall stack, was a little dude named John Crouch, or Stick, a tag-along whose chief value in life seemed to be the fact that he owned a car, a little Mazda that on this wet spring day had a speaker cabinet sticking out of one window and a guitar neck out the other. (To be fair to Stick, he also had a talent for fetching burritos.)
    We set up Mick’s equipment, and Nikki showed him the opening riff of “Stick to Your Guns.” Mick watched intensely, slouching and rubbing his anxious hands together like a praying mantis, then grabbed his guitar and played the shit out of it, making the riff so distorted and insane that we couldn’t even recognize it anymore. I didn’t actually know how to judge whether someone was a good guitarist or not. I was more impressed with the sheer volume of his playing than anything else. And I liked his trippy look and sound: It was as if he’d come from another planet populated by a species so sonically advanced that they didn’t need to take baths.
    When he was through, Cousin Itt turned to me, beady eyes glowing through his tangle of hair, and spoke: “Let’s go get some schnapps.” We picked up a gallon of schnapps at the liquor store, got plastered, and jammed for an hour. Then, Cousin Itt spoke again. He pulled Nikki and I aside and muttered something about Robin. Then he turned to Robin and told him, like a cranky old man, “You’re out of here. There’s only one guitar player in my band, and that’s me.” We didn’t even need to discuss whether Mick was right for the band or not: The dude was already in.
    Robin looked at Nikki, then at me, and neither of us spoke a word in his defense. His face grew cloudy, then red, as he dropped his guitar and burst into tears. He really was a pansy.
    After Robin took his shit home, Nikki dyed my hair black so that it would match his and Mick’s. And they encouraged me to get my first tattoo: Mighty Mouse, my all-time fucking favorite cartoon hero. He reminded me of myself: He’s little and I’m skinny, we’re both always trying to save the day, and we both always get the girl in the end. I had the artist design a tattoo of Mighty Mouse crashing through a bass drum with sticks in his hands.
    Nikki, Mick, and I started rehearsing every day, and it was amazing how many new songs Nikki kept coming up with. Afterward, we’d hang out at the Starwood like we were already rock stars. All we were missing was a singer.
    We auditioned a round, dumb fellow named O’Dean, who sang in a voice somewhere between the Cult and the Scorpions. He was an amazing singer, but Nikki didn’t like him because he didn’t sound like Brian Connolly from the Sweet. O’Dean’s other problem was that he was very uptight about this pair of ultraclean white gloves he always wore. He was under the impression that the gloves constituted having a look, and we tried not to say anything to the contrary because he was all we had.
    We scammed our way into a studio to record some of Nikki’s songs: “Stick to Your Guns,” “Toast of the Town,” “Nobody Knows What It’s Like to Be Lonely,” and a Raspberries tune, “Tonight.” They only gave us two hours, so when we ran out of time, Nikki made me go fuck the engineer. Her teeth stuck out the side of her head like the air spout in a beach ball, but she was nice and had a decent body. She took me back to her place and she had the fucking coolest bed. It had a mosquito net around it, and I had never experienced anything like that. I was a little slut back then, trying to taste all the flavors, so I told her, “Wow, I’d love to