The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band Is Mötley Crüe's Attempt at a Karma Purge, R-rated Oprah Style

The special-thanks blurb on the inner sleeve of Mötley Crüe's 1999 Live: Entertainment or Death was the first sign of real trouble. It's always bad news when rock stars thank God and a sobriety counselor on an album, but Mötley Crüe's live CD, released when the band was going through one of its shambling, broken-up phases, had a special-thanks list that stank of Crüe death. As in, Do Not Resuscitate. For real, this time.

Never mind that the wives are referred to as "soul mates" and are imbued with the power to put "love in live," or that estranged drummer Tommy Lee (who performed on every track of this fairly amazing live album) doesn't thank anyone. It was this nugget, in boldface, that was the true kick in my ghost sac:

"NONE OF THIS WOULD EVER HAVE HAPPENED WITHOUT ROCK N ROLL FANS. THANK YOU FOR LETTING US BE A MOTLEY CRUE FOR YOU."

No. Wrong. Wrong! Brothers, we didn't let you be anything. You just were, whether we wanted you or not. You just kept coming back to town and we had to see you, because you were a spectacle unlike anything we had ever seen before or since. And now the men in this band were asking us for permission to be one of the sleaziest, most screwed up, most rabidly unlucky and loved rock acts in the hard rock pantheon? Keep in mind this was a band that thanked their favorite boozes on the sleeve of 1983's Shout at the Devil.

So I tried to forget about this nice incarnation of Mötley Crüe, and, just in time, they released a book?The Dirt: Confessions of the World's Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Mick Mars, Vince Neil and Nikki Sixx with Neil Strauss (ReganBooks, 431 pages, $27.95). Which of course I read like a slavering fool. While devouring The Dirt, I was pleased to learn that my hard-earned allowance money, which I invariably spent on Mötley Crüe LPs the day they were shipped to my local record store, went straight into Nikki Sixx's thirsty arm.

The Dirt is dedicated to their wives and children, "in the hope that they may forgive us for what we've done." Each chapter begins with a brief summary written in archaic prose ("More on a gentleman who uses his fists for purposes of communication..."), which is meant to be silly-scientific and mock-refined, but really doesn't help the Crüe in its now fervent quest to beat the dinosaur rock jibe. I can picture the guys stuffed and presented under dusty glass, or embalmed. Mostly embalmed. But, as The Dirt details, it's the Crüe's hangers-on and family who tend to get dead. This is the case with every great and dangerous rock group?anyone from the Stones to the Unband can name many, many people who tried to hang out and ended up getting toe-tagged.

All the stories I read about in Hit Parader and Circus are here, in wincing, queerly eloquent first-person detail, only now they're achy with guilt and chewed through by another sort of publicity machine, the likes of which I've had nightmares about. It's the glossy, empathetic whine of recoveryspeak, humorless and heavy on hindsight. Combined with the topic of maximum rock celebrity and jammed between hardcover, we've got a genre that the tabloids can only scrape at.

In Crazy from the Heat, David Lee Roth's breakneck memoir, the tap-tap-tapping of a razor on a mirror can be heard as you read. It was funny and unrepentant, and I could tell that Dave kept most of the tastiest vignettes to himself. Meanwhile, The Dirt is an attempt at a karma purge, R-rated Oprah style. Check Nikki, sober and self-examined, reflecting on his clumsy first date with his soon-to-be second wife: "She didn't even look at me. She just nodded and walked to her trailer. I guess the last thing she wanted to do was get involved with a tattooed heroin-shooting womanizer with three kids who was clearly still on the rebound from a messy marriage." After a stilted dinner, he drops her off at her door, and "[b]ack at my big, isolated house, however, I felt so lonely and empty that I called her... [M]arriage had drained away all my self-esteem."

If this reads like a depressive flipside to Joe Walsh's "Life's Been Good," sit tight, because The Dirt gets even more gorgeous. Tommy Lee, who is not the brightest bottle in the pile of empties to be sure, morphs into an ash-covered sadhu crossed with Leo Buscaglia in his revelations about what must have happened in his wounded psyche the night he kicked Pamela during a domestic dispute: "So, unable to step back and see the situation from any reasonable perspective, I turned into a whiny, needy little brat. Maybe it was my way of becoming Pamela's third child, so I'd get the attention I needed too." Later, in his solitary cell, he would learn how to light a cigarette using a razor blade and pencil lead.

No, not the brightest, but certainly the sweetest. During an interview I conducted with the band in 1997, Tommy seemed content to repeat everything everyone else was saying and giggle about how he routinely pooped on the roadies' food spread during the supposedly sober Dr. Feelgood tour. In The Dirt, Tommy reveals that he was the dude in the Crüe who cried in group therapy during the first dry-out session in the mid-80s while the other guys made fun of him.

When Vince Neil, the perpetually blond and tipsy lead vocalist, uses the term "nacreous" to describe the 6-pound malignant tumor that was removed from his dying daughter's body, it could seem like the ghostwriter got a little too handsy in the edit. There isn't a better word out there for the pearlescent slime of a tumor, and whether or not Vince could pull "nacreous" out of the ether and into his surfer lexicon is anyone's guess. If that word was a gift from his publisher, all the better. It makes the narrative even more fascinating, actually, and The Dirt becomes almost completely airless?like music in five-dimensional sound. Totally unreal and even better than the real thing.

So it's all here. The guilt over the sister with severe Down's syndrome who was in an institution while her brother Nikki stuck a phone receiver up a girl's snatch and ordered room service (in that order); guitarist Mick Mars' ramblings about aliens, and his degenerative bone disease that caused him to look like a frozen, ghoulish granny onstage; the ODs; the American Dream of getting away with murder realized by Vince when he killed and maimed a few people via his bitchin' Pantera and his kinda high blood-alcohol content (community service and a world tour, dude, plus a brief stint in a nice jail); Demi Moore whispering "A.A." for the first time, like the Kiss of Judas, in Nikki's junk-deafened ear; the squabbling Tommy and Nikki reunited, by the book's end, at their sons' first day of school; plus plenty of killer photos showing the Crüe in various stages of fame, bloat, emaciation and health.

Yeah, everything's here, save for the music. And some of the music is so crazy good, it managed to hurdle hideous drug habits, bad management and ambition that surpassed their musicianship. But I don't know if the songs can surpass this book. Soon, no one is going to remember why Mötley Crüe is famous in the first place. Twenty-one years have passed since Vince walked into the first rehearsal and Nikki wrote "Live Wire" for him, and the dramatis personae have o'erleaped the tuneage, bro.

This can only mean that Mötley Crüe is going to tour soon. Perhaps in support of The Dirt, yes? The tour can be called Soiled: 01-02. Will there be a meeting after the show? Will we hold hands and cry? Will we talk about what it was like for us?