If Mick Mars wasn't onstage every night watching barely legal girls flash him their tits, he might be dead. Less than a year ago, before the fifty-three-year-old Motley Crue guitarist reunited with his bandmates for what has become one of 2005's most successful tours, he was holed up in a tiny Los Angeles town house, sleeping on an inflatable mattress. His face was framed by a wiry, overgrown beard, he weighed a hundred pounds, and he couldn't walk unassisted. He had been in a major depression since he split up with his longtime girlfriend -- the third in a string of gold diggers he had a tendency to hook up with -- and had been forced to move out of his home after it became contaminated with killer mold that gave him such a severe case of pneumonia that his doctor gave him two days to live. He was hooked on OxyContin and taking enough of the painkiller that he was convinced aliens were trying to abduct him. Mars was, in essence, a goner.

But then last fall, Mars found himself in a room with the rest of Motley Crue -- singer Vince Neil, bassist Nikki Sixx and drummer Tommy Lee -- something that hadn't happened for nearly four years. Inspired by a U.K. promoter's bring-back-the-Crue campaign, Crue manager Allen Kovac had been trying to put together a comeback tour. Getting the guys over their grudges would be the easy part compared to getting Mars in shape.

The guitarist has suffered most of his life from a congenital degenerative bone disease called ankylosing spondylitis, which has made the vertebrae in his spine gradually fuse together, preventing him from standing fully upright. By last fall, his condition had progressed to the point that he needed to have his right hip replaced -- a procedure that Kovac and Mars' bandmates convinced him to undergo. "I told him that it would be easier to get a superstar guitar player like Dave Navarro than to help him get better," says Kovac. "But we wanted to do this tour with him, or it wouldn't have been the real Motley Crue."

"He was so frail," says Neil. "Tommy and I had our doubts about whether he was going to be able to do this show. I think without the motivation of Motley, Mick would still be sitting in his house talking to the walls."

Instead, Mars is pulling down about half a million dollars a week on an eleven-week tour that has been extended for fifty-seven more shows through October. When promoters were first approached about the Red, White and Crue tour, they passed. So the band booked a dozen shows itself, which sold out so quickly that promoters came back with their tails between their legs, and the band was able to demand a much higher price. For half a million a week, it's easy to put aside your differences and behave yourselves.

Between the four of them, they've been married eleven times, fathered thirteen children, fraternized with hundreds of groupies and snorted, smoked, swallowed and shot up enough drugs to kill a small army. In the mid-Eighties, they liked to chop up the tranquilizer Halcion and mix it with cocaine for a living-zombie effect that predated Red Bull and vodka by more than a decade. They've been arrested for crimes as minor as speeding and as major as vehicular manslaughter (Neil's drunken-driving accident in 1984 killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Nicholas "Razzle" Dingley). The Eighties was their decade, and when it expired, so did the Crue's relevance. As Motley Crue's early-Nineties albums sold poorly, tensions within the band escalated to an all-time high, and Lee quit after a physical altercation with Neil at a Las Vegas airport.

It was only a matter of time, though, before the kind of Eighties nostalgia that has put leg warmers back on the market and New Wave back on the radio resuscitated Motley Crue. As comebacks go, this one is monstrous. Their recent greatest-hits collection, Red, White and Crue, generated a chart-topping new single, "If I Die Tomorrow." Their 2001 autobiography, The Dirt, is being adapted for a movie. This summer, Lee will release his third solo album and star in an NBC reality show, Tommy Lee Goes to College. Neil has a solo record planned for around the same time. Sixx will publish his autobiography, The Heroin Diaries, next year, and a new Crue album is in the works.

But their top priority is their reunion tour, which started in mid-February. At the tour's kickoff in Fort Lauderdale, nerves were running high. Motley Crue had never rehearsed the entire two-and-a-half-hour production -- which includes the requisite pyro, half-naked female contortionists and, of course, a midget -- but they had done one practice gig in Puerto Rico a couple of nights earlier. "It was like Sodom and Gomorrah backstage," Kovac tells me. I have a hard time picturing it: During the week I spend with the band, things are for the most part about as dangerous as a PTA meeting. Mars and Sixx are sober, and Neil is restricting his drinking to a few glasses of wine a night. With the exception of Lee, whose tour bus is stocked with a Jagermeister machine and whose dressing room is stocked with groupies, Motley Crue are no longer a gang bent on drugging and fucking their way across the country.

Except when they take the stage, they are the same old glorious Motley Crue, banging out "Shout at the Devil" and "Dr. Feelgood" to crowds that are equal parts aging mullet-heads, thirtysomething squares, young, tattooed rocker wanna-be's and slutty girls of all ages. By the time the Crue get to their sold-out show at Madison Square Garden two weeks into the tour, the kinks in the production have been smoothed out, and Sixx, Neil, Mars and Lee are having the time of their lives. Late in the show, Lee points a video camera at various girls in the audience, who happily lift their shirts on his cue. Prodded by Sixx, Lee then drops trou, whips out his dick, gives it a quick jiggle and busts up laughing.

"I was apprehensive before we started," says Lee. "I wondered, 'Does anybody care?' I'm blown away. Maybe I forgot how much people liked us."

It's four o'clock in the morning, and Lee has just finished spinning a blend of hard house music and techno at an Atlanta dance club on the Crue's night off. On a king-size bed in the club's back room, two or three girls desperate to catch Lee's eye pull down the tops of their dresses and roll around in a display of faux lesbianism usually reserved for Girls Gone Wild videos. "There just isn't any girl here tonight who I really wanna play with," he says at one point. "Play with" -- that's Lee's euphemism for getting laid.

By 6 a.m., the forty-two-year-old drummer has had enough. "I don't want all of these people on my bus," he tells his assistant. But when we climb on, there are already a few chicks waiting in the front lounge, so we head back to his bedroom and he closes the door. He doesn't have a girlfriend right now, and he says he's trying to make the most of the pleasures the road brings him. "You might not think this, but I'm really fucking picky about girls," he says. "On the road, hooking up is kind of like Burger King: You have it your way. You won't feel good about it afterward, but it will get the job done." In the five days I spend with Motley Crue, Lee gets the job done with at least three different girls, including one exotic-looking brunette from Miami whom he flew in -- first class, with her Chihuahua -- so he'd have someone to play with during a day off in Cleveland.

Lee was born in Athens, Greece, the first child of a mother, Vassilikki, a former Miss Greece, and a father, David, who was a sergeant in the Army and stationed abroad. They relocated to suburban Los Angeles shortly thereafter. Lee struggled with his grades but excelled in the high school drum corps. He was regarded among his peers as a "band fag," but if he was going to be an outsider, he figured at least he'd be the cool kind.

Lee is the youngest member of Motley Crue and the one who struggles most with his identity as a musician. He is, after all, the one with the most individual celebrity -- thanks in no small part to the home movie, leaked in 1997, of him getting eight different kinds of lucky with then-wife Pamela Anderson. When he pulls out his dick onstage, for a minute it's hard to tell who's the bigger star. (In his recent autobiography, Tommyland, his penis gets a speaking part as Lee's alter ego.) Still, Lee is aware of the danger of becoming a punch line. "There is a part of me that's like, 'I'm not Mr. Pamela Anderson, and I'm not Tommy from Motley Crue,' " he says. "Can't I just be Tommy?"

For a guy who served four months of jail time after Anderson accused him of domestic assault, Lee is more puppy dog than rooster: sweet, hyper, affectionate, eager to please. When I go to the front of the bus around 7 a.m., there are still three girls sitting there with their coats on, looking impatient. "Can you ask Taaahmmy to come say 'bye to us?" one of them drawls, trying to sound polite but coming off sour. I relay the message, and Lee sighs. "I'm tired. I just want to go to sleep," he says. But after a few minutes talking to the girls, during which time I hear the word play muttered back and forth half a dozen times, he returns to the back of the bus, leans in close and says, "OK, so get this: She said, 'I'm going to give you the most incredible blow job of your life, and then you can go to sleep.' " He chuckles his breathy laugh and licks his lips for the millionth time. Looking for approval, he asks, "How can I say no to that?"

The next day, the girl is gone (the blow job was merely "all right"), and Lee is in bed propped up on his elbows as the bus speeds from Atlanta to Greenville, South Carolina.

He shows me the tattoos on his wrists -- the names of his sons, Brandon and Dylan, written in their childlike scrawl with a Sharpie and then retraced by a tattoo artist. If only, he says wistfully, things could work out with Pamela.... These kids mean more to him than anything in the world, and she is their mother.... His voice trails off and his eyes fill with tears. He wags his finger at me and forces a laugh. "I'm not going to cry," he says. And, for now, he doesn't.

Three days into the tour, Mick Mars is spending his day off in Tampa hanging out in his hotel suite, playing guitar and watching a VH1 special featuring Patti LaBelle. He has a rolled-up towel stuffed in the crack under his door, but it's not to prevent a draft. He keeps it there for the same reason he puts a balled-up tissue in his peephole. He doesn't want anyone peering in. "This way when I go like this," he says, pulling away the tissue and placing a bright-blue eye over the hole, "they don't know I'm there." Hunched over, he strains his eyes upward to meet mine. Quietly, he adds, "I'm a freak, aren't I?"

Mars has always felt this way -- before the Crue, he was in a band called Vendetta that he found after he placed this ad in an L.A. paper: "Extraterrestrial guitarist available for any other aliens that want to conquer the Earth." These days, even when he's lounging in black sweat pants and a black thermal shirt that's three times too big for his five-foot-nothing frame, Mars resembles a sickly goth creature -- the gentle, friendly kind that you want to take home and nurse back to health. He's sparing with words, and when he does speak, it's usually to crack a self- deprecating joke. On the subject of finding a new girlfriend, he says, "I'm holding out for the right woman. I'm thinking about Angelina Jolie, but she is too young, too. How old is Charlize Theron?"

Mars, the oldest member of Motley Crue, was born Bob Alan Deal in Huntington, Indiana, in 1951. He started messing around with drugs -- trucker speed and the barbiturate Seconal, mostly -- when he was in his late teens, around the same time he got his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, Sharon, pregnant. (His oldest son, Les Paul, would be followed by two other children.) In the years since he was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, Mars has had on-again, off-again romances with a variety of different substances, but alcohol and pills have always been his favorites -- the only things that helped him forget the agony he was suffering.

"When I was on OxyContin," he says, "I was convinced cat women with cat faces were crawling all over me and trying to suffocate me and shit. And not cat women like Halle Berry, because that would have been kind of fun." Mars finally got off the pills in November. He has a "sober coach" on the road with him who gives him his daily meds -- anti-convulsives, anti-rejection pills for his titanium hip and anti-inflammatories.

It's all worth it to be back with the band that he never really considered broken up. "In my own Mick Mars world," he says, "I knew someday we would be back together. Tommy, Nikki and Vince will keep that larger-than-life beast going, and I'll keep the music part going. I'm not a young man anymore, but I'm not old enough to retire now."

Before Vince Neil's forty-fourth birthday in February, Sixx called the singer to see what he'd like as a gift. "I asked Vince if he has an iPod," says Sixx, who is desperately attached to his own 40-gig iPod, loaded with everything from the Rolling Stones to the Mars Volta. "He said the strangest thing -- he didn't really need an iPod. 'I don't listen to that much music,' he said."

Neil appeared in the first season of VH1's The Surreal Life, and underwent a Swan-like transformation (nose job, eye lift, cheek implants) for the network's Remaking Vince Neil earlier this year. It wasn't the first time he'd gone under the knife. The singer was raised in Compton, where he once got his face and chin slashed by a member of the Crips who wanted his ice cream money. He learned that the best way to defend himself from the hoodlums was to become one himself. Before he got kicked out of high school, Neil split his time among surfing, singing with his band, Rock Candy, smoking pot laced with angel dust and generally wreaking havoc.

Somehow, this guy who had his face sliced open on national television reveals the least on direct questioning. He is guarded, remote, even more unknowable than resident weirdo Mars. Maybe it's because he was the only one to be kicked out of the band (in 1994 he was replaced by singer John Corabi in hopes of giving the band an updated, grungier sound) and then rehired.

Neil has partnered up in a couple of sideline businesses, including a new line of Napa wines, a chain of Feelgoods restaurants, a new bar and bike shop at the Hard Rock in Vegas and a hangover pill called RU-21. "They all have to do with alcohol," he notes. His top priority, though, is Motley Crue. "Side businesses are side businesses," he says. "This is what I do. This is my love."

When I meet him at his hotel, he's eating a protein-heavy breakfast of eggs and bacon. He's been sticking to a vigorous workout regimen ever since Remaking wrapped last fall -- he dropped twenty pounds for the show. Neil has been remade and, in a way, reborn. He married his girlfriend of five years, Lia Gerardini, in January at a Las Vegas ceremony officiated by Surreal Life alum MC Hammer. The couple wrote their own vows, and after his, Neil began to weep. "I started crying, Tommy started crying and then Nikki started crying," he says. "All these big, tough guys, crying like babies."

Life at home in Vegas is quiet. He and Lia don't plan to have kids, he says, unless maybe they adopt -- "an underprivileged kid from Europe or something." They have two cocker spaniels, Cakes and Crackers, and that's enough for now. "Our babies are our dogs at home," he says, and, showing enthusiasm for the first time, pulls out his cell phone. "Want to see a photo? We have a full-time nanny that stays home and watches the kids -- I mean, the dogs. Yesterday morning they had omelets and jelly. For lunch they had pasta and roast chicken."

Nikki Sixx, whose past sexual exploits include shoving the headset of a hotel-room phone inside a groupie's hoo-ha and proceeding to call room service to place an order, recently had "the sex talk" with his fourteen-year-old son, Gunner. The forty-six-year-old bassist planned to start his speech in clinical terms, but as the oldest of his five children rolled his eyes, Sixx cut to the chase. "Dude, I've seen it all," he said. "If you're getting some pussy and you don't wrap that motherfucker, you are going to die. It's not like in the good old days. I used to sleep with everything. All I would do is get a shot of penicillin or something to get rid of the bugs." Gunner's eyes widened. "Bugs?!" he gasped.

"I don't know who was more freaked out, me or him," says Sixx, pulling the filter off his Nat Sherman mentholated cigarette. "I don't want to have a sex talk. I still feel like I'm fourteen myself!"

Sixx was born Franklin Carlton Feranna in San Jose, California, but legally changed his name to Nikki Sixx in 1980; he didn't want to have the same name as the father who had abandoned him. He lived with his maternal grandparents for much of his childhood, and they moved around a lot, stopping for brief periods in Mexico, Idaho and Texas. He was always the new kid in school and had a hard time fitting in. His identity came to be defined by the fact that he would never be like everybody else.

Aside from a few lines on his face and a few inches on his waist, Sixx looks much like he did in the early Eighties. His midnight-black hair juts high above his head, and his attire is a high-end version of what a teenage boy might pick up at Hot Topic: baggy jeans, chain wallet, Army fatigue shirt with the sleeves ripped off, black Chuck Taylors. But, same as his bandmates, the bass player has grown up, like it or not.

A couple of months ago, in the pages of this very magazine, Sixx said that he imagines that the music playing in hell would be something by Ashlee Simpson. Then he saw her on TV wearing a Motley Crue tee. "I feel sorry for her," he says. "Someone put her in that shirt. Someone wrote her songs for her. Someone did everything for her. You've got to be willing to make people hate you because you do something you believe in."

Despite his hatred for everything commercial, Sixx has an astutely commercial mind. Lately, he's been trying to figure out how to record a new Crue album that reconciles his evolving music interests with the old-school Crue sound that's made this tour such a success. "I know for sure that Motley Crue can change and grow," he says.

Still, there is the danger that a grown-up Motley Crue -- sans drugs, reckless sex and car crashes -- won't hold the same appeal for young record buyers who got turned on to the band by reading The Dirt. "I don't really give a shit," says Sixx, before his racing brain switches gears. "On the other hand, my psychotic personality is like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if we broke up on the road?' What do you think are the chances? These people, myself included, we're addicted to insanity. Sometimes when you're out here on the road, stealing a car doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Thank God they put me on Zoloft."

But as important as Motley Crue are to him, no rock & roll insanity will ever come between him and his sobriety. "When I found heroin, I found a way to kill the fucking confusion," he says. "You hide your secrets and how you feel about your dad not being there, how it felt to never have a mom send you a birthday card. How it felt to be a runaway, living in the back of someone else's car. You keep stuffing it down, but it was growing like cancer, and at one point it just took over. 'Do I want to be there or do I want to be here?' I want to be here. I never got to have a mom and dad. I get to be one. I'm getting to relive my own childhood through my own kids. This is right where I want to be, and if anyone is not happy with that, then fuck them."

[From Issue 974 — May 19, 2005]