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 Mötley Crüe 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 Mötley Crüe — 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, Crüe 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 Mötley Crüe."

"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.