Tommy Lee: The Ride : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The old question about Tommy Lee -- "How'd he score with Pamela Anderson?" -- was answered to everyone's satisfaction with the leak of their home videotapes. Now there's a new question: Why on earth has he put out three solo albums? Tommyland, like his previous solo work, is competent and dull -- two adjectives rarely applied to Lee's tenure as Motley Crue's drummer. The record is larded both with celebrity guest stars (the vocalists include Good Charlotte's Joel Madden and Backstreet Boys' Nick Carter) and complaints about how hard it is to be famous. The chorus of "Tired" goes, "Tommy got tired of Pamela/Ed got tired of Salma"; it's meant to be a complaint about how hard monogamy is, but it just comes off as name-dropping. Musically, the album hopscotches between pastiches of the Beatles and pastiches of Alice in Chains -- it would be the most blatantly derivative album of 2005 if Oasis hadn't already released a record this year.