Motley Crue's Circus

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 Crüe'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 Mötley Crüe, 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 Mötley Crüe 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 Mötley Crüe,' " 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?"