Tommy Lee has described how he made the call to check into rehab after he once attempted to inject whiskey into his veins back in the late 1980s.
During an interview for the Armchair Expert podcast on Wednesday, the drummer recalled how he and his Mötley Crüe bandmate, Nikki Sixx, tried to inject themselves with alcohol when they ran out of heroin amid a stay at a hotel in 1989.
The pair was dubbed the “Terror Twins” at the time.
“(We) filled up the cap with Jack (Daniel’s) and then pulled a couple syringes, and were shooting Jack Daniel’s,” he told host Dax Shepard. “It was at that moment where I went, ‘OK, what is happening? We could just drink this, but we’re shooting it. This is f**king wrong. And somebody’s going to die. That is when I realised.”
Lee went on to recount how he could “taste” the alcohol as he was injecting it, adding: “You could taste it, like you taste heroin.”
The rocker also remembered how he and his fellow Mötley Crüe bandmates, guitarist Mick Mars and vocalist Vince Neil, made the joint decision to go to separate rehabilitation centres – and hired a “band therapist” to help them stay clean.
“We’d all get together and talk about how everybody’s dealing with this new arrangement,” the 63-year-old continued. “Then, that opens up a whole other thing. Once you start getting into therapy with the people that you work with that are also going through the same thing, you’re learning all these other things about them and all of a sudden, it’s becoming really complicated at the same time.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Lee confessed that he still struggles with drinking.
“I think three years is the longest I’ve done,” he admitted. “I get so excited that I’m like, ‘Oh my God, dude, I’ve been sober for a year,’ and I celebrate. That’s the f**king problem.”
