The tragic story of how Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe accidentally killed a man
Half of the appeal behind Mötley Crüe has been more about their story than their actual music. Although they may have ushered in the hair metal movement out of The Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, their tales of debauchery in books like The Dirt painted a vivid picture of the burnouts they were on the road to becoming before hitting the big time. Just as they were about to headline some of the biggest tours in the world, their hard-partying ways started to take a darker turn.
Outside of Nikki Sixx’s nefarious heroin habit, every one of the members liked to enjoy a drink, two or ten on any evening. While they would do anything they wanted to chase that high throughout their career, one of their homecoming gigs in Los Angeles led to one of their favourite musicians ending up dead in a car.
After returning home from a show during the Shout at the Devil tour, singer Vince Neil brought down some of the members of Hanoi Rocks to the party, with drummer Razzle causing all kinds of mayhem by his side. Once the booze ran out, Neil figured they could swing by the liquor store to keep the good times rolling, peeling out of his huge house in his Pantera sports car with Razzle in tow.
Although the store was right around the corner, Neil would never return home that night, careening into the next lane and colliding head-on with a car in the opposite lane. While Neil walked away with a few bruises and broken bones, Razzle lay dead in the passenger seat beside him, dying almost instantly after the collision.
At first, the rest of the band didn’t realise what had happened, with Tommy Lee remembering in their Biography, “We just heard the sound of sirens, and we were just like ‘that can’t be them’. So we start running over, and we see the accident, and Vince is just sitting on the side of the road with his head in his hands, just crying. I looked around and saw one of Razzle’s sneakers in the middle of the road.”
After Razzle was pronounced dead, Neil was going to go on trial for manslaughter, with his blood alcohol level well over the legal limit. Although Neil got off after paying a hefty amount of money, he began to change his lifestyle, using the opportunity to get clean and sober as per his court orders. Then again, the clean living lifestyle wasn’t exactly going to go hand-in-hand with the world of Mötley Crüe.
Since the rest of the band had no intention of slowing down, they doubled down on some of their partying on Neil’s behalf, occasionally asking him to pass them their lines of coke before they went onstage. Sixx would look back on that era feeling for Neil in those situations, telling Behind the Music, “He was trying to be sober, and we’re just doing drugs right in front of him.”
If the band were to survive, that would mean them getting sober together. Cleaning up their act towards the end of the 1980s, they released one of their most successful with Dr Feelgood, which capped off their glorious era of excess. It’s easy to look back on the good times living in West Hollywood, but Neil seeing one of his friends die in his arms isn’t something a bottle of booze can make disappear.
