A great many of you have emailed and Tweeted to me about the hypocritical nature of Motley Crue frontman
Vince Neil's DUI arrest this week. I'll get back to that in a moment, but folks who didn't listen to the
May 17 episode of "The Strip" didn't catch this exchange:
Friess: Since you said you don’t drink, when did you actually, finally stop?
Neil: Three years ago.
Friess: So you’ve been dry for three years?
Neil: Yeah.
Friess: In your videos and pictures online, you’re always in the picture with the glass.
Neil: Alcohol doesn’t bother me, being around it. I just choose not to drink. That’s really kind of it. When you stop, you stop. You don’t ask why. You’re just done with it.
Friess: What made you make that decision?
Neil: Because I was drinking too much of it. And I finally came to a point where I was done. I called my wife and said, I gotta go somewhere, I can’t this anymore. And that was it. It was a little over three years ago.
Friess: And you’d tried that before, right?
Neil: Yeah, I’d been in rehab, yeah.
Friess: So what was different?
Neil: When people put you in rehab, that’s one thing. When you want to go to rehab, that’s another thing. Usually you go to rehab b/c the family puts you there, your job, whatever…
Friess: Legal trouble…
Neil: Yeah, whatever, and then they hope that some of it sticks. But when in your mind you’re done, you’re done. This is the first time I actually wanted to go to rehab.
Friess: When you watch in the celebrity culture people like Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse, those sorts of people, do you understand what those other people go through? People who aren’t in the spotlight just watch people like Britney Spears and baffle over it. Do you get it? Do you have an empathy for those folks?
Neil: Yeah, like Lindsay Lohan came out of rehab and went right back to drinking because she didn’t want to be in rehab, she was put in rehab. She’s not going to stop drinking and doing drugs until she wants to. You can put these people away for a month or two months or three months, but they didn’t do it what he wanted to.It became a more memorable exchange after Sunday's arrest in Las Vegas, obviously, because the rocker and entrepreneur -- with a line of tequila and a collection of bars, no less -- had pledged full sobriety. Unless the cops have this one quite wrong, that was a lie.
But it's not that he continues to drink that ought to upset anybody. Alcoholism is a terrible disease and, like other addictions, it makes liars out of the best of us. And as we've learned from Steve Wynn and Daniel Lamarre and a few others I do not have the power to force interview subjects to tell the truth under oath.
What's shocking here, however, is that he would drink and
drive again, given that in 1984 he was drunk when he crashed a vehicle that left a passenger dead and two people in vegetative states. For that, he got a $2.5 million fine and 20 days in jail. You've got to be a pretty hard-core alcoholic to not keep such a horror front and center in your life.
But while listeners have reminded me of Neil's declarations in that interview, nobody has taken note of this part from later in the interview when we were discussing the tequila line:
Friess: Since you don't drink, how do you test new products?
Neil: I taste it. I have a sip of something to taste it. That's a different thing.
Friess: Typically people who are alcoholics say they can never again have a drop of alcohol, not even in food.
Neil: Yeah, those are people who are just Bible-thumpers. Both of my homes have full-stocked bars for people. I have no problem with it being around. I have no problem with my wife having a glass of wine at dinner and I don't or if I go to party. I was at an autism fundraiser the other nigth at the Sterling Club and you know, they hand you champagne, they hand you wine. It doesn't matter. I don't think about it. It doesn't matter to me.Did you get that? His version of "stopping" meant becoming a casual, if minimal, drinker. But it's not moralistic propaganda that makes alcoholics incapable of having even a modest amount, it's brain chemistry. He also avoids the question at the end there, reverting to whether it bothers him if others drink. That's not the point. I know many alcoholics who don't have any trouble being around alcohol.
Neil has rehabilitated himself as a smart and successful businessman, and that's great. But if he wants to enjoy that success -- and not kill any more people -- he's going to have to have a radical attitude adjustment.
Today would happen to be the day that a bunch of pieces I've been working on crash-land simultaneously:
* The Son Also Falls: Over at The Daily Beast, I take a look today at the inner workings of the Harry Reid-Rory Reid dynamic at this stage of the two-Reids-on-the-ticket political year. Rory Reid's mother-in-law provided an amazing opening anecdote and U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley wistfully wished she had dissuaded Rory from running.
