Words for a Room Full of Strangers
Are we the same people we were forty years ago? Some thoughts on what Mötley Crüe can teach us about navigating a high school class reunion.
I graduated from Davis High School in Kaysville, Utah, in 1984. Late last month I traveled back to Utah for my 40-year class reunion at Oakridge Country Club in Farmington, where I had been asked to take ten minutes and “tell a story.” If you’ve read “We Shout at the Chat Room!,” a post of mine from January 2022, then you already know the story I told, but I framed it somewhat differently for the occasion.
Howdy, strangers!
I’m really glad to see you all, and I’m really glad I made it here. My partner Nicole and I were supposed to fly in from New York on Wednesday, spend a couple of days in Park City, take it easy, see some family, have a leisurely day today.
But then one of our pets got very sick at the beginning of the week, so we canceled the Park City part of the trip. And then he wasn’t getting better so we decided I’d have to come by myself while Nik stayed with Sugi, and then my flights yesterday got canceled because of Hurricane Helene, and I got rerouted and delayed, and I think I might have eaten something bad at the airport in Dallas, and I didn’t get in until really late last night, and I didn’t get nearly enough sleep.
But I made it. I’m here—and Nik is home at our place in Harlem taking care of a sick bunny—and I’m bummed because last Saturday she spent all day at the African hair salon up by 135th Street getting her braids redone, and she’d picked out clothes from when she was modeling full-time, and I was looking forward to strolling in here with her on my arm tonight.
But instead, it’s just me, and you can feel free to wonder whether she’s even real—if I made her up.
Which is totally something I might have done in high school.
But that’s kind of the point. We’re not in high school anymore. I’m a different person now than I was then, and I’d guess it’s the same for most if not all of us in this room. We’ve somehow been fortunate enough to survive forty years since graduation, and—while there are some threads of continuity—you don’t hit that milestone without changing in some way.
So I wasn’t just being colloquial a minute ago when I got up here and called you strangers. Because that’s what we are—a room full of strangers. There are probably people we’ve stayed in closer touch with over the years, so in some cases the changes might seem smaller and more gradual, but mostly what we’ve seen of each other over the years, if anything, are brief snapsnots, and the differences across those gaps are striking.
And that’s what I want to talk about. In a room full of strangers, it’s easy to fall back on the people we used to be, and it’s easy to want to fit the people around us into those same old molds too. (As an aside, I saw most of my siblings earlier today, and I’m telling you how true this is.) So, on an occasion like this one, it’s important to hang on to who we are now.
And that reminds me of a story, and of a great lesson I learned many years ago from an unlikely source, about holding on to the identity you’ve made for yourself.
But let me explain a little first.
When Keith [Quimby of the reunion committee] messaged me about the reunion, he asked me if I’d mind getting up here and telling a story.
I was like, “What kind of story—a story about high school?”
And Keith said, “No, it could be anything. You know, something profound and uplifting, in that way of yours.”
Now, I’m not sure profound and uplifting was ever really my brand, but it’s definitely not now, so I pushed back a little. I said, “Keith, I do sometimes get up on stage and tell stories, and I could do it, I maybe have an idea, but it might not be the kind of thing you’re looking for.”
And he said, “What kind of idea?”
And I was like, “I think I’d talk about Mötley Crüe.”
And Keith surprised me by saying, “That’s awesome! I met Tommy Lee when I worked at the Salt Palace. He was the nicest guy ever!”
And I said, “I met him too! That’s what’s my story’s about!”
So here we are.
Now, the other thing Keith said is, “But you do have to keep it PG-13.”
Well, the thing is, most of my stories are not PG-13, at least the way I tell them. But, you know, in a PG-13 movie, the Motion Picture Association will allow one single use of the F-word, as long as it comes in a non-sexual context. So I think I can make that restriction work. Let’s see how this goes.
I’ve been in web development for about thirty years now. Back in 1997, I worked for a startup called N2K Entertainment. We were a music company. We had a record label, an online CD store where you could order pretty much anything in print, and a few different genre-based websites that were meant to drive visitors to the CD store. I was the technical producer for the rock-oriented website, Rocktropolis.com.
At Rocktropolis we ran rock music news, contests, curated streaming radio, artist chats, and—coolest of all—live concert webcasts. Some of our live shows were simply streamed versions of special syndicated radio broadcasts, but more and more we began to arrange our own on-location webcasts. We would get a temporary DSL line installed in the venue—remember when DSL was cutting-edge technology?—lug our equipment over there, tap directly into the soundboard, and stream the feed out to users via RealAudio. Believe it or not, this was trailblazing stuff at the time.
We did some amazing shows. We did the Allman Brothers Band live from the Beacon Theater. We did a Halloween concert with the Cure live from Irving Plaza. My friend Andrew even got to travel up to Boston to do David Bowie’s fiftieth birthday show. But for me the most memorable by far was Mötley Crüe at Roseland Ballroom.
It was the release party for Generation Swine, which was supposed to be their big comeback album. For the weeks leading up to the show, we’d been running giveaways on Rocktropolis and debuting a new track from the album every day. But coolest of all, Andrew and I were bringing a couple of big laptops to the venue to facilitate the live online chat session we were doing before the show with the so-called “Terror Twins”—Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee.
We set up at a table in a balcony overlooking the club floor. About two hours to showtime, our chat room was teeming with fans who’d logged in for the unmoderated free-for-all. That’s when Nikki and Tommy ambled over to where we were sitting.
Now, between the kinds of jobs I’ve held, the writing I do, and just plain living in New York City, I’ve met my share of famous (and infamous) people. I met George Takei when he emceed the Hugo Awards ceremony in Yokohama. I talked with Big Bird on the set of Sesame Street, and also talked with Carroll Spinney, the man inside Big Bird. Nik and I even spent a weird afternoon trying to find a sick squirrel in Washington Square Park with Bernie Goetz, the subway vigilante who shot four young men in 1984. But that’s a different story.
None of those folks were anywhere near as charismatic and Nikki Sixx and Tommy Lee. I mean, those two looked like rock stars—tall, muscular, slim, heavily tattooed, dressed in white T-shirts, black jeans, cowboy hats, and boots that had to cost thousands of dollars—but that wasn’t the main thing. When they shook our hands and introduced themselves, they weren’t at all intimidating. They put us instantly at ease. I know they haven’t always been exactly what you’d call exemplary humans beings, but with us they came across as the nicest, humblest, most charming guys in the world.
We sat them down in front of the laptops. I ended up between Nikki and Tommy, with Andrew on Nikki’s far side. It was a weird moment for me, sitting there flanked by two rock gods. Look, I didn’t listen to Mötley Crüe in high school. Hair metal scared me. I wasn’t allowed to listen to freaking Spandau Ballet at home, let alone any band with fake umlauts in their name. Rock music just wasn’t permitted at my house. I remember back when we were in junior high, someone in some class was taking a poll what people’s favorite bands were, and I said the Utah Symphony. I didn’t know any better. And now there I was, sitting between two guys who, between them, had already married three Playboy Playmates. Not something I ever would have predicted as a teenager.
“So, do we just jump in and start?” Nikki asks us, watching the chatter scroll by on his laptop.
“You’re both logged in,” Andrew says. “Any time you’re ready.”
Nikki starts typing. I’m watching Tommy’s screen, and I see Nikki’s first comment appear:
Hey chuckleheads!
(Only, you know, he didn’t type “chuckleheads.”)
I guess I laughed because Nikki turned to me and said, in all earnestness, “Insults and profanity are the entire basis of our relationship with our fans.”
I don’t know what I expected, but I hadn’t expected him to be quite so cogent and self-aware. That’s when Tommy, who’d been pecking with two fingers at his keyboard, leans past me.
“Hey, Nikki!” he says, sounding delighted. “I just typed Fudge!”
(Except he didn’t say … you get it.)
For the next forty-five minutes, as they shot the virtual breeze with their fans, answering questions, bantering, talking up the new album and tour, this was the dynamic I saw in play—one guy very canny, focused on reinforcing the Mötley Crüe brand and pursuing what these days we’d call their social media strategy, and the other one overjoyed just to get to be there and to be who he is.
But then it was time for them to sign off and get in wardrobe for the show. Nikki got up to go, but Tommy wasn’t ready to leave yet. “I’ll be down in a few minutes,” he said. He was having a heck of a good time chatting.
Fifteen minutes later, Tommy was still there, and things in the chat room were taking an unpleasant turn. Someone in there—and these days we’d call him a troll—had been saying for some time that Tommy and Nikki were not who they claimed to be, and now he was urging everyone else to stop chatting. Tommy was obviously distressed, and he turned to me in consternation.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked me. “This jerk’s telling everyone I’m not Tommy Lee.”
This guy beside me, whose name at birth was Thomas Bass, had worked so hard and so consciously to make himself into a new person, into a famous and successful rock star, and now here’s some online jackfruit trying to put him back in the box and tell him he’s not that person, not the person he knows himself to be. And this guy, this rock star, is looking to me for advice!
“What do I do? How do I prove I’m Tommy Lee?”
Technically, Andrew and I were there for technical support, not moral support, but of course I wanted to help. This was so far outside my realm of experience, though, that all I could do was cough up the first dumb thing that came into my head. “I guess you say something only Tommy Lee would say.”
Tommy frowned, thinking, then bent back to the keyboard and typed:
Step off I AM Tommy Lee!
(Except he didn’t … yeah.)
And that actually seemed to do the trick.
Well, eventually someone from the band’s management came upstairs to the balcony and insisted that Tommy get down to his dressing room. He hugged both Andrew and me and went on his merry way. Next time I saw him, he was on stage pounding his giant drum kit in a leather diaper.
It was a fun enough show, but the music was not the highlight of the evening for me. The highlight of the evening, which I’ve never forgotten, was that indelible moment when I saw one of the most recognizable stars in rock music wrestle with doubt—other people’s doubt, self-doubt—and assert who he wanted to be, who he knew himself to be.
So now, whenever I’m in a similar situation—when someone doubts me, or tries to put me in a box, or doesn’t believe I can do or even be what I say I can or am—I think back to that moment, and I say:
“Step off! I am Tommy Lee!”
And tonight, while we’re celebrating the passage of these forty short years, I hope we all remember who we used to be, I hope we all remember who we are now, I hope we remember that tonight it’s okay to talk to the strangers—
And most of all, I hope tonight we’re all Tommy Lee. ∅
Update: Because so many people are asking, yes, Sugi has recovered nicely!
When it was announced that I’d be telling a story at the reunion, some folks assumed it would be the one they saw on the local news back in 1987. For that story, check out my memoir, The Accidental Terrorist: Confessions of a Reluctant Missionary. It’s available from all the usual sources online, though I would encourage you to order it either from your local independent bookstore or from Bookshop.org.
What Scott said: I hope Sugi is alright. And you know what they say: the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Personal example: last year, while travelling to the total solar eclipse in Exmouth, Western Australia, my sister and I had to scramble to get out of Broome because of an incoming Category 5 Cyclone.
Great story, take care!
Great story, Bill! Also: Hope your pet is okay. Also: Your partner is, indeed, lovely and does not appear to be photoshopped in there.