Behind the music: A weekly series celebrating music's untold stories, from band-splitting feuds to the greatest performances of all time.
Hair metal pioneers Hanoi Rocks were destined for stardom– until fate intervened. How did lead singer Michael Monroe carry on? He talks to Ian Winwood
Michael Monroe could have been famous had his friend not been killed by a rock star.On December 8 1984, Nicholas ‘Razzle’ Dingley, the drummer with Hanoi Rocks, was a passenger in an orange-red 72 Ford Pantera sports car driven by Vince Neil, the front man with Mötley Crüe, when Neil lost control on a stretch of road near Redondo Beach in California. The vehicle careered into the path of oncoming traffic and smashed into two other cars.
“Razzle was dead on arrival at the hospital,” says Monroe, who at the time was Hanoi Rocks’ singer. “He was all smashed up. I’m glad that I wasn’t there because I probably would have demanded to see him. It was our tour manager that went to identify him, and he never got over it. It was a nightmare for him to see his friend in that way. I went to see the body [at the undertaker] and he looked like a wax doll. I touched his shoulder and said, ‘Bye Razzle.’”
Vince Neil was driving at 65 mph in a 25 mphzone. On top of this, he was drunk; the sole reason for him being in the car in the first place was to stock up on booze for a party at his house that was hours away from entering its fourth day. As well as killing Neil's passenger, the collision left the occupants of one of the other cars with broken bones and permanent brain damage.
The crash, from which Vince Neil escaped with bruised ribs and minor facial injuries, was merely the first in a long line of violent and boozy incidents that have brought the singer to the attentions of various law enforcement agencies over the years. He was duly convicted of drunken driving and vehicular manslaughter, for which he served a scant 21 days in the Big House and paid $2.6 million in restitution to the injured parties. Speaking about the best-case-scenario handed down to him by Lady Justice, Neil described himself as “the OJ [Simpson] of rock’n’roll.”
“My world went to bits,” says Michael Monroe of the events of December 8. “It just shattered me. It was a horrible accident, really tragic, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody, especially the guy that was driving. I never blamed him. You can’t blame somebody for an accident.”
Not everyone in Hanoi Rocks was quite so forgiving. The band’s guitarist, Andy McCoy, said of the incident that “it was a crime. Not only did Razzle die, two young people got crippled… if he [Vince Neil] would have been a broke African-American guy, or a Latino, he would be doing life in San Quentin.He never apologised,… he’s made his bed, and now he’ll lie in it.”
But Neil seems all too conscious of how lucky he was. "I wrote a $2.5 million check for vehicular manslaughter when Razzle died," he said in 2005."I should have gone to prison. I definitely deserved to go to prison. But I did 30 days in jail and got laid and drank beer because that’s the power of cash. That’s f_____ up."
If there’s one thing on which everyone seems to agree, it’s that Hanoi Rocks were destined for stardom. Having attracted an audience in Britain and Japan, the band made their way to the United States in 1984 with a major label record deal and their faces on MTV. With American tastes in hard rock in the mid-1980s favouring groups with big choruses and even bigger hair, their timing was perfect.
Hanoi Rocks differed from the co*ck-rockers with whom they were bracketed in the fact that their music wasn’t complete crap. Prince may have declined the opportunity to produce their fourth album, Back To Mystery City, with the words “I don’t produce no white boys,” but the group’s melding of pop and rock was, at its best, a thing of panache. Tragedy, the first track from their first album, Bangkok Shocks, Saigon Shakes, Hanoi Rocks, is one of the finest songs from the period that most people have never heard.
Others agreed. Slash, the guitarist with Guns N’ Roses, had bought a ticket for their show in Los Angeles, while his own band would later re-issue the group’s first four albums on their own Uzi Suicide label. Chris Shifflett of the Foo Fighters described Hanoi Rocks as “one of the greatest bands that ever existed,” and claimed not to know whether he “would have fallen in love with playing guitar in a rock’n’roll band if I hadn’t discovered them in the eighth grade.” When Dave Grohl met Andy McCoy, he told him “I have met my first rock star.”
But the crash in Redondo Beach ended it all in an instant. Michael Monroe says that “the main thing for me was to stop Hanoi Rocks. Of course we could have continued, but maybe with the wrong guys. I have great memories of us as a great band that never sold out. We were a real street gang… and had we become big and famous, it wouldn’t have been the same.We decided to quit because we wanted to maintain our integrity and remember it as the fantastic band that it was.”
If Michael Monroe is at all troubled by thoughts of what might have been, he isn’t showing it. We're talkingin his dressing room at the 02 Academy in Islington, the kind of small-to-medium-sized club that has been his home for more than 30 years. With armour-piercing eyes and cheekbones like pinball-flippers, he speaks in scenic-route sentences that circulate like passages from Gravity’s Rainbow. Engulfed by laughter, he slaps a hand on his thigh and throws back his head at a whiplash angle. At all times he resembles a rock star as imagined by the Muppets.
When Monroe describes Hanoi Rocks as being “a street gang,” he isn’t kidding. During the group’s early tenure in Stockholm, the band slept in an underground bunker beneath a train station, whatever the weather. Each day they panhandled for change “to get enough money for a hamburger, or a bottle of wine so we could forget about our hunger.” They associated with refugees from Afghanistan who knew how to steal whole chickens from supermarkets. On the street, Monroe would see people shuffling home from work and think, "I’m never going to be a robot like that."
“I saw people working 9-to-5and thought to myself that I was never going to do that,” he says. “I wanted to maintain the enthusiasm I had as a kid and to be excited about stuff. I didn’t want to be a robot.”
With Hanoi Rocks in pieces, he moved to London and shared a flat in Notting Hill with Stiv Bators, the one-time front man with the Dead Boys and Lords Of The New Church. As if this weren’t lively enough, in time the pair were joined by Johnny Thunders after the guitarist’s wife had given her husband notice to quit. Monroe is surely pitching it a bit low when he says that “there was never a dull moment in that flat.”
His housemates were not exactly the homemaking types. Bators was an unpredictable presence who once accidentally hanged himself to death for four minutes onstage before being revived by his panicked band mates. Thunders was more reckless still. A heroin addict since his days with the New York Dolls, in London the guitarist led the charge in what are remembered as being some of the most drug-fuelled recording sessions in the city’s history. Both men are now dead.
But Stiv Bators and Johnny Thunders did do one thing for Michael Monroe: they convinced him to continue making music. Embarking on a life as a solo artist, he began collaborating with ‘Little’ Steven Van Zandt, at the time the erstwhile first lieutenant with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. His timing was metronomic in its perfection. In 1985, Monroe became a part of the cast of dozens that feature on Van Zandt’s best-known track, one of the finest and most joyous protest songs of the 1980s.
Released in 1985, Sun City by Artists United Against Apartheid took aim at the luxury resort of the same name at which artists such as Frank Sinatra, Queen, and Rod Stewart had performed live. Situated in the phony nation state of Bophuthatswana, Sun City provided sanctuary for artists wishing to perform in South Africa without appearing to have done so. Unwilling to allow his fellow musicians to escape on such a technicality, by way of opposition Steven Van Zandt cracked open his Filofax.
“It was fantastic,” the singer remembers. “Bruce Springsteen was a part of it. Miles Davis played the trumpet on the record. Bono was there, Peter Gabriel, Bob Geldof, Run DMC, Joey Ramone, Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, Pete Townshend, Hall & Oates, Jimmy Cliff, Bonnie Raitt…” – he laughs at the memory, throws back his head, slaps his knee – “…and I got to meet them all.
“I remember that the first time the video was shown was at the United Nations building, not on MTV,” he says. “I remember Jesse Jackson being there, and him giving a speech. It was like the United Nations of rock’n’roll, and I was proudly representing Finland.”
Michael Monroe also collaborated with Steven Van Zandt on the appropriately titled Dead, Jail Or Rock ‘N’ Roll. The leadoff single from the singer’s Not Fakin’ It album, released in 1989, the track was heard by one W. Axl Rose, from Guns N’ Roses, to whom the sentiment also applied. After the pair met for the first time in New York, Rose agreed to appear in the accompanying video. The clip, which featured the two singers dancing a tattooed tarantella, secured “a lot of new fans for me [Monroe] because he’s in a big band, but I hope in terms of street credibility that it worked both ways.”
This period represented Michael Monroe’s last shot at fame. But even with a major label behind him, the singer couldn’t resist the temptation to pour sand in his own gearbox. After complaining to PolyGram about a television advert for Not Fakin’ It that described him as “the brains behind Hanoi Rocks,” his piqued paymasters pulled not only the ad but all other support for the album as well. An onscreen appearance with the singer from the most talked-about band of the late 1980s wasn’t enough to save him, and the record barely charted.
“It might have been as big as Bon Jovi,” Monroe says. “But it wasn’t to be, so instead I decided to become more of a rarity.”
In other words, Michael Monroe decided to become more like Stiv Bators. A tireless advocate of the Dead Boys, the singer recalls driving around Los Angeles in Axl Rose’s car when the song Ain’t It Fun sprung forth from the speakers. Hearing it for the first time, Rose suggested that the two men record the track as a duet. Released in 1993, Guns N’ Roses’ sauntering version of the New York band’s master-class in nihilism would be the first and last time that Monroe cracked the US top 10.
“It was a magical experience,” he says. “I wanted the album [Guns N’ Roses “The Spaghetti Incident?”] to say that the song was in memory of Stiv Bators, and it did that.”
Twenty-seven years on, Guns N’ Roses have re-emerged as the kind of band that can fill the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium two times over with people that have paid up to £1,000 to see them. Four miles away, Michael Monroe is knockin’ ‘em bandy in a small club on Upper Street for 30 quid a pop. Like the song said: you pays your money, you takes your choice.
He sometimes hangs out with the Foo Fighters, who sometimes talk of offering him a support slot on a tour of the world’s largest venues. But then, “you know, the managers get involved and everything changes.” But he doesn’t really mind because popularity was never really the point. Throughout it all, Michael Monroe has retained possession of the one thing he values over everything else: his purity.
“No one can take away from me what I have,” he says. “I don’t do this for the money or the fame. I do it for the right reasons, which is never to compromise. All I want is to do things on my own terms.”
One Man Band by Michael Monroe is available through Silver Lining Music
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