By Martin Popoff
Infamous and gangly, tattooed and crude, Tommy Lee is back with a new record, this time the man dropping the Methods Of Mayhem tag and going with a name that needs no introduction. Lee backs it up, drops back and provides some background.
"Oh my God, you're asking me to critique my own record," laughs Lee, pausing in response to a question I figured wrongly was just an innocuous icebreaker. "Modern rock. The Methods Of Mayhem record for me was like a creative free for all. I was fresh out of the Crue and I just wanted to do everything. I'm such a fan of so many different styles of music so that's why that album turned out very eclectic from track to track, full on, tons of guest stars, just a creative free for all. This record, I didn't do that. When I started writing it, in September of 2000, I had just gotten off the Ozzfest with Methods Of Mayhem. I sort of locked myself up in my home studio here and started writing, and it's just where the music went. I just started writing stuff and that's the direction it went. It didn't sound like Methods. It's just a little more focused and it had a common thread running through all of the music; it wasn't so eclectic and that was the one of the reasons just to call it Tommy Lee. I sat there with my producer one day and he said 'Dude, why don't you just call this what it is?' And I'm like 'What are you talking about?' He goes, 'Why don't you just call it Tommy Lee?' And I was like, nah, I don't think so. I don't know if I want to do that. And the more I listened to him, and my manager, and people at the label, they all had a really good point. They were like, 'You've been in the business for twenty something years and everybody knows who you are, whether they like you or not, you know who Tommy Lee is. And I sat there, and I was like OK, and I thought, to not use your own name is kind of crazy. It's like, Methods Of Mayhem, you're starting over and trying to break some new thing. Why wouldn't you just use your name in an effort to help what you're trying to do? Magnify it. Use your name. And you know what? For me, I found that a little hard to swallow because I thought that sounds a little egotistical. I wasn't really feeling it. But the more I thought about it, it was like, you know what? These guys are right. They are absolutely f**king right. Why am I trying to... basically all the work that I put in for the last twenty something years, I'm basically throwing it down the f**king toilet, because I'm trying to create something new that no one has really heard of yet. Uh, not smart, dude (laughs)."
TOMMY LEE - Mayhem, No Method Page 2