Lemondrop

Last week, the Celebrity Memoir Book Club discussed Mötley Crüe's "The Dirt," and we're thrilled that Crüe frontman Vince Neil took time to talk to us about the book, being a businessman and rock n' roller,.

Neil has become quite the entrepreneur in the past few years. He owns two tattoo parlors, several nightclubs, has his own tequila brand and is starting his own air charter service. "So it's all the vices, basically," he says of his business ventures.

His fourth solo album, "Tattoos and Tequila" is due out in March, and he'll tour behind it next summer.

Did you ever think that almost a decade later, you'd still be talking about "The Dirt?" What do you think makes it such a "classic" in the celebrity-memoir genre?

Yeah, I'm surprised people still kinda talk about it. The one thing about this book was that we really opened ourselves up, and everything was very truthful. If you were an idiot, you don't gloss over it. You own up to it.

I like the way that the book was written. When there was an incident, everybody was there, but nobody saw it the same way -- which happens all the time. We just did some crazy stuff, and we're just really lucky to be alive after some of the stuff that we've done over the years.

We're really interested in the separate chapters. Was there anything that your bandmates revealed that surprised you when you read the final product?

I haven't read the book in so long. Yeah, I don't think anything really surprised me, though, except for maybe just different ways that [the rest of the band] saw things. Everything in it happened when we were there, but nothing anyone said surprised me.

Is there anything you wish you hadn't shared?

Nope. Not at all. When you do a book, you've gotta kind of lay everything out on the table, good or bad.

Is the movie version of "The Dirt" ever going to get made?

I guess it's just sitting on somebody's desk right now collecting dust. It's always been out of our hands. So if it happens, it's great. If it doesn't, [laughs] I'm not going to sit around and wait for the trailer to come out, you know.

One thing about [the movie], I never even agreed that the movie should be made because how can you really put those lives -- our lives and the stuff that we've done -- into a two-hour film? There's so much stuff. What do you leave out? What do you put in, and how do you actually capture it on film without it being rated X, really, because of all the excesses: girls and drugs and drinking and all that stuff? I'd rather you leave it to your imagination and picture it in your mind when you read the book. To me, that's cooler.

What's different about touring solo?

It's looser. It's a lot of fun because it's not so structured ... But my band, we just go out and we don't have a set list or anything.

We just go out that night and we sit down and we go, "Well, what do we want to play tonight?" And we throw down some songs and just go and play. It's everything from tons of cool cover songs and classic Mötley stuff and stuff from solo records and everything in between. You can't do that in Mötley. I just go out and have a lot of fun. It's fun being in Mötley, but this is a lot of fun too.

I enjoy playing the smaller places too. You never get a chance to do that in a band like Mötley Crüe. So I get kind of the best of both worlds.

Finally, we have to ask about the egg burrito. Who came up with the idea? Was it because showering would have given away that you were cheating on your girlfriends?

Yeah, because what would happen was that you would tell your girlfriend that you dropped your egg burrito in your lap. That was that. If you smelled like egg burrito it was good because you were eating it after the show, and you were fine.

How sad is this I can actually picture it right now, all of us doing that?