When I got out of jail, I planned to leave the Crüe because, after twenty years of the same thing, I had to do something else as soon as possible.

I wanted to go everywhere that no one expected me to go. I thought about my next move every day I was in jail. I had so much to say and I was gonna fucking rock it. Sitting in there, with nothing but time on my hands, a million melodies and lyrics came to my head, which, as noted before, I recorded on my home answering machine after a friend set it up to accept collect calls. My bills were fucking insane.

Nikki came to visit me in jail and talked to me while I was behind glass in shackles. Nikki and Mick were the only two bandmates who came to visit me. I told him right then, before I was even released to do the final Mötley tour, that I was leaving. When I first told Nikki, he looked at me like I was on crack. I couldn’t expect him to get it—he wasn’t sitting around, alone, thinking about his life for four months. As I explained it, he began to understand. He could see that I had a lot on my mind and that I had to work it out on my own.

I agreed to do Mötley Crüe’s Greatest Hits tour, but I told Nikki that I planned to bring my portable studio with me. When the tour was over, I was going to do a solo project. Every night after our gig I went back to my room and stayed up until three or four in the morning working on music.

I wrote a phrase that became my motto, and it goes something like this: “Music never talks back to me, music never argues with me, music is my best friend, music doesn’t put me in jail unless I get naked onstage, music makes me happy, and music makes me sad only when I want it to. Music is my memory, and music is my wife. Music is my life partner, the only one who will never ever leave me.” It’s true. I make music—it’s my language, it’s the best way I know how to say what I want to say.

After the Mötley Greatest Hits tour, my new sonic assault was ready and so was I. I pulled in all the shit I was listening to and loving. Methods of Mayhem was a creative free-for-all—something that I’d been dying to do. It was time to mix it up. Fuck, I’m a drummer, I love everything with a beat, from Earth, Wind & Fire to DJ Shadow, from Josh Wink to the Beastie Boys to Rage Against the Machine, from the Wu to DMX. And there’s more, of course. I could go on for days. I wanted to do something different and my motivation was music that inspired me from all genres.

I was free now and on my own to mix it all up—rock, hip-hop, techno, industrial—fucking rhythm for days. Some people just weren’t ready. To them, I was an eighties rock drummer turned wigger. I didn’t grow up in the ’hood, I wasn’t in a gang, I didn’t sling rocks on the block. Never said I did. Why does singing with rhythm and loving hip-hop mean I’m trying to be all gangsta? Fuck off, y’all. Whatever. Really, truly, honestly, I’ve got no interest in being involved with anything unless I love it. Listen to “Welcome to Planet Boom,” which came out in 1994 on the Mötley album Quarternary. I was already fucking with hip-hop beats and rhythmic vocals back then. I’ve been rocking samples, video, retarded drum spectacles, and whatever took shit to the next level for years.

Methods of Mayhem was a completely natural evolution for me. I didn’t care if I fell flat on my face, I did what I was feeling. I had been a fan of everything from the Beastie Boys to Nine Inch Nails for far too long. Rock and hip-hop together have always been so cool, I had to fuck with it. Dance music was kicking my ass too. And I finally had the chance to mix it up. I can play piano, I can play guitar, but first and last I’m a drummer. Hip-hop, if you ask me, is the verbalization of rhythm. It’s like playing drums with the English language. Why wouldn’t I mess with that? Why wouldn’t I make something funky?

I argued that point in every interview I did after the Methods album came out in 1999. But it was hard for many people, after seeing me play drums in a rock band for so long, to see me up front singing, playing guitar, and making music that didn’t sound like Mötley Crüe. There were journalists who just went for it to the point that I had to say, “Look, I’m not going to fight with you, but you’ve got to realize who I am. I’m a drummer; I’m moved by beats. My whole world revolves around rhythm. How can I not write music that is founded on that?” Everything I do, I do to a beat, whether it’s playing guitar, driving my car, or making up a new handshake with my kids. N!%%@, please, I’m a rhythm man.

At the same time, I love melody, and when I write songs they’re also all about melody in one way or another. Aside from the first Mötley record, which was all Nikki, I did a majority of the songwriting with him. Most of the hits that people know us for are due in part to me. And as rock as Mötley ever got, there was always a melody in there. I grew up with Cheap Trick, and if you want to hear melody and rhythm and pop you can’t deny, listen to them, right now. That power pop tradition had a huge effect on Mötley and the way I approach a song.

After working with the same three guys for more than twenty years, I couldn’t wait to collaborate with other artists. I wasn’t going to fuck around: I contacted every artist I wanted to work with directly. I assembled Tommy’s roster of all-stars: U God of Wu-Tang Clan; Lil’ Kim, the nastiest girl in the world; my man DJ Mix Master Mike; George Clinton; the Crystal Method; and the F.I.L.T.H.E.E. Immigrants, an L.A. underground rap group y’all need to check out. I just thought, “Fuck, I’m going to make a crazy new record. We’ll figure out what it is when it’s done.”

Methods of Mayhem was a huge test, and it was a test I passed, a test which made me stronger. No matter what the critics or the fans who didn’t like the album have said, I think it was probably the best work I’ve done. I stand by it fully and a lot of the hip-hop peeps I’ve met said they dug it too. And that was a huge compliment.

People who like to be spoon-fed would be confused, but I did not care. There’s a track called “Metamorphosis” that lays it all out. I wrote it in jail, and it was a turning point in my life. I wanted to write a song about how things change from one form to another: seeds to flowers, love to children, babies to adults, songs to memories, marriage to devotion, guilt to blame, and how I could be a son to my father and a father to my sons. When I sang those words all the changes I made in jail made sense.

There’s also a track called “Anger Management,” and the inspiration there is obvious. The song “New Skin” was my farewell to the shitty parts of my past that dragged me down. Here’s the chorus: “Like a snake shed my skin leave my past where I’ve been... Can you feel what I feel?... To hold on must be killed don’t cry over what’s been spilled... Can u feel what I feel?” Methods was my experiment, my Frankenstein.

I expected some fans to not get it at all. There are always those people who want their favorite artists to keep making their favorite album over and over again. After prison, I gave less of a fuck about that than ever. It was cathartic for me to write those songs because I took the lessons I’d learned in jail and put them out there for everyone to hear.

What I wasn’t ready for was the reality of dropping back into the music circus while I was on probation. There I was, touring with my band, playing our new shit, and getting drug tested every single day on tour. When we rolled into town, there’d be a taxi or limo waiting for me at the hotel that took me to the nearest clinic where I would pee in a cup while a nurse watched. That cup of urine would be shipped back to Los Angeles for analysis—and if they found a trace of anything, I was going back to my studio apartment at County, L.A.’s premier correctional living facility. It wasn’t the way I was used to touring. Plus, I’ve never been a pee-on-command kind of guy—except when playing fireman. Living on a bus with the maniacs in my band, who partied every single night, wasn’t easy. They’d forget that I couldn’t be around huge clouds of weed smoke and more booze than Daytona Beach at spring break. Headlining our own Methods of Mayhem tour was hard, but it was nothing compared to the summer we spent on Ozzfest. Every single person and every fucking place I looked was WASTED.

I got off that tour without getting into trouble and there’s only one reason for that: music. I had a full portable studio built into the back suite of my tour bus. We ripped everything out to fit all the equipment in. It was Tommy’s Nest, Tommy’s Happy Place—and I needed to go there the second I was offstage to hide from all of the debauchery around me. I’d spend most of my nights after those shows back in my room or on the bus making music.

My life being my life, things were never straightforward, even when it seemed like everything was in line. A major trademark lawsuit arose after the album came out and we were on tour. Of course it did. A company called TT Sounds Good put out some sample CD Methods of Mayhem that producers use for loops and special effects in the studio. They sued me, claiming I stole their title. Dude, I’ve had the word “mayhem” tattooed on my stomach since back when those cats were still shittin’ yellow.

It’s good that I’m a Libra, because Libras are able to see both sides of a situation. For the astrologically unaware, the Libra symbol is the justice scales. Anyway, I could see where TT was coming from, getting all sue-happy, seeing dollar signs everywhere. Sorry, that’s just my opinion. I’ll let you decide. Trademark law—I know a fuck of a lot about it now—dictates that if you release something like an album or a book, you have a trademark over that name for the body of work. Seems to me like a collection of samples and sounds isn’t exactly thematic. It’s a collection of sounds and special effects—we’re not talking Led Zeppelin IV. Anyway, the record company lawyers settled without my authorization—because they didn’t need it—but I was told by a juror that if the case had gone to a jury we would have won. During a recess toward the end of the proceedings, I was sitting in a restaurant in New York with the lawyers from my record company, going on about how we can win, when all of a sudden I see one of the team go over and shake hands with the guy who was suing me. The record company lawyer—someone supposedly on my side—just cut a deal to hand the other side a shitload of money. I almost started slugging my legal team right there over their fucking overpriced entrées. They probably billed me for those too.

Losing when I knew we could have won wasn’t the end of the insults of course. My record company at the time, MCA, pretty much went out of business. In the late nineties, all the labels were folded into massive conglomerates that control almost all the music that is put out today. It happened fast, people were fired, no one gave a fuck about the stuff or a lot of the artists, and when the lights were shut off at MCA, guess who got slapped with the lawyers’ bill in the summer of 2003? Yep. Whatever. I’m glad I had a cold bottle of Jäger on hand that morning. As a famous German philosopher* once said, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”