Motley Crue are notorious for their hard-partying lifestyle, so it’s no surprise that the band came up with clever ways to hide drugs from authorities while on tour.
“I never put it in or on my body,” drummer Tommy Lee explained during an interview on the Steve-O’s Wild Ride podcast, conducted last year but circulated again recently. Instead, he and the band had methods specific to their form of transportation.
If they were traveling by bus, Motley Crue would utilize a pop-top on the vehicle’s back ceiling which doubled as ventilation and an emergency exit: “As soon as we’d stop and pull into immigration, customs or whatever, we’d pop the top, go nice and slow, take everything, put it up on the roof of the bus and close the ventilation.”
According to Lee, this move kept the drugs hidden from authorities who came on board to search the vehicle. “Dogs, immigration dudes come through the bus, ‘Alright, all good. See you guys later.’ As soon as the fuckin’ bus door shut, boom, pop that up and pull it in.”
Motley Crue used a similar method when traveling by air. “On an airplane, you’ve got your headliner upholstery,” Lee explained, describing the fabric covering used on the ceiling of their plane. “We’d take fuckin’ cocaine, whatever it was, do as much as we could before we get there, whatever’s left we’d stick … above my seat, for some reason, there was a little fuckin’ rip in the headliner. So we’d fuckin’ get the fuckin’ bag of blow and just really crank it down as little as we could and fuckin’ just get it up inside the headliner, and put it back with a little piece of double-sided tape. And you couldn’t even tell.”
Again, the technique did the trick, as the narcotics successfully stayed hidden from customs officials – though he still had a fair share of stressful moments. Lee admitted he’d be “freaked out” whenever drug-sniffing dogs came on board, imagining one jumping on his lap to reach the hidden stash above his head.
Despite these fears, Motley Crue always managed to get off scot-free: “We pulled that off several times and never got busted.”
Watch Lee’s full interview with Steve-O in the video below.
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