Well, of course we reeked - Razzle had been holding a party’s worth of liquor in his lap.” Later I’d hear the cop saying something about how bad we reeked. “There were broken booze bottles everywhere. The impact of the crash threw him into Neil’s lap. That car struck the passenger side of Neil’s car, where Dingley was sitting with all the booze. “The next thing I knew a pair of headlights appeared at the crest of the hill and was bearing down on us - a white Volkswagen driven by an eighteen-year-old girl. Neil said his car lost its grip on the asphalt and he began sliding sideways while another car began drifting into the oncoming lane. My blood level would later test at nearly twice the legal limit,' Neil wrote. “According to a police report, I swerved to avoid a parked fire truck.

He said a wet fog leaves the streets “slick during most evenings,” which led to his tires breaking their grip on the wet pavement, as he claimed in his book. It was dark out by then, Neil explained in his book, and as he rounded a curve leading to a hill, he downshifted. “We were driving along, chatting about this and that, two long-haired guys out on a booze run, me in my customary Hawaiian shirt and shorts, Razzle in his high-tops, leather jeans, and frilly shirt,' he wrote. Because the car didn’t have a backseat, Razzle was holding all the alcohol in his lap. So, he and Dingley got into the car and they made it to the liquor store safely where they bought hundreds of dollars’ worth of alcohol before heading back to Neil’s house. “I’d been driving drunk for about as long as I’d been driving. “We’d drive the four blocks to the store, get some supplies, be back home in a flash,” he wrote. He claimed he didn’t see a problem with his state of mind. He had just bought a new car, a bright red vintage ‘72 Ford De Tomaso Pantera, which he was excited to drive. “I could have walked there, but I’d been partying for three straight days, you know - walking there was out of the question, too much reality to deal with, if you know what I mean,” Neil wrote.

So, around dusk, Dingley and Neil decided to go for a booze run to the liquor store, located just four blocks away. During the third day, despite the “seemingly never-dwindling pile of coke,” they ran out of alcohol. On December 8, Neil was having a party with some friends in the apartment, a party he wrote lasted for days. In Neil’s 2010 book, “Tattoos & Tequila: To Hell and Back with One of Rock's Most Notorious Frontmen,” he described the incident. He only served 15 days of his 30 day sentence. Two years after the crash, Neil was sentenced to 30 days in jail, 200 hours of community service, and to pay $2.6 million in restitution to the victims of the crash. Neil’s blood alcohol level was 0.17, well above the limit.

Vince Neil, Mötley Crüe’s lead vocalist, has been arrested and convicted of multiple crimes, but none as tragic as his manslaughter conviction for killing his friend Nicholas 'Razzle' Dingley, drummer of the Finnish band Hanoi Rocks, in a drunk driving accident in 1984. This shocking and sad aspect of Mötley Crüe's story is chronicled in “The Dirt,” the biographical drama film about them which began streaming earlier this year on Netflix. Hanoi Rocks continue on with a small cult following and Razzle has become a sad footnote in the history of heavy metal.Mötley Crüe is one of the most iconic metal bands of all time, but the band's path toward fame wasn't always an easy one - there was some extremely dark moments during their rock days, including when the lead singer accidentally killed someone. He would eventually reunite with his former band members in the 1990’s and 2000’s, but the music landscape was a lot different than those hard rock and metal glory days of the 1980s. Vince Neil would depart the band to go solo in the 1990s. Feelgood was the band’s last massive hit going multi-platinum in the United States. In time, like other hard rock bands, heavy metal music oversaturation, the arrival of grunge rock, and changing 1990s tastes led to these legendary bands of the 1980’s fade from the forefront of the music scene.ġ989’s Dr. 1985’s Theatre of Pain and 1987’s Girls, Girls, Girls, were megahit albums for the hard rock quartet. The accident did relatively nothing to hurt the band’s commercial success. Motley Crue would continue to hold its place as one of the premier metal bands of the 1980s. Neil would run into other troubles with the law over the years including several DUI issues. In recent interviews, Vince Neil expressed great remorse over the incident and even suggested that he deserved to spend time in prison for what he had done.

Neil’s blood-alcohol level was 0.17, significantly higher than the legal limit in the state of California, which led to being charged with vehicular manslaughter.

Raz hanoi rocks