Whoa! Tommy Lee is a charmer
The Motley Crue drummer has, shall we say, a reputation built on years of hard rocking and hard living, his celebrity marriages to Heather Locklear and Pamela Anderson, the time he spent in prison for hitting Anderson, and the sex tape of the pair that ended up in rather wide distribution.
So he's the perfect guy to send to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln to find out, at the age of 42, what academic life is all about in NBC's new comedy/reality series "Tommy Lee Goes to College."
"I got a recording contract at 17, my senior year of high school. I basically left high school and started touring around the world and never got to experience college," Lee said during a telephone interview with TV critics. "When this opportunity arose, I was like, 'You know what? I want to go check that out. . . . I feel like I got slightly robbed of that experience. Not robbed. I just didn't get a chance to."
Lee showed up in Lincoln about a week into the fall 2004 semester and caused the stir you might expect when a rock star comes to town. But he stayed for four months, attending classes, finding a roommate and — somewhat surprisingly — actually making an effort to learn something while working on the TV show.
Imagine, if you will, Tommy Lee sitting in chemistry or math or botany. The situations are obviously contrived, but he comes off as utterly genuine when he's repeating, "Please don't call on me, please don't call on me" as his class is led outside by the botany professor and asked to identify various plants.
Of course, he does get called on. And he doesn't have a clue. But the next time that happens, you can feel his sense of personal accomplishment when he comes up with a correct answer.
And it's amusing to see Lee — a world-renowned drummer — try out for the Nebraska Cornhusker marching band. To see the look on his face when he's told that drinking, smoking and swearing won't be tolerated. And the look on his face when he discovers how hard it is to switch gears from playing the drums for a heavy-metal band to playing in a marching-band drumline.
"It's a completely different animal than a normal drum set. Playing-wise and stylistically, they're two different beasts," Lee said. "I had played the quad toms in high school, but it . . . it's been awhile since I've done that. And, of course, in the show they dramatically draw it out a little bit more than it actually was, but it certainly was difficult.
"I haven't read sheet music since high school, so it took me a couple of days to refresh my memory. . . . I wasn't prepared when they dropped that bomb on me, so I was, like, 'Uh-oh.' "
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