Before joining Tom’s Hardware, I wrote a book called Bang Your Head, where I tried to penetrate the world of heavy metal. To this day, I’m still having nightmares about having to deal with the hair bands. I still go to the metal websites, like blabbermouth.net, and metalsludge.com, from time to time to see what’s going on in the music business, before it completely goes out of business, and of course saw the news that Motley Crue were suing Tommy Lee’s manager for $20 million.

The charges? “Self dealing,” and trying to “divert revenue from [the band]…” Yet the really funny charges of the suit is the band claiming Lee’s manager “engaged” the drummer “in ‘reality’ projects that were bad career moves” that hurt “the Motley Crue brand and Lee’s own image,” further adding the show Tommy Lee Goes to College made Lee look “incoherent, lazy and incompetent.”

This is truly a hair band at its finest, suing your manager for making you look dumb. The bands I wrote about often have a self-important leader who really makes the decisions, like Axl Rose, Gene Simmons, or Motley’s bassist and founder Nikki Sixx, yet whenever a stupid move is made, the management screwed it up, the record company dropped the ball, blame flies everywhere. Yet it’s hard to convince people someone else made a boneheaded decision when you’re convinced you’re smarter than everyone else in the music business, and you’re really the one calling the shots.

In his autobiography, Where Did I Go Right, manager / producer Bernie Brillstein recalled when Garry Shandling, then in his prime with the Larry Sanders Show, sued Brillstein’s firm and painted himself “as an innocent comedian who’s been taken advantage of by an unscrupulous manager.” “Come on,” Brillstein scoffed. “Does Garry truly expect anyone to believe that he of all people could be so easily taken in?” Brillstein’s partner, Brad Grey, told the press, “This notion of a poor guy who was out there on his own is crazy. And the notion that the guy who creates the most intelligent half-hour on the inner workings of television doesn’t get it, well, you just can’t have it both ways.”

Writing on Yahoo! Music, Lyndsey Parker also hit it right on the head. Tommy Lee’s manager didn’t advise Vince Neil to be the grand marshal at the World’s Largest Chicken Dance at a Cincinnati Oktoberfest. Nor did Lee’s manager make Neil “undergo an Extreme Makeover like transformation on the VH1 reality show Remaking (only to regain all his excess weight and wrinkles in record time).”

And as recently reported on tmz.com, Neil just launched his own tequila company, despite the fact he killed the drummer of the band Hanoi Rocks while he was driving drunk (nor did the band give much thought about calling one of their greatest hits box sets “Music to Crash Your Car To”).

As far as the charges of making Lee look “incoherent, lazy and incompetent,” Parker also made a good case for the band doing a good job of that themselves with their over-rated, smoke and mirrors autobiography The Dirt, and Lee’s autobiography, Tommyland “featuring entire chapters told from the point of view of, um, Tommy’s most famous body part…” Was any of this the fault of Lee’s manager?

In a rare display of candor, or reality, for a hair band, Poison guitarist C.C. DeVille once told Guitar World why the band really fell apart, not blaming managers, the label, grunge, the janitor down the hall, or anyone else within spitting distance. “You look back, and you realize we were a bunch of spoiled f*cking brats,” he said. “How dare we complain? I had everything, and I just didn’t see it. It’s embarrassing that we could be so childish. We were clearing a hundred grand a night doing what we loved, and we argued constantly about pissy stuff. They should hand everyone who enters Hollywood an owner’s manual for real life. We certainly could have used it.”