Just five songs deep into Motley Crue’s kick-off reunion show, Tommy Lee exited the stage letting the fans know he recently had broken four ribs. As the tour has tracked on, Lee has only been able to play three or four songs a night, with Ozzy Osbourne drummer, Tommy Clufetos, taking over the rest of the set.
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Lee has continued performing against his doctor’s orders with bandmate Nikki Sixx praising the drummer for his efforts. “The fact that Tommy was told by the doctor to not play with 4 broken ribs & he beasted [a portion of] our show is a miracle,” the bassist wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “We are a band and are proud of his strength. He is doing the whole tour and day by day adding more songs. What a f**king animal. Anybody out there ever break ur ribs?”
Speculation as to how the drummer broke his ribs has been floating around since the kick-off show where Lee said “I wish I had a f**kin’ badass story like me and Connor McGregor f**kin’ scrapping out in some f**kin’ bar or something, but I don’t.”
Fans can rest easy knowing the actual story, thanks to Lee’s wife, Brittany Furlan, who finally explained the cause on a new Snapchat video transcribed by Blabbermouth.
“Everyone keeps asking how Tommy broke his ribs, so I’m just gonna tell you,” she said. “We were staying at an old rental house in Nashville. It was a cool, old quirky house. But the stairs outside were made out of stones, and they were really uneven, and the roots were pushing them up from the tree.”
She continued, “I actually fell up the stairs a few times getting groceries, but whatever. So, the day that we were leaving Nashville, our driver came and we had all this luggage and he wasn’t helping us; he just stayed in the car. And so Tommy was trying to carry all of our luggage for us. And he fell down these crazy stairs and broke—broke—four ribs. Not fractured, not bruised—broke.”
She then went on to say that despite the accident, Lee immediately went to rehearsals for the reunion tour in Pennslyvania.
“And it was crazy, ’cause I came out and he couldn’t breathe. It was really scary. He was on the ground [and] he was gasping for air. And he got on a plane that day still and went and did the rest of rehearsals [for the tour] in Pennsylvania. He went to the hospital in Pennsylvania when we landed and they were, like, ‘You have four broken ribs.’ And they wanted to keep him there, but he did not wanna stay. And he’s just a fighter. He’s the toughest guy I know. I mean, look at all his tattoos; he just really fights through the pain. Anyway, that’s what happened.”
Lee is steadily playing more and more numbers each night of their co-headlining tour with Def Leppard with support from Poison and Joan Jett. The tour will continue through September 9, when they will end the long run in Las Vegas. Any remaining tickets can be found HERE.
Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation
