Tommy Lee is one charming guy. Who would've thought? This is, after all, a guy who has become more famous for his personal life than his highly successful career.
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.
"Sometimes I'm driven by fear of sucking," Lee said. "I just want to kick (butt) at whatever I do."
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.' "
The show does try to draw some dramatic tension out of the question of whether Lee will get to perform with the band or not . . . but, at the same time, we see clips of him in his marching-band uniform doing just that. So . . . not so hot on the suspense, but pretty amusing.
"I did that all through junior high and high school. . . . Actually, it was one of my favorite things in school," Lee said. "But doing it on a college level, in the Cornhuskers stadium in front of 80,000 people, that's a whole new ballgame."
If you're looking for a show full of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, well, remember — this is NBC, not MTV. And "Tommy Lee Goes to College" depends on the audience knowing the star's background and getting the joke about how a guy with his past is trying to fit in on a "normal" college campus.
Of course, even if you've never heard of Lee, all you have to do is look at the tattoos and the piercings and see the college kids' reactions to him to know this is not a fortysomething guy who's spent the past 2 1/2 decades working as, say, an accountant.
And what makes the show so charming is that Lee takes it as seriously as he does. Oh, "College" is obviously meant to entertain and, obviously, it's not going to make any difference whatsoever if Lee does his homework (except he is assigned a hot co-ed tutor), but the fact that he seems to be making an effort carries the show.
"I didn't know what to expect because I never had the opportunity to go to college," Lee said. "And then I got there, and I realized that there were exams coming and I really had to study, and I really had to work at getting into the drumline — they weren't going to just let me in because of who I was and being a drummer and all that. I had to pass. Same with the exams in chemistry and horticulture.
"It was a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. I was stressing out because I wanted to do well. I didn't want to go there and just kind of suck. I really wanted to prove to myself that I could actually get through it."
Given the life he's led, it's no surprise when Lee says, "Nothing really shocks me." But he was "a little blown away at how there were a couple of times in one of my classes that these guys were just full-blown cheating on their tests. And I was, like, 'Man, that isn't cool!' "
And, while he's the one with the reputation for partying, the production schedule didn't allow much time for that. However. . . .
"I was surprised that these kids would be in there and their exams would be over at 1 o'clock, 2 o'clock and they would race straight to the bar and go party," Lee said. "And I was, like, 'Whoa!' "
Both in the show and in the interview, Lee comes across as a nice guy. This isn't a guy taking a star trip, which is one of the reasons he eventually sort of fit in at Lincoln. Sort of.
"I would say about three or four weeks into it everybody started to realize I was going to be there for a whole semester, and it started to chill out a little bit. . . . I actually felt like I was just kind of a normal guy on campus," he said. "Which was kind of cool, because it's nice to be that guy — normal guy — for a minute."
Talking to a gaggle of TV critics, Lee was open, enthusiastic and polite. A great deal more pleasant and forthcoming than a great many "stars" a lot less famous than he is.
He didn't flinch when asked personal questions — he did find recent reports that he and Pamela Anderson are about to remarry somewhat amusing, but he didn't argue with reports that the two of them are "crazy in love."
"I think we'll always be. We're pretty much stuck with each other," Lee said. "We have two beautiful kids, and we love each other. And that's that."
What about a wedding date?
"No. Not that I know of," he said with a laugh.
And "Tommy Lee Goes to College" is definitely not from the Jay Leno school of comedy — he's not there making fun of anybody. The humor comes from seeing a guy who hasn't led a normal life being dropped into a relatively normal world for a while.
"My purpose there was to have a whole lot of fun, have a cool experience and definitely not to make any sort of mockery of anybody and anything," he said. And he's maintained friendships with a number of people he met at Lincoln.
They — like more than a few TV critics — came away from "Tommy Lee Goes to College" with a decidedly different impression of the show's star.
"I have to admit that after watching the final episode, it made me feel really good," Lee said. "I don't know what it is about it. . . . I feel like people are really going to get to know me.
"And maybe (the show will) also dispel a bunch of kind of nonsense — preconceived judgments or notions about myself. Because those things tend to kind of fly around. . . . I'm hoping people get to meet and know the real Tommy . . . and realize he's a pretty cool guy."
NBC's new comedy/reality summer series "Tommy Lee Goes to College" premieres with back-to-back episodes tonight at 8 and 8:30 on Ch. 5.
E-mail: pierce@desnews.com