The members of Motley Crue have made their fair share of reality television appearances.
While NBC provided a bird’s eye view into their drummer’s aspirations toward higher education with Tommy Lee Goes To College in 2005 and the WB teamed their frontman up with a like-minded troop of b-list celebrities including MC Hammer, Corey Feldman, and Emmanuel Lewis for the first season of The Surreal Life in 2003, few moments in the pantheon of broadcasting come close to VH1’s nearly-forgotten plastic surgery special Remaking Vince Neil.
Part of the cable channel’s 2005 lineup, Remaking was a short-lived VH1 series that focused on middle-aged musicians trying to stage career comebacks. Featured artists included rapper Vanilla Ice, ‘80s pop star Taylor Dayne, and the aforementioned Motley Crue rocker.
As reported by Brave Words from a 2004 interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer, Vince Neil said of his thought process before signing on to the program: “I’d watch these shows where people are a bit overweight and say to myself, ‘God, I wish something like that would happen to light the fire under my butt and get into the gym,’ because I was about 15 pounds over what I want to be.”
He continued, “The thing about it is, you’ve really got to make a commitment to do something like this, because once you start, you don’t want to end up where you began.”
As part of the show, Neil lost 30 pounds when he stopped drinking, gave up junk food, and dedicated himself to an intensive workout regimen. While his pants size dropped from a size 39 to a 31, the rocker’s weight loss was far and away the least shocking part of his overall transformation.
Next up, Neil had his hair dyed brown and cut into a style not dissimilar from Jennifer Aniston’s notorious “The Rachel” doo from Friends. If that wasn’t enough to make your jaw drop, he then spent over nine hours in plastic surgery. “They did a lot of things,” he said. “Brow-lift, upper-lower eyes, partial face-lift, cheek implants, nose job, jaw-line sculpting.”
In 2009, Remaking Vince Neil came in at number 92 on VH1’s 100 Most Shocking Music Moments list.