This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (12 page)

Today I always say you’re allowed to reevaluate your thoughts, opinions, or stance on anything, and I know I do it. (It’s a man’s prerogative to change his mind.) I used to say it’s easier to apologize than ask for permission. I now think I wasted too much time with drama when I did that.

So this process continues, over and over, until the paper, the pencil, and I are all lying in a crumpled mess in the corner, worn out yet content with the answers to the questions that were clawing at my head. It’s like seeing a guy on the floor, sweat pouring off his face like Niagara Falls, gasping for breath, and you ask, “Are you OK?” and he says, “Yeah, I just had the best workout of my life.”

I have been through two divorces and have done my best to keep the drama quiet. It hasn’t always been easy, or even possible. Divorce devastated me on many levels, but how I handled it set the bar for how I believe things should be handled. I am a smart-ass, big time. Love sarcasm, and when I say I have a sharp tongue, we’re talking straight razor. To hold my tongue is sometimes like holding a hand grenade. It ain’t always easy to muster up the maturity to not lob that fucker back. The old saying “restraint of pen and paper” should say “restraint of pen, paper, and send key.”

I’m getting better at it. When we got off our second Crüe Fest tour, the singer of a particular band complained, moaned, and bitched about
everything.
And, of course, he loved to tell anybody who would listen about how his band was blowing our old tired asses off the stage every single night, and naturally he shot off his mouth online, too. Those who know me expected me to crush him as I have others in the past.

But I thought about it first. By then we had had around twenty bands on that tour, hundreds of road crew members, hundreds of thousands of fans at the shows, and millions of radio listeners, and the only person to complain was this one singer in one band. That thought made me laugh so hard I could barely contain my giddiness. Before the tour the same guy was on the phone begging to be included. Now this. Sometimes the guy holding the grenade pulls the pin without knowing what to do next. That’s the guy who blows himself up.

I’ve been a lot of people in my short life—the dumb guy, the angry guy, the guy with a mission, the smart guy, and the guy with the hand grenade who is too stupid to throw it. Now I am the who I am today guy. (Please don’t count my multiple personalities in there.) And that guy is one happy, creative motherfucker. By the way, thank you for putting up with me while I exorcised my demon right before your eyes. I think I am all better now.

A Brief Interruption: Nikki Being Normal

Not that I have completely conquered my inner asshole…

Today I woke up excited. My little community is having a neighborhood parade and, believe it or not, I’m tickled pink to take my family to watch.

Of course, we came unprepared. The neighbors had lawn chairs, coffee, donuts, juice, and bagels. Some were playing music and huddled under trees in their pajamas, laughing and socializing.

Life is good. Life is funny, and as one of my favorite Spanish poems says, “I am exactly where I am supposed to be in the universe.”

My days of raucous anarchy are long behind me; I am mature in my life and so secure that I don’t fly off the handle and/or sever the nearest throat when agitated.

I’m just a dad taking his kids to see a parade.

Pulling up and parking curbside, front and center, greeting my neighbors with glee.

In the distance, bicycle horns and children laughing. In the air, excitement.

Coming up the two-lane blacktop road, kids, dogs, and a unicyclist. Antique cars and the local marching band. Banners for the neighborhood vet and housewives running for office. Candy being thrown from every vehicle as kids scamper to get that all-important Tootsie Roll.

“Maybe there is a God,” I say with a sigh.

A guy walks up to me and says, “Whose car is this?”

“It’s mine,” I say. “Is there a problem?”

“Yeah,” he snaps, “people like to stand here and watch the parade.”

Feeling somewhat foolish and ignorant in the ways of parade parking, I say, “I’m sorry, would you like me to move?”

HELP IS ON THE WAY?
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He rolls his eyes and says, “Well, you better. You never should have parked here anyway.”

Now I’m walking around to the driver side. My ass has started to burn, but I just suck it up. Then his wife says, “Anyway, you’re a rude and inconsiderate person.”

I stop in my tracks, knowing it’s too late to stop what’s about to rocket outta my mouth.

Razor blades
and fireballs…boom, direct hit.

“Well,” I say to her, “good fucking morning to you, too.” To which I add, loudly, “You know what? I am gonna park here every year, right here, on this corner, every year…until you DIE.”

Then there is that uncomfortable silence I have grown to enjoy, even as I thought I had maybe outgrown outbursts like this one.

We watch the rest of the parade and I go home content.

I can’t wait until next year. I’ll have to leave home extra early to make sure I get that parking spot.

…Anyway Where Was I?

Twenty or so years after my first therapy session with the school principal, I stepped up to the real thing. This time it was an actual professional. After all, by then I was a professional drug addict; it would only make sense to level the playing field.

Mötley Crüe had found a band counselor. His name was Bob Timmons, and he had been brought in after helping Vince get into rehab in 1985. Vince had been charged with drunk driving and vehicular manslaughter. He was but the first band member to go down in flames—first rehab, then jail, and Bob had a lot to do with saving Vince. Bob then had the pleasure of dealing with the mass dysfunction known as the Crüe. We were hitting the skids on drugs, crashing and burning, only to come back phoenixlike time after time, but even the most glamorous rock n roll debauchery doesn’t sit pretty when people die. The band was right behind Vince in needing to be saved from the flames.

After “Girls Girls Girls,” it would be my turn in the same Van Nuys facility that helped Vince. To be honest, part of me liked it and part of me (the scared part of me) hated it. I ran out of rehab, literally. But Bob was there for me, taking me to AA, CA, and NA meetings. I found a sponsor and started working through the twelve-step program. Amazing what a little light at the end of the tunnel can do for you.

I think for the first time since I was a kid I was thinking maybe I wasn’t quite as fucked up as I’d been told. I had wounds, but wounds heal and turn to scars. That saying “You know a man by the scars he has” is true for me. I have a saying too: “I never trust a person without some kind of baggage.” Because those of us who have been through the war of life and survived usually have more heart. If you have heart and are honest, you have probably worked on yourself and therefore are trustworthy. I want someone like that in my foxhole. That is the man I was turning into, but I wasn’t there yet.

Bob arranged band meetings with a therapist who would take us through the AA steps. We would go around the room and share our
feelings.
To be honest, I would have called it bullshit except I had been working on myself away from the band, so it wasn’t completely foreign to me. Mick wasn’t gonna have any of it, but Mars always will take a bullet for the team and so he sat there and steamed, but he sat there. Vince had seen and heard all this before, so he was acclimated. Tommy was open to these meetings because he believed it would help the band.

After a time I saw a change in the band and myself. It was actually working. It was like couples’ counseling, talking it out with one another and clearing away a lot of the old hurts in our marriage. Mötley Crüe wasn’t about to get a divorce. We had way too much fighting left to do, with one another and the world.

Around this time Tommy went to rehab, and so we all went and did group therapy sessions with him. Vince has been back a few more times, and to be honest I can’t really even remember half the stuff that was said in those rooms over the years, but I know it changed us individually for the better, and I know it changed the band, too. After that, the question was whether the world was ready for a sober Mötley Crüe, and whether I was ready for a sober Nikki Sixx, and the answer in both cases was yes. And so began another chapter.

I feel as though my addiction and the band’s craziness have been covered a million times, and I won’t do it again now. But I do find it interesting to see how my personal struggles connect with my creativity. My younger days formed the adult me and also fueled all my creative endeavors, even today.

The misery that drove me insane as a teenager inspired the monstrous imagery of the photography in this book, as well as a song like “Shout at the Devil.”

KOREA TOWN
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Shout at the Devil
was a film that came out in 1976. It was also a Mötley Crüe album and a song that came out in 1983.

Originally it was called “Shout with the Devil.”

After the song had become a mainstay on the lips of millions of teenagers, I researched the movie of the same name. This is what I remember finding.

Lee Marvin and Roger Moore both starred in this war film loosely based around “a girl.” The weakness for alcohol only equaled the obsession with greed and violence. All this was a nice side dish to the plot, but in the end it still seems to really be only about “a girl.”

If I had seen this movie (and I probably didn’t), it could have been the blueprint for my love life. All the toxic elements are there.

Like I said, it was 1982, maybe 1983, and I had a fervor for sticking my opinion in your face like a threat to cut your jugular, but with a pen instead of a straight razor.

I was dating Lita Ford at the time.

I remember sitting in Lita’s mom’s kitchen (Lisa Ford, R.I.P.) in Long Beach, California, acoustic guitar in hand. Lisa was cooking up some Italian masterpiece as I wrote my own. “Shout, shout, shout with the devil,” I sang (for my supper), dripping with hate for politicians (or any authority figure), even though I didn’t know any. I figured they were all corrupt and didn’t have America’s best interests at heart. (Like I was any different.) To be honest, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I was young. I was dumb. I was pissed.

In retrospect, I didn’t write that song, it wrote itself. I was just the messenger. I knew what I wanted the Crüe to look like. I knew what it needed to sound like. But I didn’t know where all that information was coming from. Some would say from hell; others just said that we were going there. Nonetheless, like a huge bolt of lightning, creativity comes down from the act of imagining, every time, for me.

Messages are like this. Signed, sealed, and delivered to us from some far-off, distant dreamland, these little “awareness pills.” No prescription needed. These are well-earned life lessons. Gobble them up, I say. After all, you paid for them.

Now, if you’re smart enough to have listened to the elders, you can take the shortcut and save yourself a lot of time and pain. Most of us aren’t so wise when we’re young, so we trudge through the darkness until we smash face-first into a cement wall. Only then do we ask, “Anybody got a light?” If you can imagine that lightbulb turning on, that’s how ideas pop into your head. It’s that simple.