This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (21 page)

Nikki

COPENHAGEN, DENMARK
JUNE 10, 2009

Got in from Norway to dumping rain. Beautiful in its dampness, I still chose to sit in my room. Wrote some, read some, slept some, chatted on the phone some, texted some. And then some more…and then even more…the road. Today seems forty-eight hours long.

1
A.M
.

Show was intense and I’m wiped out.

Good night.

LONDON
JUNE 13, 2009

She gasped. I jumped, literally pissing on my own leg. “Oh my God, Mum, it’s Nikki Sixx,” she said. Like I said, I was literally caught with my pants down, peeing in the graveyard at Highgate Park. I didn’t mean to be disrespectful, but it would’ve been worse to be lugging all those cameras around a graveyard on a hot English afternoon with piss running down the inside of my favorite pants.

So, quickly, I buttoned up and turned, somewhat red-faced, and said I was sorry (hoping I hadn’t just urinated on her family plot) and scuffled off. I could hear the girl trying to explain to her mother what a Nikki Sixx was, but I wasn’t gonna stick around and get an earful from Mum. After all, I had a whole cemetery to myself and forty-five minutes ’til closing. (Imagine being in a cemetery at closing time. Weird.)

The Highgate Cemetery is one I had wanted to visit for years but, between my past addiction and living in Los Angeles, well, let’s just say timing is everything and the time had finally arrived…Even if it feels like it came on a slow boat outta hell.

One of my favorite pictures is this wonderful shot I took there of an angel statue. I was drawn to her hands. It felt so hopeful, for a tombstone, just by the fact that the hands formed a heart shape. The light cut through the trees just right, just for a moment, and I got it. Two seconds before or a few after, it would’ve been a completely different photo. That’s the thing with photography—you can capture magic moments and, like this one, it seems like it was meant to be. Love is forever. Even in death we can be assured of that, if we have lived a full life.

All in all, another cemetery, another city, and another reminder of mortality with a double twist of humor.

Backtracking to the Download festival the night before—eighty thousand strong and the band was firing on all cylinders. We have never really been that big in Europe and rightfully so. We were too tired at the end of eight, nine, thirteen months of touring America to understand that Europe was not gonna wait around for us. Every year, same situation until one day we said let’s go play Europe and they said, “OK, but you guys aren’t really that big there.” Imagine the faces on us. And then it sunk in. We owe Europe and we were now putting in the time that we should’ve done twenty years ago, and twenty years later we’re finally about to be worth our weight in gold.

MUNICH & STUTTGART
JUNE 15, 2009

I have known our German promoter, Ossy Hoppe, for almost a quarter century. He was the first promoter to do Mötley Crüe and he has seen it all. What I didn’t know is that Ossy grew up in the Russian circus. In our conversations in that tiny backstage dressing room, I learned about that life and, of course, I asked about where to find the old, tired, and broken down. I asked where they live, and could I shoot them? He said I was in the wrong city. They mostly lived in Hamburg. We agreed that my next trip to Germany would entail a Diane-Arbus-type adventure.

The show was good, but the language barrier had us wondering if they liked us or loved us. We were convinced it wasn’t love because every time we spoke to them, they would stare back with blank faces. Of course, we needed to be reminded we have not been here in twenty years and maybe if we came more often they might know us a bit better. I accepted that lie as I collected my clothes and headed back to the hotel, only thinking of tomorrow’s adventure. I mean, isn’t this what I had been asking for?

Stuttgart, Germany, was somewhat better, but I am convinced they hated us, too. Tommy wanted to know the same thing, but when Mick stepped to center stage they roared. Vince said they just hate us three, and we all just laughed.

BERLIN
JUNE 16, 2009

I walked from the gig over to a cemetery a few minutes ago. Crumbling bullet holes hold rusted shells that are still buried in the sides of angel statues. Expired mortar casings kissing ever so softly up to mom and dad’s tombstones. Life wasn’t so grand in 1945 in Berlin when America invaded and conquered the Nazis. It was a country in turmoil and internationally hated. A country riddled with bombs, flamethrowers, and hand grenades. Overrun with tanks and leveled by U.S. bombers. Blown to pieces, then crumbled to its knees. For the grandparents of the kids waiting to see Mötley Crüe play tonight, life was so different. I can’t even imagine what life must have been like here.

We are playing in a cement building that has all the markings of the same destruction bestowed upon the cemetery only half a mile away. I sit here in my dressing room and it’s hauntingly quiet. Cement does that to a room, makes it like a bunker. It’s as though I am in a cement casket right now, and I’m feeling claustrophobia sink in. I snapped a picture on my way out of here a while ago. A sign reading Stage with an arrow on the cement floor outside my dressing room. I am tired, tired of the road. Germany is one of my favorite places, and I’m having a hard time even enjoying it this time. It’s beautiful outside, the weather is perfect, the people kind, and as always the food and drink are exceptional here. But I am worn out…If I could crawl inside one of those tombs I swear I’d sleep for a year…

At moments like this, I wake up and realize how ungrateful I probably sound. A kid from nowhere getting to go everywhere. A kid who had nothing, who now really has everything. Life is like this very moment if you’re alive enough to take it in.

I realize I complain a lot about being tired. I know it sounds selfish and I know I repeat myself (a lot). Some days I’m like an automatic weapon rambling outta control. Like some kind of Rambo(aholic) with two AK-47s on full automatic. When I am in tune with my inner asshole, it feels like I am watching them destroy everything in their path and can’t manage to take my finger off the trigger. It’s some kind of an addiction to the drama in my own head. It must be a fucking nightmare to those around me, and to be honest, I make myself puke sometimes too.

OK, enough self-loathing for one day.

BERLIN
fig.b83

I saw Lemmy in London and he just called and said he was in Berlin mixing some music. Nothing gets me outta my own way like Lemmy. I threw him and a few others on the guest list and I’m excited to see my friend. He has also become good friends with Katherine and that makes me happy. He is a “tell it like it is” kind of guy, and people like me and Katherine need that. In fact, so does Lemmy. We spoke deep into the night in London, telling torrid tales of truth and debauchery only to sometimes end the story being interrupted by the other saying “That ain’t right” or “That’s bullshit” or better, “I don’t really agree, bro.” (Not that I really remember Lemmy ever saying the word bro.)

Friends tell each other what nobody else is willing to tell you.

Now I have said my piece, may God bless these little Crüeheads in Berlin ’cause we’re about to rock their fucking faces off. It’s time to get ready…

P.S. Lemmy is here so I better play good tonight.

PRAGUE
JUNE 17, 2009

Ominous. That was the word that kept slipping from my lips. Prague, bittersweet.

Me and Katherine were supposed to come here for Christmas this year but as the time grew nearer I couldn’t shake off my fatigue from touring. The thought of getting on a plane to Europe after being on the road so much that year almost brought me to tears. Unfortunately, my way of dealing with post-tour depression also brought my girlfriend to tears. Oh, she acted like it didn’t matter. She smiled through it but, truth be told, in retrospect that was the beginning of the end for us. It was just one of many things that I would do to make her not feel special. Oh yeah, she has her part in it, too, but what’s the point of me trying to clean up her side of the street when mine still needs a whole work crew?

HELLFEST, FRANCE
JUNE 19, 2009

Sitting on the second plane on the way to Nantes, France. We left early this morning from Prague. Tommy is asleep one seat over, and Vince is watching a movie on his computer behind me. If you have ever seen the movie
Planes, Trains and Automobiles,
you know today’s story. We are going on tonight at 1
A
.
M
. I think Heaven n’ Hell (which is Ronnie James-Dio-era Black Sabbath, and some of the best Sabbath in my opinion) play first, as well as a few others. All I can say is, “What the fuck? Why are we going on at 1
A.M
.?” We’ll get offstage at around 2:45
A
.
M
., then another hour’s drive back to the hotel and up at 9 to catch two planes to make it to Spain for another festival, just to do this again…Hellfest is the name of this show and all I can say is that it’s fitting.

Some days I don’t care how hard I try to hold it together, it’s hard to keep positive.

Let me try the old Gratitude list trick and see if this helps…

1. I AM STILL SOBER, EIGHT YEARS, JULY 2.

2. MY FAMILY IS ON THEIR WAY TO SPAIN TO MEET ME. (I COULD RANT FOR HOURS ABOUT THEM, BUT I CHOOSE TO KEEP IT LIMITED FOR THEIR PRIVACY. I CAN SAY I AM SOOOO EXCITED TO SEE THEM.)

3. I ICHATTED WITH KATHERINE LAST NIGHT AND IT WAS AMAZING. I FEEL I HAVE GROWN SO MUCH SINCE I LEFT LOS ANGELES. SOMETIMES A MAN HAS TO BURY THE KNIFE UP TO THE HANDLE, HITTING BONE TO FULLY FEEL THE PAIN OF HOW WONDERFUL HIS LIFE IS. I AM SUCH A MAN. HISTORY PROVES THAT.

NANTES, FRANCE 3:30 A.M.

I think me and Vince wound ourselves up so much about going onstage at 1
A
.
M
. that we finally just got giddy. Of course, just when you think it’s gonna be lame, stupid, or worse, and nobody will wait to see us, it turned out to be one of the best of the tour, if not
the
best. When this band is one, we’re a monster…Tonight (or this morning) was one of those magical moments.

So again, I learn from my own outlook daily. In an AA meeting once I heard this old-timer say, “If I am thinking it, I am probably stinking it.” It has taken me a long time to figure out what the hell that meant, or at least what I think he meant. When I was putting together
The Heroin Diaries,
there was a lot of looking back and using it as a way to move forward, however ungracefully at times. This man, a small-framed black man with abnormally huge fingers, announced this message to me after I shared some gibberish in a meeting about being stressed. He made his point by punctuating it with his chubby pointer finger thrust in between my eyes. I can still feel his presence (and the emotional bruise on my forehead). And again I repeat his words, “If you’re thinking it, you’re stinking it.”