This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (10 page)

So now here I sit. Typing mostly, but also writing by hand some personal lessons on life, musings on sobriety, music, photography. I am grasping for newness and gasping with excitement as James, Dj, and I travel what some would say are fearsome waters. At this we laugh. The only thing to fear is fear itself.

This album is wonderful. As James announced to the room (meaning me and Dj), the lyrics on “Oh My God” are
important,
and as Dj was digging deep into himself to pull out that magical countermelody he always finds, I knew we were together for a reason.

Funny Farm is at this moment buzzing with music, the sound track for the book you are currently reading, and I am about to photograph us for the album cover. Life is perfect in all its imperfections. What’s next for us, I do not know. But I am sure it’s gonna really be fucking fun.

Today I am in the studio with James and Dj finishing work on twenty songs. Some were inspired by my photography, some have inspired photography, some will stand on their own. We are in the same free-falling zone we occupied right before the
Diaries
sound track was written. Just following our demented little hearts. Step-by-step, not looking forward or back. I can say I don’t have any expectations for this album. I just love what we are writing right now. It’s different, as it should be. It’s magical as it only can be. It’s real and that makes us proud.

What will happen to us? someone asked me recently. And I said what do you mean?

They said, well, you haven’t really toured as a band, you don’t make conventional music, and your lyrics, even though they’re inspirational, are so raw and real, it’s got to be hard for the masses to swallow.

I said, “Sounds like Sixx:A.M. is right on course then.”

I Also Play in Another Band You May Have Heard Of…

Tommy Lee has never been to my new house.

Neither have Mick Mars or Vince Neil. I’ve never invited them, and they’ve never offered to come over. It’s been this way for years. I don’t really understand how we went from being best friends in a garage band to not really knowing one another and living in mansions.

I don’t think it’s as easy as
“one day we just didn’t get along.”
If I try to unravel the situation, it would be like pulling the intestines out of this bloated rock n roll war machine. There are so many layers to the putrid onion that I am afraid it may fall apart if I start now.

We’ve been together thirty years. I look at my hands as I write this, and tattoos cover most of the scars, but they can’t completely hide time. I don’t see the age on my face, but I see it on theirs. (Do they see it on mine?) But I imagine my heart is twice as beat up as any of theirs. The only thing bigger than my love for this band is the heartbreak it can bring me. I am sometimes surprised I am still alive, not from the drugs and the fast cars, the sex and the alcohol, but from the shit this band has put me through. I wonder if I didn’t hold the reins whether it would have slipped from the lip of some cliff long ago. I am not a king holding on to his crown, just a man who loves his band even when it doesn’t always love him back.

I laugh at our own folklore, half truth, half lies, and some of the murkiest of cocktails ever tasted. It’s dirty in these waters and only the strong survive.

Of course, some things never change. When the four of us are together in a rehearsal room, it’s always the same. If you could peer in on any given day, this is what you might see…

Vince is always early, Tommy is always late, and Mick and I are always on time. I busy myself with set lists or organizing this or that. I don’t think anybody has ill feeling toward me but when I come in, I mean business, and sometimes to a fault. I can go from prankster to overly serious at the drop of a hat. I haven’t changed much over the years. I wish I could say I’ve made more progress in this area of my life. Honestly, it’s just not my nature to hang out and waste time. I have empires to build and rivers to cross (at least in my own haunted head). I always make sure to say hello to the crew and shake everybody’s hand and pass out hugs…but quickly after that come the set lists, rearrangements of songs, lighting cues, meetings with the production team, merchandise approvals, et cetera. For all the image of reckless danger that Mötley Crüe wears on its bloody sleeve, it is also in need of a business brain, which is my job.

I sometimes wonder what the guys really think of me. My insatiable desire to push us to the next level is almost obsessive. As soon as one song ends in rehearsal, I’m already barking out the next song or a key change. I show up, suit up, and wanna go for it. Sadly, I think this may be my part in the breakdown of our relationships. I fatigue myself, too. I am without a doubt a fucking workaholic. Maybe that’s why I don’t really see them or even hear from them much outside of work.

The thing of it is, I don’t think they really know how funny I can be. When I’m away from the band, I spend more time laughing than anybody I know. But when it comes to Mötley Crüe, I am dead serious. Prankster yes, always up to no good, but war is war and I am the general. I wonder at times if I don’t take this job too much to heart.

Vince fidgets, rummages through lyrics, organizes his space. He tends to love repetition. He always needs the same brand of water, his throat lozenges, and his stool in the exact same place. When we play live, he’s no different, and maybe worse. He will say the same things in the same spots at every show. If he does something and it works, he will do it again, night after night. It’s frustrating to me at times because my jones is to not conform to format and Vince’s is to stick with his routine. There you have a small rub. After thirty years of it, even the lightest touch of sandpaper can feel like something’s ripping open your flesh with a rusty hacksaw. I sort of love his quirkiness, if truth be told. Vince’s voice is the sound of Mötley Crüe.

But in the end, no matter how I want to be closer with
Vince
, he seems surrounded by walls, miles high, and nobody is gonna break them down until he is ready. I feel like I’ve tried. I know what he’s gone through. I cannot imagine how the hell you survive your daughter dying. The hurt and the sorrow he experienced can never be erased by sex, booze, or success. The other painful thing is that no amount of disconnecting from me,
Tommy
, or Mick can make him feel better about leaving the band years ago. Sometimes being brothers is about learning how to fight and forgive. Being in a band isn’t unlike being in a gang or a family, and we are brothers to the end.

The one thing I hope Vinnie knows before Mötley Crüe drops to its knees and dies, blood staining the stage as we wave goodbye for the last time, is that nobody has loved him as deeply as I have. I hope he can feel that someday. But that day is not today. He doesn’t even know where I live.

Mick
Mars has always been all about two things: tone, and no bullshit. I can’t really think of a time when the band members weren’t waiting on some “parameter change” he was doing to his guitar rig. He will flat out stop playing in the middle of rehearsal if it doesn’t sound big enough to him. As much as it irks me, sometimes I find it comforting (like Vince’s idiosyncrasies). Mick knows that his guitar sound is the wall of madness that supports Mötley Crüe, and he’ll be damned if he will ever let it be anything other than massive. It’s interesting that while he is a guitar player’s guitar player, he doesn’t respond well to jamming. As Vince fidgets and I organize, Mick will just start playing. I hear that and run to my amp and grab my Thunderbird, just in time for Mick to stop. Or sometimes Mick starts playing and Tommy jumps in. Those two together are monsters. Again I run over, jump into the water, and Mick pulls the plug. It’s like he does it to tease me, but after thirty years of the same thing, you’d think I’d get the joke or he would stop telling it. But it still happens. Mick always calls me a filthy bastard and in fact I know he loves me deeply. I was there when we thought he was dying, held his hand through recovery, and have always had an ear for his crazy ideas. We have something I can’t put into words. I truly love that man, to the point where I got his portrait tattooed on my right leg, forever keeping him near. But obviously, not so near that he comes to my house.

Chain-smoking, bouncing off the walls, biting his nails, always with a smile on his face, Tommy is about eleven years old on a good day. I think his boyish charm is my favorite part of him, yet on a bad day that equals temper tantrums and the inability to get the big picture. Highly creative, highly energized, he can be intoxicating, and my drinking and partying days with Tommy were some of the funniest of my life. He could always count on me to do the most outrageous things based on alcohol and my “I don’t give a fuck” attitude, and the two of us together were toxic trouble spelled with capital T’s. The sheer volume that comes from his drums continues to baffle me. People tend to forget what a great drummer he is. I think the worst part for me is seeing Tommy getting lost in the press, a tabloid misfit, losing his identity as one of the best rock drummers of all time. Does he thrive on the media attention, or does he die from it? Maybe even he doesn’t know.

But when Tommy sits down behind his drums and I pick up my bass, and Mars plugs in his guitar, something happens. It’s like the air thickens with excitement. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s like a weird kind of electrical humidity. You don’t just hear it, you feel it. Then Vince blurts out the first few words of the song and all I can say is, “We’re home.” I am fifty-one years old and some days I feel eighteen. This band has outlived wives and girlfriends, managers, record companies, agents—everything but itself.

It all made a ton of sense to be locked in a garage band together, connected at the hip, but we have become different people as the years have passed. I don’t feel the desire to do things I used to do just to fly the flag of rock n roll. I feel more honest in my separation from the bullshit. I am not tired of the music. In fact, it still gives me everything I could ever wish for. But the lifestyle that comes with it bores me now. The creative part is just as important as ever. The songs still are the core of everything. But drinking, girls, clubbing, and hangers-on just aren’t my bag anymore.
I’d rather shoot myself
. Maybe that’s why nobody comes to my house.

MICK MARS, PITTSBURGH
fig.mm1313

TOMMY LEE, CLEVELAND
fig.tl69

A Painful Postscript with Mick Mars

As the years have set in, Mick’s health has waned but his spirit has strengthened. There is a freedom found at death’s door that reignites your zest for what is now running out quickly…time. I see it in the shadows, waiting for us all. Death is real once you hit fifty. Lemmy told me recently that at fifty it all started to fall apart. I agree, so I fight it.

Mick is no different, but there was a time when he had given up. I had been hidden away on my Malibu ranch, working nonstop. I had done a side project or two and when it came time to resurrect the Mötley machine, Mick was nowhere to be found. It’s always been Mars riffs meets my pop and lyric sensibility that was the core to the songs in the Crüe. Now he wouldn’t answer his phone or the countless notes I left at the security gate at his private estate. I was not only worried about writing music without a partner, but I had that gut-wrenching feeling that something was wrong. Finally, I left the following message: “Hey, Mick, it’s Sixx. I am coming over to your house; I’m gonna smash through the security gates and kick in your front door in exactly thirty minutes.”

Mars called back within thirty seconds. I told him I was scared something was wrong and he said, “OK, just come over, I’ll open the door.” What I saw haunts me to this day. A frail man of eighty, maybe ninety pounds, shaved head, gray skin, with a beard to his chest. I stood there in shock. It was my dear friend, Mick Mars. He was dying, addicted to painkillers, brought on by a disease called ankylosing spondylitis. His bones had been fusing together for years, and the rest of the band never saw it coming. One year of being off the road and Mick had fallen apart.