This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (13 page)

That day you learned another simple little lesson, you grew another inch, and you couldn’t imagine why you had done what you did. Ideas come out of adversity plus dreaming. Key word is ideas
come
to you. Now, to put them into action, that’s the part that distinguishes the men from the boys, the girls from the women, and the idiots from the geniuses.

When you imagine something, you see it, you taste it, and you feel it. If you’re that clear, it becomes real. It doesn’t matter if you know why. Like magic it will appear right out of your imagination.

Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I believe this works with both good and evil. If I can imagine the demise of a villainous enemy hard enough, I guarantee something will happen to him. (Some call this voodoo.) Negative energy is equal in power to positive energy. It just takes twice as much time to dredge up the darkness as it does the light.

I have received in my life everything I have ever imagined, positive and negative. Can you imagine how crazy my brain is at times? It’s a full-blown nuclear power plant brewing up enough sewage to destroy the world (or at least a few innocent bystanders).

In my twenties, I pumped out so much sewage from my brain that I think I alone am responsible for 90 percent of all the smog in Los Angeles. (To the clown in the back of the room who called me a narcissist, that was a joke.)

Now that I am able to redirect the energy into massive amounts of positive energy, I feel like I could light a city with just my heart. Seven words I believe to be true: “We who are awake need less sleep.”

Shout at the Devil
was a film that came out in 1976.

It was also an album and a song that came out in 1983.

Originally the song was “Shout
with
the Devil.” I changed it, but that didn’t stop the press back then from saying that we were on the devil’s side, shouting alongside him. But we weren’t.

Imagine that.

Shout at the Devil
by Mötley Crüe

He’s the wolf screaming lonely in the night

He’s the blood stain on the stage

He’s the tear in your eye

Been tempted by his lie

He’s the knife in your back

He’s rage

He’s the razor to the knife

Oh, lonely is our lives

My head’s spinnin’ round and round

But in the seasons of wither

We’ll stand and deliver

Be strong and laugh and

Shout at the Devil

He’ll be the love in your eyes

He’ll be the blood between your thighs

And then have you cry for more

He’ll put strength to the test

He’ll put the thrill back in bed

Sure you’ve heard it all before

He’ll be the risk in the kiss

Might be anger on your lips

Might run scared for the door

But in seasons of wither

We’ll stand and deliver

Be strong and laugh and

Shout at the devil

If Red Light Is Flashing…

I remember being a teenager when, as I mentioned earlier, my grandmother Nona sent me a book,
The Autobiography of a Yogi,
and I drank it up. There was a fleeting moment after reading that book when a calmness came over me. Of course, it wouldn’t stick, but that doesn’t mean that on a cellular level I didn’t take some of it in.

I think every day that there is something positive to learn, and the experience is usually right in front of our eyes. I don’t think it’s a one-shot deal, more like a repetitive action. You have to force yourself to get into the game every morning. It builds us up spiritually and emotionally. It’s like going to the gym, it doesn’t happen overnight, but one day you wake up and see a change. Likewise, when you don’t go, it doesn’t take long to lose most of what you have worked for.

I have days, bad fucking days, depressing days. Days when my band is busting my balls so hard I just wanna call it quits. There are days when as a parent, as a boyfriend, and as a partner in so many exciting ventures, all hell breaks loose. Those are the days I get to measure, “How much of a man am I?”

I was in an elevator in Calgary, Canada, while on tour with Mötley. As much as I love touring, I hate leaving my family. It was a day off, which to me means a wasted day of my life. It was fifteen below outside, and I wasn’t about to grab my camera and hit the local skid row. Katherine and I were on the skids, and to be honest, I wasn’t fucking happy to be there. So I decided to go to the hotel gym and work off some of my self-pity and pull the stick out of my ass. When I got into the elevator and pushed the button for gym, I saw a sign that said, “If red light is flashing, help is on the way.” I pushed the cancel button, went straight back to my room, and wrote a riff that I sent to James over my iPhone. Magic happened once I got out of my own way, stopped sitting in my own shit, and left my room. All those years of therapy, self-help books, and rehab meetings—and maybe that book from Nona—paid off at that moment. I sat down and wrote music and lyrics and jammed with James.

When I hung up, I looked out over the frozen tundra of Canada and thought, yeah…help is on the way, always.

AMY IN WONDERLAND
fig.wl9.1

ST. GODDESS BUNNIE
fig.sgb2.1

What the Fuck Did You Say?

I heard her clear as a bell but I couldn’t believe my ears. Mouth slung open, gaping, I said to my therapist, “What the fuck did you say?”

So, as she has had to do a million times in our sessions, she repeated the words to me slowly so I could take it all in. Like I am some kind of idiot or something. Politely she repeated herself, “Just because she’s your mom doesn’t mean you have to love her.” I looked at her, then out the window, then back at her, and said, “Thank you.” I finally got it. It had been more than forty years and billions of miles, tears, fistfights, outbursts, overdoses, crashed cars, smashed hotel rooms etc.,
etc.
Not to mention two divorces and over $10 million in legal fees and I finally fucking got it. Man, maybe I am an idiot.

So if I don’t
have
to love her, then I don’t
have
to love my fucking father, either? Oh shit, that means I don’t have to be angry and resentful? I don’t have to seek and destroy, rape and pillage, pine to kill, seethe, pout, and stomp my feet anymore either?

Oh shit,
now
what am I supposed to do with all this spare time?

But for real, what am I supposed to do with this bag of shit I’ve been carrying around with me all these years? It fucking stinks, and to be honest I think the bottom was about to fall out of it anyway.

I sat up (I must have lost track of time), then stood erect and hugged the hell out of my therapist. I went to my car and drove home zombielike. I was probably smiling like a man who lost his mind and found his soul all at the same time. I went straight to bed and slept sixteen hours that night. That was the end of the beginning for me. That was truly the beginning of forgiveness for me too.

Quickie Life Lesson:
Don’t Judge Me by the Color of My Skin

Walking along the pier in San Francisco I heard someone say, “Hey, Tattoo Man.” I looked over my shoulder to a black man, very large in stature but worn down by life.

He looked as though a killer he was and soon a victim he will be.

He was obviously homeless and suffering with some serious health issues.

After the multicolored racial slur of “Tattoo Man” came the next question, “You have any money?”

I walked over to him and said, “I’ll do you a favor if you do me one.” He jumped at the opportunity and said, “OK.”

I said, “I’ll give you some money to help you out if you help me out, too.”

He said, “Anything.”

I said, “Don’t judge me by the color of my skin, OK?”

He just said, “Wow, I am sorry.”

I smiled and said, “It’s OK. Happens all the time.”

To which he replied, “Yeah, me too.”

From
Hell
to Transcendental Meditation

As I rumbled down the street with music blasting from my ’32 Ford, it would have been obvious to anybody that I was a man in shambles. Too much information being shoved down my throat with the helping hand of managers, agents, divorce lawyers…Things were not 100 percent with my girlfriend, Katherine, and I felt like my heart was stuck in a meat grinder. Alcohol was no longer an option to kill the pain. I was fifty years old and had the world by the balls, but on that day and the days and months building up to it, life felt more like a kick in the balls.

Katherine had suggested that I meet Nancy. Somebody else had advised the same for Katherine. People like Nancy de Herrera are not in the phone book. It’s word of mouth, or maybe word of heart. Today as I sit here writing, I am grateful the good news found its way to me.

It was a quaint little home in the hills off Laurel Canyon in Beverly Hills. Even though her house was nestled in a neighborhood on a public street, it still felt like solitude as I pulled up. I had only spoken on the phone to her one time. She gave me directions and told me, “Simply bring seven flowers and three pieces of fruit.” I scratched my head, shrugged, and did as directed.

When Nancy opened the door, I felt like I was going to be catapulted somewhere. Her positive energy was overpowering. She looked at me with blue eyes and shouted, “Nikki, I have been waiting to see you.” Then she looked deeper into my eyes and said, “Please come in; let’s have some tea.”

As she poured she said, “I feel like I know you. You remind me of someone but I can’t put a finger on who.” I was anxious and excited to learn what she had taught so many before me. In the 1960s she had traveled to India with John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Donovan, and a handful of others to meet with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. She was there when the ’60s erupted, led by the Beatles and their message of love. To be honest, it was the Maharishi Yogi’s message and the Beatles were the carriers to the rest of the world. That made it theirs and that made it ours…All great messages should be so blessed.

MEDICAL ROOM, FUNNY FARM
fig.mff93

All you need is love, indeed.

But for me, on that day, I didn’t know what I needed. I sat there and started to cry into my tea. I told her I was about to break, and I couldn’t stop the slow painful cracking before the final snap. She looked at me kindly, absorbed my words like a Mother Teresa, or maybe Mother Nature. She told me when the Maharishi was sitting in my very spot, sipping from that very cup, he said, “Life is not always perfect.”