This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (9 page)

Allen Kovac says, “Why don’t you try that Dj Ashba kid?”

“A DJ?” I said.

Allen laughed and said, “No, his
name
is Dj, but he’s a really good guitar player.”

That’s when I remembered he had been in the band Beautiful Creatures. So I listened to the album and called him. He was a motherfucker on guitar and a real nice guy to match. I asked if he wanted to join my new band, which I had named Brides of Destruction. And he passed. He was committed to another project, he said, and that was the end of me and Dj Ashba, or so I thought.

I continued to write with James for all kinds of bands, from Mötley and Meat Loaf to Saliva and Brides of Destruction. After the Brides’ album came out, I did a short tour to support it and then it was time to fire up the Mötley machine again. It had been in hibernation long enough. Time to wake the sleeping giant.

The Brides went into hiatus, although I planned on doing another album with them after a Crüe tour. Long story short, Tracii wasn’t happy about this and popped off in the press about Mötley, and if you know me, you know those are fighting words. So we fought, and that was the end of Brides.

At the end of a long, grueling Crüe tour, and newly divorced, it was time to get my creative juices flowing. One thing I did was start a clothing line with St. John CEO Kelly Gray. The other was to finish work on my book,
The Heroin Diaries.

One day, while I was still writing, I handed James and Dj copies of the rough manuscript and said, “Read this, and then let’s write a sound track to the movie you see in your head.” It didn’t even take three days and the songs were all falling into place. I have only felt that once before and it was in that li’l old band from Hollywood I’ve been in for thirty years. Using the lotto analogy, how many people win once, much less twice in a lifetime? And so it began…

The idea was just that we would create some music. Maybe there would be downloads you’d get with the book, maybe a CD with a few songs, maybe someday a play or a movie, and maybe, just maybe…well, we didn’t have a master plan at all. We honestly were letting the book lead us lyrically and musically down an open highway. No speed limit and no destination in sight.

Then it started growing. Other exciting ideas came. Maybe it would be songs and videos, or a short, demented film tying the book and songs together. Basically, it was a playground for creativity, and that always leads to more creativity, just like good always breeds more good. And this was really feeling good.

Dj and I would spend hours writing songs together. The glue between us was that we were having the best time of our lives. We would call James, who was busy producing different projects, and play him our deranged musical interpretations of my life misspent, either over the phone or through e-mails. And he would just lose it. Some of the songs were pretty much arranged and others in a raw infancy. In turn, he would call us and play a piece or two of music, and we would go crazy. It never really occurred to the three of us to form a band. We just loved making music.

Writing songs is nothing new for me. It’s what I have done daily since I was a teenager. I pick up a bass or a guitar or even sit at the piano, as bad as I am on it. And a melody and a lyric will always come. Ninety percent of the time, it’s forgotten in minutes. You do what you love and what you love does you in return. It’s the relationship with the moment that I cherish, like meditation, like drugs before that and photography now. It’s a very personal thing, and I think all artists have it. If you look back to a moment of creation, it was a pure, one-on-one experience. Whether we choose to share it with a friend, or a lover, or a million people is the decision you make after that personal moment.

To have a creative experience with another person has been rare for me. There’s usually a kind of selfishness in it. When I crossed that bridge with James and Dj, my creativity blossomed to another level. I saw things differently. I had a wall to bounce my ideas off. They had me looking at things differently than I usually would. Ideas started to untangle, and we got into areas of writing that seemed fresh and exciting. Their talent inspired me like nothing else had in years. It didn’t even matter to me if anybody ever heard what was being created—we had a singular vision. We found a safe harbor where critics didn’t reside.

As I wrote that sentence, I thought,
Imagine being an artist with no critics, either internal or external.
I think that pretty much sums up the creative process with us.

But life is busy, and Los Angeles is a thousand miles of freeways littered with tourist buses and traffic jams. There have been times when I was gone touring or just so busy that we didn’t write for long periods. Then James, Dj, and I would sit back down and reconnect and find that our creativity hadn’t skipped a beat.

Down the 101 freeway from James’s studio is my home away from home, Funny Farm. At the time my life there was 50 percent music, 50 percent creative insanity (wait, aren’t those the same thing?). Dj and I locked at the hip like two madmen stewing up some crazy remedy. We had more music than we knew what to do with. “Xmas in Hell,” “Life after Death” and “Intermission” are three that stand out as bookends and segues for the other songs we had been writing. I would come in with “The Elephant Man” on DVD and show Dj the passing chords from a scene that would inspire him to write a dark little piece based around cellos, timpani, and over-the-top guitars. He would call late at night with the crazy idea of children’s voices mixed with chords from a song we had written but wanted to throw in a demented Danny Elfman blender. It felt like we were weightless in our freedom. Almost dreamlike. As perfect as imperfection can be.

DJ ASHBA, BACKSTAGE NASHVILLE
fig.na26

SIXX:A.M. 2011
fig.sam11

The only thing holding us back was that neither Dj or I can really sing. I remember like it was yesterday the phone call that changed our lives.

We called James from Funny Farm and asked if he wanted to do a vocal on a song or two we had, and maybe in exchange we could do some bass and guitar on some of his. By then we had been playing music over the phone to each other for months and it was exciting to help each other out.

He came out to the farm, where we hammered out a few lyrics and a guide vocal. He grabbed the hard drives and took them back to his studio and the next day pretty much changed history for us. James e-mailed Dj and me a song called “Funeral,” but like all things in Sixx:A.M., it was to evolve. The track inspired Dj to take the guitars to the next level, which inspired me to re-record the bass and push harder on the lyrics.

The song was basically written in stone when, instead of “funeral” James sang “life is beautiful.” Lyrically, it had been a very dark song, but the new chorus opened up to what I believe we all need, and that is
hope.
There needs to be light at the end of the tunnel.

Life Is Beautiful

By Sixx:A.M.

You can’t quit until you try

You can’t live until you die

You can’t learn to tell the truth

Until you learn to lie

You can’t breathe until you choke

You gotta laugh when you’re the joke

There’s nothing like a funeral

to make you feel alive

Just open your eyes

Just open your eyes

And see that life is beautiful.

Will you swear on your life,

That no one will cry at my funeral?

I know some things that you don’t

I’ve done things that you won’t

There’s nothing like a trail of blood

to find your way back home

I was waiting for my hearse

What came next was so much worse

It took a funeral to make me feel alive

At that second, we all burst into laughter. The kind you might laugh if you had just won the lotto. Like you can’t quite believe what just happened and you feel like maybe someone is playing a trick on you. I’ve had these moments before with Mötley Crüe. I can tell you that as an artist, nothing compares to that feeling. We had accidentally found ourselves in a moment. Suddenly we knew we had to finish all the songs the three of us had been working on, individually or collectively.

So it had started innocently enough: laughter, music, satire, words, friendship and, voilà, we had accidentally written a concept album to go with my book,
The Heroin Diaries.
Of course, we had a big problem on our hands. Some of the songs had such a stand-out reaction from everybody (“Life Is Beautiful,” just to name one) that we were getting asked what’s the name of the band going to be?

“Now what do we do?” I asked.

We were three friends, producers and songwriters, and forming a band was the last thing we had in mind. James said those days were gone for him. He was happy producing and writing. Dj had been burned so badly by the industry that he wanted just to write for other artists. His big ambition was to score horror movies. And for me, life was complicated enough being in Mötley Crüe, without adding another band to the mix.

Still, many a band name was thrown around, and the only thing that mattered to me was that it didn’t mention me. First thing James said was, “How about SIXX?”

“Argh, we’re a band!” I shouted.

“OK,” Dj said, “how about 6?”

“No, we are a fucking band, not a number, and it’s not about me.”

A few other possibilities came from e-mails, text messages, and late-night calls. Excitement built as though we were three high school friends starting their first garage band and I thought, wait, if 6 is me and A is Ashba and M is Michael, then we could be 6am.

I also liked this because 6-AM is the scientific nickname for the chemical compound 6-acetylmorphine, which, when found in urine, is evidence of heroin use. So I gleefully called James and Dj and announced, “I got it!” We all agreed and that was it. We were a band.

But, unbelievably, there was already a band called 6am. So we settled on Sixx:A.M.

The Heroin Diaries
came out and slammed into the
New York Times
bestseller list despite its name and the radical Paul Brown graphic design. My publisher told me they wouldn’t release the book with such a horrid cover, to which I responded by asking for their address so I could send back the advance money. They caved and later admitted it was their second-best-selling book that year, right behind
The Secret,
which was a blockbuster. The funny thing about doing unique things is watching the fear on people’s faces. I laugh because I know it doesn’t hurt, but you would think I was proposing to saw someone’s arm off with a dull bone saw, the way they go on and on worrying about demographics this and hitting the marketing hotbeds that.

(I have seen similar looks in people’s eyes when they see my photography for the first time. The funny thing is, they ain’t seen nothin’ yet! This road is long and littered with things the imagination can’t grasp. I can’t wait to turn people on to what’s next.)

Then came the Sixx:A.M. album, the sound track to
Diaries,
which nailed a number-one radio single.

It was a lethal book-album combination that had never been tried before, and in the end, whether it sold or not, it was a first and it touched a lot of lives.

So we made cool music to go with a cool book and everything was cool. Funny how life works. Money always clouds people’s judgment, especially in big companies. I understand there are a lot of asses on the line but if you’re a record label or publishing company, just seek out the quality, look for the very thing that made you wanna do what you do in the first place, and don’t worry about what others will think. I like to say, “What people say about you is none of your business,” even in business.