Hurts So Good

Depending on your knowledge of Nikki Sixx, you'll definitely know he's Mötley Crüe's chief songwriter-bassist. You may have heard about his Sixx Sense radio show, clothing line (Royal Underground) and most likely even his autobiographical New York Times-bestseller, The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star (2007). Dig deeper and you'll discover Sixx's side-project with Dj Ashba and James Michael, Sixx:AM, which was born when a musical companion piece for The Heroin Diaries accidentally materialised. With album number three by Sixx:AM in its final stages, The Heroin Diaries is to be turned into a Broadway play. Did you know Sixx is also a father of four? “My 18 year old [daughter, Storm] told me that she started to read The Heroin Diaries,” Sixx shares, relaxing on a sofa and drinking coconut water in his backstage dressing room before Mötley Crüe's second Etihad Stadium show last month. “And she goes, 'It's, like, the same thing: you woke up and you did drugs, you went to bed, you woke up and you did drugs. I got bored with it'.”

Probably the least known fact about Sixx is this: he's a gifted photographer. A recovering addict, Sixx refers to cameras as his “new drug”. Sixx's second New York Times bestseller – This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography, And Life Through The Distorted Lens Of Nikki Sixx – unites his passions: writing music, photography and writing. Having cheated death in 1987 when he survived his second overdose, this time after having been declared clinically dead (the inspiration for Mötley Crüe's Kickstart My Heart), Sixx hopes his books will inspire people to pursue their dreams (“but maybe like a self-help book written by William S Boroughs”).    

Sixx certainly isn't your typical author. ”I understand that everybody can't write,” he articulates. I can write my own books, but it's only because I forced myself. You know, I didn't graduate high school – I was thrown out of high school for selling drugs so I'm not the most academic kid on the block. I had to apply myself.”

Before The Heroin Diaries came Mötley Crüe's collaborative autobiography, co-written with Neil Strauss and titled The Dirt: Confessions Of The World's Most Notorious Rock Band. So help us out here, Sixx: what's with the whole egg burrito thing? “The what? Oh, the egg burrito, haha,” Sixx erupts into hysterics once the penny drops. “Well, okay. There was these clubs where we'd hang out in the late-'70s and early-'80s – one club the Starwood Club, it was very famous in Hollywood and I used to work there in the daytime, and at night I would play there… So afterwards everyone would be fucking SMASHED and we'd go through a drive-through right by the club and order egg burritos to kinda absorb some of the alcohol – that's back when Mötley got together and you could drink and drive and stuff, right?

“And then one day one of us was like, 'Fuck, I'm gonna get busted,' you know – 'cause we would fuck the girls in the bathroom or in the bushes outside the club – and then, um, we would go home [to our girlfriends] and we'd smell like the other girls. So one of us was like [mimes looking down at a burrito and then having a light-bulb moment]. And we were like, 'Oh!' You bit the end of it off… HA!” Sixx stresses, “It felt good. Nobody ate the burrito after, I can tell you that. That would've been a really bad ending to the story.”

When Sixx read the entries that would become The Heroin Diaries – written between Christmas of 1986 and Christmas of 1987, which bookended the Girls, Girls, Girls album and touring cycle – he remembers “feeling proud that [he'd] gotten out”. “And I remember feeling shocked 'cause I kinda forgot how dark it was,” he continues. On his decision to publish the journal, Sixx remembers, “I did hear from a lot of people who said, 'Are you fucking sure, man? This is like peeling the onion all the way back and exposing all your intestines and every dirty, dirty, dirty thought.' And I said, 'Yeah, because I think if someone reads this it could save someone's life.” One quarter of the proceeds from sales of this book are donated to Covenant House California. “I raised over half a million dollars for a charity for runaway kids, which made me feel really good,” he admits.

As well as street photography, many studio shots grace the pages of This Is Gonna Hurt, a book Sixx dedicated to Lisa, the sister he never knew. Born with Down Syndrome and various other disabilities, Lisa spent her life in a facility and Sixx never got the chance to know her. Sixx shot a moving series of portraits depicting how he imagines Lisa would look in heaven. “When my sister passed, I was outside the mortuary and this murder of black crows just came out of nowhere,” Sixx explains of the inspiration behind this photo shoot. “The crows were [part of the shoot] because of what happened when she passed, and the girls were nude because there's a version of complete vulnerability there, but also they're naked [because] they're going to the next place, you know?” Sometimes Sixx avoids explaining the concept prior to a shoot: “If I tried to explain that to a group of people, 'Well, I have crows and I have girls and I have nudity, and I have this light that I'm using as a leak source,' they'd go, 'You're mad as a fucking bat in a bell tower' [laughs]. So I just do it and then later people go, 'I still think you're crazy, but I think I understand'.”

Sixx divulges he has “a relationship with ravens or black crows that [he] can't understand”. “It's the logo for my radio show, you know: the crow with the eye. It's very interesting, when things happen they always come to me and they surround me. My grandfather just passed away and the night before he passed away I went to take my dog outside, and there's no crows in my neighbourhood – fuckin' crows just started circling! And I looked up and I went, 'Oh, it's gonna happen,' and I went inside and the phone rang and there it was. So it's just very interesting.” If the crow is Sixx's spirit animal, it sure suits him. “Yeah, I think so,” he allows.

Okay. If Twitter was around when Mötley Crüe were at their most flagrant, what would they have posted? “It would've been Instagram of the egg burrito and real-time video of the aftermath,” Sixx chuckles. “I mean, come ON! What would we have taken pictures of? There would've been fucking eight girls, face down with their asses in the air [points backwards as if posing for an imaginary profile pic], 'Man, look at that,' you know?” He pauses and then expresses genuine concern, “Why is no band taking pictures of some fucking naked girls? Let's go, guys! I don't know what's up with these men out there; they're starting to worry me.”