Hi Nikki. Are you all right?
I’m all right, man. A little bit sick ... probably been burning the candle at both ends. That’ll do it.
Surely not!
Yeah [laughs]. I’m sure retirement will be nothing different to what I do now for Mötley.
Are you really on the Crüe’s last ever tour?
Oh yeah. December 31 2015 will be the last one. 100%. We signed a contract that the band cannot go on as a touring entity (1). Of course we’ll continue to license our music to movies and do cool things with merchandise. We’re proud of what we built. We’re not just going to walk away from it, but as a touring band, we feel that our time has come and gone. We want to leave it intact.
The tour has been getting good reviews...
It’s funny to get good reviews when you’re in a rock band. To me, looking out and seeing 30 or 40,000 people every night is the review. The local newspaper will be like, “Well they were too loud” or too blah blah blah. Nothing much has changed, has it?
You’re also promoting your other band, Sixx:A.M. (2) What’s the main difference between Sixx: A.M. and Mötley Crüe?
They’re completely different bands, different chemistry. Tommy [Lee], Vince [Neil], Mick {Mars] and myself have been brothers for over 30 years and Mötley Crüe is instinctual for us. When we make music, it’s very much in our blood. Sixx:A.M. were never thought of as a touring band because Mötley Crüe is the mothership, but it’s a band built out of creating sonics and sounds around songs. The first Sixx:A.M. record [The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack, 2007] was the soundtrack to a book (3). We didn’t know we’d have a number one hit with it. The second record [This Is Gonna Hurt, 2011] that tied in with my book of photography. This third album is just about the music.
Why is it called Modern Vintage? We went back and listened to our vinyl collection and all the great music: Wings and Queen and Bowie and Elton John and T. Rex. Rock bands in the 1970s weren’t so one-dimensional. There were all sorts of chances being taken on those records, and that’s what we did on this record.
Fans won’t be expecting a sincere cover of the Cars’ AOR classic, Drive.
It was an accident. We were talking about doing a cover song and we started messing around with Elvin Bishop’s Fooled Around And Fell In Love. We talked about 10cc. Then one day Drive just landed in my head. I called James and sang the opening line and he went, “Oh wow.” It came together really quickly. There’s a lot of space in that song. It’s wide open.
And Before It’s Over seems to have elements of music hall, of all things…
We listened to everything from Black Sabbath to Tin Pan Alley and started messing around with a ragtime thing, but because it sounded happy we wanted a darker story.
There’s a line in it about dancing naked in the moonlight. Is that something you’ve ever done?
Well I’m not much of a dancer but I’ve definitely been naked in the moonlight [laughs].
What got you interested in music in the first place?
It happened really young for me. I remember driving round Los Angeles with my mother in the 60s. I remember hearing that song Downtown by Petula Clark! It painted this image of a big city and we were driving around one. At that age, your Mum’s your hero. Music just seemed very exciting after that. I started making up my own nursery rhymes and short stories. I never set out to be a songwriter. It’s just what I love doing.
Why was Iggy and the Stooges’ Search And Destroy your teenage anthem?
By the time I got into the heavier guitar stuff I was going through that adolescent anger thing. It’s a common story but mine was also fuelled by a father and a mother that were gone (4), and not really knowing where I fit into society. That song really connected with me.
Did you really have a motto: “I’m going to do exactly what I want and fuck everybody else”?
When I was young, yeah. Because I never had a template of what a family was, I never really thought I would ever make it to that place in my life. I thought I’d be one of these crash and burn kids. So I threw myself headlong into music and that lifestyle. I never really figured I’d get out of the other side. A few years later, when I got sober and was able to become a father and have a family, that was when some of the greatest lessons came.
Is it difficult to be a father and say “Don’t do this” when your hellraising and mistakes have been so publicly documented in The Dirt(5)?
Yeah. It’s a hard place to be, haha.
You quoted some lyrics on Twitter today. “Does your desire cause you harm? Does it when the devil twists your arm? Do you run away or do you face it?” What’s that about?
They’re from a song on Modern Vintage called Hyperventilate. It’s about a love of anything. You kind of feel like you can’t breathe. You’ll do anything to have it. Is it real love or just passion? Or an addiction? You hyperventilate. We zeroed in on that moment, that compulsion.
Is it easy to transport yourself to those places now that you’ve been long clean and sober?
Inspiration comes from all over the place. When Mötley did [1989 multi platinum album] Dr. Feelgood with [producer] Bob Rock, we were already huge but that album catapulted us to an even bigger level. Bob had said to me: “What are you going to write songs about now? You’ve won everything that you can win. You’ve proven everybody wrong. You guys have money beyond any money you could ever spend in your life. You’re all driving Ferraris and seeing girls in bikinis and living in mansions.” I said: “Bob, just because I lay my head down in a 10,000 square foot cell do you think that I’m really cured?” The bottom line is that you are always … I am always trying to dig in the dirt and trying to find more skeletons and bones. That’s how I operate. I find things about myself that I want to fix or I’m not happy with or I believed were true that are not. It’s a lifelong journey.
The Heroin Diaries book documented your descent into drug addiction in harrowing, eye-watering detail. It’s amazing that you can remember it.
I can remember the Feelgood era pretty well. Before that it really was a blur. I got very spotty. I had a hangover for pretty much 15 years.
Was finding your diaries from those years like reading the words of a different person?
Yeah, and still to this day I don’t quite understand how I could be in that space and actually live … and operate on the planet. It seems so surreal.
What was it like to be dead (6)? Well, there’s that one time that’s documented in the book, which was written the night after it happened. But with every junkie there’s more than one.
There’s another particularly memorable diary entry where you describe yourself as a “alcoholic heroin and coke addict getting into pills” and how you spend Christmas Day 1986 naked under the Christmas tree, clutching a shotgun. How on earth did that come about?
Well if you shoot enough cocaine you go into a kind of psychosis, and I believed people were coming to get me. Scary place, let me tell you. It reads like some kind of a dark horror story or bedtime thriller. But in real life, the trauma that psychosis puts your body through is on a cellular level. You believe that you’re going to have an experience even though it’s not really happening. I can remember those, because you come out of them, and it’s scary. But you can only imagine what it would be like to be insane and not come out of it, or a version of that, like dementia.
Why did you recently go undercover as a record shop assistant to promote Sixx:A.M.?
I worked in record stores 35 years ago and it was one of my favourite times of my life, because I could listen to music all day. Recently, we were on the east coast and came across this shop called Vintage Vinyl, a very famous store [in New Jersey] where so many of my friends said: “That’s where I bought my first record.” So I called the guy who owned the store and said: “I’ve got this idea. Bring in these undercover cameras up in there and let me just like, work...” He had to show me, because I really don’t know how to use a modern cash register or any of this stuff! It’s alien to me, but it was great. It was self serving in that I was able to talk about the new Sixx:A.M. record, which is wonderful, but also I was able to and talk about these independent stores that need promotion. I didn’t realise how viral it would go. Literally just before it went out I thought, “Who the hell am I supposed to be?” So I made up a name and became “Larry.” Literally on the spot I came up with maybe the worst name ever. So now people will see me on the street and say “Hi Larry!” I’m like, “Are you kidding me?”
Does anyone ever call you Frank (7)?
Very, very few people. Only people that have done some kind of research and go, “Oh, that was his original name”, you know. The people that really know me know that that was my dad’s name, and the reason I changed my name was because of my relationship with my dad. So by calling me that, in a sense, you’re kind of spitting in my face.
Is that person gone forever?
I let him go, you know. He missed out on a really great son, and I’m not going to be that kind of father to my kids, that’s for sure.
You recently got married again, for the third time. Is the notorious Nikki Sixx now a well-adjusted family man?
I love it. I have a zest for life and I love the idea that I go home to my family and my wife and they understand me. We have a great life and so much fun together. I would never be single and not be a father. I had a time, and what a time it was, but this surpasses it a thousand fold. I love stability, because what swirls around me is insanity.
Do you regret any of that insanity?
The only thing I regret is if anybody got hurt along the way, but the person who got hurt the most was me.
• Modern Vintage by Sixx:A.M. is released on 6 October by Eleven Seven Music.
Footnotes
(1) In January this year, Mötley Crüe signed a contract legally forbidding them to tour after 2015.
(2) Formed with DJ Ashba and James Michael in 2007.
(3) Nikki’s autobiography, The Heroin Diaries: A Year In The Life Of A Shattered Rock Star, based on diaries written during his 1980s drug addictions and published in 2007.
(4) After his father left when Nikki was aged three, his mother would dump him on his grandparents whenever she had a new boyfriend.
(5) The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band was published in 2001.
(6) Nikki has described having an out-of-body experience following a drug overdose in 1987. After being declared clinically dead, he was revived by cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The incident inspired Mötley’s 1989 hit, Kickstart My Heart.
(7) Nikki was born Frank Carlton Serafino Ferrana on 11 December 1958.
