LATEX AND LYRICISM

Rip It Up, Issue 154, 1 May 1990, Page 16

LATEX AND LYRICISM

Nikki Sixx Gets Serious

“I don't think there's a time in my life I haven't been in love with something, whether it's a woman or a guitar or a bottle of booze or a needle.”

Thirty year old Nikki Sixx, bassist, main songwriterand founding member of LA super-group Motley Crue, is sprawled in an armchair in his manager's hotel room. In five hours he's due on stage for the second of the group's Sydney concerts but in sweat pants and baseball cap, he looks more like a Californian surf bum than one of rock's baddest wild boys (if you overlook his elaborately

tattooed right arm). Fouryearsago Sixx collapsed from a heroin overdose in a hotel lobby. Clinically dead forfour minutes, paramedics literally jump started his heart with electrodes and a five inch needle full of adrenalin, the final chapter in a deranged rock and roll lifestyle that earned Motley Crue a reputation as the scungiest rockers lucky to be alive.

Now Nikki Sixx is not only very much alive and drug free, but he and his band are enjoying Number One in America status with their fifth

album Dr. Feelgood and he's getting married in May. But as he explained in his oh-so-cool Califoranian drawl, he's still addicted to adventure.

Now that you're clean and sober how do you get your kicks? I'd really rather not talk about the drugs, y'know, it's sort of boring. Pause while I hunt nervously amongst my notes for another question. This is one cool dude. Do you feel nostalgic for your wild days?

I don't really think the wild days are over. I think maybe the destructive days are over but not the decadent days by any means. I think we're one of the most decadent

bands there is without pushing it over the edge so it's not fun any more. It's a fine line. When it's notfun any more it's fucked.

How do you define decadence? For me it's a very free spirited, free will, willing to do and try anything you want, not what somebody else wants you to. So if I'm in a club and I want to pull my pants down, that, I think is decadent. Or if I want to tattoo a Japanese dragon on my ass that's decadent. Or maybe I want to shave my head. Maybe I think punk's more cool now than rock n'roll—which I do—that's decadent. Decadent isn't going with the flow it's going against the flow. Unless going with the flow is where you were going before everyone else joined in. You're interested in punk? We always felt we were sort of a punk band 'cos that's what rock n'roll is: a nasty attitude and blues mixed together. I just think we're leaning a little more towards the nasty attitude. You've probably heard the last of any ballads from Motley for quite a long time. We have no intention of doing them on our next album at all. We'll be doing a more aggressive album than we've ever done in history. Just because it's the norm to do ballads and we like to rip your heart out with a ballad, not kiss your ass. That's what writing ballads is all about now: lick your ass so you can be heard on the radio. I don't care about being heard on the radio. I care about reaching out of the radio and tearing your heart out and going fuck, I relate to that. And tongue-in-cheek humour?

I think there's a ton of tongue-in-cheek. I don't want to get

on a soap box and preach about politics. I want the music to be more like ram it down yourthroat. / read you're getting a book published next year. It's very dark poetry. It's called Education in Rebellion and it's basically like Motley Crue lyrics but a little bit darker and a lot of tongue-in-cheek. Some slightly written from a schizophrenic stand point. Because you think humourand blackness go together? Of course! I think they have to. Life's not to be taken so seriously. I think it's to be taken with a grain of salt and that's how I write. I take a really serious subject like murder and twist in the humour.

Do you get seduced by the blackness, the romance of despair? I think so, I think it's really sexy. Do you require a lot of outside stimulus or does it all come from insideyou?

I just absorb all kinds of things. TV, walking in the hallway and running into somebody. A confrontation in a restaurant. Walking in the street and seeing some bums. Reading a newspaper headline or something that I really feel. Without You'was motivated by Tommy and Heather. So whatever's around me is what I'm writing about. A lot of it's sexual because I feel sex is really important. More the forbidden fruit side of it than the actual event, y'know. I don't consider my writing to be pornographic. I consider it to be more like foreplay or something. Do you feel creatively turned on all the time?

I can be really creative. I'm in a very creative space right now. The soonerthe tour's over the happier I'll be because I'm rea//yfucking dying to write and record right now. Other times I don't want to be creative. I just wantto be a normal guy, y'know. I hide under a baseball hat and sweat

pants and I watch TV, remote control, popcorn and I don't want to know that I'm in a band. I don't want to know about anything except my dog and my gun and my girlfriend. Then the next second (snaps fingers) the music's coming out of me. That's what's so great about having an outlet like Motley Crue. People point the finger and say I'm moody—when the show's over you never know whether I'm going to be friendly or just be gone but unfortunately that's the downside of being so creative. Things do affect

me really heavily. How do you cope with that? I used to stick a needle in my arm. Now I just have to cope with it and it's very frustrating. I usually hide a lot. I don't deal with people very well. I dea I with fa ns okay — I love fa ns — but I don't deal with most people very well because people sort of frustrate me. They try to pick too much. I don't want to be picked at. I just want to be part of something. To be in a room and be the focal point visually, mentally, physically is like, fuck man, can't I blend in anywhere? It's really killed a lot of musicians and entertainers. People like Greta Garbo turned into complete recluses because they could not handle it. You just want to go to the store and buy a bag of apples and all of a sudden it's like a fucking major news headline. What's the big attraction with tattoos? Body art I think is fantastic. Eventually I'll probably be totally

covered except for my chest. I just think it's beautiful, it's something I like so I do it. It's symbolic to me. This arm is water and fire which is blended in with yin and yang, good and evil. I was going through very hard times when I did a lot of this. The water is fighting with the fire and the skulls and the joker, which is like my personality, a bit of a prankster. It's turmoil: hot and cold, on and off, good and bad. And the pleasure of pain? I hate the pain! That's the worst part. But you've got a pierced nipple as well. That was awful. I don't recommend that. I just thought this was something that would look really cool, I want to do it. So me and Tommy went down and the guy stuck this na/7through my nipple and I thought I was going to die. It was awful and it took six months to heal. I used to drive this black bronco truck in LA and the thing bounced but it was automatic so I could drive it with one hand and hold my nipple. Oh man! What are the five most important things in your life? My fiance, my band, my friends, conflict and spontenaiety. What do you listen to? Been listening to a lot of really aggressive stuff. Soundgarden, Faith No More, Metallica, Slaughter. And I like the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. I listen to a lot of soul. I like mellow stuff like Whitney Houston and Anita Baker. Allman Brothers, Joe Cocker and older stuff like that. Are you going to go on and on and 'become like the Rolling Stones of heavy metal? Well, we really would like to be considered one of the greatest rock and roll bands in the world and you can only do that by staying around. We still don't know if someone in this band will wake up dead because I don't know when I goto bed at night when everybody else is going to bed. Somebody could jump out a window because they're a little bit cracked or they could be sitting in bed with their remote control by 8 o'clock at night by themselves or there could be, like, sixteen girls in their bed. You just don't know. But you all lead a clean and sober lifestyle and tour with wives and

.girlfriends in tow. Don't you find life lacks a certain edge? It depends on whatyou call living on the edge, right? I personally think that a bunch of fucked up rockers is about the most boring thing on this planet. Bands that rock my world are the Red Hot Chilli Peppers. That energy, that power, that's what I idolise. That schizophrenic insanity, running on adrenalin, pure rock n'roll juice! It's not fabricated out of a bottle, it's not cooked up in a spoon, it comes out of the back of your mind and that's the sickest kind of rock and roller.

I just think that the attraction to dangerforthis band is so important. We always end up in the right place with the adventure—guns, fast cars, bunji jumping. I might buy a couple of old cars, take 'em to the desert and blow them up, go sky diving, just go totally off the deep end. That need for th rills because we don't do othis (points to arm) anymore. But does the old you come out and implore you to push it a bit further? Definitely.

And you just say no. So far. I'm not an angel and I'm not not human. So for me to fall off the wagon face first into a spoon of heroin again is pretty much expected among my peers and people in my life. No-one really thinks I can stay clean. Maybe that's why I will. Do you drink? Absolutely nothing. No drugs. No alcohol. Caffeine, heavy metal and lifting weights. That's it. It's a very cool combination.

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