by Nikki Sixx
How do we all move on now that Mötley Crüe knocked you out, bloodied your nose, and busted your balls?
What if we say we’re sorry and keep our tactics to ourselves?
What if we go back to our corner, take the brass knuckles outta our sixteen-ounce boxing gloves, and come out and fight fair?
How about we just forget the whole thing ever happened?
How about if we just stop dancing around the land mine and just say it?
Go fuck yourself. Mötley Crüe beat your system.
Music belongs to the creator of the music, not to the labels.
Publishing belongs to the creator of the songs, not the labels.
“360” deals are criminal, in my opinion.
I won’t ever tell an artist to do one.
The label sharing in the publishing, album sales, merchandising, and touring?
What the hell is next, your firstborn?
Eight Basic Rules to Survive By
1. If you’re an artist, stand up for your rights.
2. If you’re a fan, support artists who don’t follow the old brick-and-mortar model.
3. Remember there is no music business without music.
There seems to be a misunderstanding that we need them.
We don’t need them, they need us.
4. Learn the legal system.
5. Know and understand marketing and branding.
6. Do it yourself. Keep it yourself. Keep your leverage.
7. Manifest your future.
It’s yours for the making, not theirs for the taking.
8. Get out your baseball bats and straight razors. This is war.
I ain’t bitter, I am fucking better…
SELF-PORTRAIT fig.ff25
III
ONE MAN, TWO BANDS
Nobody ever sounded like or will ever sound like Mötley Crüe. I can take that to my grave. I am not saying we don’t wear our influences on our tattered sleeves, because you can hear the Sex Pistols and AC/DC plain as day. You can smell the Ramones and Aerosmith stirred in together. We never denied any of that. But something about each guy in the band mixed with those influences makes us like nothing you’ve ever heard before.
To do that once is like a gift from the gods, but to have it happen twice, well, I am either one lucky motherfucker or just destined to have two bands take over the world during my lifetime. At this point I’m still counting my blessings, so I’ll await what happens and try not to predict the future. I am a firm believer in believing in yourself, and I have no doubt that what I am doing now means as much to me as what I have done in the past with Mötley and whatever I will do in the future.
Sixx:A.M., like Mötley Crüe, is a passion. Like music, photography is emotional, and when you breed music with imagery, you get honesty. That’s why people either hate it or love it. Please don’t ever tell me you “like” Mötley or Sixx:A.M., and for God’s sake either fucking hate my photography or love it but don’t sit on the fence. I have come too far to not evoke some kind of emotion from you. You deserve rage as much as you do love. I will continue to push your buttons until I take my place six feet under, one tattered sleeve saying Mötley Crüe, the other saying Sixx:A.M.
You ready to stand for something? Are you with me now?
DJ ASHBA fig.dj71
JAMES MICHAEL fig.jm62
JAMES MICHAEL, BACKSTAGE NYC fig.b29s
It’s Sixx:A.M. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is?
Sixx:A.M. is the band that never wanted to be a band.
I met James Michael ten years ago in an office in Beverly Hills. He was a budding songwriter then, discovered by my manager Allen Kovac, with whom I had started a record company called Americoma.
James was walking down the hall one day, hair a mess, unshaven. I said hello not even knowing who this disheveled guy was. (Is that the pot calling the kettle black or what?)
One day when I was in the office, listening to some of the thousands of demo tapes from new bands looking for a label, Allen popped in. “There is someone I think you might like writing with,” he said. Now, in those days Allen knew well that I was not interested in collaborating with other songwriters. So for him to even mention this was kind of like stepping onto a minefield. Except that Allen has the savvy to pick his battles, and he also has my respect. So when he mentioned it, I was receptive.
“Let me meet the guy,” I said.
The next day, standing at my office door, was the same scruffy, unshaven Kurt-Cobain-meets-male-model dude I saw before. For some reason I was in a chipper mood and invited him to have a seat (ever seen a record company president with leopard print chairs?), and we hit it off like two bats outta hell.
There is something magical about James’s voice, and I heard it day one in his little apartment in Hollywood. We two with acoustic guitars and ideas for days on end. We were like pigs in shit, and there hasn’t been a bad creative day since with James Michael.
Years later, sitting at the piano in the front room of my Malibu ranch, overlooking the canyon at sunset, someone would think we were two childhood friends cracking up over an inside joke. We were writing songs for Meat Loaf’s album, and James tried to sing like him while I had the duty of topping Jim Steinman lyrically as we were pouncing back and forth on the keyboard. In hysterics, we weren’t laughing at Meat Loaf or the music but at ourselves and the amount of fun we were having.
On a totally different front, I saw an ad in a magazine somewhere with this really cool-looking guy in it. Oddly, it said he was Dj Ashba. I personally can’t stand the whole concept of DJs, so I shrugged him off as another fly-by-night tattooed poser playing hip-hop or electronica, and turned the page.
At the time, Mötley Crüe was in a holding pattern and I had just met with Slash for lunch in Hollywood. I told him I knew the singer from Buckcherry and we should put a band together. Slash seemed to like the idea but didn’t know if the singer was right. Time passed, Slash hung out with Duff McKagan, and they decided to form a band, which became Velvet Revolver. So I ended up writing music for a band that existed only in my head.
Then I got a call from the guitar player from L.A. Guns. Tracii Guns had heard I was thinking about doing a side project and he was calling to see if I was still interested. We had a history in the glammed-out ’80s in L.A. (though for the life of me I couldn’t remember exactly what we did together). I had known Slash for years as a friend and that was a big part of why I wanted to do a new band with him (besides, he is up there with Mick Mars among my favorite guitar players). Tracii pushed to get together and jam and so we did. He is a great player and quite the little networker. It was Tracii who found the singer London LeGrand for us. He discovered him working as a hairstylist on Melrose down in Hollywood. So we three started jamming in a funky little studio in Santa Monica. Before long we found a drummer, and I wanted to fill out the band with a second guitar player.
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.
