The Dirt (8 page)

I remembered that Angie was always talking about her old boyfriend from Indiana, a guy named Nikki Syxx, who used to play in a Top 40 cover band and later with a surf-punk outfit called John and the Nightriders. I loved his name, but I couldn’t just steal it. So I decided to call myself Nikki Nine. But everybody said it was too punk rock, and punk was now too mainstream. I needed something that was more rock and roll, and Six was rock and roll. So I decided that anyone who thinks surfing has anything to do with punk rock doesn’t deserve such a cool name, and I soon applied to have my name legally changed to Nikki Sixx. It was like stealing his soul, because for years people would come up to me and say, “Nikki, dude, remember me from Indiana?” I’d tell them that I’d never been to Indiana, and they’d say, “Come on, man, I saw you with John and the Nightriders.”

Years later, on the
Girls, Girls, Girls
tour, I was channel-surfing in a hotel room and saw a strange, sallow-skinned character with long hair being interviewed. I heard the words “He’s the devil” and stopped to watch. It was him, ranting and raving: “He took my name and sucked my soul out and sold it to you all—I was the original Nikki Syxx. And he is using my name to spread the word of Satan.” Nikki Syxx—or John as he was now called, appropriately enough since John is the saint in the New Testament who tells of the apocalypse—had become a born-again Christian.

fig. 8

London, clockwise from upper left: John St. John, Dane Rage, Nigel Benjamin, Nikki Sixx, Lizzie Grey

ANGIE CONVINCED ME TO MOVE in with a bunch of musicians behind a flower shop across from Hollywood High School. There were wanna-be rock stars everywhere in the house: sleeping in the bathtub, on the front steps, behind the sofa cushions. And somehow one of them burned the place to the ground one afternoon. I returned from the record store to find the house smoldering, surrounded by curious high school students. With my bass in hand—I always took it with me in case someone in the house stole it—I ran inside to see if I could rescue anything else of mine. I noticed that there was a piano still standing that a guy who had left town to visit his parents had been renting, so I wheeled it out of the house, around the corner, and all the way to a music store on Highland Avenue, where I sold it for a hundred dollars.

Angie let me move in with her in Beachwood Canyon, where I hung around all day listening to her records and dyeing my hair different colors while she earned money for us working as a secretary. I never thought about the piano again until six months later, when two policemen pulled up and pounded on the door, looking for a guy named Frank Feranna who had stolen a piano. I told them I knew of no one by that name.

When Lizzie and I weren’t trying to get our own band together, I tagged along with Angie to Redondo Beach, where she rehearsed with her band. I hated them because they were into Rush and had lots of guitar pedals and talked about hammer-ons and, most egregious of all, had curly hair. If there’s one genetic trait that automatically disqualifies a man from being able to rock, it’s curly hair. Nobody cool has curly hair; people like Richard Simmons, the guy from
Greatest American Hero
, and the singer from REO Speedwagon have curls. The only exceptions are Ian Hunter from Mott the Hoople, whose hair is more tangled than curly, and Slash, but his hair is fuzzy and that’s cool.

For women, the equivalent of curly hair is being cockeyed. If there’s one genetic trait in women that predisposes them to hate me, it’s having a cockeye. I always fail with cockeyed women, one of whom happened to be Angie’s roommate. One night I got drunk and tried to climb in her bed, and she told Angie all about it the next day. I tried to convince Angie that I thought it was her bed, but she knew me too well and kicked me out of the house. I moved into a drug-infested, prostitute-riddled Hollywood slum, and concentrated on staying in my own bed and getting my band with Lizzie together.

We found a dog collar–wearing, bronze giant of a drummer named Dane Rage; a keyboard player named John St. John, who hauled a giant Hammond B3 organ from gig to gig; and a singer named Michael White, whose claim to fame was that he had recorded something for a Led Zeppelin tribute album once. That, right there, should have let me know that he was not the man we were looking for. That, and the fact that he had curly hair. And was kind of cockeyed.

We tramped around Hollywood in high heels and tube tops and anything else we could muster up to shock Rush fans and Led Zeppelin dinosaurs. It was 1979 and, as far as we were concerned, rock and roll was dead. We were Mott the Hoople, the New York Dolls, the Sex Pistols; we were everything that no one else was into. In our alcoholic minds, we were the coolest fucking band ever, and our confidence (and alcoholism) attracted fanatic groupies after just a few shows at the Starwood. We called ourselves London, but what we really were was Mötley Crüe before Mötley Crüe.

Except for Michael White. Everything that I despised, he worshiped. If I liked the Stones, he liked the Beatles. If I liked creamy peanut butter, he liked chunky. So we fired him for having curly hair, placed an ad in
The Recycler
, and met Nigel Benjamin, who was a real rock-and-roll star in our minds not just because he had straight hair but because he had played in Mott the Hoople as Ian Hunter’s replacement. He wrote great lyrics, and when he stepped up to the mic he fucking wailed. He could really sing, like no one I’d been in a band with before. We had an insane keyboard player who had his own Hammond, a drummer with a big North trap set, and a British lead singer. We were on fire.

I was so excited that I called my uncle at Capitol and demanded, “I want to get ahold of Brian Connolly from the Sweet!”

“What?!” he asked, incredulous.

“I have this amazing band, you know, and I want to send him some pictures.”

I sent Connolly the photos and, as a favor to my uncle, he agreed to accept my call the next week. I spent the entire day at home, rehearsing what I’d say in my head. I picked up the phone and started to dial, then hung up.

Finally, I worked up the courage. As soon as he picked up, I went right into my speech about London and how we were on our way to the big time and how we could use his advice or his support or any kind of instruction he might have. Maybe we could tour together one day.

“Are you done, mate?” he asked.

I was done.

“I got your photos and music,” he continued. “And I see what you’re trying to do. But I can’t help you.”

“Man, I think we’re going to be the biggest band in L.A., and I think it would be good for us to—”

He cut me off: “Yeah, well, I’ve heard that before, mate. My advice would be to keep your day job. This kind of music is never going to make it.”

I was devastated. He went from being my idol to my enemy: a bitter rock star sitting on a throne of shit in his mansion in London.

“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry to hear you feel that way.” And I hung up and stared at the phone for half an hour, unsure whether to laugh or cry.

In the end, it just gave me more motivation to succeed and make Brian Connolly rue the day he ever insulted me. Our manager was David Forest, a flamboyant party fiend who ran the Starwood along with Eddie Nash, who was later mixed up in the John Holmes murders (when the porn star was involved in the fatal beating of four people at a drug dealer’s home in Laurel Canyon). Forest, ever charitable, gave me and Dane Rage jobs at the club cleaning and doing carpentry in the afternoon. It worked out so that at night London would play and drop confetti and make a mess, and the next day we’d get paid to clean it up.

It was through Forest that I was introduced to the decadence that the commingling of disco and rock had brought to the L.A. club scene. I’d sit in the office with him and people like Bebe Buell and Todd Rundgren, who would poison my impressionable mind with tales of Steven Tyler overdosing and Mick Jagger getting head backstage while groupies sat around nodding off on smack. Or I’d see local heroes like Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley partying. I had all the free rum and Cokes I wanted, plus I learned all about drugs whose names I had only heard of before. Real drugs. And I loved them.

I was young and pretty and had long hair. I’d lean against the wall at the Starwood in stiletto heels and supertight pants with my hair in my eyes and nose in the air. As far as I was concerned, I had made it. I would sleep until I had to get up and do something to make money, like telemarketing or selling crap door-to-door or working at the Starwood. At night I’d go to the Starwood and drink and fight and fuck girls in the bathroom. I really thought that I had become my fucking heroes: Johnny Thunders and Iggy Pop.

Now that I look back on it, I realize how naive and innocent I was. There were no jets or sold-out stadiums then, no mansions or Ferraris. There were no overdoses or orgies with guitar necks stuck up some chick’s ass. I was just some cocky little kid in a club who, like so many others before and after him, thought that a sore prick and burning nostrils meant he was king of the world.

I
question a lot of things and form my own opinions. They’re just as valid as a rocket scientist’s or anyone else’s. Who says you have to believe something because you read it in a book or saw pictures? Who is it that gets to say, “That’s the way that it is”? When everybody believes the same thing, they become robotic. People have a brain: they can figure out things for themselves, like how a UFO flies.