Morally Repugnant...and Awesome!

Beneath the blizzards of cocaine, bindles of smack, mountains of pills and gallons of Jack Daniel’s, there’s a vital lesson lurking in The Heroin Diaries, the new tell-all by Motley Crue bassist and world-class dumbass Nikki Sixx. And that lesson is this:

You can totally bag more strippers when you’re sober.

What? You were expecting Hallmarkian sentiment? This is the Crue we’re talking about, the most debauched troupe of dirtballs to be birthed in the sin-stained gutters of West Hollywood. This is a multiplatinum metal band that, during its ’80s heyday, entertained itself in hotels by greeting room service in the nude (and that's when they were being charming).

Strangely enough, though, the boys make for riveting storytellers. In 2001, Sixx, plus Motley bandmates Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Tommy Lee, delivered best-selling oral history The Dirt, the first 250 pages of which are so morally bankrupt...I can’t recommend the book enough. Seriously, it's awesomely shocking, and it makes Led Zeppelin’s infamous bio Hammer of the Gods read like The Book of Virtues.

Equally abhorrent and highly entertaining, sorta-sequel The Heroin Diaries also includes ribald interviews with Neil, Mars and Lee. But this one’s primarily about Sixx, who kept a day-to-day journal in 1987 when Motley Crue was the biggest band in the world — and the band’s leader and songwriter was spiraling down a rabbit hole of heroin and cocaine addiction.

If The Dirt was about the party, The Heroin Diaries is about the morning-after wreckage. It’s bleak, violent, mind-blowingly profane. By embracing both candor and crassness — and dishing on everyone from Jon Bon Jovi to Slash to Heather Locklear — Sixx spins a gross, gripping yarn, the rare celeb to detail every drop of blood, every trashed hotel room, every naked groupie crawling through his window.

Say what you want about Sixx — he’s been pronounced dead twice — but in this day and age of milquetoast rock stars, it’s refreshing to be repulsed by the old-school guys. Using old journal entries and modern-day commentary, he paints scene after pathetic scene of his drug use, impotence and increasing paranoia: "There is something about spending Christmas alone, naked, sitting by the Christmas tree gripping a shotgun, that lets you know your life is spinning dangerously outta control."

Abandoned by his family, manipulated by drug dealers and grifted by the music biz, a then-29-year-old Sixx escaped to a walk-in closet in his Hollywood mansion with a pen, a notebook — and millions of dollars in drugs. He was a depressed egomaniac, a talented brat, with enough money to buy whatever he wanted. And what he wanted — despite blood in his stool, track marks on his arms and paranoid hallucinations of Mexican dwarves hopping his security fence — was more drugs.

Instead of trying to help Sixx, Motley’s management settled for keeping him upright, out of jail and very profitable. As a result, Sixx routinely asked his drug dealers to lead him to sobriety. Sure, they said. But how ’bout one more for the road?

Every now and then, "Sikki," as friends called him, would creep out of his drug den to fight with pop star girlfriend Vanity, a former Prince paramour. In one of the book’s more tender scenes, Vanity teaches Sixx how to freebase cocaine. "As soon as she showed me the real ins and outs of cooking up a good rock," Sixx writes, "it was love." Vanity, who now goes by the name Evangelist Denise Matthews, responds to the recollections with a series of increasingly zealous interviews: "I am this new creature in Christ and I persevere to keep changing for the better!" What a circus.

During those rare weeks when Sixx managed stay sober, he proved to be rather likable, a talented musician with a superheroic libido. In a downright hilarious scene, he even treats pal Jon Bon Jovi to a night in a German brothel — but can’t concentrate because the New Jersey singer, in the bed next to him, won’t stop wisecracking: "To say I didn’t get my money’s worth would be an understatement, unless I was paying Job Bon Jovi to tell me jokes, in which case I got a pretty good deal."

Compiled and edited by music writer Ian Gittins, The Heroin Diaries is not without its problems. The book has a brutally ugly design: red, white and black glossy pages, with typewriter print and splotchy Ralph Steadman-esque art. Even worse, Sixx fancies himself a true poet, but the lyrics he uses to break up the entries are Spinal Tappian at best: "I’ve never been to Eden / But it’s nice I hear tell / When I die I’ll go to heaven / ’Cause I’ve done my time in hell."

But ultimately, The Heroin Diaries provides what it promises: sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — and a curiously redemptive finale that could only happen in a Motley Crue book. Around Christmas, Sixx overdoses, is pronounced dead and then, miraculously, comes to in a hospital bed. He rips tubes out of his arms and staggers outside, "where two teenage girls were sitting crying around a candle. They had heard on the radio that I was dead and looked kind of surprised to see me. The girls...gave me a lift home as we listened to my obituary on the radio."

Comments

[Sherrie]

OK, your phrase "it makes Led Zeppelin’s infamous bio Hammer of the Gods read like The Book of Virtues" had me running to the public library website to put that sucker on hold. (Alas, they don't have it, but I did score "The Dirt" to start with.) Hammer of the Gods and Pamela Des Barres' tome I'm With the Band were passed around my junior year of high school so much that both of them pretty much disinigrated from being pawed over by the grubby teens that we were. If this book is reminiscent of those epics, I'm on it!

[Sean Daly]

Read "The Dirt" first -- it sets up "The Heroin Diaries" with more deliciously abhorrent oomph.

I'm very excited for you. You'll want to pour acid in your eyes after reading certain pages...but in a good way.