The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rockstar
By Nikki Sixx
Pocket Books (9/18/07)
ISBN 0-743486-28-5
432 pages
One of the most memorable moments from VH1’s Behind the Music was Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx telling the story of his out-of-body experience. He had just overdosed, was presumed dead, yet revived at the last minute… and he saw all this from above. What BTM doesn’t tell you was that Slash from Guns N’ Roses was with him at the time. It doesn’t tell you of the chaos amongst his bandmates wondering if he was alive or not. It also doesn’t tell you the depression and drug addiction that haunted Sixx in the year preceding this most recent overdose. These are all some of the things Nikki shares with gruesome detail in The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rockstar.
The Heroin Diaries is a journal Nikki started on Christmas Day 1986 to, among other reasons, remember what he had done the day before. This was a fascinating entry point for me personally because it was right before the writing and recording of the Girls, Girls, Girls! album and was my introduction to Mötley Crüe. Twelve-year-old me looked at the band as the coolest on the planet, and even planned to use “Wild Side” when I made my debut as a pro wrestler (don’t laugh, I was twelve). Thirty-two-year-old me was surprised to read just how depressed and suicidal Nikki was at the time.
I was even more surprised to read that “Wild Side” was actually a bastardization of The Lord’s Prayer, and inspired by his friend’s daughter, a seventeen-year-old Catholic school girl who used to stop by between classes for reasons that had nothing to do with prayer (though, she may have still been on her knees).
The twenty-year difference between discovering the band and reading The Heroin Diaries now is the most interesting aspect of the book. As a kid growing up in the ’80s, Shout at the Devil back patch in all, The Crüe were gods. They rocked. They partied. They had all the girls. This was the life you wanted to live. This was what it was all about.
Who knew that, while we were idolizing the man, Nikki Sixx was sitting on the floor in the closet in his bedroom, alone, shooting up as much heroin as he could get his hands on and wanting to die? The lifestyle we all grew up wanting as teenagers suddenly stopped looking so glamorous. It actually looks pretty sad.
That was 1987 for Nikki Sixx. Throughout the recording and touring of Girls, Girls, Girls!, that was his life. Save for fifteen days in May when he was clean and sober (except for the alcohol and the cocaine), it was doing as much drugs as he needed to just to make it through the day. There was still the debauchery you would expect; he was a rockstar after all. But at the end of the day there was just a junkie all alone, both physically and emotionally.
The Diaries aren’t all about the drugs. Nikki also went into his feelings about the recording industry, all the other bands that were biting off of The Crüe’s style, his management, and even his bandmates. I also had no idea that Slash was a friend of his from before Appetite for Destruction was released. There was a day in August when Axl Rose had actually called Nikki to tell him that Slash was all “strung out” and wanted to know if Nikki could help him or say something to him. Think about that one.
If it sounds like I’m down on him, I’m not. I’m still a Mötley Crüe fan, and even more so of Nikki personally. Even when you strip away all the bells and whistles that go along with being one of the biggest bands in the world, there’s a guy who remains passionate about what he does, and more importantly, remains passionate about music.
But he didn’t publish these diaries to say “look at me and look how cool it was to be in Mötley Crüe”—he published them for the future rockers and/or junkies as a guide book of what not to do. He’s been there and done that. He knows all the excuses and he knows all the tricks. He’s also lucky to be alive. The Heroin Diaries is his way of telling people not to make the same mistakes.
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