What better place to talk tunes with Nikki Sixx, bassist and founder of Mötley Crüe, than on the street that made the band famous, Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles? With Accept's hard-driving "Balls to the Wall" as the soundtrack, Nikki pointed out various landmarks ("That used to be Geffen Records . . . if the Guns N' Roses guys were there, we'd stand here and flip 'em off") as we cruised the Strip in his 2001 Ford Excursion Limited.
The Excursion is loaded with JVC gear, including a 6.4-inch monitor in each headrest, a pair of 12-inch subwoofers in sealed enclosures the tailgate, four Nikki Sixx Signature amplifiers tucked below the middle seat, and a CD changer and Sony PlayStation 2 in the center console. Oh yeah - there's also a video camera mounted in the tailgate, which displays images on a dash-mounted 6.4-inch color monitor. Nikki tapes whatever shows up behind him ("Hell's Angels, cops, beautiful girls - I record it all") onto a VCR in the SUV, then goes home and writes music to "sync up" with what he sees. A CD radio and DVD player are the monitor's neighbors in the Excursion's rebuilt dash.
After our ride down memory lane, we pulled over a few blocks down from the club that made Mötley famous, The Whisky ("One of the best places for breakfast when you have a hangover"), and parked for an hour-long SoundCheck Session, listening to a number of tracks selected by myself and ME Art Director Drew Thompson (a hardcore Mötley fan). Also joining us for the session was ME Executive Editor Doug Newcomb. As Nikki was not privy to our selections beforehand, we asked him to identify the artist and song if he could, then give us his impressions about the music and what impact it had (or still has) on him.
FIRST CUT
ALICE COOPER: "I'm Eighteen," from Love It to Death (Warner Bros., 1971)
NIKKI: Alice Cooper. This is the music I grew up with. It influenced the way I wrote songs. It seems like a lot of the artists I was really influenced by musically also had a visual presentation. You can't really look at a Mötley Crüe show and say we're influenced by Alice Cooper, but I'm sure we were, musically - definitely. We used to do "Department of Youth" [from Cooper's 1975 Atlantic album, Welcome to My Nightmare] in the old days, in the clubs.
METTLER: I think people have forgotten what Alice Cooper did, how he broke new ground.
NIKKI: He was so cutting edge. It was theater and lifestyle mixed together. But, you know, a lot of it's marketing. To me, AC/DC is as viable as Led Zeppelin, but they've never been marketed that way.
METTLER: When you say AC/DC, people think of a little guy running around in shorts, or maybe Back in Black.
NIKKI: They were, as far as I'm concerned, as influential as anybody. That hard sound in rock was even more original than Zeppelin in a lot of ways. Their sound wasn't forged before them. What else was amazing: It's pop and blues mixed together, played punk style. A lot of the guitar stuff is straight Chuck Berry.
METTLER: Think about a band like The Stones. You hear a Chuck Berry lick in their music, maybe you'll go back and listen to where they got it from. Maybe you'd actually be curious to find out, "Who is this Robert Johnson character? What does that mean?"
NIKKI: Right. Exactly.
THOMPSON: When Mötley Crüe first came out, you knew the names of everybody in the band. You knew the names of everybody in Kiss. Now, who's in Blink-182? I don't know.
NIKKI: There's a bigger palate to marketing now, so you'd think that we'd know more, that we'd know the color of their fucking underwear, you know?
METTLER: Not to pick on Blink-182, but you can see that lineage coming a mile away.
NIKKI: I don't know. My kids tend to call bands, "Oh, that guy with red hair." They don't even know the names of the band members. They don't even know the band members of N'Sync or Backstreet Boys.
METTLER: Well, that's ok. [laughs all around]
SECOND CUT
MC5: "Kick Out the Jams," from Kick Out the Jams (Elektra, 1969)
NIKKI: Great band; KILLER band. Yeah, it's funny, because the Stooges are from Detroit, and MC5 is from Detroit, but no one really knows who MC5 is - or Blue Cheer, for that matter. But it was the first real era of lots of amplifiers and lots of volume.
NEWCOMB: The whole thing about Detroit bands was that they'd try to blow everyone else off the stage. That was their rep.
NIKKI: That's a mysterious city to go play rock'n'roll in. That city alone would influence your music.
METTLER: Very hardcore, working-class people - blue collar all the way, no fooling around.
NIKKI: That's right, they'd bust your chops there.
THIRD CUT
AEROSMITH: "Back in the Saddle," from Rocks (Columbia, 1976)
NIKKI: Aerosmith. Awesome. I'm still a huge fan of the old Aerosmith.
METTLER: This whole album has such a great groove.
NIKKI: Great layering on this album. It was actually pretty mind-blowing to me when I first got this record because there's a depth to the audio that I hadn't heard in any of the [other] rock bands I was listening to. I know it's not necessarily cutting edge, but the way it was produced, there's a lot going on in the music.
METTLER: Jack Douglas was the producer, I think.
NIKKI: Jack Douglas, yeah. Sure was. Again, there was a band I knew everything about, top to bottom. Everything. I would HUNT for pictures of this band in Hit Parader and Creem. I wanted to know what it was like to be them. I wanted to know what that lifestyle was about.
METTLER: I wonder if it's because you can almost get all of that information nowadays that people take it more for granted. Like in '75, there's only Creem and Rolling Stone to get info from. . .
NIKKI: . . .and a minimum of 2 weeks between issues. Now you go on a website and there's Nikki Sixx telling you something, and you're like, "So what?"
METTLER: I look at my Rolling Stone Daily update online every day.
NIKKI: Well, it's never going back, so maybe we got to enjoy something then that no one else ever will.
FOURTH CUT
HUMBLE PIE: "30 Days in the Hole," from Smokin' (A&M, 1972)
NIKKI: Is this the live version, or the rehearsal version? (Sings) "Another dead rock star." [Nikki is referring to the late Humble Pie singer Steve Marriott; it's also the title to one of Nikki's songs -MM] Great band. It's funny. Humble Pie, Zeppelin - I knew I could never play that good myself. Because I'm not a soulful player, I'm a straight-ahead player. Those kind of basslines, John Entwistle's style, for me, was unreachable. So I leaned more toward the straighter stuff, like Aerosmith, and the harder, edgier stuff like Sabbath, early Kiss, and Deep Purple. In retrospect, you can really appreciate the R&B influences in Humble Pie.
METTLER: Most of the '60s British bands went directly back to R&B and the blues.
NIKKI: There was a whole era of singers like Steven Tyler. But a lot of these singers were jammers, [Ian Gillan of] Deep Purple especially. I think there came a time when pop and metal merged and the jamming stopped. It got really hard and straight-ahead. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, 'cause that's where we're from. There are very few bands out there like that now. Very few rock'n'roll bands.
FIFTH CUT
SWEET: "Set Me Free," from Desolation Boulevard (Capitol, 1975)
NIKKI: There's a song on one of their albums, and I don't know which one it was, but it sounds exactly like "Kickstart My Heart." I think it's on their live album, Live at the Marquee, the one called "Someone Else Will." I was with Tommy [Lee] and I had this obscure Sweet thing on, and and he goes, "Duuuuude." And I go, "I didn't rip it!" [laughs] He goes, "But you're a huge Sweet fan!" [coughs knowingly]
METTLER: That ain't no "My Sweet Lord" thing.
NIKKI: Yeah, let's get sued by the guys from Sweet; that'd be cool. [laughs]
THOMPSON: You had kind of a bad experience meeting somebody from Sweet, right?
NIKKI: When I was in a band called London, I sent the singer from Sweet [Brian Connolly] our whole package. I didn't even know I was doing marketing at that point, but I sent him the whole package about what the band was about - a manifesto, the whole thing. He sent me back a note saying, "This will never go, bro. This shit is dated, man."
METTLER: You'll have to call him back now.
NIKKI: Oh, I did. He's dead now. I ran into this kid in a 7-Eleven the other day, and he comes up to me and says, "Dude, I read you were into the Sweet and I never heard of them, so I got one of their records. They were Queen before Queen." Exactly.
SIXTH CUT
DEEP PURPLE, "Space Truckin'," from Machine Head (Warner Bros., 1972)
NIKKI: "Space Truckin'." Until you get into a band, you never realize what a great singer this guy [Ian Gillan] was.
THOMPSON: When you listen to music in the car, you're probably very critical of the bass. . .
NIKKI: Not really. I'm pretty forgiving, you know? I go through different preset modes, and I just listen to it. I've never gone crazy. R&B sounds best on the EQ. This is geared to go louder. Usually, I put it up louder, like this [cranks it]. But I'm not a big EQ head.
SEVENTH CUT
THE STROKES: "Last Night," from Is This It? (RCA, 2001)
NIKKI: Tom Petty, from the first album?
THOMPSON: No. We threw you a little curveball here.
NIKKI: I know this. [first few lines go by] No, I don't know! I mean. . .
THOMPSON: It's new.
NIKKI: I don't know.
METTLER: It's The Strokes.
NIKKI: The Strokes? I haven't heard them yet. Oh, awesome.
METTLER: The critics all say they're influenced by the Velvet Underground, but I don't think. . .
NIKKI: Really? I don't hear Velvet Underground, I hear early Tom Petty.
EIGHTH CUT
TED NUGENT, "Stranglehold," from Ted Nugent (Epic, 1975)
NIKKI: Nugent. I LOVE Nugent, for the simplicity. When I first started writing songs, a lot of the chords I used were from AC/DC and Nugent, a lot of straight barre chordings. You throw in Kiss, you throw in pop, the Slade, the Sweet, it's all mixed in. I think Nugent was sort of - he was right on brink of doing something original, musically. But he never really got there. You can hear it, almost like AC/DC. He kinda went poppy, but he needed to get more rhythm, more of this kind of stuff. I saw him live opening for Aerosmith, Aerosmith being my all-time favorite band when I was growing up. He just ANNIHILATED them onstage.
THE FINAL CUT
MOTT THE HOOPLE: "Ballad of Mott the Hoople," from Mott (Columbia, 1973)
NIKKI: Sounds like "Love Hurts." [vocals begin] Oh, Mott the Hoople. It's interesting. For me, [Ian Hunter] is one of the greatest lyricists ever. He's in there - he's probably like my Dylan. I don't know why this band never really made it. They had one of the greatest songs of all time, "All the Young Dudes." They had the look, they had the sound. But the timing is the thing.
METTLER: Every movement has that one group who's on the cusp of it, but doesn't quite get there.
NIKKI: So 98 Degrees is never going to make that leap. [all laugh]
METTLER: Yeah, we'll shed a tear for them. Let's have a moment of silence for 98 Degrees.
NIKKI: A moment of silence for 98 Degrees. They've been gunned down. [all laugh]
