Motley Crue's Circus

Before Vince Neil's forty-fourth birthday in February, Sixx called the singer to see what he'd like as a gift. "I asked Vince if he has an iPod," says Sixx, who is desperately attached to his own 40-gig iPod, loaded with everything from the Rolling Stones to the Mars Volta. "He said the strangest thing — he didn't really need an iPod. 'I don't listen to that much music,' he said."

Neil appeared in the first season of VH1's The Surreal Life, and underwent a Swan-like transformation (nose job, eye lift, cheek implants) for the network's Remaking Vince Neil earlier this year. It wasn't the first time he'd gone under the knife. The singer was raised in Compton, where he once got his face and chin slashed by a member of the Crips who wanted his ice cream money. He learned that the best way to defend himself from the hoodlums was to become one himself. Before he got kicked out of high school, Neil split his time among surfing, singing with his band, Rock Candy, smoking pot laced with angel dust and generally wreaking havoc.

Somehow, this guy who had his face sliced open on national television reveals the least on direct questioning. He is guarded, remote, even more unknowable than resident weirdo Mars. Maybe it's because he was the only one to be kicked out of the band (in 1994 he was replaced by singer John Corabi in hopes of giving the band an updated, grungier sound) and then rehired.

Neil has partnered up in a couple of sideline businesses, including a new line of Napa wines, a chain of Feelgoods restaurants, a new bar and bike shop at the Hard Rock in Vegas and a hangover pill called RU-21. "They all have to do with alcohol," he notes. His top priority, though, is Mötley Crüe. "Side businesses are side businesses," he says. "This is what I do. This is my love."

When I meet him at his hotel, he's eating a protein-heavy breakfast of eggs and bacon. He's been sticking to a vigorous workout regimen ever since Remaking wrapped last fall — he dropped twenty pounds for the show. Neil has been remade and, in a way, reborn. He married his girlfriend of five years, Lia Gerardini, in January at a Las Vegas ceremony officiated by Surreal Life alum MC Hammer. The couple wrote their own vows, and after his, Neil began to weep. "I started crying, Tommy started crying and then Nikki started crying," he says. "All these big, tough guys, crying like babies."

Life at home in Vegas is quiet. He and Lia don't plan to have kids, he says, unless maybe they adopt — "an underprivileged kid from Europe or something." They have two cocker spaniels, Cakes and Crackers, and that's enough for now. "Our babies are our dogs at home," he says, and, showing enthusiasm for the first time, pulls out his cell phone. "Want to see a photo? We have a full-time nanny that stays home and watches the kids — I mean, the dogs. Yesterday morning they had omelets and jelly. For lunch they had pasta and roast chicken."

Nikki Sixx, whose past sexual exploits include shoving the headset of a hotel-room phone inside a groupie's hoo-ha and proceeding to call room service to place an order, recently had "the sex talk" with his fourteen-year-old son, Gunner. The forty-six-year-old bassist planned to start his speech in clinical terms, but as the oldest of his five children rolled his eyes, Sixx cut to the chase. "Dude, I've seen it all," he said. "If you're getting some pussy and you don't wrap that motherfucker, you are going to die. It's not like in the good old days. I used to sleep with everything. All I would do is get a shot of penicillin or something to get rid of the bugs." Gunner's eyes widened. "Bugs?!" he gasped.

"I don't know who was more freaked out, me or him," says Sixx, pulling the filter off his Nat Sherman mentholated cigarette. "I don't want to have a sex talk. I still feel like I'm fourteen myself!"

Sixx was born Franklin Carlton Feranna in San Jose, California, but legally changed his name to Nikki Sixx in 1980; he didn't want to have the same name as the father who had abandoned him. He lived with his maternal grandparents for much of his childhood, and they moved around a lot, stopping for brief periods in Mexico, Idaho and Texas. He was always the new kid in school and had a hard time fitting in. His identity came to be defined by the fact that he would never be like everybody else.

Aside from a few lines on his face and a few inches on his waist, Sixx looks much like he did in the early Eighties. His midnight-black hair juts high above his head, and his attire is a high-end version of what a teenage boy might pick up at Hot Topic: baggy jeans, chain wallet, Army fatigue shirt with the sleeves ripped off, black Chuck Taylors. But, same as his bandmates, the bass player has grown up, like it or not.

A couple of months ago, in the pages of this very magazine, Sixx said that he imagines that the music playing in hell would be something by Ashlee Simpson. Then he saw her on TV wearing a Mötley Crüe tee. "I feel sorry for her," he says. "Someone put her in that shirt. Someone wrote her songs for her. Someone did everything for her. You've got to be willing to make people hate you because you do something you believe in."

Despite his hatred for everything commercial, Sixx has an astutely commercial mind. Lately, he's been trying to figure out how to record a new Crüe album that reconciles his evolving music interests with the old-school Crüe sound that's made this tour such a success. "I know for sure that Mötley Crüe can change and grow," he says.

Still, there is the danger that a grown-up Mötley Crüe — sans drugs, reckless sex and car crashes — won't hold the same appeal for young record buyers who got turned on to the band by reading The Dirt. "I don't really give a shit," says Sixx, before his racing brain switches gears. "On the other hand, my psychotic personality is like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if we broke up on the road?' What do you think are the chances? These people, myself included, we're addicted to insanity. Sometimes when you're out here on the road, stealing a car doesn't sound like such a bad idea. Thank God they put me on Zoloft."

But as important as Mötley Crüe are to him, no rock & roll insanity will ever come between him and his sobriety. "When I found heroin, I found a way to kill the fucking confusion," he says. "You hide your secrets and how you feel about your dad not being there, how it felt to never have a mom send you a birthday card. How it felt to be a runaway, living in the back of someone else's car. You keep stuffing it down, but it was growing like cancer, and at one point it just took over. 'Do I want to be there or do I want to be here?' I want to be here. I never got to have a mom and dad. I get to be one. I'm getting to relive my own childhood through my own kids. This is right where I want to be, and if anyone is not happy with that, then fuck them."

[From Issue 974 — May 19, 2005]