by Daina Darzin

In 1981, Motley Crue seemed destined to end up legendary, but dead. They were gleeful troublemakers, with a raw sound and reckless off-stage antics that electrified the developing L.A. rock scene. But unlike their punk brothers-in-spirit, the Sex Pistols, the Crue beat the odds. Six years and several multiplatinum albums later, they haven't blown up or burned out. But they came close. "Being an excessive rock & roll band, you have to know just when to pull back, or you hit the mountain," says songwriter/bassist Nikki Sixx. "The music's number one now, not proving how fast I can go in my Corvette. In the past, we might have always been trying to shock, or outdo someone else, and those days are gone. We have our eyes turned inward, I guess. I want to stick around and make good rock & roll music for a long time to come, and I think the fans are going to appreciate that a lot more than reading my obituary.

"That doesn't mean I'm wimping out or mellowing," he emphasizes. "Just that I take music more seriously than I used to, thinking hairspray and makeup were more important than my guitar." To underscore this new philosophy, Motley Crue will axe the glam-rock paraphernalia for their new tour in support of Girls, Girls, Girls. "What we wear to the gig is what we're going to wear on stage," Sixx explains. "We're kind of peacock-ish anyway, gypsy punks. We're just gonna be our own gutter-rat selves." As for the album itself, "I wanted to get back to a true, honest rock & roll sound," Nikki says. "If the Stones were started in 1980, this is what it would sound like, real street, real raunch, right from the crotch. [And lyrically,] there's a lot of faces to the band this year - we're not just touching on negative things." Though "Jailhouse Rock" (which the band has covered for years) might be seen as ironic humor in view of lead vocalist Vince Neil's 30-day sentence stemming from his car accident, the cut "Dancing on Glass" deals seriously with Sixx's new attitude towards hard drugs. "I used to think that cocaine and heroin were so glamorous," he admits. "But I'm older now - I just turned 28 - and I don't think there's anything glamorous about killing yourself slowly like that.

"I'm an excessive person," he adds, "and I still love my Jack Daniels, but I'm not going to kill myself to make an interesting life story for someone to write, sorry. And I don't want to be the one to say to kids, 'Yeah, man, fuckin' go out on the street and buy some crack.' Drugs are not cool. I did drugs and I was not cool. I'm not trying to preach - Vince does this Rock Against Drugs thing, I don't. I hope I get my point across in this one song, and I hope kids who are strung out, out there, are affected." But, lest fans get the impression the Crue are about to volunteer as the PMRC's poster children, the title cut is "about one of our favorite pastimes in the world, going to strip clubs. [Neil prefers the Marble Arch in Vancouver, B.C. and the Dollhousein Ft. Lauderdale, while Sixx favors the Crazy Horse in Paris]. 'Something for Nothing' touches on the subject of a 16-yearold gigolo. And then there's 'Bad Boy Boogie,' which is kind of a humorous look at ourselves as a band." The bluesy feeling and slide guitars on the latter were enhanced by a lucky accident when Nikki discovered an old stand-up bass in the recording studio and was inspired to come up with some classic licks. The rest of the Crue responded by giving Sixx a similar bass for his birthday. "I've always wanted one," Nikki says enthusiastically.

His love for the old acoustic instrument is in line with his collection of antiqueswhich, in turn, led to the idea for another song on Girls, "Five Years Dead." "That's my conservative side," says Nikki. "My house is all old furniture. So I found this store that had really old books, and I bought two huge boxes of them. Anyway, I'm playing guitar and going through these books, and out of nowhere, I go 'five years dead' - I'm looking at this book that was published in the 1930s - and in one minute I wrote the song." The preface of the book, by Bernard Falk, "kind of touches on my whole outlook on life," Sixx explains. "The guy wanted to be a journalist, and he chased his dream up to a certain point in his life, and then for five years he was a construction worker or something, which he didn't really want to do. So he's talking about, how much he wants to be a journalist and this other guy goes, 'Well, what are you doing about it?' and Falk goes, 'I've been doing construction work for five years.' The other guy says, 'Well, you're five years dead if you're not doing what you want to do.' And Falk wrote Five Years Dead, and it was his best-selling book."

Despite all the modem resources at his disposal, Sixx's lyrics are written in the same manner as that early 20th century volume. "A couple of years ago, I went out and bought myself a computer, got it all set up," the bassist recalls. "It was pretty neat for a guy who used to scratch on cocktail napkins from clubs-I'd have an idea for a lyric and I'd go off to the bathroom to write it down. And then Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden came over and saw all this stuff hooked up, and he said, 'You know, Nikki, this is just a glorified typewriter.'" "Nikki showed me his IBM personal computer and all these lyrics in a Rolodex file," Dickinson remembers, "and I said, 'This is amazing, and I don't know how you do it, 'cause when I think of a line, I have to write it down on a stupid piece of paper, because before I get back to my computer, I've forgotten it.'" Eventually, Sixx reached the same conclusion. "Now the computer is in the bottom of a box in the bottom of a closet," he laughs, "and I'm back to my old way of sitting in the middle of a room with paper everywhere - and I'm still writing on cocktail napkins."

Nikki has a similarly basic philosophy about the business end of music, avoiding the calculated orientation of many of his colleagues. "Rock & roll is not about chart position," Sixx says emphatically. "It's not how many records you sell, it's how they sound. Don't worry about Billboard. Don't worry about making your Ferrari payment. Too many rock stars worry about that shit, they worry about being a rock star when there is no such thing. There are no stars, period. People are people. I'm happy being a musician, that's what I'm going to do whether I'm rich, poor, successful or unsuccessful," he continues. "Greed is the motivation of so many people and it makes me fucking sick to my stomach, man. I love music and I love the kids, talking to them and maybe getting something through to them, maybe helping them with something a little bit, not playing rock star."

Nikki's distaste for the "playing rock star" syndrome may come from experiencing the other side of same when Steve Tyler of Aerosmith, Sixx's alltime favorite band, came to see the Crue perform. "This guy comes to see us, and hangs out backstage, and I was really happy for a couple of weeks, to have [my hero from] when I was 14 come see me play to 12,000 people. And then I pick up a magazine where he says Motley Crue's just a bunch of 'Johnny-Come-Latelys.' And I think, that's fucked up. I would never do that to one of my fans. Steven Tyler just put down one of his biggest fans, Nikki Sixx. But I still think Aerosmith is cool," he adds.

And Sixx, it seems, has gotten cooler. "A guy came up to me in a club a while back," he notes, "going 'WAAOOOAHH!' He jumped on the table screaming, pulled his pants down, and he goes, 'I'm wilder than you and my hair sticks up more than yours.' And I go, 'Yeah, I guess you are, if you're trying to be a fucking asshole. I didn't know it was a competition in the first place.' The point is, that's not my kind of wildness - mine runs closer to being a prankster. People come up to me and say they can see I'm up to no good," he says with a slightly ominous tone to his voice. "They can see it in my eyes."