by Daniel Berman
Staff Photographer

Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Mötley Crüe. Keep it
raised if you would read the bassist’s autobiography. How
about the soundtrack to that sordid tale? Sound confusing?
Just wait until you listen to Sixx: AM’s The Heroin Diaries.

This album is the side project of former Mötley Crüe bassist
Nikki Sixx, and chronicles the musician’s struggles with heroin
in the mid-1980s. Each song reads like a journal entry in Sixx’s
day. Some of the tracks, which were written by Sixx but vocal-
ized by James Michael, begin with a monologue and the sound of a pencil scratching paper. While listening to the music, I imagine Sixx sitting, hunched against a wall, screaming, “When you’ve tasted excess, everything else tastes bland,” in the sixth track titled “Heart Failure.” It only takes off from there.

Drug habits are frequently discussed in the album, as are death, women, the future and love. But don’t worry and consider this: as much as Sixx loves his heroin, he also warns the listener about real life. As confusing as that may be, the track “Tomorrow,” Sixx says, “everything you do is coming back to you… you can’t outrun what waits for you tomorrow.”

The defining part of this album is in the evocative and challenging lyrics. The opening track “X-mas in Hell” begins on December 25 1986 in Van Nuys, CA (as the narrator notes), and as Christmas bells start to ring, we hear Sixx scrawling busily in his diary, “Merry Christmas,” he says, “that’s what you’re supposed to say on Christmas right?” Sixx pauses and adds, “When you haven’t been crouched naked under a Christmas tree with a needle in your arm and your Christmas spirit coagulating in a spoon.”

Some of the more interesting songs are the ones about Sixx’s preoccupation with life and death. On the track “Life After Death,” he asks, “Why he had to go down a dead-end street at 200 mph, screaming for vengeance, and embracing death?” Later on in “Pray For Me,” a cut that sounds like a rock version of She Wants Revenge’s “Tear You Apart,” Sixx speaks of his funeral date, singing, “he will die before the best day of his life.”

Ultimately, the reason to purchase this album does not lie in the music at all, but in the interludes between songs. When Sixx speaks from the heart and wonders why he didn’t die from that drug overdose or car accident, we are there with him. All throughout his rock opus, Nikki Sixx makes sure that we are there with him. After all, as he sings with a chuckle, “that’s where the fun is.”