Nikki Sixx

the Life of a Shattered rock star. The brutally honest self portrait top the New York Times bestseller's list and helped change the conversation around addiction and recovery. Now he's back with a new book about his early years, entitled The First twenty one How It Became Nikki six. It chronicles his tumultuous youth, being shuttled among family members in the Midwest before heading the Los Angeles at age seventeen

to seek his fortune. Sure, they're hedonistic tales of l a at its most deboshed in the late seventies, but The First twenty one is also a story about hope, hard work, and endurance. I'm so happy to welcome NICKI six. First off, every superhero needs their origin story, and that's what the first twenty one is. Your new memoir focuses on your early years. What kick started this project, What

made you decide that to share this part of your story. Now, one thing that really concerns me and has for years, is that athletes, musicians, you people, entrepreneurs that come into money, a lot of times they end up broke. So you know, I have this this way that I do it, and I've done it since day one. I save and of everything I ever make, that's after taxes, after commissions, and I have to adjust my life around that. So I wanted to kind of write a book and like help

other people like um. You know, they have these ideas and dreams, spend their whole life and then they get a deal with the m b A and then five years later they're broke. Um And and I was really excited about the idea. And we have property where we live here in Wyoming, and the back part of my property is like twenty acres. I go back on the back part and I'm sitting on this kind of the end of the property goes down into a gulch and

I was sitting at the crow Flies. I'm literally two hours from where I grew up in Idaho, right across the grants. So I'm looking out and I'm just I'm thinking to myself, Um, you know, just how beautiful and difference this is that Hollywood and it reminds me of my childhood. And then I had this fleeting thought and um, it was like where did everybody go? And UM, I came in the house and I wrote this like couplet,

like a short poem, and it said, um. One of the lines was, you know, once once I, once I started to fly, I forgot up. And it wasn't you that lost out. It was me, in a lot of ways, losing connection to childhood friends and two family. And that's like, you know, the the Financial Book is something I'd like to do sometime in the future. But it doesn't sound very sexy. You know, it doesn't sound very it's you know, it does really anybody that book? Now during the pandemic,

there's enough stress, and you know, I'm sixty two. You know, maybe in you know, eight ten years, that's something that might be more interesting. And UM, I called up our say, UM, I want to tell my story from birth to twenty one. But the day I changed my name to Nikki six, we started talking about it and we got really excited.

It's it's a prequel speaking. Also, it was an opportunity to not only tell a story of a small town boy that fell in love with, you know, music of first on AM radio and then FM and then vinyl and the small four thousand people uh and took that that passion and went for it. And it's it's the obstacles along the way, It's the lessons you learned, it's everything that was able to put together in the first

twenty one years. I believe that whether you're talking to Lebron James, or if you're talking to top race car driver or if you're talking Richards, probably somewhere in their first twenty one years they're going to have that kind of like aha moment, like this is what I want to do. People in radio tell me, yeah, remember the moment I'm going to be in radio. People that are podcasters were like telling me that they were influenced by

these people. And then when podcasting came along, gave an opportunity and a lot of this happens in our youth because in our youth, we throw into the wind. And if you're Tony Hawk now you probably don't want to jump off the top of a house on a skateboard. But when he was in his first twenty one years, I'm sure it's what one of the greatest he was, you know, felt invincible, and so I wanted to capture some of that innocence and the discovery of music. Yeah,

what was that aha moment for you? What did success look like for you as a kid growing up in in Idaho, Um. I never really knew there was such a thing as success when money or any of it. I just wanted to be in a band. I wanted to people that wanted to do the same thing I wanted to do, which was to play music. And my my idea of what I wanted for music was is not the same as that guy or that guy and uh San slugging it out and going through auditions and

trying to put together musicians were like minded. And I was very, very strategic and very organized in my heads, like I am in a band with a guy that like that, and a guy like that, like I gotta have a band with four stars in the band, five stars like that's what I want, That's what I grew up with, UM, And so it was the that the focus of what I wanted while I was learning to be a songwriter, UM and copying the greats, whether it was the Cheap Tricks or the Miss Sweets or the

Slaves and the Pistols and putting it all into my own blender and coming up with the ideas. So then, UM, it was really hard for me because nobody in Angulists, well that's not true, not nobody. A lot of people

Los Angeles didn't want to play original music. So I would go to auditions and it was a top forties circuit back then, so you had to be able to play Summer analyd Zeppelin, you had to be able to play Tennessee See and uh you know, I don't know, uh, Parliament in Cadelic and these musicians got fantastic because of Mark came up through that playing four sets, and I'd being able to play everybody's music. That's why it's such

a great player. I would go to these auditions and they would be um, like, well, you know, you're not exactly playing designs by foreigner exactly like on the record, and I'd be like, yeah, I mean, you know, I don't know. I kind of play the way I play. And by the way, I have a bunch of original music. We don't original music. There's no money in it. And I was like, the best, what's the purpose of being

a musician if you don't. I was young. You don't write your own music, you don't write your own lyrics. If you don't, whatever you're going through And um so I just eventually had to start putting bands together. So this would have been you got to to l A when you were seventeen and what around seventy five? What was l A like at that time? This is post Laurel can you sort of post the Troubadour club type of stuff? Like what was the scene like then? It

was great? It was really great because, um you punk rock and it was kind of faltering and new Wave, which was in retrospect, had some bands with some really good songs. But as a young kid that was watching Don Kirschner's concert Midnight Special and seeing the New York Dolls and see an Aerosmith on a stage this big and just doing train cap rolla and I'm like, this

is not again. It just reinforced what I wanted, but that there was There was rock bands, and there was some kind of hippie rock bands, and there was punk rock, and there was new way. I just felt like none of it fit me. I wanted to push. And that's where eventually, uh, you know, getting together with Blackie law Las. We were like minded. Uh you know, we formed a band which was Blackie's band if you if you read the book called Sister and Um, then it was all

original music. I remember sitting there with Dane Range and come John st John on keyboards, Lizzie Graham guitar, Blackie on guitar and vocals, and me on bass in a studio and I, uh, it was first pretty you know. And I called my grandparents back in Idaho and I said, Um, I found the people, right, I found the people, um, and I knew that was the right path. Blackie is a leader. I'm like naturally like a band leader because

I had to become. Otherwise I would have been on the top forty circuit and i'd I'd still be playing cold as I in Orange County. Um and so. But Blackie fired me and Lizzie and Dane because we were green. We weren't very good in the studio and that I already been writing all these songs, but it's Blackie's band is Blackie's songs, which later went on to become WASP, and he's a great songwriter and very talented musician. Um

and we formed again. It was like, well, we don't want to be the Plimsils or the go Gos or the Knack, and we don't want to be Fear or Dead Kennedy's we want cheap trick a meats, you know, Matta Hoople queen And that's where the band London. That's how it formed. And then we got really big on the scene because there was nothing like it, and I knew I was on the right path, you know what I mean. I wasn't playing other people's music or I wasn't in someone else's band, because you were being true

to your own voice. I mean, was that ever scary for you though? Were there ever moments when you thought, okay, this this might not work out? Or did that not even cross your mind? At that point? It didn't even cross my mind. I never even thought about it, and I never considered quitting. Um No, if that's uh courage, you know, you say, oh, that young kid had courage or or if he was just had blind faith. But I wanted what I wanted lived in twenty four hours

a day. It's all I thought about. All the way back in Idaho. I would draw pictures of bands. I would draw the you know, the amps and with the stage that would look like in in in the writing this book, we went all the way back and like that, um, you know, reconnected with old friends, my first girlfriend, and a couple of the people said, yeah, the thing we were on in Jerome, Idaho, population four thousand. On Fridays,

they would have an auditorium. Some musicians would come in from wherever or and I remember there was this like bass player, huge h afro and bell bottoms, and this guitar player that had this long, shaggy hair and a weird mustache and a drink. And I was just like, that is what I'm talking about the band last week. And everybody would always say I would leave these things, whether it was in Los Angeles or in Idaho or

in Seattle. And I made my notes of what they did wrong, what if they they did this, if that been that hook should have started and and and they all laughed. They were like, oh my God, it was like torture. You know, notebooks full of what the perfect band. It's all I thought about. And it was the songs and the lyrics and the visual and and um. Anything short of that I wasn't interested in. It's so fascinating to me going through sort of the list of influences

you've cited. I mean, you've got Queen and Sabbath, but also you've got like Harry Nielsen and Elton John and these people that really are amazing songwriters. I mean, the craft that goes into their their pieces are so interesting. I mean, who are some people like that that are you know, maybe not people that people would necessarily expect to be influences on you, but folks that really taught you what it is to make a good song and a good melody and really craft that. It was about studying.

It was about studying, constantly studying. I was bad in school, but great in front of that record player. I would sit there and I figured out, like listen to on the headphones and get ideas of my own. Everything that I was absorbing. I was like, oh, I could put that into this idea, or I could put it into that idea. And I hadn't become a really good songwriter yet. I was just learning and it was really exciting, exciting. It's funny, Harry Nielsen you bring up Harry um My

son Decker's middle name is is. I was in Idaho and we made money by, uh doing all kinds of jobs, and I saved up enough money. I was at my friend's house to go down to the local like drug store that sold you know, everything from milkshakes to vinyl. And I said, I'm gonna go down there and I'm getting the new Deep Purple record, and everyone, yeah, whatever.

It was five dollars and cents from mowing lawns. I got on my bike and my my friend sister was a couple of years now, you remember this the seventies. She had on Daisy dukes, a tube top and this long all one's length there. And I would literally when I was house, I'd be like, you know, but she wanted nothing to do with the dweeb like me. You know, I was, oh game, I had no nothing that I couldn't even really talk to her. That she's probably like, your friend is weird. And then all of a sudden

she paid attention to me. She said she said, hey, um, Frankie, can I can I ride down to the vinyl shop with you? And I was like yeah, and so she wrote down and I went to the section D and there it was Deep Purple and I got it. I heard it on the radio. I'm gonna absorb everything on this record. She goes, you know, you should find this one, and I was like, no, I'm I'm good with this one.

She goes, batted her eyes and said you should get this record, and it was Harry Nielsen Nielsen Schmill has jumped into the fire on it without you on it. And I went back and my friends were like, why, where's the Deep Purple record? And so then I fell in love with Harry's music, and as the years win, I found that he was a great influence. So if I was doing a riff, uh the banana banana da da on um two two fast too fast for love, you have two fast for love the verse, I would like, well,

what would Harry sing over this? What would John Lennon said, what would Robin Robin Zanders sing over this? And then well how would Tony Iomi play this? So you know I was I was a train wreck as far as creativity, it was pick a lane, but I just couldn't. I couldn't get enough. And uh it was It was funny because years, years, years, decades later, I went to an a A meeting. Uh. We went around the room and one of the things they do is, you know you, you say who you are, and uh, if you're an

alcoholic or a drug addict. So I'd be like, I'm Nicky six all of them, you know, alcoholic, I'm a truck addict, I'm this some of that, and I'm here to get better. Right. Next guy says, you know, I'm John, I'm an alcoholic. Next guy goes, I'm here scalp b m I And I'm looking at this older gentleman and I'm like, kind of looks like Harry. It can't be Harry meals anyway. Next guy, so it comes up to me after the meeting. It says, hey, hey, kid, hey kid,

I guess I was a kid. I was like thirty, right, and he was probably I don't know, fifty five or something, and just give me a home. And I said, yeah, and you know where depends where do you live if you live in like, you know, uh, Beverly Hills. No, because it's like two live in hidden hills, Like, oh, I live in hidden hills too. So on the drive over we started talking. Came so obviously it was Harry Neils. So we started talking about music that were in me

and Harry became good friends. Harry would my house and there'd be on the door out of nowhere, just a weird time of day, and Harry would be standing there and he goes, this is my friend Richard. That would be Ringo Starr and they would come in. They would

sit in. Would you know. I don't smoke, and I never really dug it with people smoked in my house, but they were both smoking, and they were sitting in my front room telling stories about the Beatles and about this and this thing that John did with Harry at the Troubador or that that, you know, so those famous stories we've read about, and I'd be like, smoke all you want, man, because I'm just absorbing this and it.

You know, he kind of got to understand who I was and that I was a songwriter and Motley Crewe, so we kind of talked about possibly me producing a for him, and I was just like, wow, thank God to you know, for that girl at the tube top um. Look how life life is. And unfortunately Harry did pass and I got to do that, but I named my my son's middle name after him. But you know that that's how music is. Man. You you meet people and they say be careful, you know, meeting your heroes. Everybody's

had that happen. I'm sure you've interviewed people and got off and was like, Wow, that guy wasn't what I thought he was or that girl. But at the same time, yees, you can cultivate all this positivity from people, whether sing the records or reading their interviews or if you're lucky enough to meet them or become friends. And you know, guys like Steven Tyler had a big effect on me. That's my Rolling Stones and Steven messages on my voicemail when I was struggling with addiction and and he would

sing into my mind. You know, I would just be like, this is like one of my you know, childhood heroes. Uh. You know, the whole the whole experience of discovering music is uh one of the most exciting things for me. Thinking of everything you're telling me now, I mean, do you is there a separation between you Nikki and and Frank Jr. Did they almost feel like like two separate people do do they sort of coexist in you? Well,

that's a really great question. Um. So I changed my name because the information that was downloaded into my head when I was a kid by my mom about my dad. That's why I changed me. It could be Frank Farron and Motley Crue or in London or in anything else I would have done, but it was about I'm not going to carry on your name the way than me, and that information was not all her percent true. We found out and going back and going through this talking

to family members, uh, talking to people there. But my dad did leave. But why did he leave? So I think that there was a separation of I create my own family, my own legacy, which I've done. But in retrospect um I realized that that Frank and Nikki are the same person. Now sicky that the other guy, he's a little different, but I think he exists. He might only come out every now and then, But in general,

I'm enjoying to know myself as a child. Uh, not through the lens of Motley Crewe or through the lens of anything, just through the lens of family members. Story. The things that I realized now were so important to me. When I hit the seventies, I had a foundation of family that I never I blamed it all of my dad. So I split, you know, and I did. I had a great grandmother, a great grandfather, a great family members that were around, but it was something in me. You know,

you be away from that life. I mean, it's something that I feel like I'm coming to grips with now my own life in my early thirties. You grow up, you leave home, you start putting your head down and working hard and trying to build your own life with your own people and your own connections, and all of a sudden you sort of realize that you want to reconnect with your past. That you want to, you know, sort of learn more about about who I don't want to say who you were, but but sort of what

what's what's deeper inside of you. It's almost like the inverse of that John Lennon line. You know, life's what happens when you're busy making other plans. Suddenly you realize that there was this whole other history that you had, was this cathartic for you getting in touch with with these family members and your first girlfriend. What was that experience like for you? I mean it was it was

definitely cathartic in a lot of ways. Uh couldn't have happened in a better time and the worse time obviously during the pandemic. But I got a lot to spend a lot of time talking to people and I couldn't spends with a lot of zooms, a lot of interviews, a lot of things that I would hear that I forgot about, and you would hear from three or four different people and you go, wow, I do the same

thing now. You know. It's these visual things and a lot of them are positive and there's obviously always negatives in there too, and you try to grow from that. Um. I I feel that when people read the and this information and from like ten or twenty people that I've I've more like twenty or twenty five people that I are very close to it. I've sent the book too, and they were like, I see my own child, I I see like wow, when I was that age and

I discovered this band, it really changed my life. And when it's got me to think I wanted to we were like, you know, when I was going through my first twenty one. Now I'm like a professional photographer and I shoot some of the biggest bands in the world. They didn't end up picking up an instrument, they ended up picking up a different instrument, etcetera, etcetera. Journalists excess.

So I think inside the first twenty one and my dream is that yes, it's about a young kid, you know, coming from Idaho, but it's also about you and your story and the next person and the next the girl, and I think that people can absorb it. I don't know. I thought would call it a wholesome read, but it's definitely different tone to it. I wanted to have empathy, and I wanted to, through discovery, give people the benefit of the doubt. You know, I was young. This is

what was downloaded to me. You know, maybe maybe it happened this way, or maybe it didn't happen that way. Like my dad leaving, my uncle said something, you're really mad, and he never came back that moment to me. And again I don't have documented proof, even though I am with the family that raised my sister who was born with Down syndrome. My dad was a super proud Italian Sicilian. He wanted his son named after him. Uh, he wanted to take my sister home, but um, you know they were.

She was home with us for eleven months. Obviously you couldn't because she was too young. But she could never walk, she could never talk, she was blind, she had a heart problem, she had down syndrome, and she needed a family to take care of her um research. We believed the moment of impact why he left was when my sister went to at the home And for me, it was my first taste of people are disposable, like she's gone,

I could be next. It's very young, right, And then you get a mom that's saying your dad's a bad guy. Your mom's now, your dad's an alcoholic, your dad was an organizer, your dad was a drug addict. And then I talked to family members and my uncle Pop said, well, you know, I don't think I ever saw Frank ever even drink a beer. And your mind's life, Oh what the fuck have I been carrying around with me for all these years? And then then I had to go

through forgiveness. I got to forgive my mom, give because like I got five kids, I got a career, I got an amazing wife. I don't I don't want to sit around rehashing things that I don't even know for true, let's go and let's get going. I hope you feel lighter. Yeah, I feel I feel a lot lighter. Except for COVID nineteen. I think everybody put on there at least. I'm like, I feel lighter, But man, I miss being uh um mobile and physical and going to the gym and um.

You know. So part of this process during the right of this book is, you know, we left Los Angeles to sold our house and moved to Jackson, Wyoming and the top of and you can't see anybody from our house. So I went from complete suburbia and hearing stories from my friends about their buying bulletproof back the kids, and I'm like, you know what, I need to get back to my roots. And COVID helped us make that final decision.

We've been thinking about it, and my wife loves it here and I get to come back, but I also get to raise my daughter here, uh and reconnecting, and I just feel so much healthier and better and uh, you know, looking forward to getting out of the road with Molly Crewe grounded more grounded. I'm very uh. I have ideas I read down I step one, step two, step three leads to blank. You know, I always say, what's we want to win the super Bowl? How do

we move back all the way to draft right? You have to get the right got to coach together the right defensive life. Bam, bam bam. And I don't really um like the idea of like going to the super Bowl and just being like, well, we went to the super Bowl, but we lost. Very driven, you know, with with my band, with Motley Crue, with everything else I do, but being grounded with COVID, being in Wyoming has got me to be a little more in my body, if

that makes sense. Less Like everyone's like, if you've got a problem, called Nikki, He'll he'll like help, You'll work his team player. And uh now I just feel like cut loose of that brain always on fire. You know, I have to say earlier, I mean you recently celebrated twenty years of sobriety. Mean, first of all, most importantly congratulations, I mean an incredible achievement. Uh the last year year and a half has been hard on all of us,

but especially people struggling with substance abuse issues. I know many people in my own life that have had a really rough go of it in the last year and a half. What would you say to those people that really are feeling the isolation and the stress and the anxiety and the pressure of of the COVID situation that are struggling with addiction. It's definitely a hard time for people, all people UM in different ways financially and UM families not being able to see each other, UM, we all.

What I found for me that help during this time was to go inside because I can't go outside like I want to, so I go inside making some side work. So being a person in recovery, there's a there's a lot of tools out there. It's like, you know, maybe I need to redo my fourth step, Maybe I need to reach out more. Maybe I need to make a hot list of also in recovery and reach out once a week, send him a text, Hey, how's it going.

We we have to become more of a community in that sense, because one of them the Great out A and n A and some of these programs, and not everybody adheres to those same principles, but is that you have a community of people that are like minded and going through a recovery right there, just like what I was using. I I only hung out with people that were using right. So when you get into recovery, you go and you go to your meetings, you have sponsor

and you can program. You start to build up some time and you're like, wow, the first time, my if I've gone a week without drinking or a month without drinking, and people get to a year and so now they're meetings say they they can now. There's a lot of Zoom meetings, which is fantastic, some speaker meetings via Zoom. But I believe going inside, doing some inside right now to be beneficial for when eventually we can really go back outside. That's incredible advice. And I know we all

can't wait until you can go back outside. With Montley Crue, I know the Stadium Tour has been pushed back a year wisely, so for for two years you're, oh, my gosh, how do you feel about that? You know, acceptance as the answer. So I was, I was in full Have you read the first chapter of the Stadium Tour on them in the book, So it's about you know, the

training and preparing and what we have to do. The reason that I wanted that book instead of starting on the second chapter, which was all the way back was. I wanted people to know where I was at now before you you flash back. And I also wanted fans to understand the the hard work that it takes to be in a band. And and you asked me, like when I was younger, it was I ever scared? Was I ever you know worry, wasn't I don't know. I'm just my wife says I will work till the day

I die. I love work. I love solving problems. I love inventing things and watching them become real. You can touch it to play it. Um. So I wanted people to see that in the stadium tour, what diet was like, what training was like, what dedicationa was like. To the musicianship, you to your musicianship. You know, it's a lot of work, and um it was like right up there was like I was ready to go to rehearsals, to start preproduction, to get on tour. I was. I was, you know,

in the best shape time I could. My musicianship was on top of where it's been a lot of years, because you know, I had a focus, the reason of focus instead of like just playing like two you know, I got kids, I got a wife, I got other businesses. So and now it was like pure focus was on the stadium tour and then COVID. But I wanted to know that looks like like when it becomes time again, UM, probably for me and about December, I will go back

into that, Saint. I'll go back into that first chapter, and by the time hit the pre production, you know, and rehearsals in May, and then the show in June, I'll be you know, up. But what I'll be up and ready to go, and so will the What I like is the idea of right now going inside, doing some work, uh, finding out better ways to deal with different types of situations, and then going back out. My is that when people get back into it, they're not like,

all right, thank god, I'm back. You know, we can French kiss and blow boogers at each other and let's just spread the germs. It's like, what did you learn this time? What did you learn about yourself? I learned a lot about my kids. I learned a lot about my family. You know, I'm I was forced and they were forced to be together. So when the news first in Los Angeles, UM, I pulled all my kids. They were out of college, out of where. Everybody was living in the house. So like we had, like the dinner

table was packed every night. Anything my kids come over for, you know, Dad's birthday or Christmas or different holidays. Spend a day here, come over fourth of July, spend the weekend, jump in the pool. They have their own lives, right, you know, revolved me. I'm here and they always know I'm here. But now we're all together in the kitchen at night and the warning drinking coffee and I'm like, you know, that's my favorite coffee cup. You're drinking out

up there. You know, have you thought about ever doing dishes? You know, it was all this stuff that you're like, um, wow, these are this is my family, these are my kids. This is how our personalities. And you know it's watching movie night one night, uh, one night, my daughter would cook. The next night, my wife would cook, the next night, my son would cook. And no one ever wanted me

to go. So you know, well that's a really wonderful I mean, hesitate to use the phrase silver lining, but really, I mean, that's how often would that happen that you've got, you know, all your kids there as a family, just you know, not for a special occasion. It's just you're all all back under one roof. That's really special. It was we tried to make the best of a horrible situation. I know for all different you know types of people.

And I know a lot of bands are out on the road and they're they're touring right now, and we chose to not do that. You know, we just we said we didn't have a proof to believe that we would go on the road and our fans would be safe, or the crew or band members, or we would end up in cancelations or what. Because we're playing stadiums, we have to we have to also mitigate the weather, right, So we start in June it's great outside, get into

like mid September, and depending on where you are. This first an American tour um, you know, so we don't really have time to cancel five shows that Adam and late October December because they're all outside of it was being a tour. So you know, everyone's doing the best they can. A lot of my friends call me and they say, this is what the roads like, this is

what's happening. You know. I don't like the name names, because then it becomes some version made four media outlets from you is like Nikki six said he talks to blank and they said this, I'm like, um, and they tell me, you know what they're going through. Some of

them say it's like touring during the apocalypse. Someone were like, you know, we're so insulated living in a bubble that we're keeping trying to I had people that are placed smaller places that say, um, they don't get go on the edge of the stage because the fans are right up against the barricade and they're right there and they're, you know, like this is lived for to be on stage right in the fans space. They're at your face.

They're like this is like such a cool moment. And they're like, yeah, I have to stand back from the audience because I don't want to get anything. Also, we know now that we can be carrying it not even know it, so you know the testing and some bands have doctors on the road. So we made the decision by just doing it next year, they'll be better, um

um guidelines so to speak. You know, I didn't want to be a guy in a band or or any of the members of Moss say if you want to come see us, you have to do this because I'm not their dad, my band is not their mom. We wanted it to be mandated by UH, like with Live Nations. So Live Nation announced that you can't get into the shows unless you have proof of vaccination or negative tests. That's great. At least those people that are going to that show understand what their situation is and they're not

mad at name the band. So I think by next year we're gonna have you know, a lot, a lot more um clarity on what's going on. I'm dying to get on stage. I mean, I'm tim dying to get back in the gym. I'm dying you know my book. Man, I worked my ass on on this thing, and I can't believe, like I'm holding it like it's it's my catalyst night shoes. Can you believe it like happens so fast? Well, because of coronavirus, I wasn't touring, wasn't going to the office,

I wasn't doing photo shoots. I was just working on this thing. And you know, for me, a huge loss was I lost all my book, my book tour. Oh yeah, that's right. You know, we we talked about it. Like, what do we like have a class all and you know I can see the fans, they can see me, but how do I get the book and sign it? And then a lot of the UM you know retail was like, well, you know, we're not comfortable in my books really exciting and thousand or more people per um

city and you know, how do we do that? Do we let ten in at a time? This book is going to take twelve hours? You know, we don't feel safe for our employees like all this stuff. So the book tour has gone and and it bums me out, but you know, again, like the tour, we're just trying to do the best thing that we can do for the big picture. Yeah. Oh, I can't wait until the band can get back out there. And I can't wait

till till people are able to read this. My my last question for you, if you could go back and talk to that seventeen year old kid getting off the bus in uh in l Ah, what would you tell him? Um, I would tell him just follow his heart. We all like have guidance and if you can tune into it. I didn't have a backup plan my kids when I'm like okay, well you're gonna go to college and taking this course, so whatever you do, you're gonna be able to manage it, and UM have at least an idea

of six is. I had no backup plan. I had to read books. I had to figure out how lawyers work. I had to figure out how not to get ripped off. I had to start my own record company with Motley Crue because no one wanted to sign us, and I'm glad we did because we have one of the most lucrative records deals Street because we were now the band everybody had to have. We took our records, our masters from Electra Records, and own our music completely. Everything about

a brand. And I didn't know that when I was in Idaho sitting in the park, like playing this fake less Paul. But you had to learn so like fall your guidance, why you but do the work if it's out, do the work you want to be a guitar player, do the work you want to be in broadcasting, Do the work. I believe in hard work. That's the guidance, hard work determinating I will anybody if I can, I will stay in the studio longer, I will. I will rewrite a book if I have to, if I don't

think it's good enough. I constantly believe in in improvements and improvements, and um, it's worked for me. So if I guess, the only thing I would say is like, just keep educating yourself. Man out there yourself, and someday I'll write that book on how to when you make it not end up broke. Five years later, we definitely need that book out there. Yeah, Yeah, thank you. Fantastic interview, NICKI. Thank you so much for for your music and your time today. It's a huge honor. Thank you so much.

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