Nikki, I think we’ve heard this one before

Nikki Sixx is far from the only rock star to chronicle his former excesses, but he’s one of few to have had a viable career after being medically dead.

I read Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt about a year or two after it came out and it is a flat-out great read, even for someone who, like me, followed the shenanigans of Nikki Sixx, Vince Neil, Tommy Lee and Mick Mars when they were high atop the metal heap in the 1980s. Back then I read  Hit Parader, Circus, even Groove (I only bought a copy in the summer of ’87 because it had the Crüe on the cover and I wanted to read about Girls, Girls, Girls, which I hadn’t bought yet… the magazine was pretty terrible) and repeatedly watched an interview Nikki did with Paul McGrath of CBC’s The Journal, which I taped on Betamax. I even bought the VH1 Behind the Music feature on them in 199something. I thought I was well versed in what they were up to.

Boy, was I wrong.