Available in the Motley Crue book - Vol. 1 The Eighties

early 87
Vince Neil appears with Ozzy Osbourne in Autograph’s video for their song Loud and Clear, the title track of their third album. Vince and Tommy cameo as horn players in the Night Ranger video for The Secret of My Success, and also play in a golf tournament sponsored by Night Ranger.

12/1/87
As Mötley Crüe enters the studio to begin recording their next album, Nikki Sixx enrolls in a methadone program recommended by one of his childhood heroes. His weight soon drops to 164 pounds; 40 pounds less than a year ago.

30/1/87
Lying around his house all day, naked, Nikki writes a new song called Wild Side; a raped and dismantled version of the Lord’s Prayer. However, he generally struggles to write any good songs. One day he brings a song to the studio called Hollywood Nights that is so bad, it’s unusable.

19/2/87
Nikki buys a book written in 1937 by Bernard Falk called Five Years Dead that inspires a song of the same name and gets his creative juices flowing more. He also buys an old coffin.

3/3/87
Nikki writes an unused song in open tuning called Veins.

7/3/87
The songs Dancing On Glass and You’re All I Need are written in the studio when material for the next Mötley album runs short. Nikki writes You’re All I Need for his ex-girlfriend Nicole. He believes she cheated on him while he was on tour last year by seeing General Hospital actor Jack Wagner, whose 1985 song All I Need topped the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart. Nikki’s lyrics of the Crüe song are about killing your girlfriend, so he takes a copy on cassette to her home and plays it to her. She calls him an asshole and Nikki phones some bikers to break Wagner’s kneecaps.

Nikki is persuaded to have his ode titled Nona included on the album. With recording finally complete, all the tracks are mixed at Conway Recording Studios in Los Angeles.

13/3/87
Wearing a new jacket with a Nazi armband, Nikki enjoys a night out at the Cathouse in Hollywood, where he shoots up in the VIP bathroom.

24/3/87
Having completed the recording of their new album, Tommy and Nikki fly first class to New York for a week to oversee the album’s mastering process.

2/4/87
Nikki and Tommy go on a fishing trip with their engineer Duane Baron. High on cocaine out on the lake, they hallucinate and play the mastered Girls album over and over on Tommy’s little ghetto blaster. Their manager Doc meets them and tells them that Jon Bon Jovi thinks they’ve written the greatest song of their career in You’re All I Need.

Vince frequents Palm Springs and the Caribbean to keep amused while not touring. He also spends time on the road with Bon Jovi for a few days in Atlanta, singing with them on encore jams and hanging out in a local strip joint called Tattletales. Tommy continues to ride his dirt bike, as well as regularly tearing up Californian golf courses. Mick spends much of his time buying guns.

10/4/87
West Tech Security sends a guard to Nikki’s home, only to find him naked and waving a shotgun, accusing the guard of bugging his house. Doc McGhee smoothes the situation over but is tired of Nikki’s out of control drug paranoia – he sees Mexicans and midgets running round his house, he sets alarms off, or is seen by neighbours crawling naked around his garden with a shotgun at least twice a week.

13/4/87
Mötley shoots their video for Girls, Girls, Girls with director Wayne Isham. With a strip club theme planned for the video, they originally want to use The Body Shop but since that venue is all-nude and doesn’t serve alcohol, they end up shooting it at The Seventh Veil instead. By the time they finish at the club, none of them are functioning properly. They leave the club in a few cars to go to Wayne’s studio nearby to film inserts, stopping off at a Mexican restaurant for shooters on the way.

15/4/87
As a drugged-up Nikki lies on his bed at home with Vanity, he hears voices and people moving about his house. He starts shouting and fires his .357 through his bedroom door at them. After barricading themselves in the bedroom overnight, he later realises it was just his radio and he shot a hollow point right through his new JBL speakers. As Vanity leaves the house the following day, she tells Nikki they are soul mates and asks him to marry her. Not wanting to face her going crazy and starting another argument, he says yes but feels his funeral will come before their wedding anyway.

19/4/87
Nikki meets Andy McCoy at a club but wants to leave soon after. They head back to Nikki’s place where he shows a sober Andy his closet and encourages him to get high. Andy tells Nikki that he has a habit and leaves. Nikki sees his friends abandoning him one by one.

21/4/87
A big party is held at Nikki’s place. Slash wakes up in Nikki’s spare bedroom with lots of girls, and having wet the bed in his sleep.

27/4/87
In his drug-induced paranoid state, Nikki has heavy wooden shutters fitted to all the windows on his house. He thinks about going to rehab but feels he has too much to do. He even injected heroin into a vein in his penis a few nights ago, thinking he looked fantastic He sleeps with a gun and puts it in his mouth tonight and considers pulling the trigger to end the insanity.

1/5/87
Unable to stop binging on cocaine and heroin, Nikki calls drug recovery specialist Bob Timmons, who comes over to help him. Part of the twelve-stop program for curing addiction is accepting there is a greater power in the world than you, so Bob asks Nikki to get on his knees and pray to God to lose this obsession with drugs – Nikki refuses. Doing $500 or more of heroin a day, he hatches a plan cut his intake by more and more each day, and go on to methadone when low enough so he can get off completely.

9/5/87
With his grandfather Tom living at his home for a week, Nikki registers for a thirty-day program in Burbank. He plans on only taking methadone for three or four days and then going cold turkey to get off drugs. He throws away all his drug utensils.

11/5/87
The title track of the new Mötley Crüe album Girls, Girls, Girls is released as the first single, backed with another new song called Sumthin’ For Nuthin'. Girls, Girls, Girls peaks at number twelve on the U.S. charts, which is the highest placing for a Crüe single to date as it spends fifteen weeks on the charts.

When Mick Mars originally came up with the song, he didn’t like it very much, so he went home and demolished a bottle of Jack Daniels before coming up with a new lick. The soloing at the end of the song drops off, as Mick falls off his stool while recording it. The opening motorbike sound was recorded in the courtyard of Conway Studios with Tom Werman revving one of the guys’ Harleys. For the outro bike sample, Werman rode Vince’s Harley in Franklin Canyon and recorded the bike shifting through its gears.
Vince plays a demo version of the song to his friend Michael Peters, owner of the Pure Platinum chain of strip clubs, and he promises to play the song on the hour, every hour, in every strip club he owns; a promise he is said to have kept to this day.

The subsequent Girls, Girls, Girls video clip is quickly banned by MTV, due to topless strippers dancing, and they opt for a censored version for airplay instead that Mötley has up their sleeve. The video also sees the avid motorcycling Crüe riding their Harley’s, having recently formed their own Harley Davidson riding club called the Dark Angels. Vince’s new mud-wrestling girlfriend Sharise appears in the video, as well as on the inner-sleeve of the new Girls, Girls, Girls album. Professional female wrestler and wet t-shirt queen Quisha also features in the video.

14/5/87
A Girls, Girls, Girls listening party is held inside The Body Shop strip club at 8250 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood to celebrate the band’s fourth album release set for the following day. Sick as a dog, Nikki takes a handful of painkillers and lots of whisky to get him through the event. After dogging the band in his press interviews, Yngwie Malmsteen shows up at the event, so Mötley has security throw him out. The much-anticipated album ships Platinum and debuts at number five; the highest debuting album since Stevie Wonder’s Hotter Than July opened at number four in 1980. It’s also the highest debut of a metal album since Led Zeppelin’s epic The Song Remains The Same debuted at number three in 1976. Girls, Girls, Girls eventually climbs to number two but is unable to dislodge Whitney Houston’s second consecutive number one album, titled Whitney. The Crüe hears that retailers were ready to report their album as number one when Clive Davis says he will fly all of the retail heads to Australia first-class and put them up in five-star hotels to see Whitney Houston, if they report her as number one. The band feels that Girls should have been their first number one album.

Girls, Girls, Girls features gospel singers performing backup vocals, as well as street noises recorded in downtown Los Angeles. Ted Nugent’s band member Dave Amato also contributes back up vocals, as does Pat Torpey, who previously drummed for Robert Plant and Belinda Carlisle, and later joins Mr. Big. The final track on the album is a live version of Elvis Presley’s hit Jailhouse Rock, recorded at Long Beach Arena, California on the previous Theatre of Pain U.S. tour. Nikki comes up with the design for the album cover, which once again displays a new Mötley Crüe logo, this time designed by Chris Polentz, over a photo of the band on their Harley Davidson motorbikes taken by Barry Levine.

15/5/87
Nikki gets a German short-haired pointer puppy and calls it Whisky.

21/5/87
Tommy dreams that he was playing the drums upside-down, and he wants to turn it into reality. He tells management and hopes they can design a drum kit that can spin around like a gyroscope while he’s playing it.

29/5/87
After rehearsals, Gene Simmons drives over to Nikki’s house in his new black Rolls Royce and they write songs together.

6/87
In preparation for the forthcoming tour, Vince sells his house and rents an apartment in Hollywood, putting most of his possessions in storage. Mick loses sixteen pounds by halving his alcohol consumption, but he prepares large bottles for the tour labeled Mars Ade; his own cocktail of tequila, orange juice and grenadine. He stores his car at the house of his friend, who smashes the passenger’s side and asks for $500 to look after it while he is away. With lawyers and accountants pushing him hard for child support payments, Mick still finds himself broke, even though the band has now sold millions of albums.

5/6/87
Inspired by Merry Clayton’s work with the Rolling Stones, and Madeline Bell and Doris Trio’s backing vocals in Humble Pie, the Crüe decides to employee a couple of back-up singers for the tour. They work with a female vocalist Bree Howard who previously toured with Jimmy Buffet as a percussionist and has also sung with Robbie Nevil, but they decide against her joining as Nikki starts having sex with her. They audition more than ten singers in their Burbank practice facility to the song Dancin’ On Glass, before Donna McDaniel and Emi Canyn are chosen today and dubbed the Nasty Habits. Nikki’s concept is to have three sexy women on stage with their top-half dressed in a nun’s habit and dressed nastily from the chest down, but the two girls wear a range of skimpy clothes on stage instead. Emi tells them at the audition that she has only been married for six months, but wants to go on tour to get away from her husband. Vince tries his luck with both of the girls at the audition but gets knocked back.

17/6/87
Vittoria Hohman of Florida files a lawsuit against Mötley Crüe and concert promoter Beach Club Promotions after Mötley’s performance at St. Petersburg’s Bayfront Center on 20 December 1985 caused her to lose all hearing in one ear and partial hearing in the other by the time she left the concert. Her fourteen-year-old daughter Kellie suffered temporary damage as well after they sat front-row for the show, less than three meters from the stage right next to a wall of speakers. The case is settled out of court by mutual agreement two years later and the band’s insurance company compensates her with around $30,000.

Rolling Stone magazine holds a photo shoot with the band for an upcoming cover story.
After being clean for over a month, Nikki has a little shot of heroin in his hotel bathroom, to celebrate being off heroin.

19/6/87
The Girls, Girls, Girls U.S. tour kicks off in Tucson, Arizona with Whitesnake in support, after a week of technical run-throughs and rehearsals at arenas in San Diego and Arizona. The show is powered by the largest amount of PA ever taken on the road by any band. Theatrics include a giant inflatable Harley Davidson motorbike and a spinning drum cage for Tommy, which was developed in conjunction with former navy submarine hydraulics specialist Chris Deiter, after many stage set design companies told them it couldn’t be done. It is built for about $80,000 by welding the cage to a forklift, mounted on yolks from a garbage truck, connected by a heap of cables and pumped into flight with hydraulics fluid. During rehearsals Tommy would get dizzy as he played upside-down in his spinning cage, but he soon overcame this by staring at a spot while spinning; something he recalled from his ballet lessons as a child. The cage can only spin five revolutions forward before spinning back to unwind the microphone cables. Nikki and Tommy scull from Jack Daniels bottles onstage as part of the show, and Jack Daniels even release a promotionally labeled Mötley Crüe bottle as part of their affiliation. Not in great shape, Nikki vomits on the side of stage during Tommy’s solo, as his body is not geared to going full tilt yet. His girlfriend Vanity goes back home after embarrassing the band as she dances in the photo pit during their set.

Rather than Mötley traveling between shows on a tour bus, they use an eighteen-seat Gulfstream One jet, sporting a Mötley logo design with a scantily-dressed cowgirl riding a bomb, a-la World War II bomber planes. It is fitted out with beds, couches and a black leather interior. The stewardess lays out drugs and drinks on each band member’s meal tray before they board; white wine and zombie dust (a mix of the sedative Halcyon and cocaine) for Nikki, a cocktail and zombie dust for Tommy, vodka for Mick and a sleeping pill for Vince.

The tour plans to head to Japan in December after the U.S. dates, then on to Europe in January. They then schedule a return to Los Angeles on the 1 February for a couple of months off before a further American leg with Guns N’ Roses in support.

22/6/87
Girls, Girls, Girls is released in Australia.

24/6/87
Tommy has sex with Tawny Kitaen, the girlfriend of Whitesnake front man David Coverdale. He knew her from days when she used to do drugs with Ratt’s Robbin Crosby.
The road becomes ‘the airport blowjob tour’ as there’s always a line of girls waiting for the band at the airport, so they take them into the bathrooms of the private airports.

Nikki’s tech Tim Luzzi goes on stage every night in a priest’s robe while Nikki grabs his hair, tilts his head back and pretends to make him drink Jack Daniels.

7/87
Tired of the pain from his degenerative bone disease, chronic depression sets in with Mick. When anti-depressants from psychologists and anaesthetics from pain management counsellors don’t assist, he turns towards alcohol more, as his own secret medicine. He sculls six shots of vodka then a can of Coke before he goes on stage every night. He then drinks a glass of straight vodka from the side of the stage during the show, before drinking his Mars Ade once the show is over. Mick also starts seeing Nasty Habit backup singer Emi Canyn, much to the rest of the band’s disapproval, since they have a rule to not sleep with anyone who works for the band. They punish the couple by pouring drinks on them and smearing food over their luggage, amongst other things. Mick feels disillusioned and disgusted in his band-mates. He considers walking out of Mötley Crüe.
Vanity tells the press during an interview that she is engaged to Nikki Sixx and they are going to marry on Christmas Eve. He sports the Roman numeral V tattooed on his upper right arm for Vanity, but feels she always makes his life difficult as their relationship is purely based on drugs and entertainment instead of love or even friendship. She has also lost a kidney to her drug habit, and is starting to lose her sight and hearing as well.

16/7/87
After their Chicago concert, the Mötley band members head to a transvestite bar where they drink vodka shots, eat caviar and laugh at all the characters of the night. Two twins make out with each other in front of them as entertainment. Fans hanging outside the club for hours prompt the police to come in. When they see silver trays with silver lids covering lines of cocaine on them, one of the officers says they love the band and if any cops try to bust them while they’re in Chicago, just call them.

18/7/87
Video footage for the upcoming single Wild Side is shot during the show at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, Indiana. Vince informs the crowd they are going to film as cameramen enter the stage. The song is played twice, allowing all the aspects of the show to be captured for the video. Director Wayne Isham has cameras set up to capture all angles of the Crüe’s live concert. He wants to put a camera on Nikki’s bass but he doesn’t let him, so he puts it on Mick’s guitar instead. A huge plexiglass ball with a camera in it gets tossed around in the crowd capturing crazy shots before it gets broken. Wild Side is the first Crüe song to be recorded using computer technology, as Tommy played a chunky guitar riff and chopped it into sixteenth notes.

22/7/87
Mötley’s debut album Too Fast For Love reaches Platinum status, the last of their four albums to break the million-copies-sold barrier.

23/7/87
John Corabi’s wife Valerie gives birth to their son, who they name Ian Karac Corabi.

26/7/87
Mötley plays a great outdoor show at Buckeye Lake in Ohio in front of forty thousand people with Whitesnake and Anthrax in support.

28/7/87
Arriving home for a few day’s break, Nikki writes a song called A is For Asshole, and can feel depression building inside him as an accumulation of issues.

5/8/87
Returning to their hotel in Philadelphia after their concert, Tommy and Nikki lock all the doors of their limo as their driver gets out to open their doors. They then drive off around the parking lot with the driver chasing them, before crashing it into the hotel gate.

10/8/87
Wild Side is released as a single with Five Years Dead as the B-side track. The song was written at SIR Rehearsal Studios.

15/8/87
In his Parker Meridian hotel room after the Mötley show in New York, Nikki shoots up too much heroin and overdoses. Vanity finds him passed out in the bathroom with a needle lying next to him.

25/8/87
Before the Crüe’s show in Rochester, New York, someone breaks into Vince’s dressing room and steals his clothes and wallet with five thousand dollars in it. When he then goes to get some dinner, Vince slams a jar of Gulden’s Dijon mustard against the backstage wall, when he sees there’s no Frenchie’s mustard for the sandwich he is making, even though he’d been asking for the rider to be changed for weeks. The smash severs many tendons, nerves and an artery, almost cutting one finger off Vince’s right hand. The show is cancelled and he is airlifted to the Hand Centre in Baltimore, where he undergoes an eight-hour operation the next day. Management tells press that a bottle of mustard exploded in his hand while he made himself a hamburger. Vince wears a full cast up to his elbow for a month, and bandages for three months following his specialist surgery.

Aerosmith releases their ninth studio album Permanent Vacation that includes a track called Dude (Looks Like A Lady), which was written about Vince Neil. Aerosmith front-man Steven Tyler once saw Vince in a bar from a distance and thought he was a woman, until he noticed a lot of girls coming on to him. Intrigued at how he picked up chicks while looking like one, the two met and chatted. The Crüe’s repeated use of the Californian word ‘dude’ was noted and taken as inspiration for the hit song. Steve Tyler and Joe Perry leave a note on the windshield of the Crüe’s tour plane one night, telling them that they are crashing and burning and they can help them since they have been there before. The Crüe laughs-off the warning from their idols.

26/8/87
Nikki tells Vanity on the phone that it is over between them, but they still see each other from time to time and do drugs.

9/87
Mötley Crüe is hit with a $5,000 lawsuit by a woman claiming to have suffered “severe hearing dysfunction and mental anguish” after attending a Mötley Crüe concert with her daughter.

16/9/87
The Crüe’s Girls, Girls, Girls album is certified Double-Platinum, having now sold more than two million copies in the USA.

Karen Dumont stays at Nikki’s house to keep an eye on things while he is on tour.

1/10/87
Shortly before 8am, an earthquake tremor measuring 5.9 on the Richter scale occurs twelve miles east from downtown Los Angeles, directly under the city of Whittier, causing eight deaths, $350 million in property damage, and leaving 2,200 people homeless. At home between shows on the tour, Nikki runs out of his house naked, grabbing only his most important possession: his freebase pipe. He has to break a window on his side door to get back inside his house after locking his keys in.

6/10/87
Nikki rides his Harley to the band’s sold-out hometown show at the Grand Western Forum. As he arrives at the venue, a cop pulls him over and says he was speeding. When Nikki can’t produce a driver’s license, the cop says he’s going to jail; Nikki says if he’s not on stage in an hour there’ll be a riot. He arrests Nikki and puts him in the back of a police car, before Doc McGhee sorts the situation and has Nikki apologise to the cop for swearing at him.

10/10/87
Having not slept in days from drugs, Nikki skips his flight on the Mötley plane as the band travels to play a huge, prestigious show at Oakland Stadium. Out of his mind on cocaine, he feels as though he’s going to have a heart attack. Doc organises a later flight on a commercial jet and when Nikki finally arrives at the stadium in a mess, they hold a band meeting and confront him about his excessive drug use. Tour security chief Fred Saunders later says, “There were countless management meetings called during the Girls tour just to try to work out what to do with Nikki. By the end of the tour, I was hiring security guards at each hotel and just leaving two of them on his door permanently.”

15/10/87
Mötley’s show at the Tacoma Dome in Washington State is filmed and in later years becomes one of their most widely bootlegged concert videos. A fan dies from a drug overdose at the venue on the night. Nikki’s mum attends the show, after visiting him at his hotel with his sister Ceci and her two young boys: two-year-old Jake and baby Caleb. In a drugged-out state, Nikki tells them to go away and calls them every name under the sun.

17/10/87
On a day off between shows in Canada, Nikki and Tommy shoot up a lot of cocaine and heroin. When they run out, they shoot up Jack Daniels.

19/10/87
You’re All I Need is released as the third single from Girls, Girls, Girls and is the first time Mötley have so many singles released from an album. The song peaks at number eighty three during its eight-week stay on the U.S. charts. All In The Name Of... is used as the B-side on the single, which is said to have been written about the young porn star Tracii Lords. It is also the Crüe’s opening song of their set list being performed live on the tour.

21/10/87
After their show in Winnipeg, Tommy goes to Nikki’s hotel room with Fred Saunders where they sit around drinking and snorting. After a while, Nikki sneaks out of his room and douses another room’s door with lighter fluid and hair spray, before lighting it, knocking and running off thinking it was Rich Fisher’s door. It sets off the fire alarms and scares a young Chinese guy and his son who open the door that is ablaze. Nikki ducks back into his room and laughs at all the commotion.

25/10/87
Tommy and Nikki go to a Toronto club called Rock’n’Roll Heaven, where a fist fight develops after a patron makes a snide remark to Tommy about his wife Heather. They then do a radio interview with Joey Vendetta on Q107 to promote their upcoming concert, and get wasted in the studio.

27/10/87
David Coverdale from support band Whitesnake joins Mötley on stage in Montreal for their rendition of Jailhouse Rock, as Whitesnake plays their final show in support and Guns N’ Roses get set to take over. Whitesnake was originally only going to play a few early dates on the tour, but Mötley management happily increased their fee from $4,000 per night to $10,000 so they would stay on the tour, as much as they bored the Crüe members.

29/10/87
Steve Deske and Mary Ann Rizzo win MTV’s Mötley Cruise to Nowhere competition and join the Crüe on a five-hour luxury boat cruise in the Bermuda Triangle, following a private cocktail party at the ritzy Elbow Beach Hotel the night before. Two wild cross-dressers attend the party, one who designed costumes for the band and happened to win a contest and one who later goes on to front The Toilet Boys as Miss Guy. The contest winners are driven around in limousines and given $1,000 spending money.

After the cruise, Vince and Sharise spend the weekend on Florida’s Captiva Island before the Girls, Girls, Girls tour resumes.

31/10/87
Mötley Crüe shoots a video with Wayne Isham for You’re All I Need on Halloween. The video clip is based on the movie Taxi Driver and is further inspired by the self-destructive relationship of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungeon. After viewing the first version of the video that doesn’t feature the band at all, the record company instructs them to add some band footage, which is shot at Wayne Isham’s studio. When finally released, the video is banned by MTV due to its graphical content, particularly of one scene showing a body bag being zipped up, coupled with the nature of the song’s lyrics.

3/11/87
In Mobile, Alabama, Guns N’ Roses plays their first show supporting Mötley Crüe.
Skid Row approaches John Corabi this month to join them as their front-man but end up recruiting Sebastian Bach from the band Kid Wikkid instead, who recently supported Mötley Crüe in Canada.

7/11/87
After their show at Lakefront Arena, Nikki and Slash go into the French Quarter of New Orleans. They get wasted in some bars, after getting refused entry at the Dungeon because Nikki cut the bra off the owner’s girlfriend last time he was there.

9/11/87
Nikki and Slash drink shots in their hotel’s bar for hours on their night off, when they start wrestling. Nikki falls on top of Slash and when he wakes up next morning in Tommy’s drum tech Spider’s bed, he feels pain in his neck. Doctors tell Slash he has four dislocated vertebrae.

19/11/87
After throwing up spaghetti on the bar at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Atlanta, Slash immediately orders another shot to keep drinking with Nikki.

20/11/87
Tommy and Nikki cut Doc McGhee’s hotel bed in half with a knife, so when he gets into it later that night it collapses. Nikki tries to throw Fred’s bed out the window and gets a black eye for his trouble, while Mick tries to jump out his hotel window. Wondering why he has no pubic hair, Doc tells Nikki the next day that they all had their penises out on the bar and poured Jack Daniels on them and lit them on fire.

28/11/87
On the Mötley jet traveling from Fort Myers to Fort Lauderdale after their show, Nikki taunts Nasty Habit Emi and her religious ways by standing in the middle of the jet with his pants down and begging God to strike him down. As Emi cries, Tommy gets the pilot to do a barrel roll.

29/11/87
To celebrate the final Guns N’ Roses support show, the Crüe surprises them by having about twenty-five pyro blasts kick in as they commence Welcome to the Jungle. Lead singer Axl Rose wears a Mötley Crüe t-shirt on stage. After the Florida show, they party in a conference room with a heap of booze and about two ounces of cocaine that they snort off the backs of six or seven naked girls before making out with them. They trash the room as they leave and Tommy takes some pills and passes out, so Rich Fisher pushes him in a wheel chair through the airport and onto the plane at noon the next day to head back home.

10/12/87
Mötley lands in Japan to commence their Girls, Girls, Girls tour with some press commitments. Tommy is busted with some marijuana in his drum kit and is bailed out of the situation by their Japanese tour promoter Mr. Udo without any charges being laid. When they get to the hotel, Tommy drops a wine bottle out of a tenth storey window. Nikki feels sick, sweats a lot, and cramps up with pain because he has no heroin.

11/12/87
Whilst still on probation, Vince downs a pitcher of Kamikaze cocktail at a Roppongi restaurant, before flipping a table over on four Yakuza mafia gangsters in suits after he thought they were talking about him. They subsequently pull guns from their waists and aim them at Vince from on top of the over-turned table. Mötley’s security chief Fred Saunders rolls Vince onto the floor and out into their waiting limo. Vince later wakes up naked on the floor of his hotel room, not knowing what had happened. Next morning, he discovers he is missing his $12,000 diamond and gold Rolex watch that management gave him after lasting three months without a drink following his tragic car accident three years earlier. He also sees the girlfriend of the Yakuza that he took back to the hotel has gone.

Later in the night, Nikki gets arrested on his birthday in Tokyo, after being involved in a couple of fist fights at The Lexington Queen club in the Roppongi district. The first is with Tommy, who believes Nikki hit him in the mouth, while Nikki feels Tommy was so drunk that he fell over before he ever connected. The second is with an American tourist, as he smashes him in the nose before his head hits a steel pole, cracking it open and spilling blood over his eyes. Mick leaves the club wearing the owner’s Godzilla mask and terrorises people in the street with his pants around his ankles, urinating along the side of the road. He stomps on glasses and tries to breathe fire from his rear.

14/12/87
Heading back to Tokyo by train after their Osaka show, Tommy and Nikki down fifteen or so bottles of sake before they pour Jack Daniels over the heads of unsuspecting commuters, including back-up singer Emi. They order curry and smear it all over the walls in the high-speed Bullet Train, amongst other riotous behaviour. Nikki shouts angrily at Mick and suddenly throws a Jack Daniels bottle at Mr. Udo, after he tells them to settle down, but it misses its mark by a long shot and smashes into a businessman commuter, who collapses to the ground screaming with blood streaming from a wound in the back of the his head. Mr. Udo calms the Terror Twins, Nikki and Tommy, by pressing his thumb into the back of their necks. When the train stops in Tokyo, lots of Japanese Riot Squad police run along side their carriage, along with many fans. They handcuff Nikki and after Doc McGhee tells them he is his manager, they cuff him also, placing them both in a police car. Tommy hassles the police so he can go with Nikki too–to no avail. In jail, Nikki asks Doc how he likes his tattoos and asks if he should show the police.

15/12/87
Mr. Udo comes to the police station at 4am and they sign an apology note for the businessman who was hit with the bottle. When Doc and Nikki are before the sergeant with a translator that Mr. Udo brought with him, they tell the police that the bottle accidentally slipped out of Nikki’s hand and broke. He says he will also tell the American press how hospitable the Japanese people are on his return to the USA; instead of translating Nikki’s question to the sergeant of “If my balls were on your chin, where do you think my dick would be?” Nikki and Doc are released from jail at 5am but Doc has to take care of paperwork taking him until night. Just before he crashes in bed back at his hotel, a drunken Vince bangs on his door telling him that he should fire the travel agent because he was trying to make out with the Yakuza’s girlfriend, but his girlfriend Sharise was in his room, having just arrived from the U.S. without his knowledge. Doc punches Vince in the face and closes the door.

16/12/87
Nikki calls the hotel front desk and complains about the fans banging on his window; however his room is on the twenty-sixth floor.

19/12/87
After winding up their Japanese tour the previous night by playing the last of three nights at the famous Budokan in Tokyo, Tommy heads back to Los Angeles to spend Christmas with Heather in his new three-million dollar home, a hilltop spread on a golf course with panoramic views. Tommy pays a once-off $60,000 for exclusive golf club membership. Mick and Emi Canyn look forward to spending some quality time at home off the road and away from the hassles of other band members, while Vince looks forward to spending time with girlfriend Sharise; the mud wrestler from the Tropicana. With no lady nor home life to go back to, Nikki decides he is going on a solo tour of Asia to enjoy drugs and prostitutes with nothing but a packet of condoms, commencing in Hong Kong, followed by Malaysia, Beijing China, then a finale in Bangkok. Doc McGhee tries to stop Nikki from going but Mr. Udo says he will accompany Nikki on the journey. Doc then draws the short straw with Doug Thaler after feeling obliged that one of them needs to join them as well. Mr. Udo sits next to Nikki on the way to Hong Kong and tells him that the last time he saw a friend in the same state as Nikki, he died. Nikki shrugs it off but becomes more interested as he learns it was former James Gang and Deep Purple guitarist Tommy Bolin, who overdosed in 1976 at twenty five years of age. Once they arrive, they go to a Chinese restaurant that Mr. Udo says is one of the best in the world.

20/12/87
Nikki goes shopping for antiques and buys a Chinese table made from cherry wood with pearl cherry blossom inlays for his dining room. He later meets Doc and Mr. Udo for a few drinks in the hotel bar before they go to a whorehouse that poses as a strip club. He hears a band playing a Mötley Crüe song as they are shown into a private room with four bottles of Cristal champagne, two bottles of Jack Daniels, a bottle of vodka and huge plates of food. They order different fetish-styled prostitutes to entertain them, like one would order food. Nikki scores a gram of cocaine and a quarter of ‘china white’ heroin from the girls, once Doc and Mr. Udo have left. He then orders ten prostitutes in Nazi helmets for Doc that arrive at his hotel room while he is on the phone to his wife, and more for Mr. Udo. Nikki later returns to the hotel with some of the prostitutes and passes out.

21/12/87
After waking up, throwing up and shooting up the last of his cocaine stash, Nikki discovers the prostitutes stole his cash, before he meets Doc and Mr. Udo in the hotel lobby where they tell him of their disgust in the prostitutes he ordered for them the previous night. Mr. Udo flies back to Tokyo while Doc organises flights back to the U.S. the following day, thus ending the Sixx solo party tour. At night, Nikki wanders the Hong Kong streets with his female translator Li, intent on looking for drugs, when he comes across a soothsayer dressed in a brown robe at the end of a long alley off Wanchai Road. He pays four Hong Kong dollars and the old soothsayer runs his hand across Nikki’s before curling it up and pushing it away. He says to the translator that Nikki will die before the end of the year and he can’t change his ways. Nikki asks Li if those guys are just to lure tourists in Hong Kong but she sadly tells him they are never wrong. They head back to the hotel and Nikki calls his dealer in Los Angeles to instruct him to meet him tomorrow with the usual $10,000 worth of heroin and some cocaine (along with syringes) when he lands back in the United States.

22/12/87
Nikki flies into Los Angeles International Airport from Tokyo, where he gets high on a 10cc shot in the limo that picks him up to take him to his recently purchased house, which former girlfriend Nicole chose eighteen months ago. He looks in his mirror and sees himself disintegrating; his hair falling out in clumps, needle tracks down his arms, and a puffy alcoholic face.

Wanting to escape his loneliness with a night on the town, he calls friends Robbin Crosby from Ratt and Slash from Guns N’ Roses. Nikki’s silver limousine picks up Robbin from his home and they head to the Franklin Plaza Hotel where the homeless Guns N’ Roses stay. He greets Slash at the room’s door (the one next to Dave Ellefson from Megadeth’s room) with a bottle of whiskey and an antique beaver-hair top hat that he had thrown up on in the limo on the way. They drive to the Cathouse club with Slash’s Scottish girlfriend Sally McLaughlan, scoring some heroin that they pick up from Robbin’s dealer on the way. While at the club for hours, the guys often go in and out to the limo to do drugs. The last time they do it, they don’t come back for Sally, so she walks back to Franklin Plaza on her own on her first night in Los Angeles.

The guys head back to the hotel with some fans following them from the club. Robbin’s dealer meets them there with some Persian heroin he just got. Sally arrives back at the hotel and furiously tries to talk with Slash who is passed out on the couch, so Nikki goes into Steven Adler’s suite with the dealer. The dealer ties Nikki off and shoots him up, turning him blue in an instant. Nikki knocks on Slash’s door and collapses on the floor when Sally opens it. With one look at Nikki turned blue, the dealer jumps out of the hotel room window and over the balcony, running down the street yelling out that he just killed Nikki Sixx.

With Slash paralytic, Steve Adler and Sally start beating on his chest to revive him and Adler slaps him in the face with the cast on his broken arm. They drag him into the bathroom and Adler runs off, so Sally tries to get Nikki into the shower to get cold water onto him. Slash comes into the bathroom, sees Nikki and starts freaking out as he lost a friend Todd to a heroin overdose a few months ago. Sally gives Nikki mouth-to-mouth resuscitation over the bath while trying to calm Slash, who smashes the shower screen, sending shattered glass all over Sally and Nikki. After punching Slash out, Sally yells for someone to call 911 as a last effort to save his life from an overdose. The paramedics arrive quickly and take over from Sally’s mouth-to-mouth, ripping his t-shirt off to give him adrenaline as they take him out of the room. The police then question everyone in Axl’s room, not spotting a bag of dope and a vial of cocaine.

After being dead for some minutes, at the hotel named the same as his birth name–Franklin, Nikki has an out-of-body experience. He hears, “We’re losing him” and tries to sit up to see what is going on, before shooting upright and slowly ascending towards bright light all above him. He sees his body on the gurney covered head-to-toe and being pushed into the ambulance by the paramedics who had to pronounce him dead. He also sees the fans that had followed them, as well as his silver limo.

Nikki’s limo driver Boris calls Vince telling him what the dealer said and that he saw Nikki being wheeled out into the ambulance with a sheet over his face. News of Nikki’s death spreads fast, quickly reaching radio stations, which announce Nikki’s death. Not long after that, Mötley tour manager Rich Fisher calls Vince and tells him of the overdose. Tears roll down Vince’s face. Slash calls Tommy and tells him that they tried to do everything to keep him alive but the paramedics wheeled him out with a sheet over his face. Doug Thaler calls his co-manager Doc McGhee, who has just finished dinner with Bob Krasnow of Elektra Records, and tells him of the death. Rich Fisher calls a hung-over Mick Mars and breaks the news to him that Nikki is dead, asking him to call England and cancel the band’s forthcoming European tour for him, which is due to commence on January 10. Mick calls Kerrang! magazine and makes up some lame excuses for why they aren’t coming over any more.

After almost giving him up for dead, a second attempt of a double-dose jab of adrenalin brings his out-of-body vision down fast through the roof of the ambulance with a painful jerk, as the shots kick-start his life again. He opens his eyes to see a needle in each side of his chest and hears a man say that no-one will die in his ambulance, before he passes out.

When he awakes in Cedar-Sinai Hospital to a policeman shining a torch in his eyes and asking where he got the drugs, he abuses him and is told he’s not being held on any charges. Against medical advice, Nikki pulls the tubes from his nose and the I.V. out of his arm, before signing himself out of hospital wearing only his leather pants.

Outside in the hospital car park, he sees two teenage fans crying on the kerbside and holding candles because they heard on the radio that he had died. Speechless that Nikki is alive, the girls drive him home to Van Nuys in their Mazda and lend him one of their jackets. They hear his death being reported on radio stations on the way, while Nikki realises that he does have millions of people that do care about him. He gets dropped home at 5:45am, much to the amazement of Karen Dumont, who received the bad news call from Doug Thaler a couple of hours earlier. Apologising that he couldn’t find his key, Nikki goes straight to his answering machine and changes the message to say, “Hey, it’s Nikki. I’m not home because I’m dead” before shooting up from a lump of heroin stored in his medical cabinet. He passes out again.

The band’s accountant Chuck Shapiro calls Vince saying a reporter called him for an obituary quote. Chuck puts Vince on hold while he calls the hospital to verify, returning to tell him the nurse just saw him leave.

23/12/87
Doc McGhee finds out Nikki has escaped from hospital so he heads to his office and calls in Doug Thaler. They cancel Mötley’s European tour, blaming exhaustion as the official reason. Nikki wakes up on his blood-covered bathroom floor with his heroin needle still dangling out of his bloodied arm. He hears his answering machine play its message to Doc, who had arrived at his house with Doug, finding him passed out again in the bathroom while Karen had gone to work. They talk him into coming to Doc’s house in Tarzana for detox. Bob Timmons works with him at Doc’s house while Steven Tyler from Aerosmith calls daily, telling him he is going to die forever, as an effort to bully him into cleaning up.

24/12/87
Tommy and Heather have a big disagreement on Christmas Eve. Tommy realises he needs to become sober in order to save his marriage, as he is at the point where he has become violent when under the influence of alcohol.

Doc soon calls a band meeting in his living room and management presents a united front, telling them they will be paying back the European concert promoters for the cancelled shows, out of their own pockets, then advising they will quit if the band doesn’t straighten up. Every band member agrees to go to rehab, and they make a pact that they all have to be sober before recording of the next album commences.

25/12/87
Nikki’s father dies in San Jose after having a heart attack in his shower. Nikki doesn’t find out about his death until ten years later. He spends Christmas at home with Karen Dumont, Sally McLaughlan and Slash.

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