This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx (3 page)

Didn’t happen.

Next stop, Stuttgart. I asked Ossy Hoppe, our German promoter, the same question I had for Andrei. This time there wasn’t a pause, or an “I’ll ask around,” or a “nyet.” There was just a simple, “What time do you wanna go?”

“Right after the show,” I said, sealing the deal.

As soon as we left the stage I grabbed my camera bag and said to Rex, the tour manager, “I’m ready to go and you’re coming with me.” Rex is British and has worked with every band you can name, most notably Led Zeppelin. I told him not to be slow and he rolled his eyes and smiled. He has seen this movie or some version of it a million times.

We arrive at the brothel. Rex runs in first, then a minute later runs back out shouting, “Let’s go!”

Camera bag in hand, I walk in and the girl at the front desk asks, “So you want to shoot picture?”

“Yes, like this…” I say and break out some reference art I had brought along.

Soon, I was like honey for the bees and the girls started coming up, buzzing, chatting in German, and then it came. I explained what I wanted. All I heard was
nein,
again and again.

The girl up front saw the disappointment in my eyes and said, “Okay, okay, I will let you take pictures of me.” Problem was, she was a blonde and somewhat pretty. I was looking for the seamy underbelly—the addiction, the pain, the hell that is their lives. Not some German version of a California party girl.

I was about to grab my stuff and leave when I saw something in her eyes. Just a glimpse, but it was there—what I was looking for. I just needed to see it again and capture it with my camera.

“Okay,” I said, and she dragged me and Rex upstairs, the madame in tow.

I had a choice of four rooms, all pretty much the same, so I picked the red one and asked where the light was. The madame says, “Light? We don’t need light.”
Oh shit,
I thought,
maybe not for what you do…
I asked if they had any kind of lamp and after much discussion in German, a guy appeared with a work light not unlike one you would find on a construction site, harsh and way too bright.

I looked around and saw the paper towels the girls use to clean up after sex. I draped some over the lights, making a very ugly (and flammable) diffuser. I positioned the girl to get just her eyes and prepared to shoot.

I did a quick test, told her she looked beautiful, took the shot, and showed it to her. She smiled. But it still wasn’t what I wanted, what I had seen before.

Okay,
I thought,
now this is the part where I either get the shot or I get kicked out.

I focused the camera on her face and asked, “Do you like what you do for a living?”

Suddenly I saw that hurt look in her eyes,
snap, snap…

Question two, “Does your mom know you’re a prostitute?”

BROTHEL, GERMANY
fig.GM2.1

Oh, that was tough to ask. The look again,
snap, snap…

Next I asked if I could shoot her from the rear. She seemed perturbed but I snapped a quick picture and told her again how pretty she looked.

I had a feeling I was running out of time so I had her sit on her Plexiglas heels, six inches high at least. She told me she didn’t like her ass. I told her I was shooting her shoulder, and to look out the window. I fired off maybe ten pictures, all of her ass, when she blurted out, “Do you want to drink?”

I told her I don’t drink. Then she said, “Do you want drugs?” I said I don’t do drugs. She mustered up the last question, the one I knew was coming and I dreaded: “Do you want sex?”

I said,
“I don’t do sex.”

She turned toward me, crawling off her heels and off the bed. She stood erect, stunned. I took a quick picture of her then, too.

“If you don’t drink, do drugs, or want sex, what do you do?” she asked, and I said, “Oh, I just take pictures.” Then I turned on my leather Chuck Taylors and split, leaving Rex to pay the bill. I think I captured her pain and maybe even her essence. I know one thing for sure: I pissed her off. She’s got a tough life, I realize, and even though I sound like a punk, I truly respect her for surviving such a hard road.

It’s not always easy to get the person on the other side of the camera to see what I see. When I am doing a shoot with someone, I spend as much time talking to them as I do taking pictures. I want to know everything so I can make the moment honest. These people have been told over and over that they’re bad and ugly. That they’re not perfect like us. They’ve been pointed at and laughed at since childhood. Life can be cruel. It’s been my struggle, my personal battle, my obsession to make people see that different isn’t always bad.

But then I contradict myself. I instinctively believe that the face of an angel usually hides something iniquitous and wicked under that porcelain-white soft skin. (I really hate it when I am judgmental, but I am working on that.) Meanwhile, my experience has shown me that beneath the darkest of visages usually gleams the softest of hearts. The glow is easy to see if you are willing to open your eyes and admit that all life is beautiful.

Unfortunately for our society, we have been brainwashed into believing the lies of the “beautiful people.”

For example, once a year
People
magazine puts out a list of the one hundred most beautiful people. I could hurl at this public display of deception. Makes me sick to think that millions of teenagers and young adults are being lured into believing that some made-up list is the standard for beauty and success.

SELF-PORTRAIT, FUNNY FARM
fig.52ff

I am not a psychiatrist, but I stand firm in believing that allowing this kind of trash into our homes via TV, Internet, and magazines is a kind of mental-health terrorism.

It’s hard to imagine how someone’s creative energies go into reality shows like
The Girls Next Door,
showing the mental retardation caused by overbleaching while millions of viewers sit on the edge of their couches watching Hef’s Girls—watching them stare into a mirror so long that they believe the silicone is really them.

I am not saintly; I just have seen this movie before and I want my money back. I want more for myself and my loved ones.

“Entertainment” is today’s deadly poison, and we’re Tivoing it all straight into our brains. That’s how our perception of life gets distorted. It’s then that we start to believe that what’s washing over our brains is “reality.” Brainwashing, anybody?

I want us to return to the days of hard work and harder determination to better ourselves. Not being famous for being famous. I am not wrong for forbidding
People, Entertainment Weekly,
and garbage Dumpsters full of other, even worse magazines into my home for my kids to absorb like deadly diseases.

Driving to the studio today I heard a voice on the radio say, “From the same people who brought you the Kardashians, an even more messed-up family,
Meet the Lamas,
” or something like that. I faded off into the rain that was hitting my windshield. The new generation of puppets don’t even know what they’re in for, sadly.

I turned off the radio and turned on some Neil Young. I felt embarrassed to be in this industry and felt sad for the viewers who think it’s OK to idolize the newest of the beautiful people rotting from the inside out.

“Stand outside the velvet rope and yearn to be in our grace,” the message is beamed into our brains. “Try to be like us, and maybe we will accept you.”

But what if you don’t like what you see, or maybe you even view the people in
People
magazine as the freaks, the oddities, the disfigured?

Humans have always needed some version of the bearded ladies, amputees, midgets, or looming giants and other freaks.

Is it as the photographer Diane Arbus said, that we need freaks because they scare us? Or is it just human nature: we want to fit in so badly that it feels good to point out people who will never make the grade, no matter how hard they try?

It all gets really interesting when the self-made freaks become the stars that the “in crowd” wants to imitate. Oh, what a confusing mindfuck we are converging upon. In the 1980s I tattooed my body pretty much top to bottom. My own mother asked me, “Are you gonna join the circus?” Today, it’s almost mainstream to have your arms tattooed from shoulder to wrist. To have steel bolts catapulting from your lobes, nipples, and belly buttons. Now it’s OK to tattoo yourself everywhere and
not
join the circus. You can be tattooed and pierced with crazy hair and still get a job at Kinko’s or Starbucks or some other big, international chain. Thank God the lines are getting blurred by our acceptance of one another’s differences.

I love seeing the straight-looking man in a suit and tie talking to the girl with pink hair and a pierced nose at the local coffee shop. I love sitting on a bench talking to a homeless man and us both walking away feeling good. Maybe we really are capable of progress. I think we are on the road to awareness that it takes
all
of us to make this wonderful world.

If that can happen, maybe someday we’ll be capable of admitting that the one hundred “most beautiful people in the world” could possibly be the ugliest ones of all.

There was a time in my life, after living on the fringe for years, that acceptance was granted to me, like an unwanted award. I had fought hard to not conform to a society of anti-joysticks. It infuriated me that I was asked into their social clubs, VIP rooms, and roped-off celebrity enclaves. It felt like a mockery to me—to accept these “honors” would be a betrayal of my own self. I was confused by fame and success from the beginning, always more of an artist and less of a red carpet wannabe. It all just made me angry. I don’t believe anybody set out to insult me. It just came out that way.

The other day I found a journal entry from 1984. It simply said:

People tell me I am a star, fuck them.

That sentiment was comforting to me then. It tells me I was willing to stand up as an artist and not be strung up as a puppet.

It looked to me like the beautiful people had stuck their noses under our circus tent and exclaimed, “Sorry we laughed at you. We didn’t know you would be so popular and all the rage. Now we love you. Now we wanna look like you. We’d love to introduce you to all our friends…”

Hence my journal entry.
Fuck them.

How could I forgive them when I didn’t trust them?

Not so long before, they wouldn’t let me in their little world, their restaurants and clubs and hotels. I remember being asked, “Are you some kind of faggot?” because I painted my nails. Suddenly I was a sex symbol?

That was a lot for anybody to handle. I’m still trying to this day. Trying to forgive people for judging me, and to forgive myself for judging people. For becoming what I hated.

I feel like my photography somehow ties into all this.

I’m just pulling up to my studio here in Los Angeles. It’s aptly named Funny Farm, not only for the voices that speak to me from inside my own head, but also for the lunatics who crawl through the door at all hours to create with me. Funny Farm is not the kind of studio you’d imagine from a guy in a rock band. There isn’t a piece of musical equipment here except for a random, out-of-tune acoustic guitar in a corner.