Dedication
This book is dedicated to my sister
Lisa Marie Feranna’s life.
RIP
For those who feel different, estranged and like the misfits of society, may this book show the world that we’re all the same.
This Book Contains…
Cover
Dedication
You’re Probably Wondering Why I Invited You Here
Chapter 1 Look Thru My Cracked Viewfinder
Interlude Life’s Not Always Beautiful
Chapter 2 Ghosts Inside Me
Interlude This Is War
Chapter 3 One Man, Two Bands
Interlude Killer’s Instinct
Chapter 4 Help Is on the Way
Chapter 5 Tale of the Siamese Twins and the Black Rose Tattoo
Chapter 6 Rock N Roll Will be the Death of Me
Chapter 7 The End, Unless It’s the Beginning
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST fig.pr11
YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING WHY I INVITED YOU HERE
So here we sit again, pen to paper, heart in hand, me whispering softly in your ear as I prepare to take you on another journey. Last time we were together in The Heroin Diaries. Now we’ve moved on. I, cozy in my truths, and you, sometimes agitated in your opinions of me…but we’re still going to sit here together, nose to nose, pondering each other.
This is gonna hurt.
My dream has always been the same since I was a kid, to somehow show people life through different-colored lenses. Now more than ever I feel it’s important to see that way. We need to be aware that the warped perspectives of television, Internet, and magazines are sometimes poisonous. I cannot walk down the street without feeling I am being subjected to some constant sales pitch on what we should look like, smell like, dress like, or even worse, what we should be like.
I hope to take your breath away from time to time as you read about my experiences, my life, my rants and celebrations. I am going to lay it all out there for the world to see, not worried about ridicule. In my short life I have been wrong in my attitudes from time to time, have made bad decisions that have affected other lives, and still to this day I work hard at spiritual growth. The fact that when death knocked at my door I was lucky enough to tell him to come back later is reason enough to tell my story.
ON STAGE, HELSINKI, FINLAND fig.52hs
But my story isn’t so much about me as it is about life. I am just a man with a megaphone. Maybe I’ll even be telling your story. I am sure you will let me know if it moves and motivates you. After The Heroin Diaries I got hundreds of thousands of e-mails and letters telling me how readers’ lives had been changed for the better. I shared my story and maybe someone else’s life was spared too. (I am speaking of the families as well.) If the photographs of human beauty and the words in this book show you the beauty in the downtrodden side of our souls, then I am happy. I have done my job. It’s never too late to wake up. It’s never too late for change. I, too, am changing.
I am writing this book partly in hopes that I will move somebody to pick up a camera, write a poem, pen a song, or take a shot at any other dream. I have always said, “If you can dream it, you can have it.” In my heart, I’m wishing that these musings might motivate someone somewhere to go do great things.
Back when I wrote “Shout at the Devil” I was motivated by anger as I shouted into a million teenage ears. As the years go by, I become more aware that I am in a position to be heard. As I mature and become more conscious, I take this responsibility seriously.
My personal struggle is this: How do I continue to do things of importance—to grow as a man—yet remain this crazy artistic father, photographer–rock n roller, and businessman? And still not lose my edge? I think the only answer is to keep digging in my past and poking at all the wounds until I have discovered and healed every last one. The pain gives me the edge. I am grateful for it.
I think I have answered a few of my own questions here in this book. I try to be honest and walk my talk. I am happy to roll up my sleeves (tattoos and all) and let you see that I wear my heart for the whole world to see (scars and all).
So the question is, are you ready? I am, so let’s go.
EDUCATION IN REBELLION fig.1a
I
LOOK THRU MY CRACKED VIEWFINDER
This all started innocently enough…
It was a crisp spring morning in 1989. I was newly sober and looking for something to replace the drugs that had been running through my bloodstream for years, and for some odd reason decided to go into a camera store. It was a simple little Canon 35 mm SLR and a couple of lenses that started an adventure that will probably plague me forever, like music.
(Well, okay, to be honest, it wasn’t really the beginning of me shooting pictures: I had been snapping Polaroids of the band and our life on the road for years. But that’s a different book.)
I believe my photography addiction somehow ties into the fact that I’ve always had an eye for the oddities in life. Even as a kid I saw the world in my own way and thought most things that were different were beautiful and magical. Even things that other people thought were horrifying and disgusting and weird.
I’m six or seven years old, walking down a street in L.A. with my mother. We pass by an amputee. I gaze at her, transfixed.
“Don’t stare,” my mother says.
“Why not?” I say. “She’s beautiful.”
A couple months ago I’m sitting on a plane next to Tommy Lee. I’m on my laptop, going through some of the photographs I’ve created. He asks to see. He clicks through a bunch, then stops and stares at one showing an obese woman standing on a pedestal, mouth open wide in a scream, spewing some kind of clear liquid.
“You know, Sixx,” he finally says, “you are one of the most seriously fucked-up people I’ve ever met,” and he laughs, and I laugh, too, but I’m thinking, Man, thirty years together and he still doesn’t get me.
GOOD-BYE fig.23c
When I see the mainstream marketing imagery of beauty and love, I see a lie. Some people look at a rose and see romance and love. I see thorns and droplets of blood and heartbreak. I see the struggle to survive and connect and find a happy ending.
I remember as a kid looking through old photography books about sideshows and circus performers and wondering why people thought them so odd. Did people think they don’t have feelings because they’re missing limbs? They can’t love because their bodies are misshapen? They can’t be beautiful because they don’t conform to our stereotype of beauty?
Maybe we’re the ones who are ugly.
Whilst walking in downtown Los Angeles one day, a homeless man asked me for a helping hand. I think the fact that he had no hands played to the side of me that finds such irony poetic. I told him I had a few dollars to spare if he had a few moments for me in exchange. We sat together, not much different in our stories, but worlds apart in our realities. At one point he asked me why I was sitting there talking to him. After all, most people just look away at the sight of someone in his shoes, or lack thereof. I told him, as I tell you now, I didn’t know why. I do what my heart tells me to do and often I don’t understand, but I do know this: that day was one of the last times I was without my camera. The man’s image haunts me still. Not in sorrow, but because he, too, is a survivor, and he felt blessed to be alive, even on the hard, cold, streets of downtown L.A. Not capturing that moment was a great lesson in being a
photographer.
Life is full of so many false starts and abrupt finishes and unexpected detours. Just when you think you have it all figured out, something new comes along and rips the rug out from under you. I cherish this about my existence. People come up to me and ask, “Nikki, how can you be in one of the world’s biggest rock bands, have a side band with a hit album, have a clothing line, be a successful author, have your own radio show, be a father of four, and on top of that still have such cool-ass hair?” I say, “Wait, what about my photography?”
By now, I can’t imagine not taking pictures whenever the moment moves me—from the first rays of morning light bouncing off the windowsill to the laughter roaring out of a wild man standing on the corner of the freeway, begging for change. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, they say, and I say they’re right. I also say you see what you want to see, so I keep my eyes wide open at all times.
I sometimes feel like a robot, scanning the planet for information. The conversation I have with a fan in an airport, DOWNLOADED into my brain. The kid who runs in front of my car chasing a ball, making me stop on a dime, DOWNLOADED. The woman at the gas station driving a Rolls-Royce and yelling at the attendant that he didn’t properly clean her windshield, DOWNLOADED. As an artist, I take it all in knowing it will somehow be regurgitated later, maybe as a lyric, or a chapter in a book, or a photograph.
When I see something, I grab whatever’s handy and start clicking—my iPhone, my Holga or Diana toy cameras, my little Canon point-and-shoot, my homemade pinhole wooden camera, or the big Nikon D3, or my new friend, a Gilles-Faller wet-plate camera from 1890. All just different ways to collect what falls beneath my gaze.
I think the photographer who turns up his nose at a low-res cell-phone camera has lost what he fell in love with in the first place: capturing that magical moment. Taking a picture is just telling a story. You know, like the blink of an eye, a flash, then it’s gone. I know that for me, the magic is in the moment. I live for the mystery of that. I learned this somewhere along the way. I hear it in AA meetings often: one day at a time. I even hear one minute at a time.
I forget this sometimes, and when I do I start to feel out of sync with life. I think photography realigns me with the moment.
I don’t have a favorite style of photography. I love the same greats that every fan does, like Joel-Peter Witkin and Diane Arbus. But there are so many others. I recently found a wonderful book when I was in London, titled Le Temple Aux Miroirs by the French photographer Irina Ionesco. She turned the world on its head in the 1970s when she took photos featuring her underage daughter in tantalizing positions, a presexual kitten mixed with bordello queen. Raw and beautiful in the lighting and rich in texture thanks to the darkroom work, it is brilliant. But it is also her own young daughter, nude for all the world to see. It makes me think, as an artist and a parent. One side of my brain is inspired, one side repulsed.
Old cameras capturing odd people with ancient souls, sitting on antique books and furniture, sometimes shot in abandoned places, or sets made to look suitably destroyed and decayed…everything and everybody here on this polluted blue marble is destined to leave a mark, and this is one of mine. I will leave it to the history books to decide whether it’s good or bad. If it’s up to the critics, well, put it like this: word on the street is there ain’t no Grammy in my future. I ruffled way too many feathers in the old boys’ network for that to happen. I hope to follow suit in photography.
Photo sessions for me are like injections of life. I pace back and forth impatiently, like a man with a machine gun, and trust me when I say I have an itchy trigger finger. Once I get the picture, I “get the talent out,” as the expression goes, meaning I send the models away. This is the moment when the magic comes to life. It’s like capturing a soul. Going through the photos frame by frame, cursing the focus of this one, amazed at the perfection of that one.
Then it’s all about the processing of the images, the dodging and burning, and if there is any juice left in your engine (or time on the clock) maybe a print or two to hold in your hands. I almost always take an image home with me at the end of a shoot, like a cannibal takes a head. A trophy, I guess.
My favorite sessions are with the old, decrepit, deranged, and uniquely beautiful. The once living or now on the verge of dying. Maybe we’re just stopping time until we graduate to the next level (some call it heaven). No matter how they look, I say they are pretty things. After all, if they can make you feel, they must be special. There is a sensation to something that has been around for a long time, a kind of energy that I get from it. The older we are, the better we become. Just look at Keith Richards. (I am not far behind.)
I search high and low to find people who move me emotionally to photograph. Some come to me through friends of friends, casting directors or other photographers, but it isn’t easy. I have tried my hardest to get into places most people run from. Shooting galleries are almost impossible to penetrate, and mental institutions have so much red tape you’d think they were sacred. Whorehouses aren’t easy to get into when you’re lugging a camera, but I have gotten into a few.
For me, it’s love of personal contact that pushes my creativity. That’s why I love shooting on the street. Whether it was in Cambodia, Thailand, Australia, or someplace else, finding people who have fallen on the hardest of times, those who seem forgotten, has provided me with my happiest times as a photographer. They need to have their beauty acknowledged by capturing the image.
I always take my cameras with me on tour. Photography takes me away from the normal routine (and boredom) of airport-limo-hotel-venue. Sometimes it takes me far, far away.
In Vancouver, I was talking to the concierge at the hotel where Mötley Crüe was staying. You’re supposed to ask the concierge when you’re searching for the nearest great restaurant or local hot spot. Somehow I always feel like an alien because I never want to know about the nightlife (at least not that kind). But I knew that some questions are better whispered than announced to the whole lobby.
I looked down at her name tag and asked the question under my breath—way under my breath, so far under my breath I may have seemed like a crazy person miming. I said,
“Julie, I’m trying to find the most drug-infested part of town.”
She said, “Of course, sir, I’ll get my manager to help you.”
The next name tag in front of me belonged to Karl. “May I help you, sir?” he asked. By the way he blurted it out, I could tell Julie hadn’t filled him in on my request. I repeated it, at which point Karl took me aside and asked a few questions, mostly to cover the hotel’s ass, I think. When you look like I do and ask where the crack houses are, people might assume incorrectly about what you’re after. Once I explained, he said he had a few friends who are photographers and so he knew the perfect place, but first I needed to understand how dangerous it was. Imagine my smile when I got what I asked for.
Jumping into a van with a bag of cameras and six hundred Canadian dollars in my pocket was my idea of a perfect day off from the crazy traveling circus. Running up behind me came my 350-pound (and equally bighearted) security guard, Kimo. I told him he had to stay at the hotel because he would scare people away. We had a heated argument, during which the tour manager and then actual managers were called. Finally, to save time, I just caved in. We all agreed that Kimo could come—as long as he stayed far enough away so nobody would notice him, but close enough to save me if necessary. Frustrating sometimes to be thought of as a commodity.
Sucking up my ego and picking up my cameras, I was off to the crack district. It took ten minutes to get there from our five-star hotel, and three hours to get Kimo to allow me to enter the most dangerous alley in Vancouver. It wasn’t unlike a million other alleys I’ve seen except it looked bottomless. I couldn’t even tell if it was a dead end or not. Brick buildings lined it, old banks and government offices, now abandoned. This isn’t prime real estate unless you’re a junkie.
I sat alone at the mouth
of that alley for over an hour until one guy came up and asked what I wanted. I told him I wanted to take pictures. I wanted to be a fly on the wall, so to speak. I told him I was an ex-addict and maybe some of these pictures would help other people who were thinking about doing drugs.
His response was simple: “How much?”
Now, being one to bait the hook with the fattest worm, I gave him fifty dollars and he took off to tell the others that I had money and was one of them. Before long I was twenty feet into the alley and a hundred dollars lighter. I saw Kimo pacing back and forth as I handed out cash and disappeared deeper and deeper until finally I was out of his sight altogether. At last.
The alley smelled like dank piss and rotting garbage. Plastic tarps strung from one garbage bin to another created shelter from the rain and added to the stink. At first it looked like ten, maybe twelve people in clusters, but as I went deeper I saw more groups, maybe trying to keep warm and definitely trying to get high together. It was like a community from hell. There were no young kids that I saw. I don’t think I could have handled that. I saw enough of that on a trip to Cambodia and that is another level of heartache.