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Rating: I had read excellent reviews about "The Heroin Diaries," so at the first opportunity, I got this interesting book by Nikki Sixx as a gift—founding bassist and the mind behind Mötley Crüe. It is not an autobiography but a diary that, among recording studios, hotel rooms, dark closets, and backstage areas, he kept to document day by day his alcoholic and drug-addicted tendencies.
It’s 1987, a pivotal year for Mötley Crüe: the album "Girls! Girls! Girls!" is topping all the world charts, and the tour that will follow is already anticipated to be sold out everywhere. However, as we all know, the scandalous attitudes that the band has adopted in its almost three-decade career often preceded their real artistic value: we recall the various arrests of Vince Neil, the tormented and violent marriages of Tommy Lee, alcohol and drug abuse by Mike Mars. But above all, every kind of excess for Nikki Sixx, who, aware of the tragic moment and unable to get out of it, decides to document on paper the devastating self-destructive spiral that will drag him so low as to brush with death from a heroin overdose. Thus, he describes his days filled with debauchery and tells decadent episodes of a tragic reality resulting from his lifestyle associated with heavy drug abuse: there he is in partying attitudes with his trusty Tommy Lee going around strip clubs, and there he is stationed behind his front door with a gun, scared of the night guards; one day we find him performing in front of thousands of delirious people, and another closed in a squalid closet surrounded by used syringes and encrusted spoons.
The book is rich in testimonies of more or less known people in the music business: the other Crüe with roadies and managers in tow, the great drinking buddies Slash of the Guns and Rick Nielsen of Cheap Trick, the junkie companion Vanity, and his family members. Also interesting are the tales related to other rock stars, and Nikki has something to say about each of them: the Whitesnake boring on stage and in life, Jon Bon Jovi, friendly but verbose, Ozzy, excessive at least as much as him, Bruce Dickinson’s bored wife (...), Steven Tyler kind and caring, Axl Rose inscrutable and complexed, and Gene Simmons "slightly" egocentric.
An interesting story composed of short episodes (thus smooth to read) that delves into the intimacy, excesses, sadness, and euphoria of a character who, although controversial and debated, shows a deeply human, touching, and sometimes entertaining side.
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