DISGRACELAND - Motley Crue Pt. 2: The Ballad of Nikki Sixx – Dead, Doped Up, and Running Naked with a Loaded .357

Episode Date: July 15, 2025

He was broke, strung out, and cleaning up other people's puke. Then he got stiffed by a gangster with ties to the infamous Wonderland Murders. A few years later, he was dead on the floor – for the second time. This is the high-speed tale of Nikki Sixx, a rock 'n roll original who came back to life more than once to take his place as the poster boy for hair metal's wildest and wettest dreams. This isn't a comeback story – It's a resurrection. To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at ⁠⁠www.disgracelandpod.com⁠⁠. To listen to Disgraceland ad free and get access to a monthly exclusive episode, weekly bonus content and more, become a Disgraceland All Access member at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠disgracelandpod.com/membership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - ⁠⁠GET THE NEWSLETTER⁠⁠ Follow Jake and DISGRACELAND: ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠ ⁠⁠X⁠⁠ (formerly Twitter)  ⁠⁠Facebook Fan Group⁠⁠ ⁠⁠TikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court.

On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Disgrace Land is a production of Double Elvis. This is a story about stupidity and fun. Stupid behavior and fun music. Stupid music and fun behavior. It's about a dude who, well, after all these years, he's a dude, I don't quite know what I think about. He's a rock and roll original who will one day be a rock and roll icon, and, well, he's also a total cliche.

He's created one of the greatest American bands of all time, and I kind of hate them as much as I love him. I totally get this guy's importance in rock history, but I could just as easily see a rock history in the rear view that would be just fine without this dude or his band in it. This dude, Nikki Six and Motley Crew, they were full of life. Yet he died, more than once, same with his band, who are now kind of on life support. But at one point, Motley Crew made great music. Unlike that music I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music.

That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Ricky Rack. is the bastard child at Casey Kasem, MK2. I played you that loop because I can't afford the rights to faith by George Michael. And why would I play you that specific slice of tight gene cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on December 23, 1987. And that was one of the days Nikki Six died after being shot up with heroin in a Los Angeles hotel room. On this episode, Dead, Alive, Stupid, Fun, Guns, Dope, and Prince, Slash and Stephen, and Jack Daniels on the Bullet Train with Nikki Six. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland.

1980, West Hollywood, California. 14-year-old Saul Hudson bent his knees and shifted his way back as he tore ass down Santa Monica Boulevard on his skateboard. He looked back to see his friend Stephen, who was cruising right behind him on his own board with his wavy blonde hair, a stark contrast to Saul's curly black mock. It was late, and all the Hollywood freaks were out. Doopers, drop-ups, and derelicks hung off of every curb, bathed and neon, lit by the bright lights that glared from movie theater and nightclub marquise, while they took long drags off their camel filters.

A kick and a push and Saul and Stephen were gliding past the rusty nail, where men with moustaches and tightly cropped hair, wearing tight white t-shirts and even tighter jeans, loitered before ducking back into the club to find some action on the dance floor. For Saul and Stephen, the real action was just a little further up the road, where the men didn't dress so conservatively. At the Starwood Nightclub, the men wore their hair long, and they teased it up, They spray painted it, Mick Ronson's silver,

and they wore women's jackets turned inside out, cheetah-print spandex, and dog collars around their necks. Sunglasses were definitely required at night. The two boys stomped their heels on the backs of their boards and came to a stop right in front of the Starwood. Saul looked up at the marquee. Tonight, it read, London. And I'm not talking about the city.

I'm talking about London, the band, with Nigel Benjamin on lead vocals and the prettiest don't-give-a-fuckiest player on the L.A. scene, Frankie Farana, aka Nikki Six on bass. Nigel Benjamin's previous gig had been with Mott, the post-Ean Hunter version of Mott the Hoopal, so he had legit glam rock credibility. But the newly-christened Nikki-6 was making his own credit,

a new breed of L.A. rock and roll that was heavily indebted to the likes of the raspberries, the sex pistols, and the New York dolls, but drizzled all over with an unhealthy dose of Hollywood slees. At least that's what Saul had heard. Typically, the way Saul got into these shows at the Starwood was by selling whatever drugs he could get his hands on, thus endearing his underage punk ass to the less discerning clientele of a hard rock nightclub circa L.A. in 1980. Tonight, however, he wasn't holding, and the fake ID he'd long ago conjured up had gone missing, but there was another way. Saul motioned to Stephen, and the two of them grabbed their boards and walked around to the back of the venue, where Saul opened an unlocked door that wasn't being

monitored. In an instant, the thunderous noise of London rattled their skulls. They creeped closer in the darkness, fumbling their way to a spot off to the side of the stage where London was playing, where Saul and Stephen could catch a glimpse of the band and not get pinched by one of those Lou Farigno wannabe bouncers out front. London was both sound and vision. Nikki Six and guitarist Lizzie Gray looked like towering gods on either side of the stage with big hair and long legs, each of them framed by a giant lightbox,

literally these huge rectangles lined with at least 60 light bulbs each, vanity mirrors come to life. And the music was fun. It was stupid. It was 99% rockers and 1% balance, just how Saul liked it. And just how Nikki 6 liked it, too. And Nikki liked what he liked. Getting high, getting laid, and rocking out.

Though not always in that order. And most importantly, Nikki didn't apologize for any of it. And standing on the sidelines, 14-year-old Saul Hudson, the drug-dealing skateboarding kid, the world would soon know better as Slash, along with his buddy Stephen Adler, both of them just years away from starting their own band, Guns and Roses.

The two of those dudes were watching Nikki Six and taking notes. Nikki Six put his back into it and mopped up the noxious puddle of pukes splattered on the floor of the Starwood Nightclub. He didn't know what was worse to deal with, the vomit, the piss, or the blood. It was all par for the course

at the Starwood's punk nights where violence and uncontrollable bodily functions were as much much a part of the game as was a fast tempo three court tune. For all Nikki knew, that was some of his blood on the floor. He'd been here last night, not as a performer, but as a fan, watching the band Fear lay waste at the place. And Nikki had been wearing heels, which he didn't do on Punk Night

unless he wanted to be pummeled by the fist as some dude, the shaved head and the bare chest. But Nikki could take the heat, and he could hold his own, so no one was going to keep him and his band London from their beloved Starwood. Some nights they played and other nights they watched and during the day they picked up odd jobs cleaning and repairing the place just to earn a little extra money, struggling musicians that they were. But London was starting to really come into their own.

But once they became Starwood's weekend headliners, they were pulling down something like $1 to $2,000 a night, which, hey, split five ways in 1980, that wasn't too shabby. There was just one problem. They still hadn't been paid the $2,000 that they were owed for last weekend show. and they had more shows coming up the following weekend, not to mention more puddles of puke to wipe up. So before they left any more of their own blood, sweat and tears on the Starwood floor,

Nikki wanted to get paid, which meant that he, Nigel, Lizzie, and the boys had to track down the Starwood's elusive owner in order to do so. And now here's the thing about all that. The guy who owned the Starwood was this dude named Eddie Nash. Eddie Nash had a number of Los Angeles rock clubs, night clubs, strip clubs in his portfolio, places like the Kit Kat Club, the sold-out, the paradise, and a tiki bar called The Seven Seas. Eddie Nash was a Middle Eastern businessman with alleged ties to the

Israeli mob. Eddie Nash had a steel plate in his head and one lung in his chest and he was missing part of his sinus cavity probably on account of how much cocaine you did. Because Eddie Nash was a blow fiend. He was also a straight-up gangster, a racketeer, and he oversawed. And he oversawed. And he oversawed a majority of the nightlife illicit or otherwise that was currently going down in and around the greater Hollywood area. Nikki and his band had heard some of the stories about what happened to the poor sons of bitches who were dumb enough to cross Eddie Nash. But Nikki didn't see his particular predicament as a conflict worthy of kneecap-breaking

retribution. He just wanted the money that was rightly owed to him. So Nikki and the other guys in London tracked Eddie Nash down at the Seven Seas Tiki Bar where he was holding court upstairs in his office. flanked by a couple of pituitary cases with cheap suits and loaded guns. Nash sat in a very fancy and very large leather chair behind his desk, stoned out of his gourd and in full-on gangster lean. What can I do for you, boys? he asked.

You owe us money for last Saturday show at the Starwood, Nikki responded, cognizant of the two big dudes with their pieces bulging from their waistbands, but nonetheless feeling secure or surrounded as he was by his own posse. Nash laughed. It started small, and then it grew to comic proportions. His two bodyguards were laughing, too. And Nikki looked at Nigel and the others, but no one else in the room was cracking a smile. And then suddenly Nash stopped laughing.

I don't believe I owe you boys anything, came the gangster's cold-blooded response. How about that? One year later, in 1981, an LAPD SWAT team kicked in the front door of Eddie Nash's home following a brutal quadruple murder at a Wonderland Avenue townhouse, seizing a million dollars worth of cocaine in the process. That didn't stop Nash from being the badass thug that he was. Just like getting stiff by Nash didn't stop Nikki Six. The same year that the Starwood's owner got himself tangled up in the infamous Wonderland murders,

Nikki ditched London and formed a new band, Motley Crew, along with singer Vince Neal, guitarist, Mick Mars, and drummer Tommy Lee. with the stated goal to rock even harder and to be even more fun and more stupid, even if that inherent stupidity meant playing more gigs at the Starwood. Nikki knew when to back down and take the punch, but there was one thing he didn't do. Nikki Six did not apologize. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.

Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And Rule 2, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck.

I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do?

Rather be. Because pointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises.

And his entire the Kardashians family over there, everybody's going. And the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast. Whether it's therapy. or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham.

So anyway, Nicole Kimman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gayton Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Santa Monsu. Camilla Morone at Carrie Kenny Silver.

And more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. his father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever.

Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits and you'll end up doing things you never thought you do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When it comes to the 1980s and the debauched world of so-called glam metal in Los Angeles, it's super cliche to talk about all the cocaine and heroin that everybody was doing. I guess it's cliched because it's true. I mean, this was a time when dealers drove around in sports cars with personalized license plates that said,

D-E-A-L-E-R. But still, it feels like such an obvious transgression to talk about and, in a way, a lazy thing to talk about as well. Because, yeah, no shit. Rat and Wasp and Motley Crew and later, G-N-R, they were snorting and shooting and smoking all kinds of illegal drugs like there were handfuls of skittles. And yet, deep within that well-worn history

of lines of blow and syringes of junk, there was something truly shocking. an anomaly that existed in a higher gear, and its name was Nikki Six. Nikki's addiction drove him to psychosis, to madness. But not at first. You don't just go crazy overnight. You start out just another fiend, just another guy who has more in common with the Eddie Nash's of the world than your mother would perhaps like to believe.

One day you're copping a fix in a Denny's bathroom with a Pepsi bottle cap as a makeshift spoon, and the next you're in a London taxi with Andy from Hanoi Rocks after a show at the Hammer Smith-Odion on Motley Cruz, 1986 Theater of Pain Tour, pulling up to an apartment building in some shady part of town. And inside, the dealer shoots you up, and as soon as the heroin hits your bloodstream, you're out. Andy, and the dealer, and everyone else there, they all think you're dead. The dealer grabs his baseball bat, raises it above his head, and brings it down,

swinging it directly into your chest. Nothing. The collar drains from your skin. He does it again. This time, driving it straight into your back again and again. He beats you with a baseball bat. Not because he's trying to hurt you, but because he's trying to bring you back to life,

because you're so zonked on heroin. But it doesn't work. And now the dealer's pissed. Oy! he shouts, throwing your limp body over his shoulder and walking you out the front door outside, around back, and tossing your overdosed, overdosed junkie ass into a dumpster. Months later, you're still feeling the pain from that one.

Still feeling like the Walking Dead. You do a bunch of cocaine to take your mind off of it, but the Coke makes you paranoid, so you shoot some heroin, and that calms you down. And you don't know it yet, but the madness is coming. It's looming there in the dark corners of your house on Valley Vista Boulevard and Van Nuys. Soon, you'll be homebound,

freaking the fuck out in your bedroom closet, but right now you still have some autonomy. to be left in you. So you hop on your Harley-Davidson, China White as your trusty coal pilot, and drive over to Vanity's house. Vanity as in Vanity Six, the female pop group Sven Ghalyed by none other than Prince. But Vanity doesn't fuck with the purple one anymore, or so you think. She fucks with you when she feels like it. You two are like a moth and a flame, though you never know which one is which. Usually it goes down like this. She cooks up some base, you guys get high, and then more often than nod, she gets crazy and starts random.

about Jesus and God, and you can't handle it when she does that. You think of what your grandfather used to say. Who needs God? You have a Chevy pickup truck and a 12-gauge shotgun. You've got the shotgun at home, not the truck, but your Harley-Davidson, it's what God himself would ride, isn't it? But tonight, vanity is still prepping the base when you see them. There, on her dining room table, something like 200 roses inside the biggest vase you've ever seen.

Who the hell are these from, you ask? She doesn't answer. She's either too busy cooking up your next fix or she's ignoring you. And there's a card there next to the flowers so you pick it up. Vanity, it reads, drop him, take me back.

Prince. That fucking backstabbing midget, you'll fucking murder him. You'll break his knees, just like he tried to break Jack Wagner's knees. You never did get to finish the job on the General Hospital pretty boy who fancied himself a singer.

You were 99% sure that this other girl you've been seen and his chick Nicole that she was cheating on you with Jack Wagner while you were on tour with Motley Crew. Not that you weren't cheating on her at the same time, but in your drug-addled brain, you felt disrespectful. Your macho-fucco gland went into overdrive. You called in a favor from some biker friends, the kind that would have run security

at Altamont back in the day. He told him where Jack Wagner taped General Hospital, and then further told him to bust his kneecaps when he came walking out at the end of the day. And then, when he was writhing about on the ground, crying like a little bitch, To tell him, Nikki Six sends his love. But they never get the chance because Jack Wagner, the clutz that he was, tripped over himself while filming his TV show and broke his own fucking knee. Nicole thought you did it.

She never forgave you. Whatever. You try your hardest to forget about that shit show. And passive-aggressively take a hit off Vanity's pipe. Instead, thinking the whole time about taking out prints with a fucking golf club that you didn't even golf. You ride back home and feel like having some company. You call up some friends, and soon your house is full of people in cocaine and whiskey.

And your boys Slash and Stephen Adler are there, hooligans that they are, the same kids used to sneak into your shows back in the day. And now they want you to produce their debut album. You're flattered, but your habit is overtaking you. And while you don't have many of your wits about you, you at least recognize that you're in no state to produce anything. Never mind anyone's record, not that guns and roses are in any better state. The next morning you wake up to find that Stephen is fucking some chick on your toilet and slash his pissed in the guest bed.

Soon your place is empty again and you wait impatiently for your dealer to show up. He's there right on time with the goods and the gear, and once he leaves, you shoot coke into your leg or maybe it's your arm, doesn't matter. But unlike any other time you've done this, this time it's different. Perhaps it's the accumulation of your habit. Perhaps it's the miles you've logged, so to speak, but as soon as you've done this, you've done this. you do it this time, you get an overwhelming feeling that someone is in your house. You run to your bedroom to hide. And as you do so, you pass by a window and you see people outside in the trees staring in at you. Holy fuck, you jump into your bedroom closet and slam the door behind you. You're

shaking. You've got your shotgun on one side of you and your 357 on the other. They're coming for you, man. They're fucking coming for you. Coming for your cocaine. Fucking DEA, FBI, fucking tree people. You got to get rid of the drugs, even though you just had them delivered thousands of dollars. Just down the drain, you take a deep breath, throw open the closet door, make a mad dash to the bathroom, and flush the rest of your stash into the toilet. Thankfully, no one saw you do it. Or did they? You're back inside your closet now, and you look down and realize that you're naked, which, whatever, man, you're in your own house.

You can be naked if you want to be naked. But now, you're hearing more noises in the house. Coming from the living room, the dining room, you can't be too sure. You just hear people talking. Is it those damn tree people that they get in my fucking house? They're going to find you here eventually, even though the drugs are gone. And then what? You pick up the 357 magnum.

You check the cylinder to make sure it's loaded. And then, flick it shut. Another deep breath. It's go time, motherfuckers. You bust out of the bedroom closet, buck naked, every tattoo on full display, tearing through the house with the butt of the 357 pointed straight out like a magnet. The gun pulls you into the living room, screaming at the top of your lungs, where you instinctively squeeze the cold trigger firing off multiple rounds

and seemed to burst your eardrums wide open. Nikki Six stood alone in the middle of his house. Smoke billowed from the muzzle of his magnum. He just shot up his front door and his stereo, which, seconds before, had been on, the sound of which he mistook for the sound of people invading his private residence. And now he had no tunes, no drugs, and a front door with bullet holes in it.

He also soon realized that he had no nemes. and Prince, because the flowers in the card that Nikki found in Vanity's house. These were bought and written by Vanity, simply to fuck with him. It's easy to understand on an intellectual level that your addiction is quite literally destroying your life, and Nikki Six, writing in his own diaries at the time, did understand it that way. He also understood, at least in his sobering moment, that not only was there no beef with Prince, but that there weren't people climbing in the trees outside his house and no one was coming to get him.

Not tonight. But make no mistake, death was coming for Nikki Six. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends. either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of

the girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands. I said, oh, hell no. I vowed, I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up. And I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance,

like he's about to attack me, like, making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yello-O. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships, or religion, or sex, or addiction, or you just go straight, for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country

couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone at Carrie Kenny Silver and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says

She's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it, and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the Exactly Right Network. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It wasn't just Nikki Six's days that were numbered. At the end of 1987, glam metal or hair metal, the subgenre turned money-making machine by the likes of Nicky's band, Motley Crew, was living on borrowed time. But nobody knew it. Hair metal was actually entering a new phase of its life, thanks to Motley Crew's disciples in Guns and Roses. In a little more than three years, Nirvana smells like teen spirit would flick on a light switch, and suddenly big hair and spandex would appear to be far more schlocky than they were trend-setting. But right now, in December of 87, hair metal still ruled the airwaves. White snakes, here I go again, Bon Jovi's living on a prayer,

deaf leopards pour some sugar on me, and Motley Cruz Girls, Girls, Girls, Girls, the lead single from their fourth studio album with the same name. An arena rock owed to one of the crew's favorite groups of people, strippers. By December, the album Girls Girls Girls had already gone double platinum. The Motley Crew had taken their hard living, always partying, mega-heedinistic rock and roll lifestyle as an export from Los Angeles all the way to Japan. That lifestyle, for Nikki Six at least, for the time being, meant kicking junk, which would explain the routine visits he was making to the bathroom,

on the bullet train they were riding from Osaka to Tokyo. Nikki puked in shit, his brains out, and then returned to his seat next to Mali Cruz drummer Tommy Lee, who was already half in the bag on pills and booze. And Nikki joined in and caught up fast because although he may have been abstaining from heroin and cocaine as much as possible, that didn't mean he was actually sober. From a few rows down, a Japanese businessman dressed to the nines was giving Nikki a look.

It was a look that said, check out these Hollywood freaks with their women's clothes. and loud disruptive behavior. It was bad enough when they let the Beatles play Buda Khan some 20 years ago. Now they're taking junky shits in our bullet trains like their king of the castle. And Nikki Locke dies with the stone-faced Japanese gentleman. He knew that if the guy wasn't bound to his own cultural decorum, he would spit in Nicky's face, make him feel sorry for himself, make him feel regret.

But you couldn't squeeze regret from Nikki Six, just like he couldn't ring a drop of blood from the stone. Fuck regret. Fuck being dope sick. And fuck this guy. Nikki grabbed the Jack Daniels bottle. He was passing back and forth with Tommy and hurled it in the man's direction. It exploded on the wall above the man's head,

sending shattered glass and brown liquor all over him. And Nikki laughed as the man leapt from his seat and ran down the aisle, screaming. But when the bullet train pulled into the Tokyo station and Motley crew stepped off their train car to find 100 Japanese police officers waiting for them, Nikki Six wasn't laughing anymore. Actually, yes he was, because Nikki was fucked up, drunk on whiskey, high on pills, reveling in being stupid and engaging in his definition of fun and not making excuses for any of it. The Japanese man who Nikki had hurled the Jack Daniels bottle hat was there too, pointing at him, outing him to the cops. And they put Nikki in handcuffs and took him in immediately to the police station, where he was tossed into a cramped cell.

It wasn't long until Tokyo's chief of police made an appearance, and this guy didn't want an autograph. And he didn't want to keep Nikki locked up forever either. All he wanted was an apology. The translator, sitting between Nikki and the chief, communicated this request to Nikki. And Nikki mulled it over for a moment. And then said to the translator, Ask the chief this. Ask him, if my balls were on your chin, then where would my dick be?

The translator blushed. And Nikki grinned. And the police chief furrowed his brow and asked what Nikki had said. The translator composed himself, turned to the chief, and told him that Nikki had said he was very sorry for what had happened and didn't mean any disrespect. The chief gave a curt nod. He was satisfied. The Nikki Six was set free on an apology he never made.

Within a few days after playing to thousands of screaming fans in Japan, Nikki Six and Motley Crew were back home. Back in Los Angeles, where the familiar sights and smells brought out familiar urges. Strippers, porn stars, and Boku alcohol at Ricky Rackman's Cat House Club. cocaine in the limousine tooling up to the sunset strip, and heroin, courtesy of a friend, Nicky's friend, slash. In the logic of an addict, choosing to not hit up your own dealer, and instead procuring heroin from a dealer you don't know, a dealer who provides goods to your friend's friend,

it's logic that says, hey, you're just ordering something on the side here, because if you order from your guy, then of course, that's a rabbit hole where you start ordering on the regular again, and then before you know it, you're hallucinating people who weren't there. But this, having your boy Slash talk to his guy and then scoring from Slash's dealer, that's just a one-off, brother. That's a lark. This was the logic that led Nicky 6 into Slash's hotel room at the Franklin Plaza just two days before Christmas on December 23, 1987,

along with a group of friends, including Nicky's limo driver and Slash his girlfriend at the time, Sally. Nicky wasn't already fucked up to begin with, so he had the dealer shoot him up. And the junk turned him catatonic. Nikki curled up into a fetal position on the floor, a skinny ball of hair and tattoos. The dealer then noticed that Nikki's skin was turning blue. He kneeled down for a better look. He checked for her pulse.

Oh shit, yo, the dealer cried out. Nicky's dead! The dealer jumped out of the hotel window, and I mean that literally, go look it up, and disappeared down the street. Sally started giving Nikki mouth-to-mouth, and it did nothing. So she dragged his body into the bathroom, hoping to get him into the shower, and blast him with cold water. But Slash, helpless and drunk, went into a blind rage and punched out the shower's glass door.

So instead of water from the showerhead, Sally and Nikki were showered with broken glass. In frustration, she yelled for someone in the room to call 911, as it was obvious that even such a simple task was impossible for Slash to carryout at the moment. Seconds later, Sally could hear someone else screaming, Nikki Six is dead! Into the phone. And looking at Nikki's lifeless body, she couldn't help but agree. It's a strange feeling to wake up in a place you don't recognize,

surrounded by doctors and cops, and wearing nothing but a pair of your tight leather pants and hooked up to machines that are beeping and humming. You're so disoriented that you rip the tubes and wires from your body and you yank the IV from your vein and swing out of bed and onto your feet. You stumble through the halls, past nurses, and first responders, Pass some dude with a bleeding head wound and another complaining about a car that ran over his foot

and you do it all with one goal in mind to get yourself out of there. And as you make your way through the darkness of this place, through the smell of death and disease, all the way to the front door where you finally burst outside, the bright L.A. sunshine suddenly blinding your eyes, you gotta admit, it feels like you've just been reborn. Nah, that was a bunch of horseshit.

Reborn, it's a fucking cliche. But then, you are a cliche. Or more accurately, you're dead, a dead cliche. At least you're supposed to be. That's why there are two teenage girls sitting outside the hospital holding a candlelight vigil in the middle of the day. But you don't know that's why they're doing what they're doing. They see you wobbling forward, no shirt,

just those leather pants that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. And suddenly they stop crying and look like they've seen. a ghost. You don't get with all the fusses about because, well, you also didn't bother to check yourself out of the hospital. You asked the girls to give you a lift home in their little Mazda shipbox and they gladly oblige. And as they drive you back to Van Nuys, you get it. You listen in complete shock as a DJ on the radio gives a full rapport on the sudden and tragic death of you, Nikki Six, at 29 years old. And for two minutes, Nikki Six was dead. Depending on which version of the story you believe,

he was either brought back to life by Guns N' Roses drummer Stephen Adler, who said he revived Niki by getting him in the shower inside Slash's hotel room, or, as Nikki himself tells it, he was brought back to life in truly dramatic fashion by the paramedics who ramed syringes loaded with adrenaline into his chest in the back of an ambulance as it raced through the streets of L.A. on route to Cedar Sinai. Just like Young Slash once raced on his skateboard down Santa Monica Boulevard to catch Nikki's show in London at the Starwood.

And look, I'm not suggesting that hustling to a rock show involves the same stakes as getting a dead or dying heroin addict to the hospital. But where Slash, Little Saul Hudson had once craved the stupid and fun aspects of the rock and roll that London and later Motley Coo dished out, Nikki Six, too, found himself in this predicament because of his devotion to the stupid and the fun. And just like there's a fine line between the two, there's an even finer line between stupidity and disgrace. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. I hope you dug this episode.

Apple podcast listeners, make sure you have auto downloads turned on so you never miss an episode of Disgraceland. This week's question of the week is, who is the greatest hair metal band of all time? Was it Motley Crew or was it someone else? I want to know. School me, glam metalheads. Let me know. 617-90666-6-6-3-8. Leave a voicemail or send me a text and be part of the show.

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the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he just started. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts.

Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Movies can make you feel, make you dream. Sometimes they even make you appreciate architecture. Is there anybody who's been hotter in a doorway than Elizabeth Taylor? That's the kind of analysis you'll find every week on Dear Movies I Love You, the new podcast from the Exactly Right Network. Every Tuesday, we break down the films we're crushing on from blockbusters to deep cuts. Listen to Dear Movies I Love You on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you.