BOB NALBANDIAN The thing about a lot of these L.A. bands is that when they became famous, they weren’t new bands. You hear about, you know, Mötley Crüe, and it’s a “brand-new band that just came out…” People didn’t know the history. They didn’t know that Nikki Sixx had been in London and all these different bands.
DON ADKINS (photographer) I didn’t know the details of Nikki’s backstory. What I do remember is him telling me about living in the projects in the Seattle area and that life there was really, really hard. He said he had to come to L.A. to find a way to make it, and just to get the hell out of where he was. He thought that L.A. was the place to follow his passion because everything was happening here.
MICHAEL WHITE I was playing at the Starwood, and Nikki was working there as a janitor or something.
GREG LEON He would paint walls, do whatever side jobs needed to be done. I’d go there sometimes to book a gig and I’d see him sweeping the floor, changing a room around, or whatever.
MICHAEL WHITE He saw me play and he came up to me and we talked, and he said he wanted me to be the singer for his band. They were called London. I went out and I saw them and I joined the band and we started doing gigs.
DON ADKINS The lead singer of London was a guy named Nigel Benjamin. Nigel was the singer of Mott the Hoople after Ian Hunter left and they were called Mott. I think there was some frustration that things weren’t going the way he wanted, and London eventually wound up losing Nigel and they went in search of another lead singer. And that was Michael White, who had been with the Boyz. Then that kind of devolved and for about a month London ended up having [future W.A.S.P. front man] Blackie Lawless as their singer.
LIZZIE GREY (guitarist, Sister, London) Before Blackie ended up in London he had Sister, which was his version of Alice Cooper. This was a few years earlier. Sister was an interesting band. Blackie used a lot of the shock rock approach, eating worms onstage, lighting stages on fire with these massive flames.
MIKE VARNEY (producer; owner, Shrapnel Records) The guy ate worms! Out of a live bait box!
LIZZIE GREY Yeah, a box of night crawlers. Extra large. It was fun to watch.
GINA ZAMPARELLI (L.A. Club Promoter, Booking Agent) I just remember standing there in the Starwood being absolutely shocked. I was still, I think, in high school. And I was just like, “What is going on? Who is this guy?”
LIZZIE GREY Back in the day, I would go see Sister play, and then I joined the band. Then we ended up getting a guy named Frank Feranna. But Sister kinda fell apart because Blackie wasn’t really pleased with Frank’s playing. Blackie fired him. At the time Frank and I were so close it was a pretty easy thing for me to leave with him and say, “We’re gonna do this London thing.”
GREG LEON I knew Nikki as Frank Feranna. He auditioned for my band Suite 19 a couple of times and he did not get the gig. Because he couldn’t play! But he looked great. I mean, he was a great-looking guy.
MICHAEL WHITE He was Nikki when I joined London. He wanted to be Nikki so everybody called him Nikki. But every now and then when somebody was mad at him they’d say, “Frank! Fuck off!”
LIZZIE GREY Van Halen would come to see London because we were dressing up like the New York Dolls and making a big noise. We started getting people coming to the Starwood shows. I mean, we had Jagger and Richards there, the huge rock stars. Because we were providing shock rock, too. But ours was more of a fancy dress, I guess I’d call it, than the death rock kind of thing.
DON ADKINS I was going to all of London’s shows for at least a year, a year and a half. And the manager of the Starwood was a guy named David Forest. He took a liking to the group and basically gave them headlining spots all the time on key weekends. So London built up a good following. They were sort of like one of the original hair bands. Just incredibly tall hair, with the platform heels and boots. And they had the typical thing at the time, which was hot girlfriends, or girls that liked them that would help them make their clothes and all kinds of stuff.
GREG LEON I took Tommy Lee to the Starwood when London was playing. He was still Tom Bass, and he was playing with me in Suite 19.
DON ADKINS Tommy was from West Covina. He lived at home with his parents.
GREG LEON Tommy had been following me for the longest time, begging me to play drums, but he was only seventeen. I’m going, “Dude, you’re a kid!” He goes, “You gotta hear me play. Just come over to my place.” So we got together, he had a great rehearsal room. His dad, David, had built a room inside of a room in the garage. And then the bass player that we had, his mother was a booking agent, so she had us playing all over the place almost every weekend. And I was booking the Hollywood clubs, and we did a lot of parties. It was young kids having fun, girls everywhere and stuff. It was awesome.
STEPHEN QUADROS Suite 19 would open for Snow. Greg Leon was an amazing guitar player and Tommy was a great drummer. Really solid. I remember that. He was really an enthusiastic guy. I liked his energy.
GREG LEON We went to the Starwood one time to see London and Tommy just fell in love with them. He goes, “Man, there’s something about that guy…” Talking about Nikki.
STEPHEN QUADROS Nikki was the wildest-looking guy. He would show up all decked out, with his big leather heels on with Doberman pinscher dogs with him. He was like this maven.
DON ADKINS Then London went ahead and broke up and went their separate ways. But Nikki was always thinking about the next big thing. And that’s when he started formulating, I want to have this new group. I want it to be hard, heavy …
NIKKI SIXX (bassist, Sister, London, Mötley Crüe) London played the Starwood all the time, and we drew really well. So when I was getting ready to quit London, I sat down with David Forest, who ran the club, and I told David that I wanted to do a new version of London but I wanted it to be a lot harder.
DEEDEE KEEL (booking agent, Whisky a Go Go) One day Nikki came up to see me in the Whisky office. I had never seen London, but he said, “I have a new band. This band’s going to be really great. You have to book us.” I didn’t really know what to think but he was very persistent and so eventually I gave him a date. And the band was Mötley Crüe.
GREG LEON They wanted me to be the guitar player in Mötley Crüe but I didn’t want to do it. That just wasn’t appealing to me. I wanted to be in a band like Rainbow or Frank Marino and Mahogany Rush.
DON ADKINS I forget how it all came together. Tommy was there, and then Mick Mars, who had had some previous groups in L.A. came in …
DON DOKKEN I knew Mick Mars from the South Bay—he was playing in a band called Vendetta. I told him I thought he was stuck playing in that club band and he should try to branch off and start his own band.
JUAN CROUCIER One thing I told Mick was “You’re never going to make it in a band if you’re playing the covers circuit. It’s highly unlikely that a group of people are gonna walk in, see you playing ‘Can’t Get Enough of Your Love’ and go, ‘That’s the guy we need for the next huge multiplatinum band!’” or whatever.
MICK MARS I asked the guys [in my band], “Please let’s do some writing, let’s do some real music?” No, they all wanted to do cover songs. So I go, “Okay, see ya.” And I put an ad in the Recycler and I think everybody knows that story: “Loud, rude, aggressive guitar player.” That was late 1980, just after John Lennon was shot. I remember because it was ’81 when Nikki called and we started, like, playing around in January and early February.
NIKKI SIXX When I met Mick he had his shoes duct-taped together and he had duct tape on his pants to keep his pants on. The guy had no money. He had a Marshall stack and a Les Paul. He had his priorities straight!
DON ADKINS Mick was older. I thought he was in his late thirties, at least. He had more of a seasoned adult sense of humor and everything. But also there was a seriousness to him, because he was dealing with a lot of financial hardship and child support and crap like that. Basically what I saw with him was a drive, like, “I gotta get out of this. I gotta do something. I gotta make it.”
MICK MARS At the time we first got together I was listening to a lot of different artists that were kind of obscure, like Rare Bird and Be-Bop Deluxe. I was into Trapeze, Glenn Hughes’ first band. Lots of Jeff Beck, some Aerosmith, some Kansas. And the other guys, being younger, they were listening more to Kiss and stuff like that. But I had, like, ten or fifteen years on them. Hell, I’d been playing guitar longer than Tommy or Vince had been alive.
NIKKI SIXX We had this little guitar player kid named Robin who was in there for a second before Mick came in. He maybe rehearsed with me and Tommy for a week.
MICK MARS My first job. Nikki and Tommy were like, “You tell him!” So I said to Robin, “We don’t need ya!” Basically. I can’t remember the exact words. It was kind of cruel but I was put on the spot.
NIKKI SIXX And then it was the three of us.
DON ADKINS They went and found this other lead singer named O’Dean. O’Dean kind of looked like … the best analogy I can have with him is he looked like Paul Williams with black hair. The same height and everything. A really short guy. And if I had to pin his vocal style it was heading toward the direction of [AC/DC singer] Brian Johnson. Nothing that stood out about him. But they started going ahead and playing with O’Dean at this rehearsal studio, I think it was at SIR when I saw them. They had one reused song from London called “Public Enemy #1,” and they started rehearsing.
MICK MARS One day we were rehearsing with O’Dean and I told Tommy outside, “This guy isn’t right.” He was … different. So Tommy calls Nikki out and goes, like, “Hey, Nikki, Mick doesn’t dig O’Dean.” And I go, “No. I want that little blond-haired guy we saw at the Starwood the other night!” I go, “I don’t care if he can sing, because I was pretty high, but I know that the girls were going nuts over him.”
STEPHEN QUADROS I remember Vince Neil coming backstage at a Snow concert when he was about seventeen years old. He was in a band called Rockandi. Not to lift a Montrose title or anything! He was, like, the prettiest David Lee Roth kid, you know? He looked like the total perfect rock star.
GREG LEON He had a good image and his voice was really high. And the girls loved him. When Rockandi played, there would be all these girls at the front of the stage. And they weren’t in front of the guitar player or the bass player, they were right in front of Vince. Hoping he’d sweat on them or something.
MICK MARS O’Dean had a Roger Daltrey–sounding voice. Vince’s was much higher pitched—and he was much better lookin’! So Vince came to an audition and that was it. Goodbye, O’Dean!
DON ADKINS Nikki just immediately fell in love with Vince’s voice. So even before I got to meet him, Nikki’s telling me, “Don, this guy has this, like, not-of-planet-Earth voice. I can’t describe it. It’s out of this world.” And it was the perfect formula. The perfect mix.
NIKKI SIXX The first song we ever played together was “Live Wire.”
LIZZIE GREY Did I think they’d make it? No. I just felt like … I felt it was lacking something. Ironically, the vocals. I wasn’t really crazy about it. I didn’t like where they were coming from. But everybody else liked Vince’s voice just fine. So, it shows what I know.
DON ADKINS Mötley had an apartment on Clark Street, right above the Whisky a Go Go. It was just a scene up there all the time.
VICKY HAMILTON (consultant, Mötley Crüe, Stryper; Manager, Poison, Guns N’ Roses, FASTER PUSSYCAT; AUTHOR, APPETITE FOR DYSFUNCTION: A CAUTIONARY TALE) When I moved to L.A., after a few cocktail waitress jobs I ended up being a record buyer at the Licorice Pizza on Sunset, across from the Whisky a Go Go. And punk rock was kind of ruling on the Strip. It was Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Oingo Boingo, those kinds of bands. We did an in-store with the Go-Go’s and there was a line all the way down the block. But at the same time, the picture window at Licorice sort of faced the Whisky and Clark Street, and I kept seeing these guys in blue-black hair and high heels and a blond-headed guy walking up Clark, which ended up being Mötley Crüe.
NIKKI SIXX We stuck out like a sore thumb, and I think that we gave hope to all those guys running around and still loving rock ’n’ roll. That they could do something. They were like, “What the fuck are these guys up to? These guys don’t make any sense.” Because we were part punk rock and part power pop and we acted like punks but we looked like the Dolls. Even though the Dolls were punks, but you know what I mean. The new wavers were like, “Wow, this is kind of cool,” and the punkers were like, “This is really cool,” and the metallers were like, “This is awesome!”
DEEDEE KEEL For me it was a natural transition to go from a band like the Dolls into a band like Mötley Crüe. It was the same thing, only more radical. It just got more crazy and more crazy.
DON ADKINS I did a shoot with them where it was something like an eleven-hour day, and I think nine hours of that was hair. It was a really elaborate procedure. Basically all the guys would bend over and hang their heads upside down and girls would go ahead and spray their hair. Then they would carefully walk back out with their heads still down. When they were ready to get photographed it was, “Okay, Don—now!” They’d flip their heads up and you’d photograph before their hair started falling down.
NIKKI SIXX You can’t use aerosol. If you do, then you’ve got to dry your hair upside down and pull it out while you do it. And of course you’ve got to sleep upside down. You sleep on your forehead. When you wake up in the morning your hair is all messed up. And you look at yourself and you say: “I look fine.”
JACK RUSSELL You know, I thought they would do well only because they looked totally weird. And I thought, That’s probably a really smart move, coming up with your own thing. Because it’s hard to come up with an image that hasn’t been done. To be honest, in Dante Fox we were like Judas Priest look-alikes. Like, “Okay, go down to the Pleasure Chest and buy all the leather bracelets…” You know, it’s a sex shop, you could buy anything in there. I remember chasing Mark Kendall around with a three-foot black dildo. He was screamin’, “Aaaahhhhh!”
DON ADKINS Their big debut in L.A. was going to be at the Starwood [on April 24, 1981]. They opened for Y&T, who had just changed their name from Yesterday and Today. And they had more of a traditional hard rock, slight heavy metal crowd. More of a macho type of thing. Mötley Crüe came out and they musically killed it. But there were some people doing the old, “Hey, look at these guys…” Some of these macho guys that were troubled by the glam look.
CHRIS HOLMES (guitarist, Sister, W.A.S.P.) Mötley Crüe, I used to call ’em chicks with dicks.
DAVE MENIKETTI (singer, Guitarist, Y&T) We knew that they were gonna open the bill for us that night and we had heard that they were this up-and-coming band. So me and Phil, our bass player, we got up into the balcony at the Starwood and we watched about three of their songs when they first came on. And we looked at each other and we said, “These guys aren’t that good!” They were pretty raw. I mean, there’s no question about it. But we were very critical about other people if they didn’t have, like, amazing chops. But with Mötley it wasn’t about that. It was about the vibe of their band, their attitude, and of course, you know, their stage show and everything. Although they didn’t really have much of a stage show at that particular point …
NIKKI SIXX We would take the amp line, with white borders made out of painted two-by-fours with stretched black material on them. So it looked like walls of amps, right? Not! We’d have one 8 x 10 SVT cabinet and Mick had his Marshall stack. The reason that we did that was that everything looked really big.
DON ADKINS One thing that did happen at the Starwood was that one of the a-holes in the audience who was like, “Eff you, eff you!” and kinda flipping off Nikki and all this stuff while he was playing, Nikki was telling me about this later, he said to himself, “I’m gonna win this asshole over…” And he just starts aggressively playing his bass so much so that he cut his thumb open and he’s spewing blood everywhere. And the guy just shut up.
VINCE NEIL (singer, Rockandi, Mötley Crüe) Those were crazy days. Nobody knew who we were, and we didn’t exactly look normal. So people would see Mötley Crüe and be like, “What the hell is this?” People wouldn’t even stand near the stage when we played. There were some good bar fights back then where it was just like, “Fuck you, buddy!”
NIKKI SIXX I just remember sitting in a fucking cowboy bar surrounded by fucking rednecks in Grass Valley [California] and I’m wearing like yellow pants with the black stiletto boots and some leather jacket and no shirt and my hair all freaked out and Vince is like the same and Tommy’s the same, and just fucking sitting there, man. And the people are like, “Hey, man, what’s your fucking trip?” “I’ll tell you what our fucking trip is, man, we’re a rock ’n’ roll band!”