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Reviewed: "The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star by Nikki Sixx (Pocket Books).
Bad books can still be important. This one, which is so bad it's unintentionally funny, still represents an epochal cultural moment: the final trickle-down of a formerly elitist narrative invented by Lord Byron, the wildly talented English 18th century poet, into a sleazy plotline used and abused by a man representing the very bottom of the demographic pyramid -- Nikki Sixx, bass guitarist of '80s rock band Mötley Crüe.
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), was, among other things, the greatest English poet of the past two centuries, recognized as such everywhere except England and America. He was also the first and finest incarnation of the self-destructive superstar. In fact, stardom didn't just happen; it was invented by Byron. He showed the rest of the world how to be a star -- the whole storyline of early fame, wild decadence, bitter exile and a lonely, heroic death. Byron's death came in Greece, where he ended up after a lifetime of fleeing southward and eastward from his home in what he scornfully called "the moral North." Greece was in rebellion against the Ottoman Turks, and Byron died of fever while funding, training and trying to negotiate consensus among the rebel factions.
It didn't take long for that genuinely heroic death to be reduced to its lowest common denominator: "live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse." By our time, it's pretty much all you have to do -- as long as you are famous when you die. That goes without saying; there's no love lost when an anonymous loser dies, but if a celebrity dies young and pretty, the whole culture explodes in masturbatory frenzy officially presented as "grief."
Nikki Sixx, of course, may never have heard of Byron. The Byronic story came to him through more recent versions. There's a whole subgenre of Bohemian-druggie tales to borrow from, and Nikki (or his ghostwriter) borrows freely, starting with his title, a clear echo of The Basketball Diaries, Jim Carroll's 1987 record of his descent from star jock to hopeless junky. Carroll's book itself represented a clear point on the graph by which this elitist tale makes its way down toward the Wal-Mart crowd: Carroll was a protege/mascot of the NYC Beat scene whose greatest practicioner, William Burroughs, wrote the best American versions of druggie-in-purgatory, including Junkie (1953), which our own Nikki Sixx cites approvingly. Nikki sees it as his job to take this often-abused plotline further down the pop parade to where it has never gone before, and probably never should have gone at all: hair metal. And he manages to come back alive, in case you were worried.
Mötley Crüe is a band most people old enough to remember have tried hard to forget. Mötley was huge in the mid-1980s. I didn't realize how big until I read the diary entry in which Nikki whines that his manager sent his latest paycheck to his home while he was on tour. The check is for $650,000. I'd bet that that's more than really talented American bands of the 1980s like Husker Du made in their entire career.
The Mötley Crüe era was of course a low point in pop history. Nikki actually calls himself "a dreg." I've never heard that word used in the singular before, but it fits. This guy is the ultimate dreg. He does decadence strictly by the numbers. He even considers killing his girlfriend, because after all, the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend. And there's no pleasure in it. Part of that is the big lie in American culture that celebrity decadence always arises from and falls back into some private "pain." But Nikki really doesn't seem to like sex that much. The only part that he really seems to enjoy is the drugs, and since he's incapable of effective description, you have to infer his pleasure from the sheer doggedness with which he gets high.
And his drug stories are full of lies and bathos. The most interesting lie is the deflection of blame to heroin, when it's clear that Nikki was never a junky. He's a cokehead, a classic L.A. white-trash cokehead. So why is this called The Heroin Diaries? Because Nikki's publisher realized cocaine is too sleazy and too 1970s to interest anybody. Heroin, which only entered the middle-class California druggie's repertoire in the 1980s, still retains some of its exotic, forbidden appeal.
Occasionally he slips up, admitting that he does much more coke than smack, admitting at one point, "I'm not having [my dealer] bring smack very often but my coke intake is up 1,000%." And since Nikki's typical binge ends in paranoia, with our hero locked in the walk-in closet of his mansion hearing voices outside, it's clear that it's the coke, not the smack, messing with him.
Yet heroin that gets the blame when Nikki's retarded band mates discuss his descent to what Tommy Lee calls "a dark fucking place." If you've spent any time in L.A. you've probably met guys like this. For them, cocaine is simply part of a normal healthy diet, whereas heroin is just plain evil. Odd, because among intelligent druggies opiates get a lot of respect, while coke is simply despised. For serious drug people there are two ways to go: up with some variety of speed, or down with some kind of opiate. Coke is scorned as a short-acting verbal emetic, a silly drug for moneyed trash. The only intellectuals who took it seriously were Freud and Sherlock Holmes -- one a half-baked intellectual who masqueraded his literary criticism as therapy, postponing effective treatment for schizophrenia and depression by generations, the other an apotheosized peeping tom, who of course never really existed. Indeed, both were nasty voyeurs; perhaps that's a feature of coke addiction too.
See more stories tagged with: motley crue, nikki sixx, the heroin diaries
John Dolan is an editor of the Moscow-based English-language alternative paper, The eXile. He is the author of, most recently, Pleasant Hell (Capricorn, 2005).
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