Sage Sixx

If you were the parent of a teenage girl in the 1980s, Nikki Sixx was your worst nightmare. As the bassist and songwriter of Motley Crue, he was both Dr. Faustus and Mephistopheles, spreading debauchery and destruction around the world with drummer Tommy Lee as one half of the Toxic Twins. On Christmas in 1987, Sixx died, briefly, of a heroin overdose, the very one (of six) that set him on the long road to coming to his senses. Newly sober, Sixx wrote or co-wrote every song on "Dr. Feelgood," which went on to become the band’s first No. 1 album, and soared to new heights of rock stardom.

Courtney Bingham

Nikki Sixx has his own fashion line!

The rest is history as detailed in 2001’s "The Dirt," one of the most notorious rock autobiographies ever spilled. (The book was written with Motley Crue’s other members.) Since then, the band has enjoyed a resurgence with a younger audience, a hit album in 2008 and new hobbies to replace heroin. Sixx’s first book, "The Heroin Diaries," documented the worst year of his addiction in an antidrug effort that went on to become a New York Times best seller. He started a luxury clothing line, Royal Underground, with Kelly Gray, a former CEO of St. John; has a syndicated radio show and a second band Sixx: AM whose releases coincide with his books; and tweets avidly about his blue man-pedicures.

His follow-up book, "This Is Gonna Hurt: Music, Photography and Life Through the Distorted Lens of Nikki Sixx," started out as a showcase for his photography of society’s marginalized — from prostitutes to back-alley addicts. But it ended up being partly a self-help book, with more confessions about his hard-knock youth, band conflicts and struggles in love. He dedicated the book to his sister with Down syndrome, who he never knew. Sixx will celebrate Motley Crue’s 30th anniversary at the Sunset Strip Festival in August, and will appear the same month for a speaking engagement at LA’s Annenberg Space for Photography.

On the eve of Motley Crue’s circus coming to town, Sixx talked to fashion editor Serena French about suffering for art, Alexander McQueen and why the old libertine would like to control what his teenage daughter watches on television.

SF: I was wondering, with the book out now for a couple of months, whether you had heard from other people having a similar experience with an institutionalized sibling.

NIKKI: I think that’s not uncommon for [those who grew up during] the 1960s. I’m coming to hear that story more often than not, where I thought I was alone with that. I’ve heard amazing stories, fantastic stories. Ones like that, then I’ve heard where people have said their parents took a different road, and you know, have dealt with something that was almost impossible to deal with. And in the late ’50s, early ’60s, there wasn’t a lot of information on how to deal with people as far as taking care of somebody in your home, in your life, without having any kind of supervision. I became a lot more forgiving through the writing of my book of the situation, where for years I carried around a lot of resentment.