Legendary producer Bob Rock—the guy from Some Kind of Monster, among a lot of more notable achievements—recently appeared on the Talk is Jericho podcast and somehow made the recent Mötley Crüe drama more absurd. While praising Nikki Sixx‘s willingness to improve as a bassist—something he may have given up on—he revealed that Sixx once told him he isn’t sure if the bassist played on Mötley Crüe’s first four records.
“[While we were making 1989’s] ‘Dr. Feelgood’, [Nikki] says to me, he goes, ‘I don’t think I ever played on any of the Mötley Crüe records. I think somebody came in at night and replaced all my parts.’ He says, ‘So I don’t really know how to play bass.’ And I said, ‘Too bad. You’re playing bass on it.’ So I worked with him through ‘Dr. Feelgood’, did a lot of edits and made him play every note. But when we did ‘The Dirt,’ the songs on ‘The Dirt’, I went to see him and we started working on the demos. He picked up the bass and started playing, and I said, ‘Woah, woah, woah. What’s going on here?’ He had been taking bass lessons for five years. All of a sudden he’s an amazing bass player. And I think that’s so cool, in that point of his career, he wanted to be better. I admire that. So now, on ‘The Dirt’, Nikki and Tommy [Lee] played live off the floor, both of them.”
Rock praised all of the members of Mötley Crüe for their performances in the studio, which corroborates what John 5 told Eddie Trunk this month.
“Bob would come in and [say], ‘Okay, let’s try this here, and that here and this here. It was one of the most incredible experiences ever… I’m thinking, ‘We’ve got so much great technology today’… but we got in that room and it was like being in a garage working on a song when you were in high school… It was incredible, and we documented a lot of it too.”
I don’t know whether or not Sixx played bass on Too Fast for Love, Shout at the Devil, Theatre of Pain and Girls, Girls, Girls. It could be a story he told to Rock—and we all know the members of Mötley Crüe were rarely sober—and I doubt we’ll ever get an official answer one way or the other. I’m more interested in how they got Vince Neil in performing shape.