Badass Mag by Stacie Sansone

ISSUE 1 APR 2015

The Rise and Fall of Rock and Roll Graphic DESIGN

Intervie w with

NIKKI See wh

at the M

ötley C

SIXX

rüe bas

sist has

been u

p to!

Interview with FALL OUT BOY on their New Album

BONUS IMAGE GALLERY Tattoos | Drugs Rock and Roll

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INTERVIEW WITH NIKKI SIXX

Nikki talks tattoos, The Heroin Diaries, family life, watching and even appreciating High School Musical (WHAT?) in this interview by Shira Levine.

TATTOOS, DRUGS, ROCK AND ROLL GALLERY Check out some sick pics of Nikki Sixx, tattoos, and concerts in our bonus photo gallery.

ROCK & ROLL GRAPHIC DESIGN

Read up about some of your favorite band logos and how design in the the rock world has changed.

FALL OUT BOY INTERVIEW Fall Out Boy came back big time with their album Save Rock and Roll not too long ago and have produced yet another kickass set of tracks. Read about the various samples they used (including Mötley Crüe!) and more about how they made their new album.

ON THE COVER, TO THE LEFT and TO THE RIGHT Justin Parel photographed by Stacie Sansone

The body copy was typeset in Arno Pro in 10 point font at 13 pt leading and Droid Sans in 8 point font and 13 pt leading

■ Art Direction and Design by Stacie Sansone

// photo by Bill Wippert

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Intverview by Shira Levine

We got the inside scoop on how being sober has affected the ol’ Mötley Crüe bassist and got the low-down on some of his tatts!

ore than six years sober, former Mötley Crüe bassist Nikki Sixx has long emerged from rock-star rock bottom. Still working the over-processed, jetblack hair, complete with black-on-black threads and requisite metal rocker accoutrement, he looks young and refreshed, unlike most of his over-50-and haggard contemporaries. He’s in control. In fact, his most recent tattoo barks directions to the dude at the morgue who will take over when he finally kicks the bucket: “Tag Here” is etched on his toe. But if Sixx can help it, he’s not kicking the bucket anytime soon. Though he is one lucky fuck, having escaped death by overdose twice. Sixx didn’t totally piss away his rocker hey day in a drugged stupor; he managed to chronicle his life and death(s) for his debut memoir, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star while deep in the throws of heroin, booze, coke, crack, pills, and loads of forgettable sex with nameless redheads. His latest band, Sixx A.M., has an album, The Heroin Diaries Soundtrack, and he’s promoting clothing line Royal Underground—so yeah, he’s a full-on brand à la Britney Spears. And you thought that shit was just for pop stars. Sixx is a piece of fine art, with ink adorning nearly his entire body. His first was a black rose inked at 17, and he also has the names of his children and his ex-wife Donna D’Errico branded on his body. “Sixx” is spelled out across the knuckles of his left fist, and his birth year, 1958, is on the right. The slew of others, Sixx doesn’t have the patience to explain: “The rest are the story of my life.” Covert book promotion. Twice divorced with a discography of ex-lovers, it’s no surprise that “women” are his regrettable tattoos. (This, from the man who wrote the song “New Tattoo” about getting his

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NIKKI SIXX

I look at the new Sixx A.M. album and that is some of my best work. Dr. Feelgood is some of my best work. I feel like sobriety is probably the better path for me.”

woman painted on his arm.) Any glimpse into his next tattoo was shot down with: “Can’t tell you, ’cuz I don’t plan that far in the future.” It’s unclear where Sixx isn’t tattooed. He confirms the nether region is unscathed with his, “What do you think?” response. And in 2003, he reportedly had a left leg and his ass still ink-free. But a lot can happen in four years. Today, Sixx is a single dad, and instead of shooting smack between his toes, he’s kick-starting his heart for youngest daughter Frankie-Jean Mary (named after Sixx, who was born Frank Carlton Serafino Feranna, Jr.). Apparently, sobriety sucked the Sikki out of Nikki. Let’s get right into the debauchery. ■ Since you personally know how vicious heroin addiction can be, how do you feel about people like Keith Richards, who seems to make it work and apparently lives well as a user? ■ I think there are people who have the ability to maintain, who don’t have problems and just live in excess. And there are people who have addictions and need to get treatment for that or they are going to either die from it or they are going to crash and burn and take a lot of people down with them. I’m in the latter category. I don’t know where Keith is at. He seems to be able to maintain quite well and I always say hats off to those people. ■ You have kids now, do they know about Sikki Nixx? ■ With my kids, we’re real open with each other. Obviously, with my youngest one, no. She’s six and a half. We don’t have that kind of ability yet to talk about anything too meaty. But as the kids get older and they ask, well, yeah. ■ I read Madonna and rapper Master P prefer that their kids not listen to their music, do you give yours free reign to know your musical past? ■ Yeah, of course. But they listen to a lot of different music. My youngest is into High School Musical 2 and my oldest one is into Animal Collective, so it’s a pretty wide range in our house. ■ So wait, Nikki Sixx is a High School Musical 2 fan? ■ Hey, you know, I actually watch it and I go, ‘Okay. It’s just like Fame was. There are great songs, there’s acting, there’s dancing, there’s singing. You know, this is pretty cool.’ Artists back in the old days—and I’m talking pre-’70s, ’60s, and ’50s— they would have to be able to dance, sing, act, you know, have a look and a presence. And then we got to this place where there are just singers and just actors. So it’s cool to see these young artists doing everything. ■ Back to the debauchery you write about in your book. How did you make it out of that house that was on complete lock down while you were high on drugs to then drive off in your Porsche, crash it and abandon it, and then be found alive, innocently hanging out in your house with a sling on your arm? ■ Uh, God. That was like ’84. ■ How many years ago was that? ■ Some things I remember, some I have to have my memory refreshed. ■ How long do you consider yourself sober? ■ Um. … Six and a half

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TATTOOS, DRUGS, ROCK ROLL The imagery in the following gallery revolves around our featured interview with Nikki Sixx. The concert imagery portrays Nikki with Mötley Crüe. This is accompanied by portraits of the artist and pictures that embody what he is all about. Sixx loves tattoos and loves playing the bass and creating music. What more do you need?

years. I got clean for quite a few years, during Dr. Feelgood, and then slipped off the wagon, and then was clean for a lot of years, and then slipped off the wagon. The last time I started down a path once again, I just checked myself into rehab and really gave up. That was when, for the very first time, I got it. There is always a part of you that likes to go, ‘Well someday I will.’ There was no more of the someday for me. I was interested in today. That has made it really easy for me to do a lot of what is important to me. Being an artist, being a songwriter, being an author, a photographer. There aren’t many people who go in as deep as you who make it out. I was in deep. You have to do the work if you want to come out good. A lot of addicts will quit the drug, but they won’t quit the issue, whatever their issues are. It all goes back to my core issues that as a human being I need. I am not unique in my situation. ■ It seems the public always thought your best work came when you were sober, whereas people like Hendrix, Joplin, Cobain, and Morrison didn’t make it past 27, so people then think the drugs made their music? ■ We’ll never know about these guys. People say drugs and alcohol are part of rock ‘n’ roll, and that worked out great for Jimi Hendrix, and Bon Scott is living proof that it works great. … But then what could Jimi Hendrix have done if he had stuck around? What would AC/DC have gone on to do with Bon as a singer and lyricist? What would Janis Joplin have done? I look at the new Sixx A.M. album and that is some of my best work. Dr. Feelgood is some of my best work. I feel like sobriety is probably the better path for me. I am not telling people not to drink or to do drugs either. I’m just sharing my experience. ■ That comment Alice Cooper wrote in the beginning of your book about thinking you wouldn’t live past your third album and how he thought you would die like Jim Morrison kind of breaks your heart, no? ■ Yeah, we started with it right away. Alice is a great guy. It was interesting for me to see that Alice saw that from afar. As an artist, he is very aware of what is going on. At the same time, it was interesting for me that he thought I reminded him of Jim Morrison. I was never a huge Doors fan,

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TATTOOS,DRUGS, ROCK & ROLL

Nikki Sixx Selfie // taken from his Facebook

L.A. Ink Artist // by Bill Wippert

Nikki Sixx in concert with Motley Crue // by Bill Wippert

Vince Neil, lead singer of Mötley Crüe // by Bill Wippert

Nikki Sixx and radio co-host Jenn Marino with Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz // on the Sixx Sense Facebook

Mötley Crüe at the Sunset Strip Fest // by Bill Wippert

Nikki Sixx portrait // by Jack Siefeld

Sunset Strip Tattoo parlor located in L.A // by Zach Neil

Tattos on cover model Justin Parel’s bicep photo // by Stacie Sansone

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TATTOOS,DRUGS, ROCK & ROLL

Stock photo closeup of a bassist

Nikki Sixx photographed and edited by Jack Siefeld

Mötley Crüe photographed by Bill Wippert

Lead singer of Mötley Crüe, Vince Neil, in concert in Las Vegas

New Age Ink photo by Bill Wippert

Nikki Sixx portrait photographed by Zach Neil

Stock photo of a concert

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NIKKI SIXX

Continued from page 9

so I couldn’t see that. Mick Jagger, Alice Cooper, and Gene Simmons make no apologies about being CEOs and branding their bands. ■ Is it a delicate topic to put you in that corporate executive title? ■ It’s not delicate for me. I am the CEO of Mötley Crüe. I tell young artists not to sign with major record labels. They can distribute your records but do what you have to do to make money so you can make your own record. Record companies should never own the artist’s music; the artists should own it. You have to be in charge of your brand. I get to make a decision on where I go. If I want to be a whore, I can be a whore. … Or I can make the right decisions. I don’t always make decisions based on money. We license our music away for free to skateboard companies and weird underground things, then other times we charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for our music. But I won’t ever allow the band to be on ’80s compilations. … Mötley Crüe has crossed many decades. Being in charge of your own career doesn’t make you less edgy; I think it makes you a little edgier. It’s edgy to stand up against the system. ■ You’ve maintained the ’80s rock aesthetic nicely, but what’s up with these over-50 rockers, yourself not included, who dress like Boca Raton grandmothers? ■ Yeah they are pulling that 1800s presidential look, with the wig and the blouses. I just wake up, and I look the same when I just got laid as I look when I go to court. I don’t ever look any different. I can’t clean up, but I can’t dirty down. I am sort of am what I am. ■ You’ve spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill, have you discovered you have a few things in common with the movers and shakers in the political world who also have a reputation for reckless behavior? ■ A lot of the politicians— and I will leave names out because I would rather they talk about their own recovery—have been very forthcoming with their addictions. But it’s their business, not mine. Working with some congressmen and being with conservatives and liberals … has been enlightening for me. They’re doing something politically incorrect by talking about treatment and talking about drugs and alcohol. ■ Are you for or against methadone treatment? ■ Methadone is just synthetic heroin. It’s just another masking tool. I think I am fan of complete recovery. That’s the only way for heroin addicts. If you want to be on methadone you are just going to be strung out on methadone and going to a methadone clinic for the rest of your life. If that’s what you think is better than buying a $20 bag of heroin, then that’s your choice. It’s the same fucking drug. ■ You took two decades to get to where you are in your sobriety, yet in your book you call out people who didn’t participate in your book as spineless. Do you think that’s a bit harsh if they aren’t quite on the same recovery schedule as you? ■ I’ll make it real simple. This book is about showing what its like to be a fly on the wall for addiction. The proceeds of the book go to Covenant House for kids out on the street who don’t have a hope in hell. So when people told me no, I could

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Record companies should never own the artist’s musc; the artist’s should own it. You have to be in charge of your brand. I get to make a decision on where I go.”

accept that. But the people who said yes and then had their managers call me to say, ‘Well they didn’t want to say yes to you because they feel bad. They know it is about charity and it’s about recovery, but they don’t really want anybody to know that they did it too.’ Well then you are a fucking spineless wonder to me. All I am saying is if it’s to help people, why don’t you rally around the subject? ■ A lot of people used to think that you were definitely one of those addicts who would die, is your sobriety now a big ‘fuck you’ to them? ■

I don’t know about a ‘fuck you’, but it’s definitely a

‘hell yeah.’

Check out some of these songs to get your Nikki Sixx fix!

Life is Beautiful // Sixx:A.M. Stars // Sixx:A.M. This is Gonna Hurt // Sixx:A.M Home Sweet Home // Mötley Crüe Dr. Feelgood // Mötley Crüe Shout At The Devil // Mötley Crüe Girls, Girls, Girls // Mötley Crüe *ratings based on iTunes sales and personal opinion of the editior

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ROCK & ROLL GRAPHIC DESIGN

random rock discussion:

The Rise and Fall of

ROCK & ROLL Graphic Design

Some thoughts on rock logos past and present B rowsing recently through a collection of “band fonts,” my memory drifted back to Middle School where I, plastic Bic in hand, would spend countless hours carefully inscribing the covers of my Mead notebooks with the logos and signature fonts of my favorite bands: the bewinged logos of Van Halen and Aerosmith, the Ace Frehley-designed all-caps “KISS” with its lightning-bolt “S” letters (that to some were too evocative of the Waffen SS),

■ Thinking back to some of those fonts and logos, it occurred to me not only that they seemed very much of the 1970s, but that I could not easily summon similar examples from contemporary music. Is there a “Modest Mouse” font? An Arcade Fire logo? I openly admit that the real problem here may be that my own musical coming-of-age has long passed, but my difficulty at mentally conjuring up contemporary iconography leads me to wonder: Has heavy metal graphic design run its course? Is the band logo as a species dead? And is there much of a future for the graphic representation of popular music itself? ■ Looking back, the extravagant logo and the instantly recognizable letterform seems a relic of the 1970s, akin to the massive arena rock show replete with pyrotechnics and garish props; or the black concert jersey with white sleeves, dutifully declaring the band’s roster of appearances at the Houston Astrodome or Topeka Civic Auditorium. Rock was entering its apotheosis of influence, its high-imperial hegemonic stage, and the big acts of the 1970s functioned, in a sense, like corporations, with managers and private jets and “shareholders” in the form of fans — so why not have a corporate logo, a band-brand identity? We can roughly bracket this period by two designs by the renowned Roger Dean: The “Yes” logo, at the beginning of the decade, trippily organic, still breathing in the fumes of the late 1960s; and, roughly a decade later, the colder, more sci-fi like logo for the “supergroup” Asia, who themselves arguably represented the last gasp of 1970s arena rock.

the Tolkienesque Led Zeppelin and the three-dimensional Judas Priest, the sort of blurred courier typeface logo for Cheap Trick, not to mention the Bob Defrin-designed “AC/DC” logo (with its “high voltage” slash).

■ The logos and lettering tended to be campily Gothic (a procession of black letter fonts), enigmatically runic or otherworldly, all of which fit in well with my then worldview, heavy as it was on Dungeons and Dragons and the novels of H.P. Lovecraft and Terry Brooks. But what strikes me now is that those logos, whatever their originality or quality, represented one of my earliest engagements with graphic design (cereal box logos may have been the first). This being prior to the Macintosh, I did not then have much of a working knowledge of typefaces, yet I was captivated by these outrageous letterforms — often adorned with a strangely bewitching umlaut — and carefully constructed logos, which seemed to somehow perfectly capture the essence, the entire being, of my heavy metal heroes.

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■ Logo and band font design was sort of lost among larger discussions of album cover design — which also peaked in the 1970s — and even today the origins of many logos are shrouded in mystery and misinformation. Andy Warhol is often though to have designed the famous Rolling Stones “lips” logo, and on the internet one often finds attribution credited to John Pasch, but the real creator is longtime record album designer Ruby Mazur. But in many cases, the logos were simply designed by the band members, often the product of art schools. The often schmaltzy character of it all was captured brilliantly in This is Spinal Tap, not just in the discussion of the cover concept (“How much more black could it be?”), but in the treatment of the umlaut added to the band’s name. “It’s like a pair of eyes. You’re looking at the umlaut, and it’s looking at you,” as David St. Hubbins put it. The umlaut became de rigueur for a whole host of bands, ranging from Motörhead to Queensryche (which impossibly put it over

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the “Y”), and it was typically added as an afterthought, a hollow symbol of distinction that owed nothing to linguistic or cultural actualities (graphic designer Bruce Campbell notes that when Mötley Crüe played Germany, the literal-minded crowd chanted “Mutley Cruh”).

■ Punk and new-wave, the story goes, arrived in response to the excesses of the 1970s, and I wonder if, as a kind of corollary to the anti-consumerist ethos of bands like The Clash, the idea of having a single, marketable kind of logo suddenly became recherché. Indeed, the logo for Southern California punk band Black Flag was, ironically, an iconic anti-logo. Designed by artist Raymond Pettibon, the logo was a sort of shattered flag,

seen, who I know only by iPod font, so I would not even know if they had a logo, or any visual identity whatsoever. A few months ago, a leading designer, who has done some exemplary record packaging, told me, “the music business at the moment is really not the business you would want to be in, neither as a musician or a designer. The medium is changing so incredibly, and nobody really knows if music packaging is really going to be around in a few years.” When I asked an art director at a record company what the future of album cover design was, his answer was simple: “It’s disappearing. That’s what the future is.”

■ And the covers of kids notebooks — what do they hold now? What will they hold tomorrow? Maybe it would be better if they were not drawing logos. My Middle School grades were terrible. // Tom Vanderbilt

Check out some songs from bands featured in this article!

Love Gun // KISS represented by a series of four black uneven bars. It was blunt, rather anonymous, but forceful and memorable in its own right. It was also instantly legible, and indeed it became a rather popular tattoo.

■ Heading into the 1990s and the present, the number of readily iconic band logos and typefaces seems, to me at least, to have substantially dwindled. Which leads to the thought underlying all of this: Will graphic design ever have as great a role in popular music, or indeed any role at all, in the future? I know that there continues to be a quite vigorous graphic design movement affiliated with “indie rock” and other forms, from the talented folks at Aesthetic Apparatus or any number of other rock poster designers chronicled at www.flatstock.com. More often than not, however, these works are boutique, one-off projects, done in letterpress or some other antique-feeling method; works of art thought they may be, they have not, like the bands they announce, broken through to any kind of mainstream national consciousness. ■ The disappearing logo might just be the canary in the coal mine signifying the dematerialization of music. Sure, there are little JPEGs on iTunes that depict album covers, but the proliferation of digitally acquired music and the rise of “playlist culture” is a threat not only to the idea of an album as a coherent body of work, but the album (in CD or whatever form) as a package. The shift from album to CD represented meant the artist’s canvas was reducing in size to less than a quarter of its original, and now, to essentially nothing. My iPod is filled with songs by artists whose album covers I have never even

Whole Lotta Love // Led Zeppelin Breaking the Law // Judas Priest Surrender // Cheap Trick Back in Black // AC/DC Heat of the Moment // Asia Hell Hole // Spinal Tap Owner of a Lonely Heart // Yes Ace of Spades // Motörhead Empire // Queensryche Shout At The Devil // Mötley Crüe Float On // Modest Mouse Reflektor // Arcade Fire *ratings based on iTunes sales and personal opinion of the editior

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FALL OUT BOY

// photo from falloutboy.com

Fall Out Boy on the New Album ‘American Beauty/Ame

ith their second act as a band, the members of Fall Out Boy have pulled off what once seemed at least highly unlikely: not only outlasting their emo peers from the early aughts but also transcending them all the way to the top of the Billboard charts — and with real guitars, too, a rare sound on pop radio today. After a fiveyear hiatus, the band returned in 2013 with “Save Rock and Roll,” a typically irreverent album that made its debut at No. 1; now, its

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new single, “Centuries,” is hovering in the Top 20 and scoring sporting events on TVs and in stadiums across the country. But it’s not just power chords and heartbreak anymore, although it is still that, too. The band’s new album, “American Beauty/American Psycho,” out now from Island, also features production from the French D.J. SebastiAn, and borrows familiar riffs from Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” Mötley Crüe’s “Too Fast for Love” and the theme song from “The Munsters.” Joining the band on its forthcoming “Boys of Zummer” tour

is to be the rapper and walking cloud of weed smoke Wiz Khalifa, who also added a verse to a remix of the band’s new “Pulp Fiction” homage, “Uma Thurman.” “We have a collective sense of experimentation,” said Patrick Stump, the band’s singer, owing his open ear to his father’s taste for experimental jazz and Grateful Dead records, including the one that inspired the new album’s title (the second half comes from the Bret Easton Ellis novel).

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erican Psycho’ “It’s hard for us to tell how many of our fans really know the Dead, or our film and book references,” said Pete Wentz, the band’s bassist, pop-culture aficionado and primary lyricist. Both he and Mr. Stump spoke with Joe Coscarelli by phone from the Trump SoHo in New York. These are excerpts from the conversation. ■Why incorporate samples into this album? ■ WENTZ: We were emailing back and forth with SebastiAn over Google Translate, and the idea was to come up with a futuristic rock song. Who

would have thought to cut up the Mötley Crüe punk album?

Center for dads to find.” How do you get kids interested again? ■

STUMP: I feel like it’s not common in rock music, and it gets kind of lazy to do the same thing over and over again. Especially when so many other genres have figured out how to do it in a creative, exciting way. There are still a lot of rock musicians standing around going, “That’s not music, man!” It just makes us dinosaurs if we can’t figure it out as a genre.

WENTZ: The only way to do it is for kids to be able to see bands that are playing in arenas and amphitheaters that also have current songs being played on the radio. I can think of 10 bands that can sell out arenas, but I’m not sure if kids are buying their music. The future of rock is going to come from kids that listen to Skrillex and to Kanye West. Hopefully they also listen to Fall Out Boy or bands that are playing instruments as well.

■ Pete, you wrote recently, “Rock should not be relegated to a quaint little corner of Guitar

// photo from falloutboy.com

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FALL OUT BOY

// photo from falloutboy.com

■ Where do you go online to find new music? ■ WENTZ: You know how when you were into punk rock you would look at a band’s “thank you” list, and that’s how you would find new bands? The Internet version of that is like, “Who does this person follow on SoundCloud?” or “Who is this D.J. talking to online?” One of my favorite songs of last year was 18

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iLoveMakonnen’s “Tuesday,” and I followed it down this rabbit hole to this other remix he did [for “Down 4 So Long”]. Ezra [Koenig] from Vampire Weekend does a verse on it that’s probably one of the funniest and best verses that I’ve heard recently. ■What do you say to pop-punk fans confused or even upset that you’re touring

with rappers? ■ WENTZ: This isn’t the first time we dipped our foot in here: We had Jay Z on a record; we signed Tyga to a record deal; we had Lil Wayne on a record; we had Kanye do a remix. But we’re not cramming it down anyone’s throat. If you don’t want to watch something, you have the luxury of not coming to the show at all.

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■ How did Rick Ross end up with a cameo in the video for “Centuries”?■ WENTZ: When the [gladiatorthemed] video ends, the next villain is supposed to be scarier than the Goliath, and we were trying to come up with who that could be. Rick Ross seems like he could be pretty intimidating, so we reached out to him. He filmed it in Miami and had great comments on the video. He wanted to make sure his shadow was fat enough.

This isn’t the first time we dipped our foot in here: We had Jay Z on a record; we signed Tyga to a record deal; we had Lil Wayne on a record; we had Kanye do a remix.” // photo from falloutboy.com

■The song was also featured heavily throughout the college football playoff, and you performed at the N.H.L. All-Star Game. Is Fall Out Boy the new “Jock Jams”? ■ STUMP: It’s funny, I lost a lot of weight a little while ago, but when I was really heavy and taking zero care of myself people used to come up to me and say, “I run to your stuff — you’re my workout music!” WENTZ: There are no better songs than the ones that get played for highlight reels, like Queen or, more recently, “Power” by Kanye. There’s a visceral reaction. It’s the only way that I feel like I’ve infiltrated my dad’s friends at all. STUMP: We’ve been doing this for a while, but when your music makes it to sports then all of a sudden you get a lot of surprising emails and calls: “Congratulations, you’ve made it!” // Joe Coscarelli

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