Guitarist John 5 replaced co-founding Motley Crue guitarist Mick Mars last year and has been touring and recording with the band ever since. Bassist Nikki Sixx told The Mistress Carrie podcast about the decision to bring John 5 on board.
“John’s a great guy,” Sixx said. “I’ve known John for a long time. I brought John in on a Meat Loaf song that I wrote, ‘The Monster Is Loose’. And then some SIXX:A.M. songs. He wrote a song with me called ‘Lies Of The Beautiful People’, which was a big hit for SIXX:A.M. And I brought him in to do a project that I did for Netflix called L.A. Rats with Rob Zombie and Tommy Clufetos on drums, a Johnny Cash cover. And I wrote ‘The Dirt’ songs with him, and he played a lot of the guitar on those tracks. And so when this moment that we weren’t expecting happened, Mick’s leaving the band, we were in the middle of ‘The Stadium Tour’. We were in the middle of a huge tour with us and Def Leppard. A world tour, not just a couple gigs. And we had to ask ourselves, like, ‘Do we fold? Do we leave Live Nation in the lurch? Do we bone our partners in Def Leppard?’ And we had to dig deep and we were, like, ‘We’ve gotta do what’s right for the fans.’ And John was the guy. We didn’t even talk about anybody else. We knew John. I knew John. We knew what he was as a guitar player. We knew he was a writer. And it just was like taking a situation we didn’t expect and turning it into something. And now we have new music and we’re having a great time.”
John 5 had previously been Rob Zombie’s longtime guitarist, and the horror rocker was understandably upset with his decision to leave his band for Motley Crue. Sixx said he still has awkward feelings about the situation.
“It was one of those things that I feel bad about,” Sixx said. “It wasn’t my decision. It was John’s decision. I had been talking to John as a friend during some of the frustrations with Mick’s playing, specifically on the tour. And he was my friend. And when I called him and said, ‘Wow, we’re faced with a really bad situation.’ And we talked. And he wanted to do the next-level thing in his life. He’d been with Rob for a long, long time, and they were kind of coming to an end of a tour. And he talked to Rob, and Rob was not happy but understood. I still feel bad about that. That was never my intention, to go out and steal somebody from another band. That’s not what we did. But I have so much respect for Rob. It’s one of those things where I’m really happy and at the same time I’m, like… Sometimes this stuff’s f*cking hard. Like making a decision to move on without an original member. It’s not exactly as seamless as people would like it to seem. There’s some little bumps along the way, little bumps in the road.”
