Nikki Sixx says that he doesn’t get the credit that he deserves as a bass player.
The MÖTLEY CRÜE rocker addressed his standing on the list of low-end masters who seem to fall through the cracks of too many bass conversations while answering questions on Twitter.
Asked by one follower to name “the most underrated bass player ever,” Sixx replied simply: “Me”.
In a 2015 interview with For Bass Players Only, Sixx said that he was “drawn to the simplicity” of a bass guitar as a songwriter. “I love basically writing in the simplest form, and then I figure out what that means — ‘Is this a ballad? Is this a pop song? Is this a heavy metal song?'” he explained. “A lot of time some of our songs, our heavier songs, I’ll play them acoustically when I’m writing and really make sure that the melody line is really worked out, just acoustically and then get into the rough ‘n’ tumble of it. But a song has to be hummable and memorable at it simplest form, and that’s what bass does for me. I feel like the glue to everything.”
Asked where he finds your spot within what guitarist Mick Mars and drummer Tommy Lee are doing in MÖTLEY CRÜE, Nikki said: “I feel my spot is somewhere between a bass player and a rhythm guitar player. I play with a pick. I play very aggressively. I always have a distortion pedal in line, and I play less melodies and do more stuff against the guitars that create melodies. Song is king for me, so as long as the song is soaring, I’m in my pocket, and then I figure out what I can do to make the song better. In a song like ‘Too Young To Fall In Love’, for example, the bass moves from the A to the G to the F, and then towards the end it does the A to the B to the C and it walks up — the same melody line but we just kind of wrap it around a different way. It’s those simple little things that are what people remember.”
MÖTLEY CRÜE‘s “The Stadium Tour” with DEF LEPPARD, POISON and JOAN JETT & THE BLACKHEARTS ” was originally scheduled to take place this summer but ended up being pushed back to 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic which is sweeping the globe.
