Tracii Guns looks up to Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx as his role models in the rock world.
“My bass player, one of my best friends growing up, this guy Danny Tall, he showed me a little ad for Mötley Crüe,” the guitarist recalled in a new interview with VRP Rocks. “We used to have a weekly magazine called Music Connection and they had an ad in there and they were playing at the Troubadour.”
He went on to say, “I saw the picture and he knew that I would like that picture, that image, the early Mötley Crüe with all the leather and the crazy hair and I was like, ‘Oh we’re going to that.’ So we rode our skateboards to the Troubadour when I was like 15 and we saw Mötley Crüe and that was it.”
“I saw Nikki Sixx and Mick Mars and I was like, ‘Oh that’s what you’re supposed to do.’ They were so loud and they looked so cool, man. That was it, that was the end of everything,” Guns further revealed about the impact of seeing Mötley Crüe live at the time.,
The musician added, “I mean, aside from watching ‘The Song Remains the Same’ movie, which played at the big theaters every weekend, that was everything. Jimmy Page and then I saw Mötley Crüe live and that was that. Nothing was going to get in my way at that point.”
Guns also talked about Crüe’s influence on him in a previous chat with the Captain. The rocker said, “But at the time the Mötley Crüe came out, there was W.A.S.P., and it kind of came out of the L.A. punk-rock scene at that time because punk-rock really survived until about 1980-1981 in L.A., and we were really into it. We had The Germs, so we’re punk-rock and we all dressed the part.”
“So in about a year’s time, I went from having spiky black hair to having Johnny Thunder’s long black hair because of Nikki Sixx. When W.A.S.P. and Mötley Crüe started playing the Troubadour and the Whiskey, everything changed. And there were other bands, Ratt was around and stuff like that, so it was healthy, but it wasn’t quite as fun yet,” Tracii noted.
Guns shared in a separate interview that he and Sixx didn’t know each other well at first and often argued. However, after starting a project together, they quickly became close friends.
