Two of rock’s most celebrated former ‘hellraisers’, Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash and Mötley Crüe basisst Nikki Sixx, have been celebrating landmarks in their sobriety.
Slash’s girlfriend, Meegan Hodges,shared a photo of Slash with punk rock stylist Jimmy Webb, who passed away last April, aged 62. Hodges wrote, “Baby, Congratulations on your 15 YEARS of SOBRIETY! ‘An addict who achieves recovery is capable of achieving anything.’ (wise words someone said) I am so very proud of you every day but today I am so very extra proud of you. I love you to the moon and back! #recovery #youaresexyandsober #strength #bestmanyoucanbe #slash #happy4thofjuly.”
Speaking to Belfast Live two years ago, Slash admitted he was “drinking myself to death” after quitting Guns N’ Roses back in the day. “It was very excessive,” he admitted. “I’d left my band, I was getting divorced, I was going through all this shit. I had record company issues. It was really classic rock ‘n’ roll life – the bad side.”
Slash was actually ‘partying’ with his friend Nikki Sixx on the night in December 1987 when Mötley Crüe’s leader famously ‘died’ after a heroin overdose. In the band’s best-selling memoir The Dirt, Sixx recalled an out-of-body experience he had as an ambulance crew rushed him to a Los Angeles hospital. “Above me, everything was bright white,’ he told writer Neil Strauss. ‘I looked down and realized that I had left my body. Nikki Sixx—or the filthy, tattooed contained that had once held him—was lying covered face-to-toe with a sheet on a gurney being pushed by medics into an ambulance.”
Sixx posted on Instagram on July 2, in a post concluding, “when you see people who are still suffering / treading water or gasping for air, be sure to throw them a life vest. Because we give back now to those that are still afflicted and hope they too pass it on.” Sixx ended his post with the hashtags #SobrietyRocks and #20Years.
