Nikki Sixx has to "laugh" about his brush with death.
Nikki Sixx
The Motley Crue rocker was pronounced dead after a heroin overdose in 1987 but was resuscitated and now he likes to make jokes about the incident, even if not everyone finds them funny.
He said: "I got a lot of great one-liners now like, 'Jesus Christ and I both died and came back.' That doesn't sit well in the Bible belt. But you've got to laugh."
The 60-year-old musician admitted he was in a huge amount of pain after his heart restarted, and compared the experience to rebooting a computer.
Asked what dying taught him, he told Rolling Stone magazine: "That it hurts to come back. My heart stopped. My body stopped.
"It's like you turned the computer off and they restart the computer. It felt like I'd been f***ing hit by a truck. Every single thing hurt. My hair hurt. That reboot is a bitch."
The 'Home Sweet Home' hitmaker believes he survived due to "spiritual intervention.
He said: "Let's just say there was some spiritual intervention. God knows I wasn't the one responsible for surviving. I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. If I leaned toward anything, it would be Buddhism."
And some of Nikki's biggest regrets include "scaring" his loved ones with his drug habit and seeing the band "self-destruct" at the height of their success.
He said: "I learned that drugs are like Band-Aids and that Band-Aids don't work. You've got to clean out the wound. I had to struggle with that through the fame and success.
"In certain parts of my life, I could have made better decisions. I feel bad for the people in my family that I scared.
"And I regret that when the band finally got what we wanted, we were self-destructing."
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