Nikki Sixx said his wife discovered his criminal past only after she read parts of his new memoir.

In The First 21, the Motley Crue member tells of his upbringing and recounts moments of hustling. Those include selling candy to other kids at inflated prices, stealing a guitar from a music shop and being fired after selling stain guard to carpet-store customers that was actually just water.

“I said to my wife, 'Hey, check out this section here,'” Sixx told Billboard in a new interview. “And she goes, 'Oh, I didn't know my husband was a criminal.’ And I go, 'Whoa, is that what you got out of it?' She said, 'Well, that's what you wrote. You did this, you did that, you did this.’ I went back and looked at it, and it's like, yeah, that's what I was doing.”

But he argued there was a vision behind his actions – most of what he did was part of the effort to make Motley Crue a success. “I was constantly hustling for the dream,” he said. “There was a lot of petty stuff, but I'm sure if I'd been caught, I couldn't be, like, 'But officer, I was doing it in the good name of rock 'n' roll, and I'm gonna form a band someday that you guys are gonna love.' They'd be like, 'Cuff him!' But literally it was down to, 'What will we do to be able to get what we want?' - which was get the band onstage.”

The First 21 also contains a chapter about preparing for the band’s upcoming tour, although it’s been postponed twice due to the pandemic. “We're impatiently waiting for when we can start band rehearsal," Sixx said. "We usually rehearse for about a month. That gives us a little bit of time to work on other stuff as well, setup and breakdown and stuff like that. The Stadium Tour chapter was important for me to write because I wanted fans to know what we do, at least what I do, to prepare for such a thing.”

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