Megadeth bassist David Ellefson was there when Nikki Sixx was declared clinically dead from a drug overdose before the Motley Crue member was revived by a paramedic after two long minutes back in 1987.
Here’s the complete statement from David:
“I was there. Steven Adler and I were friends, and I didn’t really know the other guys too much, I think [I] maybe met Slash once or something. … It was right up the street from where Dave and I met on Sycamore, it was at the Franklin Plaza Hotel up on Franklin and La Brea, and, yeah, I was up there.”
He continued:
“I’d never met Nikki before or any of the Motley guys, and we’re just partying and Slash and Nikki come busting into the room. I wanted to see if I could wedge some drugs off of them but they didn’t have any, so I guess they were looking for some too. That was kinda what happens at the wee hours of the night.
They left and went in the room next door and, I mean, literally, I don’t know, 15 minutes later, a girl comes running, ‘Oh my God, Nikki’s dead, get some ice.’ You could hear the helicopters, you could hear the sirens. I mean, it was all going on.”
Remembering Sixx’s overdose now, the musician expressed the lasting shock of the experience.
“Thank God I really wasn’t around it,” Ellefson said of the Motley Crue bassist’s death-defying incident. (The two musicians are now friends, and Sixx recorded 17 years of sobriety in 2018.) “I had no part of it or anything, but it was just a brush by a moment in rock and roll. It was a sobering reality and a wake-up.”