tearsofthecowgirl

“When I was sixteen, Lita Ford was the girl that I dreamed about: a total rock fox. I had posters of the Runaways all over the bedroom in my parents’ house. Now, just five years later, I’d signed Motley Crue, and Nikki Sixx was living with one of the Runaways. And not only was I hanging out with them, but I was also giving them food and money. I’d stop by Nikki and Lita’s house when I could and bring them Haagen-Dazs ice cream or a Subway sandwich. People always said that the pair of them fought like cats and dogs, but they were always fun to be with. As time passed, however, the house kept getting creepier. I’d drop in and see The Necronomicon, a black-magic spell book, lying on the table. Niki was heavily into satanic stuff and wanted to call the record Shout with the devil. It was upsetting to the label, and it was upsetting to me. I knew the promotions department would use the title as an excuse to completely ignore the album.
I went over one night to have a discussion with Nikki about changing the title. When I walked in, he and Lita were huddled on the couch. "I’m kinda freaked out,” Lita said. “Weird things are happening in the apartment.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, looking around at the freshly painted pentagrams and Gothic paintings that Nikki had on the walls and floor.
“Weird things just happen,” she said. “Cabinet doors keep opening and shutting, there are weird noises, and things keep flying around the apartment for no reason.”
“Listen, Nikki,” I said. “You have to stop fooling around with this satanic black magic shit. It’s powerful stuff, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t mess with it.”
But Nikki didn’t care for grandstanding. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It just looks cool. It’s meaningless symbols and shit. I’m just doing it to piss people off. It’s not like I fucking worship Satan or something.”
I knew I couldn’t change his mind, so I left. When I returned two nights later, there were forks and knives sticking in the walls and ceilings, and Nikki and Lita looked much paler and sicker than usual.
“What the hell have you guys been doing?” I asked.
“We aren’t doing anything, man,” Lita said. “I tried to tell you: Stuff is just flying around here on it’s own.”
As she said that, and I swear to God I saw this with my own eyes, a knife and fork rose off the table and stuck into the ceiling just above where I was sitting. I looked at Nikki and freaked out. “There is no more ‘Shout with the Devil.’ If you keep shouting with the devil, you’re going to get killed.”
You can believe what you want, but I truly believe that Nikki unknowingly tapped into something evil, something more dangerous than he could control that was on the verge of seriously hurting him. Nikki must have realized the same thing, because he decided on his own to change the album title to Shout at the Devil. To this day, that incident remains one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever seen in my life.“
–Tom Zutaut