Two minutes. That’s how long Nikki Sixx was clinically dead. No pulse. No breath. Nothing. And according to Steven Adler the man who lived through rock ’n’ roll’s most unhinged era from the inside those two minutes felt like an eternity carved straight into his brain.
Adler still remembers the color first.
Purple.
Not metaphorical. Not poetic. Purple like the lights going out on a Vegas strip club at dawn. Purple like the kind of silence that makes your stomach drop because you know, deep down, you’ve crossed a line you can’t uncross.
It was late 1987, the year excess wasn’t a phase it was policy. Heroin flowed like backstage beer. Bands didn’t flirt with the edge; they sprinted toward it in leather pants and eyeliner. And Nikki Sixx, the snarling architect of Mötley Crüe’s chaos, had finally gone too far.
According to Adler, it happened fast. One moment Sixx was there sarcastic, reckless, indestructible. The next, he was slumped, still, his skin draining of color like someone had yanked the saturation knob on life itself.
“He just stopped,” Adler has said. “No breathing. No response. He turned purple.”
Panic doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Paramedics were called, sirens slicing through Hollywood’s night like a warning nobody wanted to hear. When they arrived, the verdict was brutal: Nikki Sixx was clinically dead. No detectable pulse. Gone for two minutes that felt like a lifetime to everyone watching.
What happened next sounds less like medicine and more like a war scene.
The paramedics didn’t waste time with subtlety. They went straight to the nuclear option: adrenaline shots directly to the heart. Not one two.
Imagine that. Two syringes of pure chemical lightning slammed into your chest, trying to bully your heart back into remembering what it was supposed to do.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then chaos.
Nikki Sixx gasped.
His body jolted. His eyes flew open. He sucked in air like a man dragged back from the bottom of the ocean—and in a very real way, that’s exactly what he was.
Dead for two minutes. Back from it in seconds.
But here’s where the story takes its legendary turn where it stops being a medical miracle and becomes rock mythology.
Because Nikki Sixx didn’t wake up grateful.
He woke up angry.
Hospital bed. IVs in his arms. Monitors beeping like a countdown clock. Doctors telling him he’d just died.
And Nikki’s response?
No.
According to Adler, Sixx tore the IVs out of his arms, blood splattering the sheets. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, still wearing his leather pants, and walked staggered ran out of the hospital.
No discharge papers. No apologies. No looking back.
He escaped.
Just like that
Picture it: a man who had been clinically dead minutes earlier, storming into the night with adrenaline still pumping through his veins, refusing to be contained by walls, wires, or warnings. It was insane. It was reckless. It was pure Nikki Sixx.
And somehow miraculously he didn’t die that night.
But something did change.
Because you don’t come back from death without bringing a piece of it with you.
That moment those two minutes burned itself into Sixx’s soul. It haunted him. Followed him. Whispered in his ear every time he picked up a needle, every time he told himself he was invincible.
Years later, that whisper turned into a song.
“Kickstart My Heart.”
The title alone tells you everything. Not metaphor. Not poetry. A literal resurrection set to a screaming engine and one of the most adrenaline-soaked riffs in rock history.
When Sixx wrote it, he wasn’t exaggerating. His heart had been kickstarted chemically, violently back from death. The song’s racing tempo, its breathless lyrics, its sense of barely-controlled momentum it all traces back to that hospital room and those two syringes.
Steven Adler knows it. He lived it.
Adler himself would later battle his own demons, spiraling through addiction and near-death experiences of his own. But when he talks about Nikki’s overdose, there’s still disbelief in his voice. Not fear amazement.
“He should be dead,” Adler has said more than once. “Any normal person would be.”
But rock ’n’ roll has never been about normal people.
The craziest part isn’t that Nikki Sixx survived. It’s that he ran. That he refused to lie still. That even death couldn’t keep him pinned to a hospital bed.
That moment became the dividing line in his life the proof that the party had a price, and that he’d already paid it once.
And yet, somehow, instead of ending the story, it launched a new chapter. One that turned trauma into art, chaos into anthem, and a near-fatal overdose into one of the most iconic songs of the ’80s.
Two minutes clinically dead.
Two adrenaline shots to the heart.
One man ripping out his IVs and running back into the night.
And a song that still sounds like a heartbeat racing toward the edge.
Rock didn’t just survive that night.
It came back louder.
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