NIKKI SIXX: 'Now Is Better Than Later' For MÖTLEY CRÜE To Stop Touring

MÖTLEY CRÜE held a press conference on January 28 at Hotel Roosevelt in Los Angeles where they announced that the band will launch its "Final Tour" later this year, with the group planning to play 72 shows in North America in 2014 and more overseas in 2015. Making it official, the four members of the band had their lawyer draw up a formal "cessation of touring" agreement that goes into effect at the end of 2015 and prohibits the members of the group from going on the road again under the MÖTLEY CRÜE banner.

Asked why MÖTLEY CRÜE felt now was the right time to end the band, bassist Nikki Sixx told Time.com: "Now is better than later. We're at our peak now. We're making a movie of [the band's biography] 'The Dirt'. We are still selling out arenas everywhere we go around the world. It's the original four guys.

"The concept of hobbling off into the sunset with only two of the original guys in the band doesn't appeal to us. That's not the band that came up listening to the RAMONES and AC/DC's 'Dirty Deeds' and going, how do we make those two bands into our band?

"The very first show, Vince [Neil, vocals] and I ended up in the crowd in a fist fight! That kind of set a precedent for who we are and what we do.

"Being such huge rock fans, so many before us have let us down and been sort of embarrassing. You have to squint your eyes and they kind of look like the same band.

"We play a lot of festivals and I'll hear that so-and-so is on the bill and I'll run up to the side of the stage to see them and say, 'I know they're older, but I don't recognize anybody,' and Vince will say, 'Oh the only guy in the band is the drummer's brother.'"

Regarding whether it's safe to assume MÖTLEY CRÜE is planning something special for the band's last shows, Sixx said: "Yeah. You know, you don't want to reveal too much because it blows the surprise.

"I remember back in the '80s, bands would come to opening night and come to see what we were doing, because we were always changing it. Then they would fly back to L.A. and shoot their video and release it and we would see it on MTV and we would see it and say, 'That's our fucking show!' It was like, what the fuck! They just wanted to copy us. Music execs would even say, 'We need three guys with black hair and one guy with blonde hair and you guys need to be rebellious.' What is this, fucking 'American Idol' 1985?! So we started to be really private.

"The band has always prided itself — even when we were a club band — on pushing it as far as we could push it. If you look back to 1981 at shows at the Whisky [A Go Go in Hollywood], we played them like they were stadium shows, but they were only to 250 people. It's just what we do. We were doing it for no money, building stuff ourselves. Vince was an electrician and he would wire up some lights and build a drum riser — Tommy [Lee, drums] would cut the wood and me and Mick [Mars, guitar] would paint it. It was all about making our show bigger and bigger and bigger. It's something we continue to do, but now we incorporate technology and try to push the boundaries that way. That's where we are now — we're at a place where we are looking at what's out there and what we can use. Sometimes we go back and look at shit from the old days. We're looking at stuff from the '70s and '80s and mixing things to create a new breed of stuff. That's exciting to me and what I think is going to be different. Because this is it."

Read the entire interview at Time.com.