California guitar wizard John 5 doesn’t believe in downtime. He’ll hit City Winery with his solo band Sunday, less than 24 hours after playing Mohegan Sun with his other band, Motley Crue. And between solo and Crue gigs, he expects to be onstage every night this month.

“Don’t tell my wife this, but I don’t like vacations,” he said this week. “Of course everybody loves playing the enormodomes — That’s fine, it’s amazing. But I’ll tell you honestly, I have as much fun playing the small clubs, that’s what I did growing up and it’s my whole life. I like seeing people, I enjoy being close to them, seeing their faces and hearing their stories. And that’s the honest to God truth.”

John 5 made his name in heavy rock and metal; he’s put in time with Rob Zombie and David Lee Roth, and his stage name was supplied by former boss Marilyn Manson. But his earliest musical roots are a country mile away. “There have always been  epiphanies in my life, and the first one was ‘Hee Haw.’ It was guys like Buck Owens and Roy Clark who made me want to play guitar, and then I went on to Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen. Even today I love everything from Slayer to Waylon Jennings — It’s all music to me. And I still love songs like Joni Mitchell’s ‘California’ and Don McLean’s “American Pie’—You can’t deny those songs are masterpieces, and they’ll live on forever.”

John joined Motley Crue two years ago, when founding member Mick Mars retired. And he says that his goal there is to rock the boat as little as possible.

“If I’m going to get into a situation like that, it has to be something I have a deep appreciation of and respect for. I’d already been a big fan of Motley Crue and seen them live multiple times, so I’d done my life’s research. And that’s a crazy, intense responsibility, with Mick being in the band for 41 years. I don’t want to disappoint the fans in any way, so I learn those solos exactly as he played them. The fans have heard those solos just that way for most of their life, so it’s important to me. But the Crue gives me a solo spot at every show; they didn’t have to do that and I appreciate it.”

Though he does a Crue medley in his solo set, you might hear anything from a fusion instrumental to a Sinatra standard to a Eurythmics cover. “It’s a lot of fun, I also get to play banjo and mandolin. When I make solo albums, I try to record everything live, the way they did in the ‘40s. Everything on those records was live, and you can imagine everyone in the studio looking at each other and smiling. That’s a lost art.”

His Winery show will likely be one of the loudest ever at that venue, and one of the smaller gigs he’s played in years. “It can be a lot of work trying to remember everything, even though I practice all the time. But we keep throwing more things into the set, so imagine watching somebody juggling chainsaws — ‘Whoa, is he going to mess this up?’ It’s kind of like that.”