by Scott Ian
I’ll leave the rest to you my friends. You can listen for yourselves. Enjoy it, and I hope it fucks your world the same way Darrell and Ronnie fucked with mine.
Illustration by Stephen Thompson.
YOUR HERO SHOULD NEVER WEAR DAISY DUKES
(Unless Your Hero Is Daisy Duke)
It was a hot Los Angeles day in the industrial wasteland of faceless, low, concrete buildings, chop shops, nameless bars, railroad tracks that go nowhere, and mysterious warehouses somewhere between North Hollywood and Burbank.
One of those days so hot that the tar is melting on the street and if I stepped on it, it’d eat the shoe right off my foot like a snake swallowing a large rat, slow and deliberate with purpose, my poor shoe sinking into the street, choking on the hot blacktop until it disappears and the street closes over it like it never happened. It was that fucking hot.
I was inside one of those mysterious warehouses filled with band rehearsal rooms that are gloriously temperature controlled to a balmy 68 degrees, rehearsing for an upcoming Anthrax tour.
After jamming for an hour it was time for a break. I took off my guitar and headed out to take a piss and grab a cup of coffee. I walked out of the rehearsal room, and before I could even close the door behind me a vision leaning over the Ms. Pac-Man machine stopped me dead in my tracks.
I was looking at the perfectly tanned back and legs of an almost naked person, except for a pair of the shortest short-short Daisy Dukes (shorts made famous by Catherine Bach on the awesome eighties TV show The Dukes of Hazzard), with perfectly tanned butt cheeks hanging out of them. I was horrified. I was horrified because this wasn’t a beautiful California girl out of some perfect summertime Beach Boys–esque dream; it was a nightmare. It was stupefying. It was so fucked up that it was impossible to tear my gaze away from this unfathomable, disturbing sight.
It was my hero.
It was Lemmy.
I won’t poison your eyes with a photo, you can Google the offending image if you dare. It’s out there.
It was Lemmy standing there playing Ms. Pac-Man, all tanned and barefoot except for a pair of the shortest Daisy Dukes I had ever seen, a half-smoked cigarette burning away in an ashtray as he tried to avoid being eaten by Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.
LEMMY.
My hero. The coolest, hardest, toughest, smartest, funniest guy in the history of rock and roll. I couldn’t make sense of it, nor should I have been able to. The lack of context made the apparition deeply surreal. At that point I’d been a Motörhead fan for fourteen years. Fourteen years of Lemmy in head-to-toe denim and leather and then—BOOM. It was like seeing Clint Eastwood in a Speedo. It’s just not right. It’s not cool.
I forgot about going to the bathroom and getting a coffee and instead ducked right back into our room. I figured I’d wait a bit and then hopefully Lemmy would be gone. Twenty minutes later I peeked out the door and he was still there. I found out from a friend who worked at the rehearsal studio that Motörhead was also rehearsing there for the next week. Normally I would’ve been very excited about this, but having just witnessed what I saw I was calling everything I knew into question. Seeing your hero wearing Daisy Dukes can do that to you. My world was turning upside down. I just wanted to go back in time to when Lemmy wore black jeans and boots. I asked my friend if he too had seen what no one should ever see, and before he spoke I could see in his eyes that he had. I hugged him tight, commiserated, told him, “Everything is going to be okay,” and headed back to the room to finish rehearsal, keeping the secret of what I had witnessed to myself so as to not freak out the rest of the band.
When I got to rehearsal the next day I snuck, Batman-like, to our practice room, hypervigilant so as to not have my eyes molested. As I turned a corner there he was again, leaning over Ms. Pac-Man, cigarette burning in an ashtray, naked except for the Daisy Dukes. I averted my eyes and just kept walking, and as I was about to walk into our room Lemmy quickly turns to me (still playing the game) and says, “Hi Scott, how are ya?”
Jarred by his sudden query and in no way ready to have a conversation with my pants-challenged hero I mumbled, “Hey Lem,” and without stopping I opened the door to our room and was safe. Whew.
This went on for days.
I spent as much time as I could in our room, not wanting to bump into Lem, but it was useless. I’d invariably see him in the hall or playing the machine or out front having a smoke, face up to the sun, getting even more tan than he already was. I was avoiding him, and it was bumming me out because I really wanted to hang and didn’t want him to think I was being a dick—which I was, because he’d say hello or try to start a conversation, and I’d have some bullshit excuse, so I decided I would get up the nerve to directly confront the issue at hand. I had to know why.
The next day I got to rehearsal, dropped my stuff off in the room, and headed straight to the lounge where Lemmy was in his usual spot playing Ms. Pac-Man, cigarette accompaniment, no wardrobe change. I took a deep breath and steeled myself, summoning the balls to question my hero’s fashion choice. I sidled up next to the Ms. Pac-Man machine and said, “Hey Lem, how are ya?”
“Good, Scott. How are you?” he replied without looking away from the game.
“I’m okay, thanks. Um, uh, cough, um, hey Lem, mind if I ask you a question?”
He gave a barely perceptible nod and raised an eyebrow, staying focused on Ms. Pac-Man’s health.
This was it, my moment of truth.
“Uh, what’s with the shorts?”
As the last word fell out of my mouth it was like a chill came down over the room and everything got silent. Lemmy picked up his smoke and slowly turned his head toward me. It’s like I had tunnel vision and could only see his mouth taking a long drag on his cigarette and then blowing the smoke into my face, the acrid cloud angrily surrounding my head as if to punish me for daring to question the man. As the smoke cleared I could see Lem staring at me, looking at me in slo-mo from head to toe and back up again, studying. Already nervous from having questioned my hero and now paranoid because he was eyeballing me so intently, I looked down at myself to see if there was something wrong, to see what he was seeing. Everything looked right to me: Vans slip-ons, camo shorts just past my knees, Maiden T-shirt—what I would deem proper summer attire for a guy like me. I immediately regretted the question and just wanted to get out of the conversation as I stood there nervously waiting for his reply. I looked up, and Lemmy, still laser focused on me with his best spaghetti western stare, points with his cigarette hand at my shorts and growls, “Scotty, those are pants”—and then pointing at his Daisy Dukes—“these are shorts.”
And upon uttering that completely inarguable statement he immediately turned back around to the game that he had never stopped playing with his other hand the whole time he was looking at me.
And Ms. Pac-Man was still alive.
What the hell?
So not only is he Lemmy, but he’s the Fonz too?
What could I possibly have to say? He shut me down with truth, and there was nothing I could do but accept his logic. It didn’t mean I had to like my hero wearing Daisy Dukes; it meant I understood why and that made the next few days at the rehearsal studio much more fun.
We finished up rehearsal and headed out on tour.
Over the next decade I crossed paths with Lem many times, whether it was me going to a Motörhead show, Anthrax and Motörhead playing festivals together, or Anthrax opening for Motörhead on tour. I always had a great time hanging with him and felt privileged that I could just sit and have a drink and converse with him, usually about politics and war.
In 2009 I was asked if I would be interested in being interviewed for a Lemmy documentary, and of course I answered yes. During the interview I was asked whether I had any “crazy Lemmy stories,” and the Daisy Dukes tale immediately popped into my head. I ended up telling an abbreviated version of this story for the movie. Months later I heard from the director that the movie was finished and my segmen
t was getting a lot of laughs at screenings. I was just happy to be a part of documenting my friend and that people were getting my bit in the spirit of good humor for which it was intended. Once the movie was out it seemed like everywhere I went people would come up to me and tell me how much they loved the Daisy Dukes story. My visual nightmare seemed to connect with people.
Anthrax were on the Mayhem festival in the summer of 2012 along with Slipknot, Slayer, and Motörhead. I hadn’t seen Lemmy since the release of the movie, and I was really excited to get to spend what was going to be like summer camp across the states with Lem and company. The first show of the tour was at the San Manuel Amphitheater, a big outdoor venue in San Bernardino, California. When I walked into the artist area backstage I saw Lemmy sitting outside his dressing room having a smoke. I walked over to say hi, even before heading to my dressing room to get rid of my bags, as I was excited to see my friend and catch up. Lemmy gave me the nod of recognition—slight head raise and an arched eyebrow as he took a drag on his cigarette.
“Hey Lem, how are ya?” I asked.
“Good, Scotty. How are you,” he replied in that unmistakable growl of his.
“I’m good, man, thanks. Excited for the tour?”
“Yeah, yeah, should be good, ya know,” he answered. Then he took another long pull on his smoke, exhaled staring at me, and said, “I hear you’ve been getting a lot of laughs in my movie with that story you tell about my shorts.”
Awkward. Was Lemmy mad at me?
Suddenly I was twenty years old again, meeting him for the first time, all nervous and sweaty, my voice seemingly going up an octave, and I stammered, “Uh yeah, ha ha ha, yeah, that story. Ummm, it’s funny, right?” No answer from Lemmy. He sat there silently, slowly smoking and looking off somewhere else. “So yeah, the, uh, the movie was really good, Lem. Congratulations on that,” I stuttered, not being able to deal with the silence he was throwing my way.
His reply was another long, pregnant pause, and another cloud of Lemmy smoke exhaled in my direction. Finally, after what felt like forever, Lemmy, still staring at me, growls, “What the hell were you doing looking at my ass anyway?”
And with that microphone drop of a reply, Lemmy flicked his cigarette butt to the floor and crushed it with his boot, and as he walked into his dressing room he turned around toward me and smiled.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Pearl Aday, Jason Rosenfeld, Dominick DeLuca, Mark Osegueda, Steven Wiig, Kirk Hammett, Charlie Benante, Marc Paschke, Frank Bello, Lisa Tenner, and Erik Luftglass for helping with the when, where, and why of it all.
Thank you to my editor Ben Schafer for being awesome.
Thank you to Justin, Lissa, and everyone at Da Capo Press.
Thank you to Marc Gerald and Kim Koba at UTA.
Thank you to everyone who read I’m the Man, giving me the opportunity to write this one. Cheers my friends, these tales of mirth and mayhem are for you.
Thank you to everyone in this book that I have crossed paths with over the last forty years—here’s to us; who is as good as us? Damn few, and they’re all dead!
ALSO BY SCOTT IAN
I’m the Man: The Story of that Guy from Anthrax
(with Jon Wiederhorn)