“I mean, I used to say he did his work,” says Chesters, unwittingly helping to establish Lemmy’s reputation as unsuitable for any gainful employment other than the haphazard helming of his own shambolic show. “I did an interview for a documentary, and they say to him, ‘Didn’t you roadie with Hendrix at one time?’ And he goes, ‘Speak to Neville about that.’ So I get a phone call. So, ‘Yes, he came in supposedly to help me’ and they said, ‘Did he work? Did he do anything?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And they said, ‘Are you sure?’ And I said, ‘Well what do you mean?’ ‘Because most people said he just hung out with the band.’ And I said, ‘Actually, come to think of it, yeah, that’s what he did.’”
“It was very confusing because we were tripping all the time,” reminisced Lemmy in October 2006. “[Hendrix] came over to England from America and there was this guy named Owsley Stanley the Third. He was one of those guys who had a laboratory and he gave Hendrix about ten thousand tabs of acid. It was even legal back then. Hendrix put it in his suitcase and gave it out to the crew—there were only two of us. We had the best acid in the world in 1967 and most of 1968. After a while it doesn’t affect your work because you learn to function. I drove the van from London to Bletchley, which is about 150 miles, on acid with a pair of those strobe sunglasses on. They had the vision of a fly, where you would see eight times around. I drove the van with those on for 150 miles on acid, and we got there.”
Lemmy’s also been known to say that he would score drugs for Mitch Mitchell as well, but when obtaining acid for Jimi, he said his pay came in the three tabs of ten that he would have to take on the spot, while Jimi took seven.
But working for a genius must have been a trip of its own. “Oh yeah, everybody knew it as soon as he came to England,” continued Lemmy. “When he came to the States, you had Monterey and everybody knew about it. It was like that in England. He played one show and everyone knew. It went around like a wildfire. Pete Townshend came out of a club where Hendrix was playing and Eric Clapton was going in. Eric asked Pete, ‘What is he like?’ and Pete replied, ‘We are in a lot of trouble.’ We used to get Clapton sitting in a chair behind the stack with his ear pressed up against it trying to figure out what he was doing. But I was just hired part time while he was in England. When he went abroad, I was not invited. I was living at Noel Redding’s house and he needed an extra pair of hands. I have been really lucky. I have been in a few of the right places at the right time. My street credibility is incredible. I saw the Beatles at the Cavern, too. It ends up that I was on hallowed ground but it was actually a filthy hole.”
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“Lemmy was there about three months maximum,” laughs Chesters. “Somewhere between two and three months. After that I really only saw him intermittently. After the Hendrix thing, we always had the same women, one way or another. Sometimes I got there before he did and got one over, but only infrequently. In the early days he wasn’t the most outstanding musician I’d seen, but he did pull himself together and managed to be . . . he’s almost an icon, Lemmy, and it’s funny. It’s not necessarily because of his music. There was a period in the mid- or the late ’70s where he was known to hang out with debutantes in London. Now you know Lemmy, you know what he looks like, we all know the features. And none of us could understand why there was constantly, almost weekly, photographs of him in the leading London newspapers hanging out with debutantes. But that’s what he did. And he became an icon.”
“I lived with him for some time,” muses Hawkwind saxophonist Nik Turner, answering Lemmy’s drug question. “I thought Lemmy was a lovely guy, actually. We got on very well. He was a bit difficult to live with in some ways, because he would be sort of on a different time scale to other people in the band. He went his own way very much. I mean, the band were leaning towards a psychedelic sort of influence, really, and Lemmy wasn’t particularly into psychedelics. He was more into speed, you might say.”
Plus, he wasn’t much of a hippie. More like a biker, says Dave Brock. “Yeah, we used to know a lot of the Hells Angels in the early days and all that. But Lemmy was always more so buddies with them. I mean Motörhead had more of a problem with them than we did. Lemmy used to always put down on his guest list, ‘Hells Angels England.’ And sometimes you wouldn’t know who the fuck was turning up there. You’d go to his dressing room, and all the food and drink would be gone and you’d walk in, ‘What the fuck?! We don’t know anybody here.’ A bit problematic sometimes, you know. But we still do the odd bikers thing. We get along well with them actually. I mean, a lot of them are our age now. Their festivals are always well organized, well together. You very rarely get any trouble.”
With respect to Lemmy’s burgeoning recording career, following up his three singles with the Rocking Vickers, in 1969 Lemmy appeared on his first full-length record, Escalator, by Malaysian percussionist Sam Gopal. Lemmy is credited as Ian Willis, as he had been considering changing his last name to that of his stepfather, George Willis. Already long known informally as Lemmy, for years it was assumed the nickname came from young Ian’s frequent attempts to borrow money, as in “Lemme a fiver.” However, Lemmy later confessed that he made up the story and had been paying for it ever since.
“It was very convoluted, because we had no songs,” recalls Lemmy, when asked about those Sam Gopal days. “And then I stayed up all night on methamphetamine and wrote all the songs on the fucking album in one night. I was playing guitar then. But we never really could play live shows too well back then because they didn’t have contact mics for the tablas and things, which are very odd to amplify, because they rely on boom inside to get the sound; you can’t really record that. I mean you couldn’t microphone that; you couldn’t then anyway. That was 1968.”
Lemmy, built for speed with white Rickenbacker and early use of the bullet belt, accompanied by Larry Wallis on guitar and Lucas Fox on drums at this short cover-heavy gig in 1975.
© Paul Apperly
Lemmy’s next gig, after a brief situation with Simon King as Opal Butterfly, was to provide a breeding ground for Lemmy’s nasty sound, as it rumbled from both his bass and his face.
“After Hendrix, I became a dope dealer for a while and that was a natural apprenticeship for Hawkwind,” laughs Lem. “The guy that played the audio generator in Hawkwind ran out of money and went back to the band. He took me with him because he wanted one of his mates in the band. I had never played bass in my life. The idiot that was there before me left his bass there. It was like he said, ‘Please steal my gig’ so I stole his gig. So me being a bass player was an accident. I went to get a job as a guitar player with Hawkwind, and they decided they weren’t going to have another guitar player. The guy doing rhythm was going to do lead, so they said, ‘Who plays bass?’ And Dik Mik said, ‘He does.’ Bastard; I’d never even picked one up in my life. And I get up on stage with the fucking thing, because the bass player left his guitar in the gear truck. And Nik Turner was very helpful. He came over and said, ‘Make some noises in E. This song is called ‘You Shouldn’t Do That.’ And walked away from me.”
The “audio generator” Lemmy refers to is in fact Dik Mik, and it is said that a mutual fondness for amphetamines cemented Lemmy’s entry into the ranks of the notorious space rockers, through the recommendation of Dik Mik. Ironically, Lemmy’s behavior on speed would also be the reason he’d be thumped from the band later on.
“You’ve got to remember, Lemmy was a guitarist to start with,” notes Hawkwind guitarist and leader Dave Brock, spiritual twin to the original, pre-Motörhead Lemmy. “I mean, what happened was when Dik Mik brought Lemmy along, he didn’t have a bass. We had to go and buy him a second-hand bass. And of course Lemmy’s bass playing is very similar to guitar playing, in a sense, by playing block chords and stuff like that. So it was a different technique. Lemmy’s fantastic, obviously, now, but you have to think that at the time, the way he played, it was just different. So consequently, that�
�s why me and him used to play really well together, because I used to play similar lines to Lemmy. So that’s why we were able to play together very well. And now when I do a solo album, my bass playing is a bit like Lemmy’s. I play chords on the bass quite often. It’s a style of playing, really. Instead of picking it and playing note by note, quite often . . . it’s hard to explain without playing the bass. But when you’re playing, it’s quite easy, and Lemmy and I used to be able to do that together.”
“I don’t use distortion,” clarifies Lem. “I don’t use any pedals. No effects, just plug it straight into the amp. Just a basic Marshall, but it’s turned up very loud, and I hit the guitar very hard. That helps, too. But you’ve got to know how to hit it very hard. A lot of people hit it very hard and it don’t happen. Yeah, I’m doing the old-school version, no mechanics for me. Actually I don’t play bass. I play rhythm guitar and a bit of cockamamie lead guitar on a bass—that’s what I do. It’s a unique style but it’s not one that people have copied, if you’ve noticed, so I don’t think it’s that popular, but it works for me. I always hated it when you get a band playing that was really good, and then the riff drops out because the guitar player has to do a solo, and it sounds wimpy as shit with just the bass player behind him. So I always swore I’d never let that happen.”
Nik Turner drills down further to posit a source for the churning bass sound Lemmy would make famous. “The idea came from the fact that the previous bass player had been Dave Anderson, and Dave Anderson had a Rickenbacker. And Lemmy was a friend of Dik Mik’s, and he turned up at a rehearsal, and he said, ‘Oh, we need a bass player,’ and Lemmy said, ‘Well, I don’t play bass. I play guitar.’ He’d previously been a road manager for Jimi Hendrix. And we said, ‘Well, you know, there’s a bass here,’ which was Dave Anderson’s bass. And we gave the bass to Lemmy to play in that situation at that time. I’m not saying we gave him the bass. We gave him the bass to play. And then I think that’s where he started, really. Because he was an advocate of the Rickenbacker bass from then on, and he quickly gave it a great popularity, really. But Dave Anderson had played with Amon Duul II and I think he played the Rickenbacker then too. And so Lemmy had the Rickenbacker, but he had a guitar technique, and he played the Rickenbacker bass like a guitar—chords and stuff like that, rather than just notes. So he created his own sort of musical genre, really, with what he had at hand, and the situation he was in.”
Below proper chords there are bar (or barre) chords and then double stops, which generally refers to two strings being played at once but normally on a bowed instrument. Lemmy would go on to use mostly double stops, switching from fourths to fifths, plus single notes, as well as his turgid and toppy bass sound: lacking in low-end warmth and high on distortion through mid-range and high-end frequencies. His chosen weapon was a Rickenbacker 4001 bass which naturally lacks in low end, even more so when played through a stack and with acceptance of distortion and volume. This general philosophy when it comes to bass puts Lemmy in a club with the likes of Rush’s Geddy Lee and Chris Squire from Yes. The difference is that those two guys want their individual notes, their playing, to be heard whereas Lemmy just wanted to be heard.
“The bass and treble are all the way off and the mid-range is all the way up,” Lemmy told Jeb Wright of Classic Rock Revisited. “I came up with that by just fucking with the sound. I like that sound; it is kind of brutal but that is what we were looking for. I had a Rickenbacker with a Thunderbird pickup on it back in the old days. It was a horrible monster but it wore out eventually. I love the shape of Rickenbackers. I buy guitars for how they look. You can always fuck with the sound once you have them. You always had to change the pickups on the old Rickenbackers because they were crap. Now they have really good pickups. I have a signature bass with them that I designed.”
And as for his propensity to play more than one string at a time, having started on guitar is a piece of the story, continued Lem. “Partly it is, but it’s also because I am the only back end for the guitar player. I always hated bands where when the guitar player stopped playing the riff and started playing the solo, the whole back end falls out. I always made sure there was plenty behind them.”
Lemmy quickly became a beloved member of the Hawkwind clan. Appearing first on the band’s third studio album Doremi Fasol Latido (1972), plus Hall of the Mountain Grill (1974), Warrior on the Edge of Time (1975) and seminal 1973 double live album Space Ritual. Toward the end of his time with the band, Lemmy gave us signature rock songs soon to become Motörhead staples, namely “Lost Johnny” and “Motörhead.”
“Lost Johnny” is a co-write between Lemmy and the Deviants’ Mick Farren, but “Motörhead” (existing in versions with Lemmy singing and with Dave Brock singing) is a rare sole-Kilmister credit and his last for Hawkwind before his firing. The set piece for the band and life philosophy to come would be written at the Hyatt House hotel on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, ironic for the fact that Hollywood, and specifically the Strip, would become Lemmy’s home for the last decades of his life. “Did you know I wrote ‘Motörhead’ just down the street from here?” Lemmy told Jon Sutherland in 1982. “I was on the seventh floor of the Hyatt House, stoned out of my mind, playing Roy Wood’s guitar. Cars would keep stopping and cops would get out and get back in the car thinking, ‘I’m not going up there.’”
Reflects Brock on that Warrior on the Edge of Time era, “That [album has] got the ‘Motörhead’ with Lemmy singing it, and me singing it. Basically, it’s the last record that Lemmy did with us, and after that, we changed quite a bit, because of Lemmy, or because Lemmy went. Lemmy was a great influence.”
Lemmy’s firing from Hawkwind in May 1975 is the stuff of legends, almost amusing for the fact that he was already proving to be such an outlaw with substances that he could be fired from this notoriously drug-addled band for going too far.
“I was fired from Hawkwind,” explains Lemmy, in his curiously matter-of-fact manner indicative of the man’s view of an unjust world—in fact one in which he called his ex-mates fascists, rather than hippies. “I got busted going into Canada. My last gig with them was in Toronto. It was thrown out of court anyway, because it wasn’t what they said it was. So there was no criminal record attached to it. Hawkwind just threw me out because they were trying to throw me out for ages.” The border agents thought the white substance was heroin, but it was speed, not yet banned.
Asked about how these stories take on lives of their own over the years, Lemmy agrees, adding, “You know, I tell you, it’s a funny thing. If you go back as long as I do, there are a lot of people in bands. Bands don’t remember that well apparently. Take any four members of Hawkwind and me, you will find five different recollections of the same incident and it runs all the way through your time with the band. You think, is that really what happened? Am I right and they fucked up? Hang on, what drugs were we doing that day? Was I out of it? Was there something that pissed me off? You try explain it and there is no explanation. You remember it different, because you’re standing in a different part of the room and somebody else spoke to you at the same time the incident went on. It’s funny. That’s why I really don’t rely on eyewitnesses anymore, man. If I was the cops, I’d throw that category out.”
Concerning Lemmy’s ousting from the Hawkwind ranks, Nik Turner recalls that “the conditions in which he left were sad, really. We were playing in Detroit and were going to Toronto. We were in the United States still, and I think we stopped at a service station, and Lemmy went to the toilet and fell asleep in the toilet or something and we couldn’t find him. We were ready to go to travel on, and we looked everywhere for him. We couldn’t find him. We thought he’d probably hooked up with some people that he may have met and gone off with them, because he did spontaneous things like that, quite frequently. Not on a regular basis, but it wasn’t out of the question in our minds that he might’ve done that. And so consequently we traveled on without him. And apparently he did;
he’d fallen asleep in the toilet.”
Not so, says Lemmy, who has said that he wandered off with his camera to take some pictures and was knocked out and mugged of his camera, only to awaken and begin his odyssey.
“And then coming through customs,” continues Turner, “he’d been searched and they found what they thought was cocaine in his possession, and they arrested him for supposedly possession of cocaine. But when they analyzed it, they found out it was amphetamines, and they didn’t take such a dim view of amphetamines, so they let him go. But by this time, certain things had happened that had made him rather difficult to work with. And so we had a meeting and it was decided that he should leave the band. And then everybody was saying, ‘Well, who’s going to tell him?’ And nobody wanted to. But I just took the bull by the horns and said, ‘Well, I’ll tell him.’ I had the very unpleasant job of breaking the news to him. And by this time we’d flown another bass player out from England. We had another guitarist, actually. We had Paul Rudolph from the Pink Fairies and he wasn’t a bass player either. He was a guitarist. But we knew he could play bass, and we asked him to come and play with us, and Lemmy was sort of sent back to Britain. I mean, it was all very sad, and Lemmy sort of held it against me, because I was the one who told him. Although now having explained it to him, it’s not something he still really holds against me. But it was all a bit of a problem, even though he did make it through the border.”
Notes Hawkwind expert Rob Godwin, “Apparently they flew Paul Rudolph in from England because he was Canadian, and he could actually get into Canada without a work permit at the last minute. As for Lemmy’s bust, I’ve heard two stories on why he was let go. One was that he was released because they charged him with possession of the wrong thing, and under Canadian law you can’t charge somebody twice with the same crime. The other story was that they released him because amphetamine was considered a foodstuff in Canada and was not illegal.”
Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers Page 2