Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  To clarify, the band had played Detroit on a Saturday and traveled separately, stranding a temporarily lost Lemmy on the Sunday, as Nik explains, with most of the guys arriving in Toronto on that day. Lemmy, having had to hitchhike on the U.S. side and then having been flown from Windsor, Ontario, shows up on the Monday and the gig that night at Massey Hall is to be his last with Hawkwind. It is decided on Tuesday that Lemmy be sent home, and Paul Rudolph’s first gig with the band turns out to be Cleveland the following Friday, with an interim gig in Dayton, Ohio, having been canceled.

  Further explaining the firing, Nik says, “Because we didn’t know where he was, and because we were told he’d been busted for hard drugs, it was very inconvenient. We didn’t know how long he was going to be in custody. We just had to make other arrangements, basically. So I think he played one gig and then we dispensed with him. And I mean, he was still on bail for supposed possession of hard drugs. It was all too complicated, really. It’s not the sort of thing you want in the band. All you want to do is get to the next gig and play. You’re on a tour, you’re committed, and you don’t really need those sorts of complications. You just want to get on with it and not deal with the side issues of people’s personal problems within the band.”

  “The story as it goes is that he was using different drugs to the rest of them,” says Godwin. “They were mostly into hallucinogenics—LSD and stuff like that—and pot, and he was taking speed. Him and Dik Mik, who was ostensibly the synthesizer player, they were speed freaks, and the problem—I don’t think was a personality clash as much as it was a case of that the speed guys would stay up for 24 hours and sleep for 24 hours, and frequently Lemmy would be late or barely show up to get in the bus or get on the truck or show up on stage. And the bust at the border was the straw that broke the camel’s back. If you look at the interviews he gave, he’s said he’d still be in the band if they hadn’t fired him. He loved being in that band. Dave loved playing with him. And that period of Hawkwind, if you actually listen to what they were playing when he was in the band, which is from January ’72 to May ’75, it’s the stuff that particularly stands out.”

  “He was not at all in the limelight,” answers Rob, when asked what Lemmy’s stage presence was like during his run with Hawkwind. “He was quite content to stand in the shadows as the rest of them were. They all stood in the shadows. In ’72, when I saw them, the house lights went down and all you can see onstage was red lights on the amps. And then Nik Turner walks out and starts throwing joss sticks into the audience—lit. You can imagine the fire marshal letting them do that now. And you cannot see the band at all. And then they start playing and the psychedelic lights and smoke take over and you never saw them. If you look at photos from that period, you will see that Lemmy is standing in the back lineup, along with Dave, and the only people who step forward to the microphone were Nik and Bob Calvert, when they were alternating doing narrations. And then Dave would step up to sing. But Lemmy was always singing backing vocals for the most part. And he’d stand in the back, right in front of his amps stacked up, virtually further back than the drummer—Simon King was further forward than Lemmy was. And Dave too.”

  “So Dave and Lemmy more or less stood side by side, back, almost behind the drummer,” continues Godwin. “And both of them said over the years that they had this telepathic sort of empathy when they were playing together. And Lemmy, right up to just before he died, said he’d never had that before or since with anybody else. Him and Dave were totally lockstep. You only have to listen to Space Ritual to hear it. It’s a live album, and you’re going, fucking hell, how are these guys doing this?!”

  Cleaved from his space-rock soul brother, Lemmy managed to wrestle home from Canada three bass guitars and a suitcase on the plane. Licking his wounds in England, he would have to plot his next move, forever saddened by the loss of his Hawkwind family. His first plan of action back in London would be to abscond with what was on the band premises of his leftover Hawkwind gear and promptly paint it all black.

  CHAPTER 2

  “A bullet belt in one hand and a leather jacket in the other.”

  And so Lemmy is fired for the last time, deposited back in London, his ideas for rock ’n’ roll nastiness suddenly potent and palpable now that he is forced into being his own boss. He would soon create a blast of a band, first under the name Bastard—“Our manager pointed out that we would have a hard time getting on TV with that name; I have to agree with him, you know”—and then, more prudently, Motörhead, named for his old song, named for being a speeder, up all night, up all day, up the next night too. Says Lem, “The name comes from the last song I ever wrote for Hawkwind. I thought it just sounded like a good name. When you name a band, it is really tedious. We just thought Motörhead sounded good and I think it worked out for us. We were very lucky to get that great logo.”

  Summarizing the series of events so far, Rob Godwin says, “So, ’75 comes along, and Hawkwind have put out a single: ‘Motörhead,’ with Lemmy singing. The song ended up as the B-side of the single ‘Kings of Speed,’ to promote Warrior on the Edge of Time. But they had also recorded a version in the studio with Dave Brock singing it, a little bit earlier. They had recorded a version with just the power trio: Lemmy, Dave and Simon King, with Dave singing it first. Incidentally, the roots of the song ‘Motörhead’ go deeper than that. Right after they did Doremi Fasol Latido, Bob Calvert, who was Hawkwind’s vocalist and narrator, did a solo album called Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters [1974] and Lemmy is on that. This is something that every Lemmy fan should go listen to. Calvert was not famous enough to be able to pull in lots of big names, so he does a solo album, and he essentially brought in Hawkwind as a backing band. And the first track on that is called ‘The Aerospaceage Inferno,’ and if you listen to the bass on that, it’s the song ‘Motörhead.’ And this is two years before he supposedly wrote the song ‘Motörhead.’

  “And the roots of Motörhead are in the Space Ritual album as well, which is also 1973,” adds Rob. “Lemmy joins in January ’72, and he plays on Greasy Truckers Party [an album by various artists], which is where the recording of ‘Silver Machine’ comes from, and is released in the spring and goes up to like No. 2 or No. 3. That is when I first saw them; I saw them in August 1972. And immediately after that, the first studio album that Lemmy did with them was Doremi. And then the tour for that is what produced the Space Ritual album. And if you listen to those two records, particularly Space Ritual, which is the one everybody raves about, you know, it’s a power trio. It’s Dave, Lemmy and Simon King. I mean, it’s like a power trio with special effects. Somebody once said it’s as though Hendrix, Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd had an orgy on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, which I kind of liked. In Star Trek, all those sort of weird sound effects that they used to have going on the bridge, I’ve actually seen bloopers where none of that is on there and it’s dead flat. It’s only when they edit in all those sound effects that it actually comes to life. I always thought of Hawkwind as being like that, when Lemmy was in the band particularly. It was like this kick-ass power trio—with a bunch of sound effects.

  “Anyway, Hawkwind put out the album, and Lemmy gets fired at the end of the North American tour. Hawkwind goes back to England and headlines Reading Festival in August, and the album was doing really well at that point—and Lemmy is out on the skids. I was at Reading, and I remember being really disappointed that he wasn’t there. Although, I think Paul Rudolph was a really good bass player and guitar player and did a good job. But it was just the fact that Lemmy wasn’t there that was very sad. But what Doug Smith—who was Hawkwind’s manager and soon to be Motörhead’s manager—told me is that when they got back, Lemmy was really, really upset. And by all accounts he actually cried when he was told he was out of the band. Doug said, ‘Lemmy came to me and said, “What are we going to do?”’ And Doug said, ‘Well, I’ll sort something out.’ And the next thing Lemmy is told is, ‘You’
ve got a gig this weekend.’ Lemmy was like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t have a band.’ And he said, ‘Well, put a band together, because you’ve got a gig.’ So he made some phone calls and found Larry Wallis and Lucas Fox. Larry Wallis was another Pink Fairies guy. Larry Wallis was a Pink Fairies guy, and Paul Rudolph, who had replaced [Lemmy] in Hawkwind, was a Pink Fairies guy, and quite often Pink Fairies and Hawkwind used to play a lot of songs together. They were called Pinkwind. Not long after that, they would play opening shows for Hawkwind, as Doug would double bill them together.”

  ~

  “Lemmy and I were involved from 1970 through to, I think, 1989,” recalls Doug Smith, who was the manager of Hawkwind and Motörhead and would later have great success with Chumbawumba. “And of course he came through Hawkwind and into Motörhead, having been dispersed on the Canadian border for something that, quite honestly, I won’t even get into at this point, but it was a very manipulative situation that took place. And for a period of about six months after his sacking, which quite honestly shouldn’t have happened, he sort of tried to put Motörhead together, although there wasn’t really a name of the band. He had my support, and obviously financial support, to try to form a band. And he went through the likes of Lucas Fox, Larry Wallis, and I think even Luther Grosvenor [of Mott the Hoople] for a short while was being considered, if the thing was going to become a four-piece. And he sort of settled on those three: Larry, Lucas and Lemmy.”

  “Went over to Chelsea,” recalls Larry Wallis of that first meeting, speaking with Forced Exposure magazine, “went in there, plugged into an amplifier, said, ‘One, two, three, go!’ and the three of us made the most horrible racket you’ve ever heard. We did that for 15 minutes. When we were finished, we all said, ‘Great! Aren’t we wonderful? Let’s all be in a band.’ Then Lemmy put out a big line of white stuff and said, ‘Do you want some of that?’ I asked the dreaded question, ‘What is it?’ He said, ‘Amphetamine sulphate.’ I stayed awake for the next three years. I didn’t even blink for three years.”

  Larry Wallis, ex–Pink Fairies, not looking the part at this early Motörhead gig at Barbarella’s on Cumberland Street in Birmingham, August 12, 1975.

  © Paul Apperly

  But as Doug explains, Motörhead didn’t happen as quickly as lore would have it. “No, not at all. What basically happened was Lemmy went into a major depression after that. Because as far as he was concerned, he just wanted to rejoin Hawkwind. He didn’t think that Blackie [Paul Rudolph], who was the replacement bass player, would last the tenure, and sooner or later Dave Brock would give in. It was just Dave, really, that manipulated the situation. And, you know, Lemmy could be a complete pain in the ass sometimes, as far as being reliable. And I think that his two days of disappearance prior to the crossing of the Canadian border had a lot to do with the band finally just getting rid of him. And it hadn’t been the first time. It’d probably been about the 50th time. I’m exaggerating; it must’ve been at least the 10th time, there’s no doubt about it.

  “So he was happy to hang out for that initial period, in the hope that the band would change its mind and he would rejoin and life would carry on. Because in actual fact, at that particular point, Hawkwind was very successful. That’s where he wanted to be. And starting a new career and a new life for himself was going to be hard. What basically happened then was that we suggested to him that he should try to put an act together. And it became a rather long-winded situation, because he was in a rehearsal studio, and, you know, he wanted to rejoin Hawkwind. So he took his time. They took a while before they played their first date.”

  Note the lack of umlauts and the ex-Hawkwind designation. Little Bob Story was France’s semi-famous answer to the U.K. pub rock sensation. Edgar Broughton Band was closely aligned with Hawkwind in the freak community.

  Lemmy, Larry and Lucas played their first gig ever at the Roundhouse in London, opening for Greenslade, on July 20, 1975, taking the stage to a recording of a Hitler speech and the sound of marching soldiers—quite the effect. The set list was a loveably lazy one that could only be played by a band that barely existed at this juncture. Covers all, the most cover-y were “Leaving Here,” “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” and “I’m Waiting for the Man”—the first two demonstrative of Lemmy’s pride in old rock ’n’ roll schooling, the latter apropos of nothing. But the balance pointed the crooked finger way for Lemmy’s concept. There was Hawkwind classic “Silver Machine” and from Larry’s old band, Pink Fairies, “City Kids,” the opening track from that band’s final album, 1973’s Kings of Oblivion. Codifying and underscoring Lemmy’s unsteady idea were his couple of penned and co-penned Hawkwind signatures “Lost Johnny” and “Motörhead,” the latter used as opener and soon to become the band’s “Black Sabbath” and “Iron Maiden.”

  Wrote Geoff Barton in his review of the gig for Sounds, surely the band’s first notice, “Given the short amount of time M’head have had to rehearse and forgetting (if at all possible) about the utterly disastrous version of ‘Silver Machine’ that they played, it was a promising showing. If the band can tighten up (both musically and physically) then there’ll be little to touch them in the bulldozer music league and numbers like ‘Lost Johnny’ and ‘City Kids’ could well develop into show-stoppers. ‘This will be the dirtiest band in the world,’ announced Lemmy, upon forming this new band. At the moment Motörhead are just slightly grubby, but they’re well on their way.”

  Added Nick Kent in the NME, addressing a gig weeks later when Motörhead opened for Blue Öyster Cult, “The fact that Lemmy’s consortium raging through the likes of ‘Bye Bye Johnny’ and ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ ultimately comes on like nothing so much as Budgie on methedrine can’t exactly gladden the soul of the more discerning metal aficionado. Forced exile camping it up at the Roundhouse should keep them from harm until such time as they see their way to approaching their craft with something other than all the panache of a butcher stripping meat from an overripe carcass.”

  “The early audiences were ‘amused’—all these blank people standing with their mouths hanging open,” scoffed Lemmy, speaking with Chuck Eddy. “People call us heavy metal because we have long hair. If we had short hair, they would’ve called us punk. We’re a rock band. I am rock ’n’ roll. I’ve seen the whole thing. I remember Elvis’s first record. I think we have more in common with the Band. When we first started, we were playing ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ and all these Yardbirds-style songs. I wanted to be the MC5. We ‘bend’ like dance music. Except it’s too fast to dance to.”

  Lucas Fox, sporting a bit of a rocker/Teddy Boy look and an odd tom-tom configuration, 1975.

  © Paul Apperly

  Doug remembers one of the band’s earliest dates at the Greyhound club in Croydon. In fact, he is adamant that this “semi” gig took place on July 17, 1975, making this, in fact, Motörhead’s first show, not the commonly referred to July 20 show at the Roundhouse—well, sort of. “It was quite a large club, in actual fact, a ballroom above a pub,” relates Smith. “The poster for the show read ‘Lemmy’s Motörhead.’ Everybody assumed there would be a lot of people; in fact, it was probably about 65, 75 percent filled. Halfway or 20 minutes into the gig, Lemmy stopped playing and said he couldn’t play anymore, and went off. His fingers stopped working basically. He said they froze. And so I had to actually stand at the venue entrance and hand back the ticket money to all the punters who’d come in. The promoter, Steve Mason, made me do it. And strangely enough, Steve ended up being the managing director of Windsong, one of the largest independent music distribution companies in the U.K. But the Greyhound was a very important venue, and they didn’t want their reputation damaged, so they made me pay the ticket money back to the punters.”

  Exploitative release On Parole was further delegitimized by being made part of a series of records with simil
ar graphics under The Rock File banner.

  This first incarnation of Motörhead signed to United Artists, as Lemmy was still contractually bound to Hawkwind’s longtime label: Lemmy, as mentioned, using drummer Lucas Fox and guitarist Larry Wallis to make his vision real. A dodgy, uneven album was recorded in 1975, which the label didn’t enjoy, preferring not to release it, that is, until the band had moved on to Bronze Records and become famous. On Parole would be issued in 1980, and it’s obvious why the label passed the first time—the sessions revealed a wobbly band unsure of where they were going.

  Recalls Smith on the aborted record with United Artists, “You have to remember this is all going on through the lens of four, four and a half sackings by the band, because every time Lemmy ran out of money, I’d get sacked. Anyway, we’d reached a point where my partner Richard Ogden and myself formed Western Productions, to put Motörhead’s albums out through United Artists. And we had been able to get a substantial advance for him to record and work with Dave Edmunds. Lemmy wanted to work with Dave Edmunds because Dave Edmunds was Lemmy’s favorite, favorite artist. So Dave Edmunds went down to Rockfield, and they started the production, and eventually they spent all the money. So United Artists went, ‘We’re not giving them any more money until we get some tracks.’ So when I told Lemmy that, he sacked me. And he said, oh, I’ll get a manager who’ll give us some money. So then they had a guy called English Frank, who became very well known in Los Angeles for his free newspaper. His brother had a small photographic business, and he, I think, banked off his dad and put his money into Motörhead.”