“In my early 20s, I had kind of stopped playing. I used to jam with people and that was about it. Like I say, I had some trouble with the law and that is when people told me that I needed to get serious about music and change things around. Up until Curtis Knight, I was not that serious about music. Once I got in that band, I started to take things more serious. When I got out of Curtis Knight I did the thing that was on Anchor Records but I never finished it, as I fell out with the guys.
“That was when I did the solo thing and, at the same time, I was working on a houseboat; I was building it.”
Going nowhere fast, Eddie nonetheless told Wright, “I had not given up on the music biz. I was working on the boat to raise money to pay for my solo project called Continuous Performance. I had already laid down the four tracks for the album, and once again, I found myself singing. The money I was making on that boat is what I was using to make my solo album but, once again, I couldn’t find a singer, so I sang it myself. I am not a singer so it never went any further. I met Phil Taylor because he came and applied for a job on the houseboat. He needed a job and I gave him one on the boat where I was, by then, a foreman. This was a long project and I was the only one still standing. The boat is still there today on the River Thames in Chelsea. I pass it quite often and always have a brief reminisce. Phil was crazy, but a really good guy and we got along. Fate? I definitely think so!”
Phil recalls about how Eddie looked the mellow hippie with the long hair, but really cracked the whip, not too much of a problem, really, because Taylor got a lot of work done, arriving in the morning still speeding from the night before and maybe the night before that. A Scottish friend had told Phil that his foreman boss was also a guitarist and the stage was set.
An odd way to look at it, but in essence, Eddie found himself in Motörhead because of the On Parole record. “Yes, that’s right, because it had all come about because the original band had made an album—I wasn’t in the band then—with Larry Wallis. He had done so many overdubs in the studio, he felt that he couldn’t do it live. So that’s when they started—he told Phil that he would like to try a second guitarist to help out. So that’s where Phil made that original contact with me, to become Larry Wallis’s second guitar player. But obviously, like I said, when the rehearsals happened, Larry had already left Motörhead in his head, you know? I don’t even know why he had come to rehearsal, really. I mean, that was the last time he ever played with Lemmy. He already had enough of it, for various reasons. He got me in the band so he could exit the band. I mean, Motörhead is not an easy band to be in. It’s not like a piece of cake; it was very difficult. Lemmy was difficult, and the three of us, it could be intense. What can I say? It was intense.”
With Fast Eddie, Lemmy had found in a partner another outsider, another misfit, and something of an enigma, given his traditional rock upbringing contrasted against the abrasive, incendiary music he was about to craft, clang and kerrang.
“My first hero was Eric Clapton with the Yardbirds,” Eddie told Classic Rock Revisited about his staid rock roots. “They used to play down the road so I was able to see them regularly. Five Live Yardbirds was like my bible and I played the whole album with my first band, the Bitter End, mostly in my dad’s garage. Then, Eric went with John Mayall, and I played all of that album with my next band, Umble Blues. Then, along came Hendrix, the Cream and Jeff Beck’s Truth, and that was kind of the foundation of my music. I always thought of myself as third-generation blues, as I followed the above. They, of course, followed the original American blues players. I guess these were the influences that helped shape a lot of my life experience. My roots are definitely in the blues, but, as I said, I am third-generation. I think that’s why Lemmy and I got on so well when we were writing. We both had similar musical roots. We wrote some great songs together and there are definitely some of our early influences in there.”
As for Lemmy’s claim to fame, Hawkwind, Eddie figures, “I was never a big Hawkwind fan because they didn’t have a lead guitar player. I think that kept me away from them. When I would listen to them I would wonder where the lead guitar was. Meeting Lemmy for the first time, I was surprised how friendly he was and keen to have the rehearsal for my audition. I have to say I liked him from the start and was looking forward to a jam together. Having been with Hawkwind, he had toured the States and had all that experience to pass on to Phil and myself. I always thought of him as a big brother.”
And so the improbable trio that would become the classic Motörhead lineup was born. We have the “big brother” outlaw and the somewhat dispirited outsider on bass and guitar, respectively. They are, in Eddie’s estimation, one rock ’n’ roll generation apart. But also by Eddie’s math, so is the band’s drummer, Phil Taylor, one generation fresher than the two plyers of stringed instruments within Motörhead. Phil Taylor was born in September 1954, injecting roughly five years of youth atop Eddie, and 10 years to the biggest brother in the band, Lemmy.
CHAPTER 3
Motörhead: “Like a fucking train going through your head.”
Gigging, poverty, more poverty, and then some more gigging eventually led Lemmy, Eddie and Phil to an attempt at a single for seat-of-the-pants Stiff Records. The single indeed got recorded, the band strumming up “White Line Fever” backed with “City Kids” in December ’76, roughly a year after their first gig together, when they blew headliners Blue Öyster Cult off the stage. But the record had to be withdrawn before it ever saw the light of day, when United Artists, who wouldn’t release their own sessions with the band, screamed breach of contract. Soon Motörhead found themselves legally able to sign themselves over to Chiswick, but again, comically, only for a single.
“Yeah, I went to shows,” recalls BÖC manager Sandy Pearlman. “I saw [Motörhead], not at the Roundhouse, but opening for Blue Öyster Cult, the first show that the three of them did together, for better or worse. They had opened for Blue Öyster Cult at the . . . I think we did five days or something at the Hammersmith; that’s when I first saw Motörhead, and two years later they were a really big band. It was interesting. I was on a panel with Lemmy a few years back. I was like, ‘Lemmy, I saw you guys open for Blue Öyster Cult on all those shows,’ and then I think I saw them at some big outdoor show in France, and then I saw them next again in France, with Shakin’ Street opening for them. And I said, ‘It had become so loud by this time that you and Blue Cheer share the distinction of bands that were best enjoyed from outside of the hall.’ He liked that! That was cool! And I guess it was cool. It was really true. Even for me, it was like OTT. And I have abnormal tolerances for volume, so you can only imagine how loud this was. But they had some pretty good shows. You saw the opening act inside the hall and then you went outside and left the door open and listened to Motörhead if you could find a protective surface.”
“We got offered opening for Blue Öyster Cult at Hammersmith Odeon,” recalls Doug Smith, “and of course we took it. And the sound engineer, who went on to engineer Sutherland Brothers and Quiver, and then ended up being the managing director and chairman of one of the largest cabling companies in music, who cabled most of China’s auditoriums, nowadays, anyway, he mixed the band. And every time Lemmy sort of leaned forward and put his ear out and looked at the audience and said, ‘Can you hear us?’ the audience was like, ‘No,’ and he shouted to him to turn it up. And it went so high that eventually it was painful. Motörhead probably did blow them off the stage, but they blew them off the stage with the sound, the volume. And that’s where they got this reputation as the loudest band in the world. But they didn’t do so well as far as the media were concerned. Because the next week, the headlines in Sounds or NME were in effect calling them the worst band in the world.”
But soon after that, it was time to get serious, and not just seriously loud. “I can picture it in my head just now!” enthuses Fast Eddie, when asked about getting to record an album with Motörhead, the next step in what was
so far looking like a dire career ladder.
“Speedy Keen from Thunderclap Newman, he was a producer, and he was sort of a mate of mine. I’d met him in Ealing years ago, and we used to see each other occasionally and have a jam together and all that. And he was obviously quite successful and a lovely bloke. And I had this nice . . . well, it wasn’t a nice flat, it was a squat sort of thing, around in West Kent. It wasn’t a squat, but it was sort of a tumble-down shack, with very cheap rent. And people used to come around there and hang out, and it became quite a place. And Speedy would come and hang around, and I was talking to Speedy because we were going to break up at that gig, at the Marquee gig. Phil had kind of had enough. He said, ‘Listen, we’re not going anywhere,’ and we had a few disappointments with Stiff Records with that single we had done, so there was disappointment.
Lemmy and Phil, April 5, 1979, at the Empire Theatre in Liverpool.
© Alan Perry/IconicPix
“But there was nobody in the business like Motörhead,” continues Eddie. “They were scared stiff of us, because we looked so fucking angry. The Hells Angels and the bikers used to come to our shows. And of course, we just didn’t stick with regular people too well, like promoters and the business. So we always felt that they were all dead against us, and we were fucking soldiering on against all that. But it was getting difficult. Phil was intimating that maybe we should knock it on its head, because it’s not getting anywhere. And I said, well let’s fucking . . . let’s get the last gig at the Marquee recorded, and at least we’ll have something, for history’s sake, you know? This was a Friday night in April of 1977. I was really quite serious. So of course we didn’t know anybody. We didn’t have any fucking money so there was nothing we could do, and Lemmy had come in contact with Ted Carroll from Chiswick Records. I’d said, ‘Why don’t you give him a phone, and see if he’ll be into bringing down a mobile and recording it?’ So that’s how that came about. And he said, ‘We can’t use the Marquee, because they want five hundred quid for you to record there.’ And that’s even before you start. Money was tight in the ’70s. He said we couldn’t pay that kind of money to record there.
“So at that point, [Carroll] said, ‘Look, I’ll pay for you to do a single.’ So after the Marquee gig . . . Speedy had this big old Mercedes—it was fucking great, an old banger, but it was fantastic—we all jumped in that, and he drove us down to this studio in Kent that night, and we set up that night at about 2 a.m. and played all that night and all the next day, and just laid down all the tracks as we played them onstage, did the overdubs and all that.
“I had done an album with Curtis Knight in 24 hours. I told the guys this, and as we had been playing the tunes over and over, it made sense. So we started recording about 4 a.m. on Saturday and finished everything at about 6 a.m. Sunday morning. We crashed out and left Speedy and John [Burns], the engineer, to do the mixing and they had anything that was left to keep them awake.”
“So come sort of Sunday, we were sleeping, we passed out sometime, I don’t know, Saturday night or Sunday about 6 o’clock in the morning. And when we woke up, Speedy and Johnny were still mixing the track ‘Motörhead,’ and they were mixing it when we had left them. They were mixing it all night and they had 32 mixes of this fucking thing. A pile of boxes . . . because we were all fucking speeding, you know? And the only reason we fell asleep is because we just ran out of fucking . . . we just ran out. We’d had enough.”
But when Eddie and the guys woke up and heard Speedy and Johnny working on “Motörhead,” what they didn’t know was that in the interim, the producers had mixed the rest of the album.
“And then of course Ted came down about 6 o’clock Sunday evening, and instead of saying we had a single, we said, proudly, ‘Here Ted, we’ve actually made a little surprise for you. We’ve done an album.’ And we played it for him and he fucking loved it. He was bowled over by this. Because he was a really genuine . . . he loved the music; he was into it. And the rest, really after that, was history. He wanted us to remix the ‘Motörhead’ track because it was going to be a single, but we went to Olympic to do that. So basically it was all done in those 36 hours.”
Eddie told Jeb Wright of Classic Rock Revisited, “Once we had an album the whole landscape changed. We had hope again and there was interest from promoters thanks to Ted and our part-time managers Doug Smith and Frank Kennington. They had something to work with so it was game on.”
“Doing the rest of the album was easy,” says Clarke. “Just that they got stuck on ‘Motörhead,’ because it was going to be the flagship song. And because we were all out of our fucking tree—Speedy and John particularly—because they were sitting there engineering, they got right carried away. But that was our thing—drinking and speed. I didn’t drink before I joined Motörhead, but after I started taking the speed, I needed something to calm me down a bit. Because before that I was a bit of a hippie; I used to smoke dope and stuff, so of course, I was quite laid-back. But once I started taking the speed, the fucking dope didn’t work or nothing. And of course, it was one of those things that was cheap. Speed was cheap, you know? And Special Brew, the beer we drank, was cheap. Because there was no money, we just had to get by on what we could. That changed later, but that’s another story.
“So yeah, they were doing speed before I came along. Because I never used to drink. I was a dope man, you know, a hippie. A long-haired hippie. But I could fend for myself, that’s what I did, but I would take a little bit now again, because when I was working, it used to help. But whenever I was with them, Phil and Lemmy, suddenly it was all the time, and then of course I had to start drinking, to calm me down a bit. And that’s how my drinking started, because like I say, I didn’t really drink before I joined Motörhead.
“Because I was a late starter, that’s maybe why I couldn’t handle the drink as well as they could, you know. It caused a few problems, but not too many. But it caused one or two. But no, it really was three people who were thrown together through weird circumstances. And the first time we played, it was probably not good, but after a while you work it in, you know? Between the three of you, you work it out. And the one thing we had going for us, we wanted to work it out, and we could work together and we were friends, enough. And we really did sort this thing out, and in the end we really had a great band. And we were writing great tunes, and rocking on.”
But the drugs and booze, Eddie remarks, “It’s kind of what made the world go ’round back then. I was not particularly into speed but I soon got the hang of it. I wasn’t a big drinker, but after six months with Motörhead it seemed a natural progression. Of course when we started we did not have a pot to piss in. That always keeps you pretty healthy.”
One doesn’t think of Speedy Keen as a producer who would churn out a gruff and rough album such as Motörhead, even if he had just worked with the notorious Johnny Thunders the previous month. I mean, words have failed critics for years to describe the sound of this middle finger of a record. One could argue that sonically it was approaching putrid, halfway to what Venom would willfully cough up like phlegm three years later and pretty much alone as a predecessor to the toxic works of that notorious band from Newcastle.
“It was just the way we were, really,” shrugs Eddie, by way of explanation. “It was quite a weird sound we had. Okay, there’s Lemmy’s bass obviously, which has always been the same, that grinding . . . like a fucking train going through your head. Phil was a complete nutter on the drums; he was all over the place. And I was kind of . . . I was struggling to keep up, but I was like the newest member, so I was just cutting my teeth. And of course we didn’t have great equipment in those days, or guitars. I had a Gibson, but it only had one pickup, an SG, an old 1960, ’62. It wasn’t that old then, but it is now. And I’ve still got it somewhere. I keep it in its original case with all the Motörhead stickers on it. It’s something I sort of treasure. And so we did have a bit of trouble wit
h our sound. And nobody really tried to record Motörhead in this way before, and it was really quite difficult, I think, for Speedy and everyone else, to get a grip of it.
“I had to work into it, without a doubt,” said Eddie to Jeb Wright. “It was very difficult at first. Phil was having trouble as well. It was a difficult situation as Lemmy set the stage by the way he plays rhythm bass. He really plays the bass like a rhythm guitar so there was no real bass parts in that band. There was just this god-awful noise coming from the other side of the stage. Of course, that is what made us unique. I was really a blues player as I loved bands like Led Zeppelin. I had to adjust to work with Lemmy. I actually switched from my Les Paul to a Stratocaster as I found that the Strat cut through the sound better. I needed to cut through Lemmy’s sound rather than to try to get louder than Lemmy. The Strat sound is a bit thin but it does cut through and when you run that through a distortion box it sounds rather nice. I really did have to adjust my sound to fit Motörhead’s sound. It took a while to get it right. When we started out we had headlines saying that we were the worst band in the world. After about 12 months we began to come to grips with it and that is when things started to happen. It really did take a year or so to get settled in, but once we were in the saddle then we were off and running.
Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers Page 5