Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  O’er to side two of the album and another couple of riding songs underscore the bitter, weather-blasted, leather-faced theme: “White Line Fever” and “Keep Us on the Road” were a couple of new ones for our desperate and sleep-deprived trio of heroes.

  “For ‘White Line Fever,’” recalls Eddie, “I think it was, ‘We’ve got to write something, guys.’ We were all saying that: we’ve got to write something. So I just came up with that riff, and the rest of it, of course we just all came in on E. We were very keen in those days, playing-wise. We loved playing together and making fucking noise. So we just kept jamming on it, and Lemmy is actually a very good vocalist, I think; I really like Lemmy’s voice. And he would just start singing on it and so of course we knocked it into shape. It was quite a simple song; it didn’t really go far. It was basically on a 12-bar framework, but riffing, so it’s sort of disguised. And ‘Keep Us on the Road’ was another one where I was just coming up with a riff. I had all these riffs going on in my head, it seems. So as I threw the riffs out, Phil and Lemmy would pick up on them, and between us, we would knock them into a song. And that was really how we wrote all the time, the whole way through, a little bit out of the ordinary.”

  There were also covers on the album, such as “Train Kept a-Rollin’.” Explains Eddie, “We used all the songs off of On Parole, basically; we left a couple off. But we did about eight of them, I think. But we needed more material. We managed to write two. But ‘Train Kept a-Rollin’’ and things like ‘I’m Your Witchdoctor’ were just numbers we thought of that we could do, to give us an hour’s worth of material to do a few shows, you see? Because it was all sort of hand-to-mouth in those days. It wasn’t the glory days; it was tough, in the ’70s. We didn’t have fuck-all, and it was just one of those situations. So we just had to make do with the material.”

  Continues Eddie, “Lemmy and I of course, we were sort of Yardbirds fans, back in the ’60s—we had a lot in common on that front. And ‘Witchdoctor’ was done by John Mayall; that was another ’60s thing. So it was going back to our roots. The Yardbirds did ‘Train Kept a-Rollin’,’ and Aerosmith did it in the ’70s. Though we were actually taking it from the Yardbirds version, with Jeff Beck, after Eric had left.”

  “Oh yeah, Lemmy knew a lot of that stuff, definitely,” adds Phil, expressing an interesting view on the recording of covers. “Because in his formative years, he was first and foremost a fan of all those bands, and he used to play all the 45s. [Lemmy] was totally into the American sound, because that’s where it all came from. I mean, did you ever see a movie called Stardust, back in the ’70s, with David Essex? It was about English guys in the late ’50s, and they would form a band, and Keith Moon was in it as well—he was the actual drummer. And there is this one scene where they’re rehearsing in a little town hall, and they’re all playing, and they’re playing an original song David Essex has written, and the guy walks in and says, ‘Oi, what the fuck are you playing?!’ And they said, ‘Well, it’s one of our songs.’ And then Ringo Starr says, ‘What are you talking about?! You’ve got to be an American to play your own songs.’ So it was like that. People thought that only Americans could write original songs.”

  In total, the band chose to include versions of every song first generated at the spurned On Parole sessions save for “Fools,” “Leaving Here,” “On Parole” and “City Kids.” The new ones were “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” “White Line Fever” and “Keep Us on the Road.” Old friend, deviant and co-writer of “Lost Johnny” with Lemmy in Hawkwind, Mick Farren, was back and in the credits for “Keep Us on the Road.”

  “Yes, he did that one and ‘Damage Case’ for us,” recalls Eddie. “But I knew him before I knew Lemmy. I happened to run into him many years before. We used to jam together. We had a little setup in Cornwall where we used to go down, set up and jam. I went to see some friends and I met him through these friends. It was him, actually, that when I got into a bit of trouble and I was going to be sent to jail—I was about 23—he said to me, ‘Look, man, we’ve got to get you working. You’re too good a guitarist not to be playing.’ And so he got me some auditions, I started auditioning and I didn’t go to jail.

  “Because I got the job with Curtis Knight, when I was in court, Curtis turned up in court,” recalls Eddie, on avoiding time. “And so I’ve got this big black dude sitting there in the courtroom. Very funny. But, it must’ve helped because I didn’t go to jail in the end. This was to do with smokes. You know; back in the day, back in the ’70s, having a bit of cannabis was like a hanging offense. Of course, now it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow anymore. But back then it was quite serious. Anyway, it was all thanks to Micky Farren, really. So I owed him a big one. He lived in L.A., but he came back here briefly, I think, about two years ago, and I was hoping to go and see him, but he lived down by the sea in Brighton, and I never got to see him. And the next thing I hear he’s died on stage. Lemmy and I had a conversation about it, in Birmingham; we sat down and had a little chat about Micky. And we sort of talked in admiration of him dying with his boots on. And that’s really what Lemmy would have dearly loved to happen. To be up onstage, thumping it out and then just . . . gone. Which is perfect. I mean, I would certainly love to have the same thing, but of course, I’m not onstage at the moment. You know, I’d have to do a guest appearance with someone and then die.”

  “The first Motörhead album has three Hawkwind tracks on it, which gives you some idea how unprepared Lemmy was to start a band,” notes Rob Godwin, whose label Griffin Music later issued a Motörhead compilation. “There was ‘The Watcher,’ ‘Lost Johnny’ and ‘Motörhead.’ The dust jacket has a picture of Dave Brock, and Lemmy thanks ‘All Hawkpersons.’ He and Phil also thank Doug Smith. Regarding the punk acceptance of Motörhead, yes, Mick Farren co-wrote ‘Lost Johnny.’ He was a hell of a character. Farren, Michael Moorcock, Felix Dennis and an assortment of other anarchists drove the counterculture in London. They were constantly in trouble with the police. Farren formed the Deviants, which were like Britain’s earliest ‘punk’ band. Sort of like the Stooges. The Deviants shared billing with Led Zeppelin during the last few months of 1968 in pubs around England. Farren told me that Plant’s voice was totally shot from recording Led Zeppelin between gigs so he got him gargling dental anesthetic!”

  “Farren went on to write more songs with Motörhead and is pictured on the dust jacket of Motörhead’s first album,” continues Godwin. “I’m not sure, but there is another guy pictured on there who might be Tom Robinson. Farren was also completely nuts about the leather biker culture. He ended up writing the definitive book on the subject, which may have influenced Lemmy. He also wrote The Titanic Sails at Dawn in 1976, which some people think predicted—or even precipitated—punk. So it appears that right from the start Motörhead came with legit ‘punk’ credentials. Spawned by the people’s countercultural band, Hawkwind, embraced by the founder of the Deviants and then signed to Chiswick—it’s punk all the way.”

  A rare daytime sighting, 1981.

  © Wolfgang Guerster

  Despite the band’s varied influences and their ability to transcend classification, on the buried but rich literary side of Motörhead’s debut record, it was pretty apparent that Lemmy could paint graphic, passion-filled pictures with words, irrespective of the clanging music enclosed.

  “There are a lot of good lyricists,” muses Lemmy, when asked about wordsmiths he admires. “The new wave of bands are pretty good lyricists, except for this heavy metal thing which is atrocious of course. And the rap thing has turned up a lot of good lyricists, but I don’t like the musical genre as such, although there are a few good lyrics in there. But there’s a lot of complaining as well. But the best lyricists ever I thought were the Beatles, probably, and Bob Dylan. I mean, people dismiss him now, and it’s right in a way that he should be dismissed, because he went completely off the fucking track. But in the early days he was a consummate ly
ricist. Skunk Anansie are good too, for someone more recent. Chuck Berry of course, when I was growing up. Little Richard because he was outrageous. You couldn’t tell what he said, but it was great.”

  Asked by Sam Dunn what his favorite punk acts were, Lemmy says, “You can’t be a fan of a whole movement. You have to differentiate. Because you never mention a movement; you should just ask about individuals. If you asked me about individual punk bands, I will tell you what I thought. But the whole thing went from the Damned to Elvis Costello—sorry, I can’t like or dislike all that. I wasn’t into the Clash. Everybody seems to think they were the only punk band in the world. I was into the Pistols and the Damned, and a band called the Cortinas from Bristol. They were all about seven years old, but they were great. There were all kinds of good bands. Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers was great for a while, until the smack came back.”

  “A lot of people liked The Clash, but not me,” Lemmy told me a couple years previous. “They just didn’t seem to have a direction apart from Sandinista! There’s that funny picture of them all wearing that shit behind the walls in Northern Ireland, hiding from the freedom fighters. Joe was kind of mixed-up. He died mixed-up. He didn’t really know what he wanted to do and he could be talked into stuff. Nice enough guy. But I play rock ’n’ roll and punk was very close to rock ’n’ roll. You listen to ‘The Chase is Better than the Catch’ and it’s not metal. It’s rock ’n’ roll. It’s very blues-oriented.”

  With respect to Eddie’s guitar heroes, that’s another linkage back to the ’60s. “For sure, I’d have to go back to Jimi Hendrix. ‘Purple Haze’ for me, when he first did that, it fucking blew me away, took me head off. These are the people I look up to, Jimi, Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton. The first Cream album . . . there were some great solos on that. So I was a ’60s guy really. I had come up on John Mayall, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, early the Purple, ’69, ’70, Led Zeppelin, that was my diet. Lemmy’s was a tad earlier, because he’s a bit older than me. He had a little bit more of the rock ’n’ roll thing—Buddy Holly—whereas where I came into it, I was listening to the Stones and the Yardbirds, Jeff Beck and Clapton. Now Phil was a little later. He was listening to stuff from ’68, ’69, ’70 and he tended to like a bit of everything. He was really into drummers.”

  Eddie continues, “Phil’s a bit younger—but my roots go back to Five Live Yardbirds, and Hendrix and Cream and John Mayall, and Lemmy, he was a bit earlier. Like I say, he was Little Richard and all that because he had the extra five years on me. So he went back even further. So we had these three tiers, really, like Lemmy going back to Little Richard, me starting at the Yardbirds, and then you had Phil starting five years later. So it was probably quite nice, because you had these three eras—that might’ve been one of the secrets. Three sets of eras in one. Nowadays, it wouldn’t matter so much, but this was all happening so fast back then. You know, five years back in the late ’50s and ’60s was a long time. A lot happened musically.”

  As for articulating what kind of bands might have been inspiration for Lemmy, Clarke dismisses the idea that at one point Lemmy wanted, for example, a five-piece with a lead singer (actually affirmed by Lemmy in interviews) and that down this road, MC5 were touted as some sort of blueprint.

  “Nope. I mean, he liked MC5, but no, all he wanted was a band that could play and do gigs,” Eddie says. “And he was gonna play what he was gonna play, and as long as he could do that, that’s all he wanted. Because Lemmy never wanted to sound like anybody. Lemmy wanted to sound like Lemmy. He plays a particular sort of bass head, and he had a particular sort of sound, with a lead guitar amp with all the bass off it, so it cuts your head off. So, I’m gonna play like this, and of course we all had to fit around it and make it work. Which was not a bad place to be. Because it makes you unique, you see.”

  With Motörhead now staining record collections up and down England, it fell to the rock press to frame for the punters just what was lurking in the grooves of their latest preposterous purchase.

  Wrote Ira Robbins in the respected Trouser Press, “Formed around that demented Hawkwind fragment, Ian ‘Lemmy the Lurch’ Kilmister, and fueled by the legends of such minimalist superstars as the Pink Fairies and Deviants, Motörhead is the nightmare band of the British motorways. Unbearably loud and heavy, these three outlaws have added another dimension to the darker side of heavy metal—sort of Steppenwolf meets Sabbaff and beyond. Aided by the outrageously inappropriate Speedy Keen as producer, Motörhead has translated to plastic eight of the loudest songs in their repertoire in an album destined to become a metal monster classic.”

  Kris Needs in ZigZag deemed the band the “sound of speed. Raw power incarnate, like the villain says in the comics. But this ain’t no baddy’s bullshitting. Motörhead hit you right between the eyes with one of the most lethal combinations since they invented dynamite. They make you wanna scale walls and bash holes in the ceiling with your head. Motörhead make you feel like you can do anything. The Superman syndrome which comes from the best high-energy rock ’n’ roll which transcends mere notes and chords and becomes the raging wall of exploding, devastating noise. Rampant energy as unleashed by the MC5 on ‘Kick Out the Jams.’”

  Other than the unnecessarily dated Steppenwolf-meets-Sabbath descriptive, both reviews articulate accurately what is going on inside of this plainly weird, wonderfully and willfully bad-to-the-bone record. It’s heartening to see that writers were understanding the concept right from the start, and not simply dismissing the band as inept.

  Much of the rest of 1977 would find the band still trying to beat people over the heads with a record that wrinkled the nose like a bad smell ’round back of the pub. Motörhead looked dangerous and sounded dangerous. In fact, the band sounded beyond indignant or defiant into the realm of disdainful—disdainful of the business and maybe even any possible fan base. The ultimate and instant effect was that, sure, girls want the bad boy, but guys were on board too, attracted to the leather, the chrome, the biker menace of the entire drunk and drugged package. As Eddie would attest, Motörhead was the gathering of three misfits into an incubator, a pressure cooker, an experiment in audio terrorism that better work out or no one was gonna eat tonight.

  A fair claim by the good folks at Chiswick.

  And as far as motivation went, was this a band taking the piss, or were they truly this ragged, bloody and bedraggled? Fact is, it would become a moot point, as Lemmy, Fast Eddie and Philthy Phil would soon take on a scorched earth policy, cranking in quick succession Overkill, Bomber and Ace of Spades, proving that at least the flaming core premise of the Motörhead album—if not its final tally of points on merit—was a particulate bundle worth accelerating and exploding. In other words, Motörhead, as weird and hapless and as outsider as it is, would not be a one-off, but rather a sturdy frame to be built upon until the machine that was Motörhead would snarl its way to a No. 1 album, unfathomable by the white-knuckled band as it existed in 1977.

  CHAPTER 4

  Overkill: “He was a bit of a lad, old Jimmy.”

  All one had to do was stare into Overkill’s front cover—one of the greatest metal flak jackets of all time—and one could visually and viscerally read that Motörhead had wizarded up a massive improvement on their two false starts at a debut, namely On Parole and Motörhead (who but Motörhead would screw up and make two first albums?). Essentially, as far as guitarist Fast Eddie was concerned, Overkill, which was released on March 24, 1979, was the debut of the classic lineup, featuring all new songs written by two beset-upon warriors kicked and punched by the business for years and one drummer who fell into Motörhead like he fell out of bed.

  But one can’t overestimate the intoxicating effect of moving from the crude black-and-white cover of the debut to Joe Petagno’s power-packed sleeve cooked for Overkill.

  “I didn’t know Joe that well,” explains Eddie. “Obviously we met a few times, but it was somethin
g that Lemmy had already had done when I joined the band. My contribution for Overkill was I said, if we’re gonna call it Overkill, let’s blow up the death’s head. And so as you see, that’s what they did.”

  Full page U.K. music weekly ad featuring cover with added eyeballs.

  Joe, in fact, was none too pleased with the final result, having felt rushed at having to do the job in about 10 days. He points to his work on the band’s 2004 album Inferno as a better rendition of the complexity he was going for.

  O’er to the back, and any metalhead standing in the shop worrying about his prospective purchase would be transfixed at the promised heaviness of the scene. Eddie looked like some sort of revenge of the hippies time-traveler, Phil promised a wall of percussive death rained down upon as he powered two bass drums, and Lemmy establishes his look for all time, his caustic caw thrust up at the mic, bass as accompanying weapon, and more bullets in the belt just in case his first attack runs into trouble.

  But back to the business of the music itself in 1978 and the electric path ahead toward infamy: the deal with United Artists was a disaster, the deal with Stiff was a mercifully brief bust, and the deal with Chiswick at least kept them on the road—it was the band that left Chiswick, prompted by a dispute they had with manager Tony Secunda, with Secuda himself leaving shortly thereafter and moving to California. But now Motörhead had mid-sized Bronze to give them a little substance in their lives. The guys would not take the opportunity lightly, crafting the most brutally rocking album the world had seen to date (please, try name another).