Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  “Shut it Down” is another very cool potential Motörhead anthem that never rose to widespread recognition, cruising briskly, topped with a malevolent riff from Eddie who picks his places over a signature skittery Phil Taylor shuffle.

  “‘Speed Freak’ I really like,” laughs Eddie, on yet another very fast one, but a fraught mess not without punk charm housed within its yobbish verse melody. “I love that fucking track. ‘America’ wasn’t bad either, but it all sounds a little unfinished. It didn’t have the input of the three of us. It was left to me to put all the input into it, and as I say, I considered in the beginning that I couldn’t play and produce at the same time. I never thought that was possible. And I thought we were doing it together. But they weren’t interested. I’m upset, still, to this day. Breaks my fucking heart.”

  Toronto was never the same.

  © Martin Popoff

  “(Don’t Let ’Em) Grind Ya Down” is arguably Iron Fist’s greatest triumph. Opening with a strident drum flourish from Phil, it then settles into a mid-paced groove over which Lemmy spits out the nasty version of Motörhead’s credo, the cynic’s view of why they do what they do, us versus them in a world of miserable thems.

  Strength to strength, as we draw to a close, “(Don’t Need) Religion” is Lemmy’s snorted grand statement of his steadfast atheism, augmented best if and when an interviewer can get him on the topic.

  “I have always hated organized religion,” spits Lemmy. “If I believed in God, I would not need an interpreter. God is the first to do everything, right? You should be able to talk directly to him. You don’t need some special building with some guy who has a degree in God. Every army in the world has had their tanks and guns blessed by their respective priests. It is kind of weird since the Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Blessing a weapon is kind of odd to me. So many people claim that God is on their side that I wonder if God sometimes wonders who is on his side. So I am kind of anti-God. If there is a God, then he is a miserable bastard. Sometimes I think he might be the devil dressed up as God. I say fuck God and fuck the Devil; I’m responsible for what I do. I don’t have to hide behind anything. If I am anything, then I am an anarchist. You can’t trust people to get it to work right.”

  There’s a sophistication in the musical presentation of “(Don’t Need) Religion” that, again, coupled with other songs on the album that are less than breakneck speed, makes for a sincere and true advancement in the band’s catalog, even if the magic of chemistry and fire and emotion is located in greater abundance on, say, Overkill and Ace of Spades. Still, all told, it was good to see Motörhead working with such sophisticated chord changes, combined with a memorable central riff, no less.

  Eddie in a mean pair of boots.

  © Martin Popoff

  Last track on the record is “Bang to Rights,” which depicts neither Lemmy at his best lyrically nor Eddie playing anything too interesting, Clarke turning in one of those circular riffs vaguely anchored in the blues but then made metal amidst the mayhem that is Motörhead. It is of note that non-LP track “Remember Me, I’m Gone” is little more than a variation on the tired “Bang to Rights” construct, same mindless beat from Phil, strumming, chord changes, the end.

  Wrote Kerrang!’s Steve Gett favorably, surely maintaining the peace and the magazine’s cozy relationship with the band, “Crank up the stereo, open the windows, scare the hell out of next-door’s tomcat, have their mutt yelping for its kennel and set the neighbors themselves fleeing in a state of total disarray. Your folks might threaten to kick you out . . . But what a way to go? The bottom line of my ramblings is that Motörhead have remained loyal and true to their cause, never getting into fashions or ephemeral trends. Basically, they’ve stood their ground without compromise, and I can think of only one word befitting such action—HONESTY!”

  And yet, conversely, “Lemmy hates the record,” says Eddie. “I mean, Lemmy hates it. I never thought an awful lot of it, because of, obviously, the history in it and the fact that we weren’t as enthused by the material. And like I said, I didn’t realize what was going on. I blame the management to some degree. The record company were desperate for product, so they looked forward as well by forcing us to go ahead so quickly. You know what the fucking joke was? We did the fucking album, and we’re coming down to the studio with the fucking album sleeve. Then there’s a fucking tour booked, we go out on the fucking road, do the first gig, and the fucking album’s not in the shops! Can you fucking believe that?!”

  “So we’re on the road and it’s like terrible because nobody knows the fucking tunes. So we said, look, we have to do evasive action. We’re going to have to do the old set. So, oh, we do the old set, fantastic. So we did the old set, and Phil said, ‘If you don’t do the new set, I’m leaving the band.’ And I wish I’d said, fuck off then. Oh, I do, because then I wouldn’t have had to leave the band. Because he did what I did. But of course, what did Lemmy and I do? We said, ‘All right, then, all right, Phil; at sound check tomorrow, we’ll go through half a dozen of the songs, and we’ll put them in the set.’ So we did that and we put them in the set. Well, of course, it was the worst tour we’d ever done. Because the kids were standing there wondering what the fuck we were playing. Because they couldn’t get their hands on the record. So it was a nightmare! It wasn’t until we hit the last six, seven numbers, that the fucking crowd came alive. Well, by then, we’d all died a death on stage. So that didn’t help either. Plus Doug came to Lemmy and wanted us to take Tank out on the Iron Fist tour. But something had happened to them and they were fucking awful. And in fact we were awful. The record’s not in the shops and so right there, the tour was actually a bit of a fucking disaster. I could almost say it’s the worst tour we ever did because of those two things. So things were bad and went from bad to worse. It seemed like all the fucking stars had aligned to destroy the band. And true enough, that’s what happened.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Eddie’s Last Meal: “A bottle of vodka on the table, a glass, and a little pile of white powder.”

  Essentially, the demise of the classic Motörhead lineup came down to arguments for integrity on one side—Eddie’s—and arguments for maintaining a sense of humor on the other side—Lemmy’s. Both are positive qualities and both are reasons rock fans love the original Motörhead so much. Those disposed exclusively to the serious side or the jocular side exist, but most Motörhead fans appreciate both: that the band could rock deadly hard, and that Lemmy was a serious wordsmith with a complex, though mostly cynical and near nihilistic, point of view, balanced against the idea that the guys can take a joke.

  The summary of Eddie’s gripes included the previously discussed hassles over the construction of Iron Fist, the cock-ups in getting the record into the shops and arguments over playing the new songs. But if we had to pick one isolated event big enough to bust up the band, it would have to be Lemmy’s intention of recording a single with Wendy O. Williams of shock rockers the Plasmatics, specifically a cover of Tammy Wynette’s country classic “Stand by Your Man.”

  “It all started at the beginning of the Iron Fist tour [May 1982],” begins Eddie. “We were going to start in Toronto, funny enough. The Live in Toronto was done there [Castle issued the show as a VHS in 1982, with the audio used on the reissue of the studio album], at Maple Leaf Gardens. That was done that night, and yeah, they made a little movie out of it. But before that we went to New York, met up with Wendy and them and did some rehearsals, doing ‘Stand by Your Man.’ Lemmy always liked women performers. And I was trying to get them to do it a little more rocky, you know what I mean? I’m saying, ‘For fuck sake, could you take some of the chords out?!’ I’m saying, ‘Why don’t you turn it up a bit?’ But they wanted to do all this poncing about with it, these sappy chords.

  “That’s really when I started to notice Lemmy was fucking having it out with me. He’s like, ‘Mate, why
don’t you just fucking shut up, man? We’re doing it this way.’ It was all that, you know? Lemmy got mad and started arguing. I got mad and was yelling back but what I didn’t realize at the time is that he had already had enough of me. And I was thinking, oh, what the fuck have I done? So of course when we got up there to Toronto, and I’m producing it, and they’ve laid the fucking tracks down, and of course Wendy goes out to sing and she can’t fucking sing in the key they’ve done it in, so then we have to transpose it and do it again. Of course, when she does finally start singing, it wouldn’t’ve made any difference what fucking key it was in, because she couldn’t fucking sing. I didn’t realize that, and I don’t think anybody did, but of course, Lemmy wants to . . . you know, he’s got a soft spot for her. And one thing leads to another, and Phil . . . Phil’s already been talking to Brian Robertson. I didn’t know about that. So he wants Brian Robertson in the band. So suddenly an opportunity appeared for them to get me out of the band.”

  We’ve heard all about Phil’s and Eddie’s punch-ups. Lemmy always maintained that it was a brotherly type love/hate relationship, and that the violence would always end as quickly as it erupted. But obviously over time, resentments set in. It didn’t help that Lemmy was accusing Eddie of drinking too much to function, with Eddie counter-accusing, pointing out that Lemmy could often barely make it through gigs having been speeding all day and night, passing out the minute he got off stage. It also didn’t help that the guys still weren’t making much money, primarily from their lack of progress in America, and that creative energies and excitement and motivation had all been depressed for the last record. So there was this undercurrent with Phil’s reservations about Eddie, but let’s also not forget that Eddie had been threatening to quit on a regular basis.

  At least that’s always been Lemmy’s assertion. Doug Smith? Not so much. “Oh dear, I suppose, you know, a few times. I suppose a few times. But it’s difficult for me to decide whether or not it was him playing power games. And when I say power games, you know, throwing his weight around, or in actual fact, that he had had enough. You just have to sort of take it as it comes. And with them, it comes with the fact that they were like a little three-piece marriage. They would have arguments all the time that would cause them to sort of sometimes not speak to each other. But it was part of it.

  “But sure, they always had arguments, terrible arguments. It’s all part and parcel of, I suppose, being and working with people. Rock ’n’ roll bands are like marriages. Everybody’s got an opinion and everybody feels they’ve got a right and all the rest of it. It’s very hard to make a lot of people work in the same direction. But it doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, that angst and anger and everything that they had came out in very hard-played music.

  “In reality, Eddie was the one who probably was more responsible than Lemmy and Phil,” continues Doug. “I think that’s the easiest way of saying it. Eddie was responsible for a lot of the melodies, and probably pushing along rehearsals and pushing along recording. He would have to work hard to get Lemmy working, because he’d usually been out all night. He was like that in Hawkwind as well—exactly the same. Just as long as everything was organized, he’d try to be there. As far as I was concerned, I worked with him for so many years, I thought he was a friend. But it didn’t turn out that way. But I hold no ill will.”

  Most definitely the cracks were beginning to show. When I asked Eddie what Phil might not have liked about his guitar playing, Clarke says, “Oh, he always used to moan about it, and he didn’t think the sound was right and I twiddled too much. He was a funny bugger, Phil. You know, he was out of his head most of the fucking time, so I never quite got it. I was actually the only one who could fucking do anything. That’s why I ended up doing all the fucking administration shit. Getting them to rehearsals on time and all that. And I think they resented it. But they got me out in the end, so they got their wish.”

  And as alluded to much earlier, Eddie’s running of things has its pathology right back to the very first time the guys even played together. Phil as loose cannon, Lemmy as aggressively lazy with certain aspects of his career as a part of his complicated live fast and loose philosophy . . . it was there in the beginning and it was getting worse at the end.

  “Yeah, well, without me, the band would’ve never got back together,” laughs Eddie, referring to the very beginning, when it was threatening to fall apart before ignition. “When I first got my audition, I had to pay for the audition, I had to go pick them up in my car, pick up their equipment, take it to the rehearsal room, pay for the rehearsal room, have the audition and take them all home again. You know, if it wasn’t for me, Motörhead would never’ve got started again. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not blowing me own trumpet. But I was always the one who did the administration. I had the get up and go. All they had was the get up and go from the speed and take me to the off-license and get me a can of beer. That’s all they could manage.”

  Lemmy wearing a T-shirt of the band that would break up the classic Motörhead lineup.

  © Piergiorgio Brunelli

  Clarifying his role in the business affairs, Eddie says, “Not so much what the manager should be doing, but if there was a question about contracts or whatever, it was, ‘Oh, go ask Eddie. He’s in charge of that.’ So in that sense I was kind of like the one who could do that. If something had to be discussed, they would say, ‘Well, you better speak to Eddie.’ But no, the managers did their job. I had obviously kept things rolling as I would. You have to keep rehearsals going and make sure you put the work in. I was a bit of a stickler for doing rehearsals and making sure that was spot on. Whereas Lemmy preferred to go down to the pub. And Phil was a bit like that too. There were some disputes where we were trying to get Lemmy into the rehearsal room to write new tunes and all that. He could be a tad disinterested in that side of it. And over the years it became pretty frustrating for Phil and myself.

  “I was always the one who cracked the whip. I was the one who did the production and I was the one who was involved in any business deals. They were always saying, ‘Eddie, what do you think?’ It was always me that had to go in the room and do the talking. I think Lemmy just got fed up with it. It wasn’t my fucking idea to do it but they were always asking me and I was always the one who would say, ‘Fuck, I’ll just go in and talk to them.’ I knew a bit about putting bits and bobs together, on the other side of the business, as it were. I was working; I used to do odd jobs for a living. I’d do all sorts of things. Because I was trying to finance a solo album at the time. So of course I was doing laboring work, so I could pay for the studio. You know, I was full-on dedicated to my art. I loved it—and I would do anything.”

  Right there we see a level of integrity out of Eddie that fans surely found palpable and inspirational. And despite Phil’s punk rock slash through life, we know that he also took drums and his sound and the making of the records seriously. Lemmy, too, was loaded up with integrity, but it was also in his nature to downplay caring too much about anything, and it’s almost as if against his will, he had to act that way with his band mates, be that Clarke and Taylor or Campbell and Dee. No question though, it was Eddie who took industry barbs about Motörhead being a joke most to heart.

  As Angel Witch’s Kevin Riddles alluded to earlier, Eddie was reining in his playing to support the band’s strength, its raison d’être. “Obviously, it was very restricting,” agrees Clarke. “It was very restricting. I didn’t quite realize how restricting until I got to my first rehearsals with the new band Fastway. I was playing with Pete Way and Topper Headon and we had a fucking ball. Suddenly I realized there’s this whole new world out there, you know? It was nice. But there’s something else that made Motörhead great though. You know, if you’ve all got to fit into a sort of box and find your niche together, that makes you unique. But there’s a lot of pressure as well, because you’re always having to fucking work on what yo
u’re doing to make it work—which created tensions in itself. And of course those tensions eventually led to the split in the camaraderie.”

  As for having to take the reins, especially during the Iron Fist sessions, Eddie says, “We put in a lot of time, but Lemmy’s Lemmy. He’s always been Lemmy. His thing is, hey man, I play in a band and I play bass or whatever. I play and that’s it. And I would have to ferry him everywhere. You know, he expects to have a chauffeur taking him wherever he’s going. I get up on stage and do my thing and that’s it. He was the powers that be—Lemmy was Lord, you know?

  “Lemmy didn’t drive,” chuckles Eddie, back ’round to that interesting wrinkle in Lemmy’s reality. “He got taken wherever he wanted, because he didn’t drive. I don’t think he ever wanted to drive so he could always be chauffeured around. But at least that way he could stay high on Valium and having a few drinks and not have to fucking worry, you know? Oh yeah, he had it all worked out. As things go, Lemmy had it pretty much all worked out. Ol’ Lem, as we used to call him sometimes. But you know, barring that, we were still a three-piece; it was still three of us together. It would not have worked without Phil being who he was, me being who I was and Lemmy being who he was. That’s the only reason it worked. And with Phil being quite ill up to the end, obviously I’d been thinking a lot about Philip, when I first met him and everything, and I love the little fella, and we made some great music together. But there’s no way Motörhead was anything other than three people locked in—that was the only reason it was there. And once I wasn’t there and Phil wasn’t there, it couldn’t possibly survive as it was.”