Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

by Martin Popoff

  Back to the backing tracks that broke the camel’s back: “So, right, we did the rehearsals in New York for the Wendy O. Williams thing,” continues Clarke, “and then we drove up to Toronto, and then we had three days in the studio in Toronto. Lovely studio, quite new, and it had a lovely Neve desk in it. The studio was in a new district, and I remember thinking Toronto is quite nice, to go out and have a coffee on the street and all that. But of course, once that happened, I said, ‘Look man, this is garbage; we can’t possibly put this out.’ And they said, ‘Look, man, we’ll put on the cover that it’s got nothing to do with you. It’ll say, “This has nothing to do with Eddie Clarke.”’ I said, ‘Man, you’re missing the point, Motörhead is my band as well. It’s our credibility that is on the line here.’ I thought Motörhead was in danger of becoming a laughingstock. But they were already thinking like it wasn’t my band anymore. The bastards. So anyway, we did the Toronto gig and then we jumped on the bus and then we drove down to New York for the New York gig.”

  Which is pretty much the way Phil Taylor says it went down at the time, speaking with Jon Sutherland from Record Review: “It was a bit stupid because even Will Reid-Dick, who came to Canada to produce the single, knew it wasn’t supposed to be something like Paul McCartney or a big production. Everything was going fine, we had all the backing tracks down, no fights, no arguments. Then Wendy arrived and started singing. Will Reid-Dick and Eddie took a break and said they wanted to get something to eat, and they never came back. They hid in the TV studio, which was away from where we were. After couple of hours, Lemmy and Rod Swenson, Wendy’s manager, started thinking, where are they? Finally I walked around and found Eddie. I asked him, ‘Don’t you think you should be over there?’ And he said, ‘Fuck that. I don’t want my name on that garbage.’ I had a feeling he was bubbling. So I left and I could hear him saying, ‘I’m gonna leave the band if this shit comes out. It sounds like Mickey Mouse on nitrous oxide,’ which is quite true, actually.”

  So Phil assumed the role of peacemaker, a position he claims he had in the band. “Yes, on stage, I’ve always been in the middle, and in life, I’ve been in the middle. The sort of peacemaker of the band. The stable part of the band. Eddie hadn’t spoken to Lemmy for three days and I kept saying to Eddie, ‘Don’t leave the band.’ The guy had quit the band once a week for seven years. And I thought this was a stupid reason to leave the band. We offered to put out a press release that would say that Eddie wasn’t on the record and didn’t like it. I offered to put on the back of the record, ‘This record contains no Eddie Clarke; he had nothing to do with it and he thinks it’s crap.’ Wendy’s manager or any of us wouldn’t have cared at all. So it was no big deal. That still wasn’t good enough for him. Nobody runs the band. We all run the band. Our manager takes care of the business affairs, but luckily we’re a three-piece and we vote. The one who’s odd man out has to bite the bullet.”

  To clarify then, the single wasn’t completed in Toronto. “No, we recorded the backing tracks, two lots of backing tracks, in Toronto,’ explains Eddie. “Wendy went out to sing, I went to the off-licence and bought a bottle of Jack and went to the hotel and got drunk. Because I just couldn’t stand it; I just couldn’t picture it. It got to the point with that song that I couldn’t live with it. I told Lemmy, ‘If you’re going to do this, then I’m going to leave the band as this is rubbish.’ I said to them, ‘What we should do . . . we’ve got Will Reid-Dick here, why don’t we put a blues thing together? We can do a Motörhead play the blues. You know, do “Hoochie Coochie” and a 12-bar, maybe something else, a bit of harmonica. We can lay that down now and Will could take it back to London and mix it and put it out while we were on tour in America. How about that?’ ‘No man, we want to go with this Wendy O. Williams thing.’ And that was it for me, really. It was a terrible piece of work.”

  Not exactly right—Eddie played the Palladium in New York two nights later.

  As for why Will Reid-Dick was on the trip, Eddie explains that, “He was the engineer/producer on Iron Fist, and he also came over because when they did the Wendy O. Williams thing, they didn’t want me to play on it—they wanted me to produce it. I don’t know why. They were obviously already fucked off with my playing back then. I don’t think they liked my playing. I think that’s kind of why they got me out of the band. I think they went off my playing. And so they didn’t want me to play on it, and they said, ‘Well, why don’t you produce it?’ And I said, ‘Look, if I’m going to produce it, I’m going to have to get Will to come over and do the engineering.’”

  Phil kept trying to keep tempers tamped, telling Sutherland that Lemmy was “totally amazed” at Eddie’s anger about the session. “I didn’t say much to Lemmy because I was still trying to make peace with Eddie and try to get him to stop his ridiculous attitude. He asked me about it, and I said, ‘Eddie’s mellowing out a bit,’ which he really wasn’t. See? You have to tell little white lies occasionally, even to your friends. But Eddie wanted the record stopped. He was doing this Vic Maile trip and he started sounding like him. His attitude became, ‘I’m the producer. I say what goes on, and how you play it.’”

  “So I’m in the bus on the way to New York,” continues Eddie, “and of course they’re playing Wendy O. Williams all over the place. They carried on doing the recording without me and they were playing it in the bus on the way to New York. I was losing it. They know I’m really upset. They’ve got Plasmatics T-shirts on; they’re taunting me all the way down. The manager’s with us, and I’m saying to the manager, ‘Man, this isn’t gonna work if they carry on like this, because apart from me knocking ‘em both out, I’m going to have to fuck off.’ Because I was going to knock ’em out and fuck off anyway, because it was pissing me off so much. I really got the fucking hump that they weren’t getting it. I told them, ‘Man, you’ve got to stop playing this song or I’m going to fucking lose it.’ I told the manager that he needed to do something or war was going to break out. And the management wasn’t helping. Doug Smith was being a complete ass. You could see that the band is splitting up in front of him, and what did he do? Nothing! You know, he let these two cunts fucking get away with it, and it really pissed me off.

  “And so when we got to the hotel in New York, it had reached a fever pitch. So the manager called a meeting of the people that were around us in Toronto, and Phil and Lemmy, and this road crew, you know, the head of the road crew and that, and a couple of business guys that were there looking after us in Toronto. And they’re sitting there, and they’re saying, ‘What’s the problem?’ And I said, ‘Well, look, this is a piece of shit.’ I said, ‘Ask him; he said it was shit.’ I had talked to management and told them that the track was rubbish and they all said they agreed with me. And I turned to this guy, and said, ‘Well, you said it was shit.’ He wouldn’t speak. Nobody would speak in my defense on how bad this fucking music was that they wanted to do. They were all standing there being silent. All of sudden I was all on my own with six or seven people who were all saying I was a twat because I didn’t like this record. In your heart of hearts, you know it’s rubbish but they won’t say it in front of the band.”

  “So in the end, I said, ‘You’re all a bunch of cunts’ and I fucking stormed out. One of the fucking big road crew guys, the gorilla, started to chase me down the fucking corridor. I had to fucking floor him. I had to drop him in the corridor so I could get to the lift and get away. It was all a bit over the fucking top. And the other fucking road crew jumped on him, fortunately, or he would’ve killed me. And I just ran off. So I ran off to the road crew’s hotel around the corner. Well, I got a cab. All I had was a bit of Canadian money. I said to the guy at the desk at the Holiday Inn in New York, ‘Give me 20 bucks, quick.’ I wanted to jump out in the street and get in the first cab.

  “It all got funny that night,” continues Eddie. “We were supposed to play the following day. I sat up all fucking night waiting to hear some n
ews. There was no news. They had two roadies minding me at this time so I couldn’t leave the room. When I look back on it now, it is all quite funny. They kept me prisoner all fucking night, didn’t they? They wouldn’t let me out and all this and so in the end it was past the point of no return. Anyway, I get a call at quarter of ten the next morning and am told that Lemmy said he would do the show under one condition. That condition was that I had to go to the show and do my sound check first and then I would have to leave the building and then the rest of the band would go in and do their sound check. I am in fucking New York, man. I’ve flown all the way over here from England, so I want to do the show. I do what they want, and then I am ready to go to the dressing room. I had to go and do my sound check, and I had to be escorted out, back to the hotel so that they could then go in and do theirs.”

  “So when I get to the fucking show that night—this is really quite funny—I’m being led in, I’m almost handcuffed to a guy, a minder. They have this huge dressing room but I don’t get to go in there. He takes me in my dressing room, and it’s a little boiler room about six foot by six foot with one chair. There’s a bottle of vodka on the table, a glass and a little pile of white powder, right? And that’s it. And I’m sitting in there on me fucking Jack Jones and I’m thinking what’s the matter with these cunts, you know? I did the show but it was a funny show as we were obviously fucking hating each other.

  “So after the show, which was pretty fiery, I went into the dressing room with the agent, Nick Caris from DMA. He’s saying, ‘Why don’t we go talk to Phil and Lemmy?’ I agreed as I was high off the show and I wanted to do more shows. I didn’t want it to end there. I go into the dressing room and there are about two hundred people there and they are all playing the Plasmatics, and this huge dressing room, the size of a football field, is all full of smoke. This guy goes over and gets Phil and Lemmy as I wait just inside the door. They come over to see me. Lemmy looks at me and says, ‘Go on and speak.’ I said, ‘Guys, I know a lot of shit has gone down here but I’d like to carry on and do the rest of the tour.’ I said, ‘Look, guys, this is ridiculous. We’ve got to carry on. We can’t let this get in the way.’ They said, ‘No man, fuck off.’ And that was it. So I was out the fucking door.”

  “I liked Motörhead,” begins Nick Caris, offering his version of events. “Motörhead had melodies. They were aggressive music, but there were melodies; they were kinda like Metallica version one. Anyway, yes, I brought Motörhead over for their first headline tour, which we sold out all the three-thousand- and four-thousand-seaters. Some promoters didn’t want them in hotels; they were famous for trashing Holiday Inns in Germany or something. So I was on my way to New York. We had sold out two shows, first time in New York for Motörhead. This was with Eddie, the real Motörhead. I land at Newark airport and I call my office and they say you gotta call Doug Smith, the manager of Motörhead, who is in England, there’s a problem. So I call him and he says, ‘You gotta get to the venue. Eddie just quit the band.’ Oh jeez. I didn’t have the venue’s backstage number, so I called up Ron Belzer’s office, who was the promoter. I said, ‘Ron, Ron, you got ’em sold out for two shows, tonight and tomorrow; I need to talk to them.’ ‘Oh, okay.’

  “So I went to the venue; this was still early, about 4 o’clock, and I talked to Eddie. I said, ‘It’ll be okay; I’ll go and talk to Lemmy.’ And I thought I had everything worked out. I walked Eddie back in with his head down, and Lemmy said, ‘Nope, you’re out of the band.’ I remember Phil was sitting back in the corner, just quiet. And that was it. That was a great band. But of course Lemmy and Phil were really powerful. Because remember, that was a rhythm section. And they were powerful, and it almost didn’t matter who was playing guitar, although Eddie was obviously excellent and he was part of the original thing. But I met Lemmy when he was in Hawkwind, and Motörhead was like a straighter band compared to Hawkwind. But I love Lemmy. You wouldn’t think it, but he’s so intelligent it’s ridiculous. But by this point, they were always at each other, and I know Eddie didn’t like Lemmy doing ‘Stand By Your Man.’”

  Lemmy with the incomparable Wendy O. Williams, who died by her own hand, April 6, 1998.

  © Ray Palmer Archive/IconicPix

  As for Phil’s recollection after 30-odd years of what went down, he told me, “I still don’t really know what happened with Eddie, because he was always leaving the band and we never took him seriously. And then when we went to Toronto to do that thing with Wendy O. Williams, I mean, he’d already heard—we already went to Bronze Records and listened to Plasmatic songs, and Eddie heard her voice and what it sounded like—he knew what was expected. And he was going to produce and play on it. And then for some reason, when we got into the studio, when Wendy started singing, he just kind of freaked out and changed his tune. It’s almost as if he went into the studio not as a member of the band and had never heard of Wendy O. Williams. He just freaked out, ‘What the fuck is this? This is garbage! I’m not having anything to do with this. This is making Motörhead look like idiots. She sounds like Mickey Mouse!’ And the thing is, I said to him, ‘Eddie, what are you talking about? You knew what we were doing before we came over. We’re not doing it with the intention that the world is going to think it’s the next best thing since Jimi Hendrix. We’re doing it for a laugh, you know? I mean, not to ridicule ourselves, but it’s a fun single. That’s what we’re doing. We’re doing it for fun, and then maybe we’ll make a bit of money, great. That’s what it’s about. It’s not something that’s going to be split up and analyzed by people, like we’re trying to be the world’s greatest band or producers. We’re just doing it for fun, you know? That’s all it is. Take it for what it is. And you knew that before we came out here.’

  “And he didn’t want anything to do with it,” concludes Phil, “and so he left the band. And me and Lemmy said, well, fuck it if he comes back and says ‘I didn’t really mean it; I want to come back’ like he did before—fuck ’im! We’ve had enough of this. But he never did, actually. He never said he wanted to come back. So we just left it at that and that’s where we got Robbo in.”

  Eddie, to this day, doesn’t know how far in advance Phil and Lemmy were musing over getting Brian Robertson in the band, but according to Phil, speaking with Jon Sutherland in late 1982, “He was the first person I thought of when Eddie left. It immediately came to mind. He was doing something, but he wasn’t tied down to a band or anything. He was making a solo album at the time, combining all sorts of sounds, instruments, and styles. He has rhythm tracks for synthesizers, real drums, real instruments, electronic drums, electronic instruments already done. We knew, though, that he wasn’t doing anything permanent. Lemmy rang him up and said, ‘Oh, Robbo, how’d you fancy touring with Motörhead?’ Without delay, he said, ‘Sure, why not?’ As soon as he got his visa together, we met him at the airport. We had known him for a few years, but we never played with him. Robbo, Lemmy and I, among others, were social drinking buddies, so we knew him quite well. We’d see each other at the same pubs and face down in the same gutters. We knew he had a bad reputation. We thought, if there was anyone crazy enough to do it, it would be Robbo. Our main objective was to survive, not die. Robbo had just had a little spell in hospital just before he came over here. He was doing a bottle of Remy Martin a day and his liver was really screwed up. He hadn’t been out on the road in four years, and here he is joining Motörhead, which is really jumping into the deep end.”

  “That’s one reason why I’m so pissed off at Eddie,” continued Phil, reminded that there was a Japanese tour planned and a U.S. tour to finish. “It’s one thing to leave a band when you’re not doing anything, but to leave right in the middle of an American tour is the most inopportune time. He said finally that he was thinking about leaving back when we were in London. And I said, ‘Thanks very much, you bloody shit. That’s really nice to tell us this.’ It used to be, when we had a disagreement, it was just a smack
in the mouth, a couple of apologies and everything was normal. I would’ve preferred to have parted amicably without any violent thoughts towards each other. We’re really pissed off. How else would you feel about a guy who dumps on you like that? If we had bottled the tour, we may never have been able to come back. Instead, we’re going ahead with it, playing a half-hour set, sometimes less than the support band. So far the audiences have been really great. When we get back to England, we’ll have three days off and we’ll get in as much rehearsing as possible.”

  Lemmy, part of the same conversation, was hopeful about the path forward. “When we started playing with Robbo, we started realizing how much we repeated and how much we really didn’t know what we were doing. It sounds quite different. With Robbo, it will still be Motörhead. Robbo had a difficult time getting used to the sound because it was like playing without a bass player and having two rhythm guitarists. In fact, he’s used to a four-piece with another guitar and a bass player; so far, he seems to like it.” He then repeated the oft-quoted tall tale about just how loud Motörhead was, describing the band’s PA as the “biggest I’ve ever seen: 117,000 watts. A guy called up during one of our outdoor gigs from six miles away and said he couldn’t hear his TV, and we were just sound checking. I’m sure it was better than what was on the telly anyways.”

  With the story having grown from four miles to six miles, journalist Sutherland nonetheless underscores Motörhead’s effect on people, writing that, “Trying to explain Motörhead to people is like describing the numbness of a sledgehammer to the forehead with glee. It takes a certain amount of wildness to accept the band. Audiences that see Motörhead are forced at a multi-decibel point to make a decision on the band. Usually they are totally absorbed or outright stunned. Motörhead is definitely powerful. Motörhead is pretty much an unknown commodity here in the United States. Those who have seen the band have had a chance to see why the band has dominated the English heavy metal scene. Motörhead is the largest draw and merchandiser on the English metal scene and does fantastic business at live shows, and with buttons, T-shirts, patches and rock ’n’ roll paraphernalia. They are headliners topping the bill at huge outdoor festivals where the sheer speed, volume and intensity of their performance makes it hard for other bands to consider following them on stage.”