White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  There was this terrible one-upmanship rivalry going on, concerning whether you knew the original artist or not. Like the support band would say, ‘We’re gonna play “Fortune Teller” now by the Merseybeats,’ but then the Merseybeats would come on and say, ‘We’d like to do “Fortune Teller” now by Benny Spellman.’ Of course, that never lasted very long, ’cause they just told the whole audience who the original artist was, right? Another thing that bands would do was take an old standard and rock it up. Rory Storm and the Hurricanes really did a number on ‘Beautiful Dreamer’, I recall, and the Big Three had a go at ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah’!

  It was a unique time with some truly incredible bands. One of them was Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Johnny Kidd used to wear an eyepatch and a striped shirt and pirate boots. Sometimes he’d wear a white shirt with bouffant sleeves – great get-up. The Pirates had the first strobe light I ever saw, created by the simple expedient of the roadie getting his hands on the club’s main switches and turning them all on and off very fast. Their guitar player was Mick Green, who was excellent – I used to carry his guitars to get into their shows for free. Years later, I made a record with Mick. Loners like him never made a reputation then. Eric Clapton got lucky – being an isolationist worked for him, because people sought him out. All the other isolationists, people didn’t bother with ’em!

  Another great band was the Birds – nothing like the American Byrds who were happening around the same time. This Birds had Ronnie Wood, who later joined the Rolling Stones, playing guitar. The Birds were magic, fucking excellent, far ahead of their time. They only had three singles and they were gone. I used to follow them all over the place, even slept in their van. The band I was in at the time – the Motown Sect, of whom you will hear more in a bit – had the honour of doing a gig with them. I still remember the Birds’ line-up: Ali McKenzie singing, Ron and Tony Munroe on guitar, Pete McDaniels on drums and Kim Gardner on bass. Kim now has a pub/restaurant in Hollywood called Cat and the Fiddle. He was a great bassist, but he hardly plays any more. A very good-looking band, the Birds were and Ronnie especially in those days was a very charismatic boy. He used to wear a brown herringbone tweed suit, two-tone shoes and he had a white Telecaster – that was very cool. They were like Mods with long hair, which I liked, ’cause I would never have my hair cut.

  See, England has always been very fashion-oriented. Fads came and went very fast. The Mods were a very odd sort, as least in my estimation. They had very short hair, combed over to one side – kind of like John Kennedy but with a rooster-tail-like swatch at the back. And they wore trousers made of this very thin cord material with these bright print, tropical-style jackets, and two-tone shoes. The nearest American equivalent would be the Beach Boys, but we didn’t have the surf thing – it was really more in-town, as far as England was concerned. And the Mods used to wear eye make-up too, especially the boys. The crowd of people I was in disliked them, but in retrospect, it was no worse than what we were doing. I mean, we thought they were sissies, and they thought we were yobs – and you know, we were both right.

  I got to meet a lot of great musicians at the start of our careers. Jon Lord was one. Jon Lord was, and is, a consummate musician. He later on played with Deep Purple, Whitesnake and Rainbow, but when I met him, he was playing for the Artwoods who, funnily enough, were fronted by Art Wood! Even funnier, Art Wood was Ron Wood’s brother, but hold on a moment.

  There was this huge, great palace of a boozer called the Washington on the seafront at Llandudno, and they had rock shows in the upstairs ballroom. Then they started having jazz and blues nights. They had Graham Bond, with Ginger Baker and Dick Heckstall–Smith; they had the Downliners Sect, jazzman Alan Skidmore and them one night, the Artwoods.

  So I was lounging about the place, staring at the exotic equipment, and I watched them play – pretty good, I thought, from my lofty critic’s perch in north Wales! Anyway, I was talking to Jon Lord after the show, and he and the band offered me a lift back to Colwyn Bay. I’m sure Jon’s regretted that ever since! The poor fool gave me his address in West Drayton, near London, and about three weeks later, off I went. I mean, this Impossibly Huge Star would probably have a huge mansion, and he would probably let me sleep in the servants’ quarters and introduce me to other Impossibly Huge Stars with whom I would seek my fortune, etc.

  Alas for dreams. The address turned out to be a house on a council estate. I arrived at about three in the morning and rang the knocker and banged on the bell.

  A sweet little old lady opened the door – ‘Yes, who is it?’

  ‘It’s me,’ I said, ‘er, Lemmy from north Wales.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Jon Lord will remember me. He gave me this address.’

  ‘Oh, no, dear, he’s on tour in Denmark!’

  Why hadn’t I considered this possibility? I was young and dumb, that’s why.

  ‘Ah . . .’ I said.

  She looked at me. I looked at her.

  ‘Er,’ I said. Silence grew between us.

  Then she said something for which I will be eternally grateful, star turn that she was. ‘Oh well, never mind dear, you can sleep on the couch and we’ll see in the morning.’ You don’t get much of that in our brave new world!

  So I awoke to find Ron Wood, with three of his mates, hanging over me, going, ‘Oi, wot you a-doing on my mum’s sofa, eh?’ So she was Mrs Wood, mother of Ron and Art, and Jon was living there. Coincidence, eh? I got to go to a Birds gig that night, and then I went to Sunbury-on-Thames – but more of that later.

  Back in those days, the most impressive band, hands down, was the Beatles. They were the best band in the world. There will never be anything like the Beatles, and you really had to be there to understand what I’ve just said. Nowadays younger people think the Beatles were just a band, but they weren’t. They were a huge phenomenon all over the world. Everybody changed because of the Beatles, even politicians. The Daily Mirror in London ran a page every day about what they were doing. Imagine: a big, national fucking newspaper devoting a page each day to a band? They were more than huge.

  The Beatles revolutionized rock ’n’ roll, and they also changed the way everyone looked. It seems ludicrous now, but for those days, they had very long hair. I remember thinking, ‘Wow! How can any guy have hair that long?’ Really, it was just combed forward, with a slight fringe over the collar. We all had quiffs then – before the Beatles, it had been ducktails and Elvis.

  I was lucky enough to see them play the Cavern club in Liverpool, back at the beginning. They were really fun, eating cheese rolls while singing, and they used to tell a lot of jokes. They were hilarious. They could have been a comedy team. And they had weird guitars that none of us had ever seen. John had his Rickenbacker and Paul had that violin-shaped bass. All the rest of us had Stratocasters; I mean, a Strat was the ultimate you could wish for, Gibsons weren’t even around. And George, I believe, was playing a Hofner Futurama, God help him. Later on, he got a series of Gretsch’s. It was like, what? These weird guys with long hair and these funny guitars and they’re posing in their shirt sleeves with their ties pulled out! Everybody else was wearing these horrible, rigid suits, encased in these terrible, ten-button, suffocating Italian jackets. So that was quite a revelation.

  And the Beatles were hard men, too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia–a hard, sea-farin’ town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time that’d beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo’s from the Dingle, which is like the fucking Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy’s boys – they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles – not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing ab
out. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always shit on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.

  I remember one gig the Beatles had at the Cavern. It was just after they got Brian Epstein as their manager. Everyone in Liverpool knew that Epstein was gay, and some kid in the audience screamed, ‘John Lennon’s a fucking queer!’ And John – who never wore his glasses on stage – put his guitar down and went into the crowd, shouting, ‘Who said that?’ So this kid says, ‘I fucking did.’ John went after him and BAM, gave him the Liverpool kiss, sticking the nut on him – twice! And the kid went down in a mass of blood, snot and teeth. Then John got back on the stage.

  ‘Anybody else?’ he asked. Silence. ‘All right then. “Some Other Guy”.’

  The Beatles opened the door for all the bands that came out of that area. It was like Seattle became in the early nineties – the record labels came up and signed everything that moved. Oriole Records held an audition session in a ballroom that lasted for three days. They set up some equipment and seventy-something bands went through and played one song each and the label signed about half of them.

  Epstein had other bands besides the Beatles. One of the few he had that didn’t make it was called the Big Three. Johnny Gustafson, who later was in Quatermass, Andromeda, and then the Merseybeats, played bass. The band had a fantastic guitar player, Brian ‘Griff’ Griffiths who had this old, beat-up Hofner Colorama – a horrible fucking guitar with a neck like a tree trunk, but he played unbelievably. And the drummer, Johnny Hutchinson, did all the singing, which was unheard of then – a drummer singing? They were an excellent R&B band, but they got emasculated by the business. The band put out one record that they were happy with, but it didn’t make it, so after that they were stuck with two Mitch Murray titles – he wrote a lot of those saccharin-sweet pop songs (one of them was ‘How Do You Do It?’ for Gerry and the Pacemakers). Those didn’t go anywhere, either, so Epstein dropped them. It was a shame ’cause they were a great band.

  I suppose you could say that these bands were my peer group, a few years older than me, maybe. And I was in bands myself all this time, of course. You were no doubt wondering when I would get around to that. I already had been through the usual local band thing back in Wales, but in those days, putting together a group wasn’t easy. You couldn’t get equipment for a start. Whether a guy was going to play bass for you rested mainly on if he had a bass or not, not if he was a good player. And if he had an amp you could all plug into, he was definitely in. It was primitive shit. I was lucky to have my Hofner Club 50 guitar. I saw it hanging in this music store, Wagstaff’s, in Llandudno. Old man Wagstaff – he was about 107 and he was an all right guy. He ran an old-fashioned store that would let you take things on spec – put a few quid down and he’d hold it for you for ever. Needless to say, he went out of business. His son took over and immediately sold the fucking store! I think it became a ladies’ lingerie shop.

  It was after seeing Oh Boy (possibly the best rock show ever) and 6–5 Special (which wasn’t!) I was driven to be a guitar slinger. There weren’t many players around in Wales. You’d hear about somebody three villages up who had a guitar and you’d go and interview him. I met Maldwyn Hughes somewhere in Conwy when I was living there – he was a drummer (or, he had a drum kit!). He played in a dance-band style – brushes and riveted cymbal – but he was okay for then. We got a guy he knew, Dave (his last name escapes me, but he came to a Motörhead gig last year!), who was a good guitarist, but a horrendous person. He had green teeth, and his father, a failed comedian on the dinner club circuit, was always around cracking these rotten jokes. Dave, however, thought his old man was hilarious and would quote him when he wasn’t there. At first we called our band the Sundowners, then our second name was the DeeJays.

  My first show in front of people was in a basement caff in Llandudno. My big moment was singing ‘Travelin’ Man’, a song by Ricky Nelson who, incidentally, was a real good singer, and as handsome as few thousand motherfuckers. Otherwise, we did a lot of instrumentals by people like the Shadows, the Ventures, Duane Eddy, stuff like that. Around the same time I was also playing with this guy Tempy. He was an extraordinary person who taught me a lot about sarcasm, and was a most difficult person to get along with. He played bass – I mean, he really played bass, and for about one and a half hours we hooked up with the local moody guitarist, Tudor, but what with Tempy’s scornful sarcasm, my amiable insults and Tudor’s eggshell ego, it was no surprise that, although we played together beautifully, that one rehearsal was it. Shows how good it could have been if I remember it forty years later. That sort of petered out, so back to the DeeJays!

  We got a singer, Brian Groves, who was a dark, heartthrob sort of guy, a bit like Johnny Gentle, if anyone remembers him. And finally we found a large bass player called John, who was a remarkable rarity in that he had a Fender bass and an amplifier – so he was sort of the Bill Wyman of north Wales, I suppose. My God, we thought, we’re made now! But amazingly, we weren’t! We played a lot of factory dances and weddings and stuff, and then I got the itch – I knew that wasn’t it. Then we kept losing members until it was finally just me and Dave, two guitarists and nobody else, so we played instrumentals for a while. That was the DeeJays. I joined another local band called the Sapphires but they had this terrible hyperventilating guitar player who I couldn’t put up with. Between that and the Hotpoint factory, you can see why I left Wales.

  When I arrived in Manchester, I had an Eko in my hand. What a horrible guitar that was! It looked like Liberace’s fucking stage jacket made into a guitar – all silver glitter and black. And it had ten push buttons on it and only two of them worked. The others were just for show – I took the panel off and they weren’t connected to anything. But I swapped it soon enough for a Harmony Meteor (which I should have kept), then traded that in for a Gibson 330, which was a cheap version of the 335. And I changed bands about as often as I changed guitars. First, the Rainmakers: I don’t recall how I got with them but by the time I’d joined them, they were already past their prime, and I wasn’t in them for very long. After that, I was with another band for about three weeks. I don’t even remember what they were called – that shows how impressive they were. Then I joined the Motown Sect, where I would stay for about three years.

  I met the guitarist, Stewart Steele, and his bass player Les just from hanging around in Manchester. They had a drummer called Kevin Smith (who lived next door to Ian Brady and Myra Hindley), and I joined up as a guitarist and did most of the singing too. I didn’t like singing much – I still don’t, but I’ve gotten used to it by now, obviously. After about two years Les left and we got this bass player whom I knew, name of Glyn, but we called him Glun – who knows why? Glun was a very strange individual. He only ever had one girlfriend, and they got into weird sex immediately when they met. She was this chick who used to walk around the sand dunes in Wales and she always wore this white bikini made out of chamois leather – very thin, clingy material. And she would never talk to anybody. Nobody knew who she was, but everybody wanted to know her! Then she showed up one day with Glun, who was going bald already at the age of twenty. He was a good-looking guy, though. He looked a little like Dennis Quaid, the actor who played Jerry Lee Lewis in Great Balls of Fire, except he had a mass of blond, frizzy hair.

  Anyway, the Motown Sect were a kickass R&B band. Stewart was a very good guitarist, well ahead of his time. He had a Gibson Stereo 345, which to everyone else was very big news. And he had a treble-boosted Vox amp, too, which was also a big deal. The Sect played exactly the kind of music that I wanted to play, so I fitted right in. We only called ourselves the Motown Sect because Motown was very big then and it got us gigs. But we didn’t play any Motown songs at all, not one. We all had long hair, dressed in striped T-shirts and we would play harmonica and sing blues. We did some great covers of Pretty Things tunes, and the Yardbirds. On stage, we used to say, ‘Here’s one for all the James Brown fans!’ And the audience would go, ‘Yaaay
yyy!’ Then we’d say, ‘It’s by Chuck Berry and it’s called –’ Some of the crowd would go for it, because they’d never heard it before. Some of them would really hate it, but what the fuck could they do? We were on stage, you know, fait accompli.

  We really had no equipment, no one did in those days. I remember we played at Halifax town hall, supporting the Pretty Things, and we had one 30-watt amplifier. Can you imagine that? The two stacks I’ve got now are 100 watts each – back then, it was everyone, bass, two guitars and vocal, hooked into one 30-watter about the size of a practice amp. It seems to me like I’ve always played at the same earblasting volume, but obviously that’s not the case. I suppose back in those days we were taking more care with what we were playing, because you could hear every note. And we always used the house PA. Everybody did, even Hendrix years later. Hendrix used the house PA all through his career in England. Some of the places we played had two 10-inch floor speakers on each side of the stage with a little metal amp with handles on the back. Hopeless. How we ever did it, I’ll never know. But you never know how you did anything when you were twenty. You look back and you think, ‘Fuck me! What was I doing! I didn’t do that, surely.’

  Members of the band started to leave eventually. Stewart, as talented as he was, wound up going nowhere, sacrificed himself to his nagging mother and his marriage. Anyhow, I wanted to get out of Manchester, because the band was obviously going nowhere. When I saw the Rocking Vicars for the first time, I knew they were my ticket.