White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  As if all this wasn’t surreal enough, I saw a UFO while I was with the Rocking Vicars. We were in our Zephyr, going home to Manchester from Nelson in Lancashire, across the moors, and this thing came over the horizon. It was a bright pink colour and shaped like a ball. It went zhoom and stopped dead. I don’t give a fuck what you tell me – a cloud of seagulls, a fuckin’ air balloon, forget it. It wasn’t any of them things. This object went whuuum like a bat out of hell and stopped like that. So we got out of the car and we were all looking at it. It hung there and it seemed to be pulsing, but that was probably the effect of the atmosphere, just like the stars appear to pulse. Then suddenly, bang, and it went right over our heads, from standing still to about a hundred miles a second. Phoom! And it was over the horizon within two seconds of starting off. Nothing we make can even produce a facsimile of that performance, right? Therefore, when you’ve eliminated all the possibilities, it was a UFO, however improbable that may seem. I’m sure it wasn’t looking at us. It was probably more interested in America – it was probably there by the time we were back in the car!

  A couple of times the Rocking Vicars got to play outside of England. One trip was to Finland (I never went back there again until I had Motörhead). The Vicars had a No. 1 record there – of course, you only had to sell about 30,000 45s to be No. 1.

  The Vicars were the first British band to play behind the Iron Curtain. I’m not sure how that got set up – our manager was an enterprising geezer, despite the crockery. We played in Yugoslavia, which was sort of the crossover country of the Eastern Bloc. That area doesn’t have much going for it, really, other than that. Basically, its crops are rocks and scrub, and everybody’s poor. We played in Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia. Then we went down into Montenegro and Bosnia. And everyone would be bitching about everyone else. I mean bitching like these people really wanted to kill each other, apparently for historical reasons that have faded from their memory. It’s ingrained in the children from the time they’re a year old, it’ll take a miracle to ever stop them. The Serbs hating the Croats – that’s all you ever heard then, and it’s still the same now. Of course, I figured they all were the bad guys because the Communists were doing shit that I wouldn’t do to people. I didn’t know my own people were doing the same shit to them. I can’t say that Yugoslavian trip was particularly enlightening. We only got to see the good bits – you get the tour guide, you know, but in a Communist country, he’s the Tour Guide, right? If he says we don’t go down there, we damn well don’t go down there!

  Finally, in early 1967, I left the Rocking Vicars. They were still going until seven or eight years ago, as a sort of cabaret act. But I had bigger plans for myself, see. Conquering the north of England wasn’t good enough for me any more. I wanted London.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  metropolis

  I left the Rocking Vicars, thinking I was going to be a star in my own right immediately. Everything was going to be wonderful and huge women would get a hold of me and do things to me with raw carrots – you know, shit like that. Of course, it didn’t happen quite that way.

  The first time I went to London I lasted there for about a month – after waking up on Ron Woods’ mum’s sofa. I stayed with a friend of mine called Murphy, whom I knew from when he was living in Blackpool. He was a little Irish folk singer, fellow dosser. Nice character. We used to know these two gay tailors who would make all our clothes – they’d measure the inside of your leg four or five times. They liked Murph and Murph would go hang out with them now and again. He wasn’t fucking them, though – at least I don’t think so. But they made him a Batman suit, with a hood and batwings that went from the arms to the waist. He was going to fly off Blackpool Tower, see – publicity stunt, like.

  Blackpool Tower is a scale model of the Eiffel Tower – it’s about a quarter the size! Still too tall to fly off it if you don’t make it, really. But Murph got all dressed up in his batsuit and we all went with him to the Tower and headed straight for the geezer at the ticket stand.

  ‘Hello!’ Murph announced. ‘I am Murph the Bat Man! Let me in!’

  ‘Why?’ the ticket-selling geezer phlegmatically inquired.

  ‘I’m going to fly off the top!’ Murph declared.

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘I am!’ Murph insisted.

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Out of my way!’ demanded the five-foot-five batperson.

  ‘I’ll tell you what, mate,’ the guy told him. ‘You give me the money and then fly up there, and if you make it you can come back down and I’ll give you your money back. How’s that?’

  He took the glory away from poor Murph, his fleeting chance of a claim to fame. Anyhow, Murph had already gone to London when I decided to head down there myself. He had this terrible rat-hole flat in Sunbury-on-Thames. Well, it wasn’t that bad a flat, except there were about twenty of us dossers living in its four or five rooms and there was no hot water. No grub and no money either. We were getting a band together, me and Murph and Roger, this drummer – he had no drums, but he played on cushions! I ran out of patience after a short while, so I went up north. I woke up one morning, sitting on a beach in South Shields eating cold baked beans out of a can with my comb. I thought, ‘There’s got to be more to life than this.’ So I went back home and got fed for a bit. I didn’t see Murph again for about thirty years, and when I did I was pleasantly surprised to find that he’d weathered the years with his mind relatively intact (at least what was left of it after the sixties). He’s now an author; when I saw him he gave me a novel he’d written. When I get around to reading it, I’ll let you know how it is!

  Not long after I’d returned home, the Birds were playing up in Northwich, near Manchester, so I got a ride down with them back to London. When I got there, I phoned the only number I knew in London (apart from John Lord!) – Neville Chesters. He had been a roadie for the Who and the Merseybeats. I asked if I could doss on his floor and he told me to come on over. At that time, Neville was working for the Jimi Hendrix Experience and he was sharing the flat with Noel Redding, Hendrix’s bass player. They needed a spare set of hands, so about three weeks after I landed at Neville’s, I got a job working for them.

  Jimi Hendrix was huge in England at the time – he’d just had two No. 1 records – but no one in America had heard of him yet. I worked for his band for about a year on all the TV shows and the tours through England. I didn’t get to go to any of the foreign gigs, unfortunately, because I was only a fetcher and a lifter. Still, it was an amazing experience. Hendrix was the most startling guitarist ever, no doubt about that. Everything about him was great – his playing was truly astounding, plus he had a great stage act. He was like a cat, a snake! When he performed, he would drive the chicks fucking nuts. I’ve seen him go in his bedroom with five chicks – and they’d all come out smiling too. And of course, the road crew got the spin-offs. A stud, Hendrix was; and I’m crass enough to think that’s quite a good thing. I don’t know what’s wrong with being a stud – it’s more fun than not being a stud, that’s for sure! Unfortunately I didn’t get to mix with him offstage much – I wasn’t part of his private life. I was just working for him. I do recall that he was a very gentle, very nice guy. But most people were nicer in those days. It was one of those ages of innocence, you know. Nobody had started dying yet.

  I liked the other two guys in the Experience, too. Noel Redding was all right, only he used to wear a nightshirt to bed, and Aladdin-type shoes with the curly toes and a nightcap with a tassel. That was quite a sight. Mitch was nuts, as he still is today, in fact. One time I was standing on a traffic island in the middle of Oxford Street and Mitch bounced up to me, wearing a white fur coat, white trousers, white shirt, shoes and socks – complete vision, you know. ‘Hello, I don’t know who I am!’ he said and ran off again. I don’t think he knew who I was, either!

  This period of time, the late sixties, was brilliant for rock ’n’ roll in Britain. There hasn’t been such a w
ealth of talent in one era since. The Beatles, the Stones, the Hollies, the Who, Small Faces, Downliners Sect, Yardbirds had all come out of the same three-year period. The ‘British Invasion’ had changed the face of rock music for all time, so in London we were sitting on top of the world. There was a lot of blues going on: Savoy Brown (which was much bigger in the States than in England) and Foghat started off as blues bands, and the jazz–blues thing came in for a little while. There were people like Graham Bond, who had Jack Bruce in his band, and Ginger Baker, both of whom went on to be in Cream. The Beatles had just come out with Sergeant Pepper, so they were certainly flavour of the fucking month! Two of them had just gotten busted, too, so they could do no wrong – John Lennon as icon–martyr, and Yoko looking violated at his side.

  Everywhere you looked, there were good bands coming up. It’s depressing nowadays because you have to dig to find a really great band, and there seem to be thousands of awful ones. There were thousands of bands then, too, but really, at least half of them were great. Just to give you an example, I was along for Hendrix’s second UK tour, which ran from 14 November 1967 until 5 December. Co-headlining were the Move, who’d also just had two No. 1s in a row; then Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett – his last tour; Amen Corner, who were then at No. 2; the Nice, featuring a young organ player called Keith Emerson; and the Eire Apparent, later to become the Grease Band backing Joe Cocker. All for an entrance fee of 7 shillings and sixpence (70 cents American). And that was normal for the era.

  You didn’t think I’d get to talking about sixties London without mentioning drugs, did you? Oh no, not I. Our whole crew was on acid during the entire tour. And we all got the job done just fine. Orgasms on acid, by the way, are fucking excellent, really unbelievable, so I was doing plenty of that, too. As a matter of fact, acid was still legal back then. There weren’t any laws against it until the end of ’67. And as for marijuana – well, you could have passed by the average copper on the beat, smoking a joint, and he wouldn’t have known what it was. In fact, a friend of mine once told a cop it was a herbal cigarette, and the guy went for it. It just seemed like all of London was out of their heads back then. We used to get high and go down to the park and talk to the trees – sometimes the trees would win the argument. We were told that acid didn’t work on two consecutive days, but we found that if you double the dose, it does!

  There were some great clubs in London, like the Electric Garden and Middle Earth. You’d go there and everybody would be tripping. There was a chick who used to stand in the doorway of Middle Earth, by the cash register, handing out acid. She’d give one to each person as he or she walked in, free. One thing we used to do was get a crystal of acid, which had a hundred trips in it, and dissolve it into a hundred drops of distilled water in a bottle. Then we’d take a dropper and lay the mixture out in rows on a sheet of newspaper. Then when it was dry, we’d put the page back in the paper, go out, rip off the corners and sell them to people for a quid. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d get a piece of the treated newspaper that had two trips in it; other times, a soggy bit of paper!

  Real acid tripping, in those days, wasn’t all groovy-like, peaceful shit. The first trip I took lasted for eighteen hours, and I couldn’t really see. All I saw were visions, not what was actually around me. Everything, every sound – you could snap your fingers and it would be like a kaleidoscope – doomph! Your eyes would just turn into noise-activated, coloured strobes. And all the time your mind felt like you were on a rollercoaster, sometimes slow at the approach to the top of each drop and then – wheeee! Your teeth would kind of sizzle, and if you started laughing, it was incredibly hard to stop. You could say I liked acid. But acid is a dangerous drug – that is, if you’re complacent because it will wake your ass up! If you were a little uneasy about yourself, you would either be catalyzed by it or you wouldn’t show up again – you know, they’d take your tie and shoelaces away, and your belt, and put you in a room with no windows in it and a lot of soft walls. A lot of people I knew went to the basket-weavers’ hotel on acid.

  Everybody was taking pills, too. Uppers, like Blues, Black Beauties and Dexedrine. It was all pills – I never took powder for years and years. Really, if you’re in a band, or especially if you’re a roadie, you need to take them things because otherwise you can’t keep up with the pace. You can’t go on a three-month tour without being on something. I don’t give a fuck what they say – keep fit, eat your greens, drink juice – fuck off! It’s not true! I don’t care if you eat two hundred artichokes, you still won’t last through a three-month tour, doing a gig a day.

  Everybody did downers as well. We were doing Mandrax (the same as Quaaludes in the States). Once we bought a canister of a thousand Mandrax, but when we opened it, they had all melted – they must have got wet somehow. There was just this mushy mess of Mandrax at the bottom of this thing. So we laid it all out on the breadboard, rolled it down with a rolling pin and put it under the grill and we wound up with this white sheet of Mandrax, and we’d snap a corner off and eat it. Sometimes you just got a mouthful of chalk (the binding) and sometimes you’d get three Mandrax – sort of opiate Russian Roulette! I had a prescription for Dexedrine and Mandrax. In those days, there were a lot of doctors who’d prescribe you anything if you gave them the money. Harley Street doctors at that. And the doctor I went to took me off Mandrax, because a law had just been passed against it, and put me on Tuinol as a substitute. They were horrifying, really. Fuckin’ Tuinol was seven or eight times worse than Mandrax. Mandrax is a little baby boy compared to Tuinol! That was dumb as shit. As usual.

  But back to the rock ’n’ roll part of my story, as opposed to the drugs (or the sex) parts. Eventually, I did start playing in some bands around London. At first, I got a job playing guitar for P.P. Arnold. She used to be one of the Ikettes, and she had a couple of hits in England. I was in her band for about two weeks, until she discovered I couldn’t play lead. So I lost that job. Then in ’68, I wound up singing for Sam Gopal. He was half-Burmese, half-Nepalese or something like that – I forget now. But he played tablas, which are impossible to amplify. They’re too boomy, see – at least they were for the equipment of the time. He’d had a band previously called the Sam Gopal Dream, which had been on a show called ‘Christmas on Earth’ with Hendrix in December of ’67. Some people think I played that gig, but I didn’t. By the time I met up with Sam, he’d dropped the ‘Dream’ and was just going on as Sam Gopal, in suitably modest fashion!

  I was introduced to Sam by a friend of mine called Roger D’Elia. He played guitar and his grandmother was Mary Clare, a very famous English actress, a long time ago. I was living at Roger’s house and he told me he was forming a band with Sam Gopal and this bassist Phil Duke, and they needed a geezer who could sing. The music was sort of a blend of psychedelia, blues and Middle Eastern rhythms meets the Damned! We recorded one album, did one tour through Germany and played a gig at the Speakeasy in London. That show at the Speak was standing-ovation time, so we thought we were gonna be stars, but it was actually all downhill from there on in!

  Sam was determined to be a star. That’s what he really wanted. He was a real fucking poseur, but I didn’t mind that at all. I mean, I’m a poseur – what are you doing in this business if you’re not a poseur, right? So Sam was all right. He had his own ideas and all, but he let me write anything I wanted to. I wrote nearly all the songs that wound up on our only album. Back then, I was still using my stepfather’s name, so I’m listed as ‘Ian (Lemmy) Willis’. I credited ‘group’ on a few of the songs, but the truth is I stayed up and wrote them in one night. That was when I had first discovered this wonderful drug called Methedrine. The only two I didn’t do on the record were ‘Angry Faces’, which was written by Leo Davidson, and a Donovan song, ‘Season of the Witch’ – we did a fair version of it, actually.

  The album, Escalator, was put out by this record company called Stable. That was a joke. It was run by these two Indian geezers who had no idea whatsoever how t
o run a record label. I don’t know how that whole deal came together. It was one of Sam’s projects – he knew the producer and all. Escalator wound up doing nothing, zero. Stable was too indie of a label, even for the indies. Eventually, it dawned on us that the band was going nowhere, so we just gave it up. Funny enough, I ran into Sam Gopal in 1991, just before I left England to move to America. It was very strange, because he was just walking up the street, right around where I lived, and I hadn’t seen him for ten years. We chatted for a bit and he told me he was getting a band together – you know, all that fun stuff. Still!

  After Sam Gopal, I spent about a year with my guitar hanging on the wall, and I just tripped out and dossed around, living in squats. It’s easy to do when you’re young, and I was twenty-three. It was around this time that I learned to hate heroin. It was always around, of course, but not very much at first – it started to be a real problem around 1970. I knew this guy, Preston Dave – he wasn’t even a junkie. He was getting there, but not quite. And a bunch of us were sitting with him at a Wimpy Bar, the early English attempt at, say, Burger King. It was in Earls Court Road and was open all night. Preston was shaking and shit, so he went off to Piccadilly – where you went to score heroin. So he came back and went to the toilet. A few minutes later, he came lurching out backwards. His face was black and his tongue was sticking out. Somebody had sold him rat poison – took his money, smiled at him and sold him certain death. I thought, ‘Hell, if that’s the kind of people who are hanging around with heroin, you can fucking have it.’ And I also saw people doing horrible fixes with old, blunt needles that would really fucking mess their arms up. You’d see people with embolisms in their arms the size of a cricket ball. And they’d be selling their asses for a fucking shot. It always looked like misery to me. No fun at all.