White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  I’ve had so many fucking friends die from heroin, but the worst of it was that the girl I was the most in love with in my life died of the stuff, too. Her name was Sue and she was the first girl I ever lived with. She was all of fifteen when we first got together – most embarrassing if caught by the police, but there you go. I was just twenty-one when we met in 1967 anyway, so I wasn’t exactly some randy old geezer. More like two randy young ones! The big deal – at least to everyone else – was that she was black. We were ostracized completely. All our friends left us – hers and mine. And this was supposed to be the era of peace and love, you know! Everybody was listening to black music for the first time and all. Ha! It just proved how hypocritical they all were. Nobody knew how to deal with us. My friends left because I was associating with a nigger, which I thought was very bad news all around – fuckin’ assholes. Her black friends thought I was the oppressor, stealing a young black girl and making her my plaything and shit. Bollocks! I pointed out to them that when I left the house, I didn’t hold her by the wrist – she could come with me if she wanted and stay if she wanted. But Sue and I didn’t care, really. Hell, if you lose friends like that, they ain’t your friends anyway. Besides, we were in love, so no one else mattered anyhow.

  Sue and I used to fight like cat and dog, though. She was a triple Gemini, so you never knew which personality you were talking to. We never had enough money, and then she started working at the Speakeasy. She kept getting offers from people – she was young and had only just discovered she was beautiful, so people took her for a ride. While she was working at the Speak, we split up – one of the four or five times during the course of our relationship – and then she screwed Mick Jagger. I asked her afterwards, ‘What was he like?’ And she said, ‘Well, he was good, but he wasn’t as good as Jagger, you know,’ which was perfect! She meant, of course, that Jagger couldn’t live up to his own reputation. No way he could, even if he swung in, pole-vaulted into the room on his – well, you catch my drift.

  Anyway, Sue eventually got a job in the Lebanon, dancing in Beirut. That was before it got demolished, and it was still a playground of the Western world. She returned with a staggering heroin habit, and it was never quite the same after that. I’d just gone back with her and she went up to her granny’s. While she was there, she got one of her friends to come around with some smack. So she went in the bathroom and shut the door. Did the shit, drew herself a bath and then she passed out and drowned in her own bathwater. She was all of nineteen.

  I was in London when she died – I had joined Hawkwind by this time – but I didn’t go to the funeral. I mean, who wants to see them dead? I liked them alive. She had a sister, Kay. She was as pretty as Sue. I don’t know what happened to her but if she’s reading this, get in touch – we’ll talk about Sue a bit. Yes?

  So I knew from personal experience that heroin was the most awful drug to get involved with, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t go through a few harrowing experiences involving the search for my own substance of choice. One time, about ’69 or ’70, I really came unstuck. A bunch of us were sitting around, waiting for the speed to arrive. This guy was going out with a nurse, see, who worked at a dispensary, so he bribed her into getting us some amphetamine sulphate. Finally, she came in with a mason jar with what looked like amphetamine sulphate written on it. And we, greedy bastards that we were, dug in immediately. But it wasn’t amphetamine, it was atropine sulphate – belladonna. Poison. We’d all done about a teaspoonful of it, which is like 200 times the overdose, and we went berserk, the whole lot of us.

  I was walking around with a TV under my arm, talking to it. Somebody else was trying to feed the trees outside his window. It was really interesting for a while, actually. Then we all passed out and somebody called Release, the firm with the free drug rescue van, and they loaded us all in the back like bundles of wood and took us to the hospital. I woke up in this bed and I could see through my hand. I could see the wrinkles in the sheet under it. Then I saw the institution walls. ‘Fuck me!’ I thought. I was convinced I’d landed in the loony bin. Then I realized it was a normal hospital because the sleeves on the jacket weren’t long enough. And I saw, across from me, my friend Jeff, just waking up.

  ‘Psst! Jeff!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’re in hospital.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here. Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Be quiet!’

  So we got out of bed and I was just pulling up the jockeys when:

  ‘AAAAARGHH! THEY’RE ALL OVER THE FLOOR!’

  And he was leaping and screaming, eyes like organ stops, ‘Worms and grubs and ants – WAAARGH!’

  I got back in bed.

  Eventually the doctor showed up. ‘If we’d got to you in another hour, you would have been dead.’

  I was thinking, ‘I bet you’re sorry, you miserable bugger.’

  He said we’d had the antidote, and that it would take a while to wear off. Well, it took two weeks and it was a really strange time. I mean, I would be sitting, reading a book, and I’d turn to page 42 – but there was no book. Or I’d walk down the street, thinking I was carrying a case and suddenly – oops! I’d have nothing in my hand. Weird . . . but interesting. Not interesting enough to do it again, though!

  Finally, after dossing around for some months, I wound up in another band, Opal Butterfly. I met their drummer, Simon King, at a place called the Drug Store in Chelsea. The Drug Store was a big flash gaff, about three floors high. There was a restaurant at the top and a boozer on the ground floor and a record store in the basement. All these boutiques and other stores, too. It was one of the first mall-type places. It was rather expensive, but it was an all-right place. The guys in Opal Butterfly used to hang out there to drink, and I hooked up with Simon and just sort of drifted into the band. I don’t really know why I was hanging out with him – I never got along with him all that well. But you will be hearing more about Simon later.

  Anyhow, Opal Butterfly was a good band, but they never went anywhere. They’d been around for years when I got in and it was only a few months after that that they gave it up. One of the guys, Ray Major, went on to be in Mott the Hoople. The break-up turned out to be rather timely, because it was only a couple of months later that I wound up in Hawkwind.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  speedfreak

  My association with Hawkwind began with Dikmik. The ‘instrument’ he played in the band was a small box with two knobs that sat on a card table. It was called a ring modulator, but it was actually an audio generator that went out of human hearing at both high and low end. If it went up, you would lose your balance and fall down and vomit; if it went down, you shit your pants. You could make people have epileptic fits with this contraption. On stage, Dikmik could pick out the audience members who were susceptible. When we were playing in Hawkwind together, I’d go up to him and say, ‘Any good ’uns?’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, that guy there. See that?’ And he’d twist the knob – hrummmmm – and the guy would start flopping about. Amazing things you can do with sound. But of course, we could never tell for sure if it was the audio generator or if it was because we’d spiked all the food with acid before the gig. But as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Anyway, it was Dikmik who got me in Hawkwind. He was running around, looking for speed and of course he found me eventually. I was living with this girl in a squat on Gloucester Road in London, and she ran into him. ‘Oh, I’ve got a friend at home who takes pills,’ she said. So he came round and we discovered that we had a mutual interest in discovering how long the human body can be made to jump about without stopping. We went on something of a binge that lasted about three weeks, during which we had about two hours’ sleep. He had decided he was going to India to find the Sufic secret or some fucking mystical shit like that. But he only got as far as Gloucester Road, which is in the wrong direction anyway, and then he gave up. He’d found me anyhow, and that was fine
with him because he was the only speed freak in Hawkwind – the rest of them were acidheads – and he wanted some company.

  I’d seen Hawkwind before – not at the beginning, when they were known as Group X, though. The entire audience looked like they were having an epileptic fit, all six hundred of ’em doing the same move. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I have to join them – I can’t watch them!’ I wanted to get a spot playing guitar. Their lead guitarist, Huw Lloyd Langton, had just left the band – disappeared, really. They had been doing a gig at the Isle of Wight festival. They weren’t really playing at the festival, though; they played outside of the festival – how’s that for being alternative? Anyway, a bunch of them were sitting around a campfire and Huw had done something like eight tabs of acid. ‘I’m going for a walk, lads,’ he told the others, went over a hill and nobody saw him again for something like five years! That’s the way things were in Hawkwind – loose, very loose. Huw did re-emerge a few years later, in a band called Widowmaker (not Dee Schneider’s 1990s project, which we’ll come to later).

  So I was hoping for the guitar slot, but I wound up on bass instead. In fact, the day I joined Hawkwind was when I first started playing bass. It was in August, 1971. The band had an open-air gig at Powis Square in Notting Hill Gate, and the bassist, who was Dave Anderson at the time, didn’t show up. But like an idiot, he left his bass in the van, which paves the way for a successor, doesn’t it? You’re almost inviting somebody to come along and take the job off you, which I did. Apparently, Dave didn’t like doing free festivals, like the one Hawkwind was doing that night. He wanted to be paid all the time, and the band was into doing all these benefit shows. I remember us playing in defence of the Stoke Newington Eight, whoever they were. They’d been put in jail for some fucking thing and we thought it wasn’t fair because we were freaks and everything wasn’t fair because of the pigs – you know, all that crap that you talked to each other in those days. So we were doing all these gigs for these people, but the whole time we were getting conned. The organizers of those gigs had pockets everywhere. Quite a racket, that used to be. Still is, really. But once again, I digress.

  Anyhow, here was Hawkwind at Powis Square with no bass player, and somebody was running around asking, ‘Who plays bass?’ Dikmik, seeing his opportunity to have a full-time partner in speed, pointed at me and said, ‘He does.’ ‘Bastard!’ I hissed at him, because I’d never played bass in my life! So Nik Turner, who played saxophone and sang, came over to me and said in very important tones, ‘Make some noises in E. This is called “You Shouldn’t Do That”,’ and walked off again. I mean, that’s a lot of fucking information, isn’t it? And then they opened up with another song anyway. It must have gone all right, ’cause I was with them for four years. They never officially told me I was in the band that whole time. Del Dettmar, the synthesizer player, sold me a Hopf bass, which he got at an auction at Heathrow airport for about £27. I still haven’t paid him back for it.

  As I said earlier, Hawkwind was a very loose outfit. Every few months, there was a change in the line-up; people would come and go. You were never quite sure who was in the band at any one time – at least, you were never sure who would show up. At one point, there were nine of us in the band and then just a few weeks later there were only five of us, and then there were six, and then seven and then five again. Every picture you see, it was different people in the fucking band. It was very strange. Dave Brock, who sang and played guitar, founded the band in July of 1969 and he’s been its only constant member over the years. It’s his band, really, the same as Motörhead is mine. Hawkwind would not exist without him. And even he would disappear occasionally. He would go through these, like, nature boy phases – that’s what we used to call them – striding out into the fields with a staff, naked but for a loincloth, and you couldn’t get to him. I mean, there was no point in saying, ‘Dave, we’ve got a gig tonight,’ ’cause he was gone, he was busy being nature boy, right?

  In addition to being the main part of Hawkwind’s power core, Dave also wrote most of the songs. But he would never write with anybody else in the band. At least with Motörhead, I give the others credit, but Dave was all self-sufficient. I learned a lot from him, really, about vision and tenacity – things I already knew about, but watching him bolstered my confidence. He just made me sure of it. He had his quirks, too, like his spanking fantasies. He used to pass schoolgirls on the road and lean out of his car, yelling, ‘Spank! Spank! Spank! Hello, girls, spanky-spanky!’ When he was tripping, he was always convinced that he’d bitten off his tongue. He never had, of course, but he used to keep a red bandana in his back pocket and he would wipe his mouth with it. Then when he saw the bandana was all red – aaargh! – and off he’d go! One time, in Grantchester, we pulled that trick on him and it took me forty-five minutes to talk him down (I was tripping at the time myself, so I probably wasn’t doing a very good job!). Dave was always trying to beat the taxman out of money. One time he was explaining to us, ‘I went and bought this new place. I’ve written it off against the old place and got this farm and they can’t touch me.’ And it transpired that as he was telling us that in London, the marshals were going through his house in Devon and taking all the furniture. Fucking miraculous, that.

  Nik Turner was the other half of the power core in those days since he was the frontman, basically. He was in Hawkwind from the beginning, too, and he was one of those moral, self-righteous assholes, as only Virgos can be. Nik was the oldest one in Hawkwind – older even than Dave and I think that’s where some of his behaviour came from. Like, on the one hand he could be very old-fashioned but he was also keen on showing off how outrageous he could be. I guess it was some sort of post-hippie, mid-life crisis. And he would do annoying things, like play his saxophone – through a wah-wah pedal – right on top of the fucking vocals. Whenever we got a new sound guy, Dave or I would tell him, ‘Singing – sax out.’

  I recall one time when Dave didn’t show up for a gig in north London, and we rang up his house in Devon. His wife, who hardly ever spoke, told us, ‘Oh, I don’t know where he is. He took some mescaline and went for a walk. That was this morning and I haven’t seen him since.’ So Nik got this guy, Twink (who later founded the Pink Fairies), to play lead. The only guitar we had had two strings on it and he couldn’t play either of them because he was a drummer. That was one of Nik’s great decisions. He was also one of those who later got me fired from the band, so there you go.

  But Nik was occasionally a source of high amusement. One time he walked up to the mic, holding his sax, which was plugged in, and he disappeared in this fusillade of blue sparks! We were all laughing, ‘Yeah, great, Nik!’ He finally shot back into the amps and they fell on him, which gave me immense personal satisfaction. Another time we had a gig on an open stage that had this moat running in front of it. So we were playing and it was pouring fucking rain – all these hippies were sitting under bits of plastic, just sopping wet and buying hamburgers for £15 – all that good festival shit. Part of the stage was under this bowl-shaped enclosure, but the front four feet were totally open and wet. Me and Dave were out there and Nik makes an entrance from the left, dressed as a frog – he had black cowboy boots, green tights, a green leotard and a full rubber frog head on. He was holding the saxophone and capering – he was a great caperer, Nikky. So he came capering along the stage and I said to Dave, ‘It’s about time somebody pushed that fucking frog into that pond –’ and as I said it, he skated straight into the fucking water! I had to stop playing, I was laughing so hard. And then Stacia – our dancer – came up and tried to help him out and she fell in with him! I was on my knees, fucking helpless with laughter.

  Another time we were in Philadelphia or somewhere like that and he was doing his trick with the joss sticks – he used to light these joss sticks and fill his mouth with lighter fluid. Then with all the lights out, he’d go POOM! and you’d get this big ball of fire. And this one night he overdid the lighter fluid. He went POOM! and set
his hand on fire – there was this black silhouette hand in the dark surrounded by a halo of flames with a voice screaming, ‘OW! OW! OW!’ So we took him to hospital and he had blisters like sausages up his arm. But he still played that night, which showed fortitude, I will say that. He’d get drunk as a cunt on wine and once, in Switzerland, he walked out of the side of the stage and leaned on the PA and the whole thing collapsed on him. The only part of him sticking out of the rubble was his arm, holding the sax. Poor Nikky – he could be a bit accident prone.

  Our drummer at the time was Terry Ollis – we called him Boris or Borealis. He used to wear nothing on stage. He’d come on wearing a pair of his old lady’s knickers – that’s all – but he’d take them off halfway through the first song anyway. He was a dynamite drummer, but his dick kept getting in the way – free fall, you know, and he’d wind up hitting it with his stick. Ow! – There’d be gaps in the fucking music. But he was still excellent, and an excellent character, too. He used to work at his dad’s scrapyard on the outskirts of Far Westland, and he was always coming to rehearsals and gigs in weird clothing he found there. One day he’d show up in a German army outfit, and another day he’d show up in an old woman’s shawl. Then he got into downers and that turned out to be his ruin. The last gig he ever did with us was at Glasgow University in January of ’72. He fell out of the van on the way there. We stopped at a light and he thought we were there, so he opened the door and collapsed out onto the street. He was all over the road, his bags scattered and shit. We didn’t know he’d gotten out, so we just drove on. Later, we found him and somehow we got him to the gig. I remember Nazareth was supporting us and when they finished, we put up our gear and he walked onstage and sat there with his drumsticks crossed on the snare all night. Never played a single hit. So it was obviously time for him to go. A shame, really. We replaced him with Simon King, whom I knew from Opal Butterfly. He was another one who wound up getting me fired from Hawkwind – and I was the one responsible for getting him in the band!