White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  Dikmik left the band around this time; he got sick of all the power politics and shit that was always going on within the band. So he went off and lived with this bird who was a great friend of mine who’s living with Simon King now – London can be a very incestuous place. But while Dikmik was living with her, he became a pot dealer for ages until he got busted. He wound up spending six months or a year in jail and when he came out, he became a moocher, sleeping on the couches of his friends. He spent two years on my couch until I finally threw him out. It was a shame – Mik had a very incisive mind, but prison knocked him down and he never recovered from it. I think he was profoundly shocked by prison life. He changed when he came out – you become a victim instead of a predator and that’s a terrible thing to see.

  But the best thing about the band for me was that we got to play a lot outside of England, and I hadn’t travelled for a long time. My first gig abroad with Hawkwind was the Olympia in Paris. A German band called Amon Duul II played with us – they had the industrial sound way back then, and they were very well known in Europe. We caused a riot at that show: it was just kids going nuts, really, but the CRS (riot police) came out like the fucking Gestapo. Another gig I recall doing was at the Lem Club in Italy – that really pissed Dave off!

  I got to America for the first time in 1973, after Space Ritual was released. I took to it from the start – unlimited whoopee! It was fucking El Dorado for an Englishman. You’ve got to understand how drab and awful England was to grow up in back then – even more than now! Then you get to Texas – you can get England into Texas three and a half times! You can drive through Texas for two days and still be in Texas. And the clarity of the air in places like Arizona and Colorado is incredible. The first time I was in Boulder, I looked out the window and there was this range of mountains that looked like they were right on top of the hotel, but they were fifty miles away! We’d never seen anything like that, and it was the same for any European band.

  Our first tour started off at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia, and then we went up to New York and played at the Hayden Planetarium – the comet Kohoutek was coming across, you see, and we were all very cosmically inclined. It came across all right, but it wasn’t visible to the naked eye – bit of a swizz and that was about it. But we had a party at the Planetarium and saw this programme about Kohoutek and shit like that. It was a huge party, where I met Alice Cooper for the first time, and Stevie Wonder was there. In the middle of the lobby, there was this big lump of moonrock, and Stevie’s minder brought him over, placed his hand on it – ‘Moonrock, Stevie’ – and led him away. Then during the show, I looked around, and there was Stevie Wonder again, with his minder telling him, ‘It’s going across now, Stevie, left to right.’ Who’s fucking nuts, me or them?

  We took acid quite consistently all across America. In Cleveland, we were spiked three times with angel dust by three different sets of freaks before we went on, and none of us noticed. That’s how much acid we were doing!

  Then you come to Los Angeles and you think you’ve died and gone to fucking heaven. It’s the palm trees. I remember our plane landing at LAX, circling around to descend, and I looked down – every yard had a blue pool and the palm trees were huge. And as we drove down Hollywood Boulevard, lined with all those palm trees, I thought, ‘Wow, this is something else, this place.’ And really, it was magical at that time, young men over from England. Of course, by the time I moved over years later, I knew it wasn’t – intellectually at least. But you never quite lose that feeling of wonder.

  As a matter of fact, it was in Los Angeles I wrote my last song for Hawkwind. It was ‘Motorhead’. We were at the Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard – the hotel Led Zeppelin made famous with their tales of destruction. The Electric Light Orchestra were staying at the hotel the same time as us, and their guitarist, Roy Wood had an Ovation, which he lent me. So there I was on the balcony of the Hyatt, at 7.30 in the morning, howling away at the top of my voice. The cops seemed vaguely disturbed by my racket. They kept stopping their cars, getting out and looking up at me. But then they’d just shake their heads and take off. Maybe they thought they were hallucinating. Incidentally, on the original recording of ‘Motorhead’, the one for Hawkwind, there was a violin solo. If any of you out there think the violin is a sissy instrument, you’ve never heard Simon House. He played like a maniac and he ripped through that song. He did some great stuff, Simon. He ended up playing with David Bowie later on.

  We toured America four times while I was in Hawkwind. Simon House, who played synthesizer and violin, came on just before the second tour. Eventually, he replaced Del Dettmar, but he and Del were both in the band at the tour’s start. Del quit in the middle and went to live in Canada, where he built a log cabin with his own hands – literally. And he was a little fella, too! He built it for his wife, who was pregnant at home in England. About seven months later, when the cabin was finished, she and the kid came out by ship – and the kid was half Pakistani. Nasty shock, eh? Went straight to him, too. I don’t think he immediately put her right back on the boat, but it was words to that effect. Very bad news.

  Things with Hawkwind started to go downhill when the drum empire took over. That started in July, 1974, when Alan Powell joined. Simon King had injured himself playing American Football, and Alan filled in for him on our Norwegian tour. Then, when Simon came back a few weeks later, Alan wanted to stay because he was having so much fun, and he and Simon were mates and all that. So the two of them started playing together. That, as far as I’m concerned, was the end of Hawkwind because those two killed it between them.

  I’ve seen a lot of pompous drummers in my lifetime, but when it came to this pair, it was ridiculous. Simon and Alan’s two drum kits were set at the centre of the stage in this huge semi-circle of percussive effects, which we never used. There was an anvil and several bells, tubular and the hanging kind, and all sort of things that could be hit. It was quite amazing, really – jolly well made sure that you knew your place! But not me, of course. I gave those two fuckers no peace. I’d be standing by the side of them, urging, ‘Hurry up you cunts! Slow – slow! Come on!’ They may have hated it, but it sure kept the band going. But it wasn’t just the goings-on with the drum empire that upset people. I was just too forward for the rest of the guys. During my years with Hawkwind, I really came out of any shell I may have been in, stagewise. I was always at the front of the stage and showing off, and since I wasn’t the leader of the band, it was considered most presumptuous. And I’d started to write songs, which I think pissed everybody off as well. Not to mention the drug thing. See, I was the only speed freak left in the band. Dikmik had been gone for a couple of years, and I was a minority of one. I was the bad guy . . . as I still am today. So when I got busted going over the Canadian border for cocaine possession, they took that as an opportunity to fire me.

  The really fucked up – but also lucky – thing about the whole situation was that I didn’t even have any coke. It was May of 1975. We had just played Detroit, and we left early the next morning for Toronto. Some chick at the show had given me some pills and I had about a gramme of amphetamine sulphate. Apparently, when you’re travelling from Detroit into Canada, you can go over the bridge or under the tunnel. The thing to do, if you don’t want to be hassled, is go over the bridge, but we weren’t paying attention. Under the tunnel we went and got a surprise awakening by the border police. ’Cause it was early and I wasn’t thinking, I stuffed my contraband down my pants. Not a good idea – they searched us to the skin, and the cops got my stash. They took the amphetamine sulphate and put some of it in one of those vials that you shake up – if it turns a certain colour, then you’re in trouble. But it doesn’t differentiate between speed and cocaine. Well, it turned the right colour – for the cops, that is. ‘This is cocaine, buddy, you’re going to jail!’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ But the bastards kept me and the rest of the band went off to Toronto.

  So there I was, stuck with the Canadian police.
They didn’t even bother charging me for the pills, but I was arraigned and sent down to jail on remand. This was, as you can well imagine, not a pleasant experience. I’d been locked up in cells overnight, but never in a serious jail like this one. I remember I was in the delousing room, ready for the spray when this wonderful voice behind me said, ‘You’re bailed.’ Well, as I found out later, the only reason the band got me out was because my replacement wasn’t going to get to Canada in time. Otherwise, they would have just let me rot. I wouldn’t have rotted anyway – since what I had was amphetamine sulphate and not cocaine, the case was thrown out as a ‘wrongful charge’, and they couldn’t charge you again for the same substance. So I was free and clear.

  The band had got me a plane ticket and they flew me over to Toronto. I got there just after they’d finished the soundcheck. We did the gig to tremendous applause, then at four o’clock in the morning, I was fired. I was doing the wrong drugs, see. If I had been caught with acid, those guys would have all rallied around me. I think even if I’d been doing heroin, it would have been better for them. That whole hippie subculture was so fucking two-faced, when you get down to it. It was all ‘Speed kills – wow, man, bad drugs’, and stupid shit like that (and keep in mind, all the people I know who said that are now dead or messed up on heroin). Well, all I have to say is that at least speed keeps you functional. Why else did they give it to housewives for all those years?

  Hawkwind had very bad timing, kicking me out of the band when they did. They were on the verge of really making it in America when I got fired, so they must have been fucking insane. But it wasn’t because I was fired that they failed; it was because of who they got to replace me, in addition to firing me for all the wrong reasons. When I left Hawkwind, they got a guy called Paul Rudolph to play bass. He used to be a great lead guitarist for the Pink Fairies, but he was a very, very mediocre bass player – the reverse of me, in fact. And he just saw the band straight into the Twilight Zone – it was a terrible fucking mess. They tried carrying on into Ohio, did about four more gigs and cancelled the rest of the tour. Dave, God help him, actually wanted to bring me back into the band, but the drum empire wouldn’t let him. So the drummers and the bass player took over and the band went in a bad direction. They made a couple of – well, they weren’t bad albums. Musically, they were excellent, but they were really naff. There was no nuts in ’em – when I left Hawkwind, the cojones came with me.

  CHAPTER SIX

  built for speed

  I had my revenge on Hawkwind for firing me. By the time they got back to England, I’d stolen my equipment out of the band’s storage space. I don’t remember how we got in now, actually. We must have got somebody from the office to nick the key for me or something. In fact, I don’t even remember who came along with me – it was Lucas Fox, probably, who wound up drumming in Motörhead for the first few months. He was the only one I knew who had a car. We had just got my stuff in the van when Alan Powell caught us. That was a nice coincidence, since I’d just seen his wife! He was shouting, ‘Yeah, ya cunt! You thought you’d steal your stuff back!’ We drove off, laughing, and I yelled back, ‘Yeah, go and ask your wife!’ But I don’t think he did, because I saw her again the week after and she never mentioned it.

  I was also busy doing other, more important things. Within two weeks of getting back to London, I put together the band that was to become Motörhead. I wanted it to be sort of like the MC5, since that was the big hero band of most of the underground, and throw in elements of Little Richard and Hawkwind. And that’s more or less how it turned out. We were a blues band, really. Although we played it at a thousand miles an hour, it was recognizable as blues – at least to us it was; probably it wasn’t to anybody else.

  It was pretty easy getting the band together, really – too easy, in fact. Within a very short period of time, I’d recruited guitarist Larry Wallis and Lucas Fox as the drummer. Larry I already knew – he’d been in UFO before they made a record, and he had been playing guitar for the Pink Fairies after the departure of Paul Rudolph, the guy who replaced me in Hawkwind. Pretty incestuous, eh? On top of that, the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind used to play on stage together billed as Pinkwind (Hawkfairies didn’t work, really). Lucas was introduced to me by my roommate at the time, a girl name Irene Theodorou, who I called Motorcycle Irene, after the Moby Grape song. I’d begun living with her before I went on my last tour with Hawkwind. She wasn’t a girlfriend of mine, just a friend, although we did have some wild times together. She was a very nice girl, and a good photographer. She did some shots of us in the early days. Lucas had been hanging around with Irene, hoping to fuck her. He never did, of course. He was a bit of a dork, but a very sound guy, really, and since he was always around, and a drummer, and had a car – he appeared very handy. I didn’t want to sing; I wanted somebody else to do it. But the problem with that, of course, is you get stuck with a fucking singer! No matter – we never did find anybody else and I wound up doing the vocals.

  At first I was going to call the band Bastard, a name which pretty much summed up the way I felt. But the guy who was managing us at the time, Doug Smith (he’d been managing Hawkwind – that’s how I knew him), didn’t think it was a good idea. ‘It’s very unlikely that we’re gonna get on Top of the Pops with a name like Bastard,’ he pointed out. I figured he was probably right, so I decided to call the band Motörhead. It made sense: ‘Motorhead’ was the last song I wrote for Hawkwind, and it was also the American slang for speedfreak, so all the pieces fitted. And it was a one-word name; I believe in one-word names for bands – they’re easy to remember.

  So I took my psychedelic-coloured amps, painted them flat black, and Motörhead got under way. The press was having a field day with us – my firing from Hawkwind had been in all the British music papers, and everyone wanted to know what I was up to. That was when I came up with the famous quote that first appeared in Sounds: ‘It’ll be the dirtiest rock ’n’ roll band in the world. If we moved in next door your lawn would die!’ Actually, I stole that line from Dr Hook, but it quickly became the first of Motörhead’s many catchphrases.

  Our first show was on 20 July 1975 at the Roundhouse. That was fast, considering I’d left Hawkwind in May. We opened for Greenslade, a kind of pomp-rock band formed by this guy, Dave Greenslade, who’d been somebody’s keyboardist. All the bands in those days had intro tapes, and since I’ve always been a World War II fanatic, we used a recording from Germany of marching feet and people yelling ‘Sieg Heil!’ It just sounded really powerful and incredibly cold, all those feet smashing on the German cobblestones, that bromp, bromp! tromping sound. That was our outro tape, too. I had a silver-painted human skull on stage, on the top of my stack. But in spite of these theatrical touches, I have to admit we weren’t very good (bloody awful, let’s face it!). Undaunted, we proceeded to go on a trek of England through most of August. After all, that’s the only way you get better – you keep playing.

  We were already attracting fans, though – punks, old Hawkwind fans and a horde of nasty characters were coming to see us. And some of them were really getting into it. One young kid showed up at our first show in white boots and a bullet belt, just like mine – and I’d only gotten the boots two weeks before, so he was really early. From the start, we were inspiring slavish fucking loyalty in people – that’s the funny thing about Motörhead: our fans and our crews really latch on to us. The soundman we have now has been with us since around 1977. He made a bunch of money when he was working for Black Sabbath. The tour we asked him to do was only going to make him a third of the money, but there he was on the plane with Sabbath’s crew, plotting all our sound and lights. Somebody told him, ‘You should be doing Black Sabbath’s stuff,’ and he replied, ‘Yeah, man, but these are my boys!’ And he left that tour to come and do us. We’ve always had people like that. It’s some sort of disease people catch from the ultimate underdog band.

  And we were definitely underdogs at our next London gig, which was at the Hamm
ersmith Odeon on 19 October 1975. We were supporting Blue Oyster Cult, but we certainly didn’t get any help from them! In fact, they sabotaged us completely. They gave us no soundcheck, and the Odeon is notorious for its bad sound. I’ve noticed that a lot of American bands treat their openers poorly, like they want to destroy the competition before it even has a chance to compete! British bands don’t do that – at least mostly they don’t – nor does Motörhead.

  That show earned us a new reputation and our own category in the Sounds poll for that year! We were voted ‘Best Worst Band in the World’! Nevertheless, we had a record deal with United Artists – they were Hawkwind’s label and they decided to hang on to me, at least for the time being. That was good . . . or so we thought at the time. So late in the year, we went down to Rockfield Studios, which is located on a farm in Monmouth, south Wales, to make a record. Dave Edmunds was going to produce it. Dave is one of my heroes. He became famous with Rockpile, and as a solo artist, but I knew him from Love Sculpture, which was his first band. They did an instrumental version of ‘Sabre Dance’, which was the fastest thing you’ve ever heard in your fucking life! It’s some of the best guitar, too, because everybody was on pills then, and Dave was fast already.

  Unfortunately, Edmunds only recorded four tracks with us: ‘Lost Johnny’, ‘Motörhead’ (two of the songs I wrote while in Hawkwind), ‘Leaving Here’ (an excellent Eddie Holland song – I used to see the Birds play in my Manchester days), and ‘City Kids’ (a Pink Fairies number that Larry wrote). Then Dave got signed to Led Zeppelin’s label, Swan Song, and they took him away. That was too bad, because I really liked working with him – he was just like one of us. I recall one night, when we were listening back to a track, Dave stood up and said, ‘Excuse me.’ He went out of the door and threw up, then he simply came back, sat down and carried on. We used to find him slumped over the board with white noise howling out of the speakers. He also helped me fix a guitar. One of my strings kept jumping out of the nut – that thing that your strings go on at the top of the neck. So he told me, ‘All you need on there is a bracket above it. Come with me.’ And we broke through a window of this toolshed on the farm to get a drill. Then he smashed this old guitar, took the bracket off it, drilled holes on my guitar and put it on. It’s still on there to this day. Good man, Edmunds, great spur-of-the-moment guy. And he’s made some great records. He produced the Everly Brothers comeback album with Jeff Lynne, and the Stray Cats, among many others. After Dave, we wound up with Fritz Fryer as producer. He was in a sixties band called the Four Pennies who had a couple of No. 1s in England. A very good band, but they were a bit soppy. So Fritz finished up our record, which was a shame, really. He was all right, but he wasn’t the man Edmunds was, which is not surprising, since he was the man Fryer was!