Jesse Owens came home, covered in glory and eight medals after showing Hitler the benefits of democracy and a multi-racial society, and they wouldn’t serve him dinner in a restaurant in his own town. What the fuck is that? That kind of double standard is what really pisses me off. Do you know that there are still clubs in England and America where Jews aren’t allowed? This is a country of denial. Look at the model airplane industry – they won’t put a swastika on the model of a Messerschmitt 109, and that was the national insignia of Germany at the time. So does that mean that in the future, there will be no white stars on the side of a fucking Mustang kit because somebody in the planning room believes it’s a symbol of American imperialism? Are any Jews less dead because they won’t allow a swastika on a plastic model airplane? No! And let’s not even get into what so-called Americans did to the real Americans – the Indians. As you can probably tell, I’ve had my share of arguments over all this. Apparently people don’t like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, ‘Oh! Wait a minute – I was wrong.’ I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you.
Anyhow, let’s get back to business, meaning the nasty business of the record industry. That was one of the main reasons I moved to Los Angeles – to be near our record company. We’d had a meeting with Jerry Greenberg, the head of WTG, in London, and he was most interested in us and very supportive. But I immediately thought to myself, ‘I’ve got to be on the spot.’ I couldn’t be in England with Motörhead on an American label because it had never worked before. And this was the first time we’d actually been signed to make a record – each time before, the American corporation was just picking up a record we’d made for a British company. So it was even more important for me to keep an eye on things.
From the start I knew my suspicions were justified. The first thing the record company did when I arrived was to give me a brunch at their offices – brunch! I mean, what the fuck is brunch? Can’t they spell lunch, do they have a problem with the letter ‘l’? And do you know what this big deal, welcome-aboard brunch consisted of? Take-out Chinese food in foil pans – ‘You want some more sweet and sour pork, Lemmy? Great to have you over here, man! Motörhead has always been one of my favorite bands!’ Ha! None of them had ever heard a fucking thing we did, except for the week before when they had to cram. It’s such shit, and so obvious, yet they thought I couldn’t see them for what they really were. Nearly everyone there was some old industry executive shoved into a new position at a new label. I didn’t see anybody new and vibrant about.
That said, I do want to mention that Jerry Greenberg was great, as was his assistant, Leslie Holly. Leslie used to let us use the office phone to call around for gigs and new management. We couldn’t have afforded all those transatlantic phone calls on our own, so that really saved our butts. What we didn’t realize at the time was that we were being taken for a ride – and so was Jerry Greenberg! All I can figure in retrospect is that Sony must have been using WTG as a tax write-off, because those fucking executives seemed to do everything they could to guarantee that WTG – and, as a result, anything Motörhead did for them – would lose money. But let’s face it, when have record labels not been manned by a bunch of idiots? Like the old CD long box affair during our time with Sony. They were having huge fights over the long box – it was one of the most inconvenient forms of packaging anyone ever came up with, and there were people at Sony losing their jobs over the loss of the fucking long box! That alone says a lot about what’s wrong with the industry. Fuck it – call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always preferred vinyl over CDs anyhow.
Record company stupidity (and Chinese take-out brunches) aside, people did take note of my move to Los Angeles. There was a real buzz going on for us when we got signed to WTG and when I moved over here. I was on the cover of BAM and getting all these invites from people. It was great, being big news again for a while. And we were about to live up to all this hype and attention (brief as it was) by making one of the best records of our career.
But before we even got in the studio we had a record coming out, totally against our wishes. Our former manager, Doug Smith, released that live recording of our tenth birthday party show. We had told Douglas back in 1986 that the video of the show was enough and we didn’t want it out, so he’d been sitting on it ever since. Once we were away from him, though, he did what he wanted with it. It was purely a cash-in thing, of course. We slapped an injunction on him to keep him from releasing it (actually Wurzel was the one who took action in England, as I was already living in the States), and that kept it at bay for a while. But we gave up in the end; it was just too much work. And besides, like I mentioned, we were working on a new record, so we were quite busy.
Of course, being Motörhead, it couldn’t possibly go off without a hitch. The first thing we had to overcome was the album’s original producer, Ed Stasium. We recorded four songs with him before we decided he had to go. See, he overstepped his mark. One day we were listening to a mix of ‘Going to Brazil’, and I said, ‘Turn up them four tracks there.’ He did and there were all these claves and fucking tambourines that he’d put on – he must have gone in after our session and added all that junk. He certainly didn’t do it while we were there! That was very strange, and so we fired him. After that, we got Pete Solley, who was great.
Several of the songs on 1916 – ‘Love Me Forever’ and ‘1916’, for example – were very different from anything we’d done before, but it’s not like we were trying to change; we just did. Things started to change when I came to the States to live, and we just sort of continued on from there. But quite a lot of 1916 was exactly what our fans had come to expect from us, only better, of course. Take ‘I’m So Bad’ – it’s a loud rock ’n’ roll song with absurd lyrics, just typical Motörhead. What’s really strange, though, is that some woman from the Melody Maker said that the lyrics are sexist! I don’t know where she got that. ‘I make love to mountain lions/ Sleep on red-hot branding irons/ When I walk the roadway shakes/ Bed’s a mess of rattlesnakes’: you tell me how that could lead to the oppression of women! Then there’s my usual Chuck Berry fixation in ‘Going to Brazil’. ‘Ramones’, the fastest (and shortest) song on the album, actually started off as a slow number. Then at one point I said, ‘Let’s play it a bit faster,’ and it sounded just like the Ramones, so that’s how that came about. And although ‘Angel City’ was about living here in LA, I wrote the lyrics before I moved. ‘I’m gonna live in LA, drinkin’ all day/ Lay by the pool and let the record company pay –’: that’s really not too far from the truth! ‘I’m gonna kick ass, I’m gonna spit broken glass/ I’m gonna shoot out all of your lights’: it was one of them songs where I cracked myself up writing it. I was all by myself, laughing outrageously. And we put some saxophone on it – that was something new.
But what really surprised people (in a positive manner, I hasten to add) were some of the other tracks. ‘Nightmare/The Dreamtime’ and ‘1916’ both relied heavily on keyboards, which was very different for Motörhead – or any heavy band in 1990. In fact, ‘1916’ also had cello and no guitars whatsoever. I wrote the words before I wrote the music. It’s about the Battle of the Somme in World War I, but I’ve had people come up to me and say, ‘Isn’t it about the Irish Rebellion?’ because that was in 1916 as well. (The Irish are always singing about 1916, and the great Post Office massacre and all that.) But it happened that I was in England, watching a programme about World War I and I had a brainstorm when they got to the Battle of the Somme. Nineteen thousand Englishmen were killed before noon, a whole generation destroyed, in three hours – think about that! It was just terrible – there were three or four towns in northern Lancashire and south Yorkshire where that whole generation of men were completely wiped out. And those towns are still suffering from it because they never were able to build their population up again. Places like Accrington, in Lancashi
re, were fucking destroyed. They brought five old guys back to the battlefield in this TV special. One guy, who was about ninety, said, ‘They told us to walk, not run, and we walked across and all the lads around me laid down. I thought there might have been an order from the rear that I hadn’t heard. And then I realized they were all dead.’ It’s a case of the English killing more Englishmen than the Germans. Hindenberg, who later became president of Germany, said, ‘They were lions led by donkeys.’ So I wrote a song about it. But I do have a lot of ambivalence about that tune. This kid wrote to me and said he played it for his grandfather, who was there, and the old man cried all the way through it. That’s a very great compliment, but I’m not sure I like the guy feeling that bad for my gratification. It’s an amazing thing to have happen, though, to reach back over all those years and touch somebody like that.
We were quite happy with the recording of 1916. The artwork, of course, was another matter, but that’s because the record label was sticking its grimy hands in it. Whenever that happens you can pretty much guarantee that things are going to get fucked up. Bronze did the same thing with Overkill. We were all gathered in the conference room, the tables were removed and there was this easel sitting there with an overhead light shining on it. They pulled off the cloth, gave it the grand unveiling, and there it was – a motorcycle engine block with a woman’s nude torso coming out of it. She was sprayed red and the background was blue. It was just pathetic. And the company man says, ‘There you are! So what do you think?’ I picked it up and said, ‘That’s your best shot, is it?’ and I threw it out the window. I think he figured out I wasn’t too pleased! If you look at the cover of Overkill, you’ll notice there’s no engine or naked woman to be found, just one of Joe Petagno’s classic renderings. Anyhow, we had much the same problem with 1916. They brought in five sketches, all of them atrocious. So we sent them all back, amongst much moaning and groaning and temper tantrums from the art department – you’d think we were dealing with a bunch of nine-year-olds! Sony ended up farming it out to somebody else, which was fine with us. And in spite of our efforts, they still screwed it up – you’ll find all the flags of Europe on the cover of 1916 except for France. And the whole point of the title song is that it’s about a battle that was fought in France! But what can you do? Even so, I think it’s one of our best sleeves, and one of our best albums overall.
Although 1916 wasn’t released until the beginning of 1991, the first single, ‘One to Sing the Blues’, came out a few weeks earlier – on my birthday, as a matter of fact (that’s really a great song – maybe we’ll put it back in the set one of these days). In February, the usual happened – we went out on the road and did a bunch of TV and radio shows. Phil Taylor’s mother died just as we were beginning our tour through Great Britain. She had cancer, and we sent him home to see her. He was able to spend some time with her before the end. We all loved Ma Taylor and her death really hurt Phil. I don’t know if that’s the reason he gave up on the music – probably not – but it certainly didn’t do him any good.
Opening for us throughout Great Britain were the Almighty and an American girl group, the Cycle Sluts, who came with us through Europe, too. The Cycle Sluts were something else! They were pretty much a novelty act, with funny lyrics. I think they were doing it for a laugh and the chance to travel around the world. They were nice girls, and I enjoyed having them around. I had a terrible crush on one of them for the whole European tour, but I never got her. Typical.
There were only a couple of troublesome points on that tour. While we were in Britain, I got the gastric flu and we had to reschedule four dates. I was really sick and spent four days in a hotel, just throwing up. It came out of me like a thunderbolt. We’d be in the van and one minute I was all right and the next minute I was heaving out the window – ‘Stop the van!’ (Those viral things are gonna keep getting stronger, ’cause every five years a new strain comes out that they didn’t plan on, and someday one of those bugs is gonna kill half the planet.)
The other trouble concerned that other deadly virus known as our record label. They sent a camera crew on the road with us and spent five days in Germany shooting a video, Everything Louder Than Everything Else, then tried to stick us with the $9000 bill! Of course, we never paid, and a couple of years later, we were dropped, so they had to eat it – bad luck, guys, back to the drawing board! Tax loss anyway, right?
Overall, the songs from 1916 went down pretty well. We set keyboards off to the side. For a while, Phil Campbell was playing them on ‘Angel City’, but he got very stroppy and we had to stop him doing them after a bit. We’d wind up with horns and no guitars. Phil would have had to have been an octopus to make it work – he is some sort of amphibian, but definitely not an octopus! So our guitar roadie Jamie did the keyboards until we phased them out. We never did play ‘1916’ live; it’s too iffy, because you have to have silence for it, and you’re not gonna get it with our audience. Any mixed reactions we had in England didn’t have anything to do with our music – a few of our English fans seemed to be a bit upset that I’d moved to the States. It was like I deserted them or some such shit. Since half the band – Wurzel and Phil Campbell – were still living in Britain, they couldn’t quite hate us, and they couldn’t completely love us either. (Philthy had come to the States, too, with me, but he had the wrong visa in his passport and they sent him back! Another Motörhead foul-up.) They didn’t really know what to do with us. The main trouble was that we didn’t totally sell out the venues, so all the English promoters stopped booking us, except in London, for the next five years. They were the only country in all of Europe – the whole world, actually! – that wouldn’t underwrite our shows and guarantee the money. And we certainly couldn’t afford to put up the cash – it would have amounted to something like £100,000 to tour our own country! I certainly didn’t have that kind of money, and if I had, I would have spent it on something else. We finally got to go back to tour England in 1997, and it thoroughly amused me to see that we sold out everywhere we played.
In May, before we went to Japan, we made an appearance on the David Letterman Show. Actually it was only me and Phil Campbell; Wurzel didn’t want to do it and I don’t remember where Phil Taylor was. They only wanted two of us anyway because we had to play with the show’s band. We didn’t perform a song from the new record, though – it was Chuck Berry’s ‘Let It Rock’. And we never did meet David Letterman; in fact, he got the name of our album wrong. He called it Motörhead! But we did see a lot of Paul Schaffer, the band leader – he was great. All in all, though, the David Letterman experience was not that impressive. They gave me a hard time about my cigarettes – ‘Pardon me, but you can’t smoke in here.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘It fogs up the camera lenses.’ Stupid excuse No. 1,869, you know?
By the time we went to Japan we had changed managers, again. Phil Carson was offered a job at Victor Records, and I can’t blame him for taking it. So we went with Sharon Osbourne – Ozzy’s wife – but that only lasted for a few weeks. I’d been asking her to work with us for ages because I knew she was a great manager, but as it turned out, she wasn’t for us. It did not go at all well. Our trip to Japan was the clincher. We wanted to take our tour manager with us, ’cause he knew us, but she insisted on sending hers, this guy named Alan Perman (he’s dead now, and no, we didn’t kill him – although I would have liked to). Alan destroyed our career with Sharon. He claimed we wrecked a hotel and all kinds of shit, and we didn’t do anything! Nothing. What he did was give all the float money to Phil Campbell, which was a completely idiotic thing to do. Shows you what kind of a tour manager he was. And then he tried to cover himself by saying he had to pay for us wrecking this hotel. We did none of the stuff that he said we did. We weren’t exactly angels but this was just one of those times we were actually innocent! (And I’d like 3,426 other cases to be taken into consideration!) It was unbelievable, a complete fabrication. And then he came back and dumped the whole crew at the Hyatt in LA, found our regular tour
manager Hobbs’ room, gave him $300 and left. What’s Hobbs going to do with $300 and six crew in the Hyatt House? And the band hadn’t been paid yet, either.
This was all very bad news, but unfortunately Sharon believed Alan’s lies and thought we were the bad news! Once we were back in the States, it was a foregone conclusion. We were already judged and sentenced. Sharon dropped us three days before the start of our American tour because of Alan – he was her boy, see, so she had to stick up for him. And Sony got infected by all of this, too, and were running around in a panic – ‘Oh, we can’t ever send you to Japan again!’ They’d rather take anybody else’s word, even an asshole of a tour manager, than ours. Jesus. We even arranged for the on-the-spot guy from Sony in Japan to phone them up and tell them the truth and still they wouldn’t believe it. Someone from Japan came down to our Irvine Meadows show later in the year and told our record company how great we were and it still didn’t fly! That’s how much credibility we’ve got. We’ve got this reputation – which we don’t deserve, mostly – that we’re bad people and we’re not professional. At this point in my career, why would I even care about trashing a hotel room? It’d make more sense for me to go and trash my own apartment – it’d be cheaper!
Anyhow, in between the Japan fiasco and touring America – which went better, even if we didn’t have management – we went through Australia for our second, and probably last, time. That was a disaster. I walked off stage at one show because, once again, some kids were spitting on me. I don’t like being spat on (and really, who does? Even the punk bands in the seventies didn’t like it!). Call me old-fashioned if you like, but I won’t put up with it. I told them, like I always tell such crowds, ‘If you carry on doing that, I’m leaving, and I won’t be coming back. So if you see anybody doing this, cripple him because he just stopped your show.’ Usually it works, but it didn’t on the Gold Coast. It was really a shame, because I don’t like walking off stage, but I will not be fucking spat on! Incidentally, one of the reasons I won’t put up with it is this: Joe Strummer of the Clash was singing once and one of these dickheads spat right down his throat! Not only was it nauseating, boy and girls, no – wait – he got hepatitis! Nice, huh? Not me, sweetheart!
White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Page 19