Anyhow, on to Sony’s brilliant Operation Rock ’n’ Roll tour. They had five heavy bands from various Sony labels do a tour together. The line-up was Alice Cooper, Judas Priest, us, Metal Church and Dangerous Toys. The Metal Church and Dangerous Toys guys were the best company – you never saw Alice (he was generally on his bus watching Japanese splatter movies) or anyone in Judas Priest, but I’d always run into some of the guys from the other bands somewhere. Usually at a strip club. Every city we went to, we’d all go down to the local strip club, and there they’d be. Nowadays, I’m the only one in our band that goes out – the others have become responsible citizens (well, not Phil Campbell).
Anyhow, the record label sent us all off in this blaze of manufactured glory. Things were a bit rough for us at the start, since we didn’t have a manager, but Hobbs picked up the slack wonderfully. Leslie Holly at WTG lent us a hand as well, and I’ll be forever grateful to the two of them. Then the other bands’ crews pitched in, too – they’d finish their meals early and come out and do our shows, and for nothing! That was really nice of them. We stole nearly every show on that tour, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Track down any of the reviews, and you’ll have proof enough. The LA Times, for example, called us ‘the tangy mustard in a bland noise sandwich’, which I thought was odd, but nice! We were getting our pictures in the paper and Alice and Judas Priest weren’t. But some nights, when a band had to be bumped off the bill, guess who wound up the loser? If you’ve hung in with me till now, I think you know the answer. To be fair, we did cost more than the bottom two bands, and Metal Church did get bumped off of some dates, too. Dangerous Toys stayed on because they were the apple of Sony’s eye at the time. The singer had red hair and sang with a falsetto, just like Axl Rose, so you figure out their motives. We ended up being cut out of six or seven dates. In North Carolina, when we got scratched, we went down to South Carolina with Metal Church and did our own gig. The problem was nobody was fighting for us, since we didn’t have a manager. If we had the manager we have now, believe me, we would have been on every fucking night of that tour!
Unfortunately, we missed the last four gigs of that tour, and amazingly enough, it wasn’t Sony’s fault! There was an accident backstage in Boston and I broke my ribs. See, I was climbing all over this bird at the side of the stage – she was really keen and I was really keen. ‘Do you want another drink?’ I said, and she said, ‘Yeah.’ So I reached over for my drink and fell over my own equipment and cracked two ribs. It only took me about a week to heal, just long enough to miss the end of the tour.
We found another manager finally on that Operation Rock ’n’ Roll tour – Doug Banker. He’d worked with Ted Nugent, and he had also created some gambling system that got him banned from Las Vegas. But anyway, he came up to us at one of the shows, and we decided to work with him. When he started off, he seemed quite good, but then it began to degenerate. I think part of it was that he lived in Detroit and we really needed to have somebody right there on hand, not halfway across the continent. Plus he still had things going with Ted Nugent in some form or another. I’m not quite sure what happened, really. The bottom line is he just didn’t get into it enough, and with Motörhead, you’ve got to be all or nothing. Either do it completely or don’t bother, ’cause it’s a hard fight for us, and we need someone who’s gonna fight full-time. I don’t think Doug Banker realized that, and that he would have to put up with too much shit – record label shit, accusations regarding incidents we weren’t guilty of, etc. I admit we’re a fucking tough band to work with! But it took Doug, and us, a few months to realize how transitory our working relationship was going to be.
In the months after the Operation Rock ’n’ Roll tour, things were looking up, which was a change – things hadn’t looked up for Motörhead in about a decade! We had all those great reviews, our new management, which hadn’t yet had time to sour, and 1916 got nominated for a Grammy. To be honest, I was quite surprised when I got word of it. (If I’d known what an anti-climax the ceremony was going to be, I probably would have just said ‘Fuck off!’ and left it at that!) I was beginning to do quite nicely financially, after more than a quarter of a century in the music business. A good portion of this was thanks to the Ozzy Osbourne album, No More Tears. That record sold millions, and I wrote the lyrics to four songs on it (I’ve since written more, and a couple appear on Ozzmosis). That was one of the easiest gigs I ever had – Sharon rang me up and said, ‘I’ll give you X amount of money to write some songs for Ozzy,’ and I said, ‘All right – you got a pen?’ I wrote six or seven sets of words, and he ended up using four of them for the songs ‘Desire’, ‘I Don’t Want to Change the World’, ‘Hellraiser’ and ‘Mama I’m Coming Home’. I made more money out of writing those four songs for Ozzy than I made out of fifteen years of Motörhead – ludicrous, isn’t it! I’d like to mention that I’m available for more songwriting if anybody is interested. Quite reasonable rates – just the mortgage on your first-born child!
By the time 1992 had begun, we were working on songs for the next Motörhead record, which came to be known as March or Die. The Grammy ceremony happened during this period. Doug Banker and his wife attended along with me. His wife was sitting in between me and him, but when they were announcing the candidates for ‘Best Metal Performance’, he switched seats very quickly, just in case, so he could get on camera. That was funny as shit! Metallica won that night, of course – they’d sold something around four million albums, while we’d racked up about 30,000 so it wasn’t even a competition. But the acknowledgment was nice. If only for length of service we should get a fucking medal from the music business. All we ever got from Sony were headaches (and I have more to tell, so hang on to your corsets!). 1916 was our most critically acclaimed record, as far as the mainstream went – it got a great review in Rolling Stone, and an A+ in Entertainment Weekly (actually, the woman who helped me write this book wrote the Entertainment Weekly review – but that was long before she met us!). So in that way, it was a success. And we made a success of our months on the road – we got the audience off its ass, we got the crew off their asses, we got the promoters off their asses and we got our managers off their asses (or off ours!). The only thing we weren’t successful at was getting the record company off its ass! We thought maybe we’d be able to accomplish that with March or Die . . . Ha! Fooled again!
There were other problems too, that were becoming glaringly apparent when we were getting ready to make March or Die. The biggest one was Phil Taylor – when he came back to the band in 1987, things started off okay, but they gradually got worse. For a long time we were trying to convince ourselves that Phil was all right, but he really wasn’t. In ’84 he left because he idolized Thin Lizzy, and thought that with Robbo, he could do the best for himself musically. He began to look down on what Motörhead did. And of course, when he came back, other than the fact that we were better, Motörhead was basically very similar to when he left. So there was something missing in his drumming when he returned. ‘Eat the Rich’ wasn’t a particularly well-played track, as far as drums went. And after Orgasmatron, Rock ’n’ Roll was pretty feeble for drums. He would start tracks out at one pace and then end up at another. It was really fraught, because you’d go on stage not knowing what was going to happen. And you couldn’t discuss anything with him ’cause he’d just go nuts. Once Phil Campbell said to him, ‘You played like a cunt tonight,’ and he went fucking nuclear – but of course, Philthy always hurts himself when he goes nuclear. He was losing it off stage, too. There was the time he tried to climb out of his room through the bathroom mirror at the Park Sunset, thinking it was a window. He rang me up saying, ‘It’s time for soundcheck and I can’t get out of my room!’ and this was at five o’clock in the morning! It was great timing because I was just about to climb over on this woman. So, as you can imagine, I was pretty pissed off. But I told the chick, ‘Stay there, hold that thought,’ and went downstairs. Sure enough, his door was jammed, and as we were
both trying to push it – me outside, Phil in – the LAPD came up behind me with a fucking huge pistol. There I was, dressed in underpants and a kimono and the cop’s got me against the wall, patting me down – procedure run amok! Then he started asking me questions, like, ‘Is he dangerous in there?’
‘Oh yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘He’s pretty dangerous – mostly to himself. I wouldn’t worry about it.’
Then the cop wanted to know, ‘Has he got any weapons?’
‘Oh, he uses anything, furniture, walls. Anything.’
The cops couldn’t get in through the door either, so they went in through the window and burst the door out with a puncher. And Phil was sitting there, covered in cuts and bruises, trying to climb through the bathroom mirror. Didn’t he notice somebody who looked just like him coming through from the opposite direction? You’d think he’d get out of the way, wouldn’t you?
Shit like that was happening a lot. Maybe we could have handled these incidents, but the fact that he couldn’t keep time was just too much. He was really bad in the end – on 1916 we had to put him on a metronome to do ‘Goin’ to Brazil’! Then he was supposed to get together with Wurzel and Phil Campbell in London to work on the songs for March or Die (I was in LA at the time, furiously writing more lyrics), and it was a disaster. They played for half an hour and Phil Campbell turned around to Phil Taylor and said, ‘You don’t know these fucking things, do you?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he replied.
‘How come? We’ve been practising them at home, me and Wurzel – why don’t you know them?’
‘My Walkman broke at Christmas.’
Good excuse, eh? And this was weeks and weeks after the holidays! So that was pretty bad news, and by March, when we played at a Randy Rhodes tribute concert at Irvine Meadows, it was worse. By then we knew we had to fire him; we’d started recording the new album and it wasn’t working out at all. But while it was necessary, I’ll always feel bad about the way I fired him – I did it on the phone and it wasn’t right. I shouldn’t have done it that way but I just couldn’t face another fit. We had warned him three times in the past two years to get his act together, and Phil had been in the band long enough to know when he was fucking up. But it didn’t seem to bother him and finally he had to go. Tommy Aldrich did most of the drums on March or Die, except for ‘Ain’t No Nice Guy’, which Phil did, and ‘Hellraiser’, which was done by our new drummer, Mikkey Dee.
I’d known Mikkey for many years. Motörhead did a tour with Mercyful Fate when Brian Robertson was in our band and Mikkey (who is Swedish) was their drummer. In fact, I’d asked him to join the band once before, around the time Pete Gill joined up, but he was just joining Dokken at the time so he couldn’t do it. This time, I cornered him at the Rainbow – he was living in LA at the time – and he was free. So we had him down and tried him out. The first thing Mikkey did with us was ‘Hellraiser’ and he was very good immediately. It was obvious that it was going to work. We did two songs with him in the studio – ‘Hellraiser’ and ‘Hell on Earth’ (one of Motörhead’s eternally amazing lost tracks) – and then we immediately went out on the road with Ozzy. It was trial by fire time for Mikkey and he was scared shitless, but he performed miraculously. It was funny, really, because the rest of the band had their doubts about him. After all, here was Mikkey with his big, blond hair, and he’s good-looking and he knows it. So there were a lot of snide ‘big hair’ comments going on, and all this shit about glam-rock sissies. But it only took Mikkey one show to shut them all up. It was zippo time – not a word after that. Everyone was going, ‘Jesus Christ!’ and I was laughing, saying, ‘Yeah? Wasn’t it you guys that were going on about sissies and glam rock just an hour earlier?’ Mikkey, I have to say, is the best drummer I’ve ever played with (having said that, I want to add that Phil Taylor was excellent in his day, too).
Between being such a great drummer and having that mass of big, blond hair, Mikkey is an absolute wonder, as far as attitude goes. He’s even more arrogant than me and that’s saying something! But he’s got a sense of humour about himself, which makes it all right – I mean, if he didn’t have a sense of humour about himself, he’d be unbearable. But he’s so flash that it sends me into fucking fits. He knows what he’s doing the whole time – he’ll be doing a number on a bunch of birds and then he’ll catch my eye and we’ll just laugh. Occasionally, however, he’ll have a false sense of security. One time we were in a whorehouse in France, on a boat, for some reason – there were all these little floating brothels. Mikkey, Phil, a couple of lads from the crew and myself were there because there was nowhere else to go, basically, and we had thought it was a strip bar but it turned out to be a whorehouse – doesn’t make much difference in France. They only had champagne, and I didn’t have anything to drink but the other guys did. At the end of the night we got a bill for something like 200,000 fucking francs! So Mikkey went completely apeshit, screaming, ‘I’m not going to fucking pay them!’ with this thick Swedish accent that comes out when he’s pissed off. They called the cops immediately, and the French cops hate Englishmen even more than they hate other Frenchmen. So the CRS (the riot police) came in and they had guns, and Mikkey’s shouting, ‘Why are you here? It’s a fucking whorehouse! You’re fuckin’ part of this clip joint! You fuckin’ French cunt!’ and all this shit. And this cop has his pistol pulled and Mikkey was tearing open his shirt and yelling, ‘Go on! Shoot me!’ And we kept telling him, ‘Don’t do that, mate, ’cause he will shoot you. He wants to shoot you.’ Finally we were able to drag him out. He kicked the police car and the cops were right behind him, but he got away with it all – they probably didn’t want anything to do with a loony like him. And that champagne couldn’t have been very good because after four drinks, Mikkey’s usually on one knee.
Generally we don’t have any trouble with Mikkey at all. He’s really part of the band – not like Brian Robertson pretending to be some kind of guest star – and he wants to be involved in everything, which is very good. Sometimes, though, he’ll come on the bus in the middle of the night when everybody’s sleeping and blast the stereo. Me and Phil usually get bunks as far away from the front lounge as possible! But that’s a very small price to pay for what we get having Mikkey in the band.
Anyway, I need to backtrack a bit and talk about the making of March or Die because quite a lot went on during that time in addition to our changing drummers. For one thing, Los Angeles had a riot after the Rodney King verdict. We were at the Music Grinder, which was in the east part of Hollywood – right on Hollywood Boulevard, in fact – recording ‘Hellraiser’ rather appropriately. I came out from doing my vocal and there was a TV in the lounge showing a burning house. And I looked out the window and saw the very same house from the other side! It was right down the street! Everything was on fire, people were running around – it was complete mayhem. Mikkey was there and he was screaming, ‘My car! My car’s outside!’ and the guy from the studio came in and said, ‘We’ve got to cut it a bit short today, boys.’ As you can tell, we weren’t terribly concerned with the historical significance of this event. We went home – there was a curfew, it turned out, for about four days – and it was like driving through a battlezone. The rioters, I heard later, got as far as the Beverly Center but not all the way to Beverly Hills, which, if you ask me, would have been the logical place to go if you’re downtrodden. You know, kill the aristos and all that. But no – they attacked each other, which I thought was really stupid. Black people were attacking Koreans; where the fuck did that come from? I don’t care how lippy the Koreans are in their stores – you don’t have to go to that store, then, do you? Take your business somewhere else! And then they burned their own corner stores; that’s really smart, isn’t it? And on top of that, the whole thing was being taped by the news crews and the police helicopters and these rioters were waving into the cameras, going, ‘Hi! I’m looting!’ I mean, your number one rule about looting is not to be seen doing it, right? Those people wanted to be medi
a personalities even more than they wanted to be free. Fucking idiots – they deserved to go to jail, if you ask me!
We also got a new manager, Todd Singerman. As far as Motörhead goes, that had some historical significance. I don’t remember how we were introduced, but Todd just showed up at my house one day. He wouldn’t leave until I said he could manage us. I don’t even know how he got to Motörhead because he had never heard of us before. ‘I want to be your manager,’ he told me and I said, ‘But you haven’t had any experience.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I used to work for a Congressman.’ He was fucking fixated! I’m not kidding: he was around every fucking day, ringing the doorbell – ‘Hi, it’s Todd!’ and I was like, ‘Oh, fuck!’ But he was chauffeuring me around and taking me to parties and different things – you know, showing how useful he was. Finally he wore me down. Doug Banker wasn’t working out and I knew we needed another guy, so I said to the rest of the band, ‘Look, we need a new manager,’ and they were game because they’d been after me to get rid of Doug Banker for a while. And I told them, ‘I’ve got this guy called Todd Singerman. I think he’d be good.’ Wurzel was suspicious; after Doug Smith, he never trusted anyone. Life can do that to you, you know. But Todd came around and talked his way into the job. He worked hard to get the job, and now that he has it, he has to work even harder! Any time he complains about being snowed under, I just tell him, ‘Look, you fuckin’ volunteered for the job, man. Too bad!’ And he does an excellent job. Todd’s a fighter, and we need someone like that. He’s persistent, too – something I learned about him early on!
White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Page 20