White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography

by Kilmister, Lemmy

  We spent a week early in 1993 playing a few low-key shows at this place in Anaheim called California Dreams that doesn’t exist any more, and figuring out what to do about a record deal. We had to have a deal, of course, and we ended up getting one with a German company, ZYX, which was a fucking disaster. But they offered us more money than anyone else – they offered us stupid money, up front – so we took it. And we were fucking broke: that’s what you do when you’re skint, you take the money. It did start off looking good, I have to admit. For one thing, Germany had been our best market for years, so it made sense to sign with a German label. And they made all kinds of promises and they flew across the Atlantic all the time to see us. Since ZYX was primarily a dance label (that should have tipped us off right there), they said we could do the distribution and have our own subsidiary label and all that. But in the end they insisted on doing it all themselves, which was a complete nightmare. They didn’t know anything about American marketing. Plus the guy that runs the place is the one who started the company back in 1926 or whatever. He was so fucking old he spit Noah’s Ark and all decisions had to run by him. I don’t recall how many times Todd went across the Atlantic to deal with them, but it was more than they did coming to see us! Todd had only been managing us for a little over a year during all this and those months were really a baptism of fire for him. However, he rose to the occasion remarkably well.

  Anyhow, we had no clue about what we’d gotten ourselves into, and we just went along making an album, like we always do. This was the first time Mikkey was in with us from the start and he turned out to be even better than we expected. He was very involved in the songwriting process for this album, which came to be called Bastards. Phil Taylor hadn’t been interested in the writing process for a very long time before we fired him. And Mikkey also came through when we got in the studio. He banged out the drum tracks in record time. He was amazing, and has continued to be amazing to this day . . . not to mention amusing!

  We also got a new producer for this album. For the better part of our careers, it seemed like Motörhead changed producers every other album – Jimmy Miller did two, as did Vic Maile and Peter Solley. They never seemed to be any good for more than that. I think we wear them out! I don’t remember the name of the other guy we were looking at for the new record, but it was between him and Howard Benson and we went with Howard. Howard certainly earned the gig: he was keen and he came to all the rehearsals (though I have to say it was the last time he did that!). Howard was there, Howard was gonna do this record whatever fucking happened. He just came and hung around until we said yes. That’s really what he did – in the end, we just said, ‘Fuck it, let’s let him do it!’ He really wanted this album and we gave it to him and amazingly enough, he stayed with us for the four albums. I don’t know how he managed to break the two-album barrier but he did and we were generally pretty happy with him in spite of some of his weird habits (I’ll get into those later, but don’t hold your breath – they aren’t that exciting). He did a great job on Bastards – I think it’s one of the best albums Motörhead has made so far. Every song on it is strong. ‘Death or Glory’ and ‘I Am the Sword’ are probably my favourites, along with ‘Lost in the Ozone’. Then there’s ‘Don’t Let Daddy Kiss Me’, which is about child abuse. I wrote that one on my own and I’d had it for three years in my pocket. I offered it to everybody – Lita Ford, Joan Jett – ’cause I thought a girl should sing it but no one ever took it up. They would hear the song and say, ‘I love it! I must sing it, you’ve got to let me have that song!’ and then three weeks later, the manager would call and say, ‘No.’ So I wound up singing it myself.

  We really enjoyed making Bastards. Although he was with us for the next album, Sacrifice, I really consider it Wurzel’s last Motörhead record, because it was the last one where he was really there in spirit. And we had fun showing Howard how to work with us. He gets really girly in the studio and it’s a simple thing to get him upset. He’ll start going on – ‘Don’t insult me, man!’ and all – and I’ll just say, ‘It’s impossible to insult you, Howard. Why should I bother? You’re doing that all by yourself.’ Once he was wearing a shirt that had, I don’t know, the number 36 or something on it, and Phil said, ‘Is that shirt foreign, Howard?’ He said, ‘No, why?’ And Phil replied, ‘I’ve never seen “cunt” spelled like that before.’ We got him twice with that and finally he started freaking out – ‘Why did you hire me, then, if you don’t like me!’ And Phil said, ‘Well, you were the only one in our price range.’

  Despite this Howard really liked being our producer. He certainly won’t stand to have anyone else talking shit about us, that’s for sure (I think he’s probably had to defend us at some length at one time or another). We did argue quite a bit while we were in the studio, though, me and him. Early on in our working relationship, there was one day where I’d been waiting around to do some vocals for endless hours while he was going over some guitar part or something. So I finally got a hamburger and I was just starting to eat it when he said, ‘Right! Vocals!’ ‘Oh, you cunt!’ I said. ‘Why don’t you let me eat my fucking hamburger?’ But no – ‘Come on, come on, we’re on a deadline!’ Howard being a bitch in the studio, you know. So I did the logical thing; I shoved the burger’s contents into the mixing board. I figured it was fair. Howard’s eating habits, incidentally, leave quite a bit to be desired – he eats all these terrible vegetarian things, fruit and nuts. That shit’s not healthy! Human beings are carnivores – just look at our teeth! Our digestive systems are not made to handle vegetarian food. It makes you fart all the time, and you get intestinal flora. Vegetarianism is unrealistic – that’s why cows have four stomachs and we have one. Think about it. (Hi, Howard!) And don’t forget – Hitler was a vegetarian!

  The whole time we were working with ZYX, recording the album was the only thing that went smoothly. But when we’re in the studio that’s generally the way things go anyway. Mikkey, when he first began recording with us, was surprised at the way we do everything off the cuff. He was used to people like Don Dokken, who work on the same record for three years and have everything planned out beforehand. I can’t stand working that way. We go in with nothing and just hammer it out. It costs less that way, and obviously it works. If it didn’t we’d do it another way. Anyhow, the record was great but the problem was you couldn’t find it anywhere. You could find it in Germany – it’s a German label, and that’s the only market they know. Everywhere else it was terrible. It took a while, but they finally got it in Japan. In the US nobody even knew we had a record out. We toured a lot behind it anyway – we figured that if you can’t get the record, then we’d better get out there and play it for you! But really, the whole situation was tragic.

  Bastards was one of the very best albums we ever did and it just vanished completely. It’s just so disappointing, when you pull out all the stops for an album and you’re really thrilled with it and nobody else cares, especially not your own record company. We couldn’t even get ZYX to pay for promotional copies. Our publicist, Annette Minolfo, asked for 200 CDs to give to DJs and press and they said no, it was too expensive. Too expensive?! They just gave us half a million dollars advance to make the fucking thing and now it’s too expensive to promote it with 200 fucking CDs! Somebody’s got to have his head up his ass, right? One thing I have to say about Bastards, though: at least it was on the radio, which is more than anyone could say for 1916 or March or Die. That’s because we actually sent them the record ourselves. Simple, really.

  Anyhow, after we finished making Bastards, we went through both North America and Europe twice, the usual sort of thing. We had some fun in Montreal with Mikkey. There were two guys backstage – transvestites. They were dressed to the nines and they wanted to have their picture taken with us. As you know, I don’t care about a person’s sexual predilections, much less how they dress, and Phil’s the same way (Phil dresses up like that himself half the time – why do you think he’s called ‘Stiletto Heels’ on
Bastards?). But Mikkey’s another story altogether – for all his pretty-boy looks, he hates that sort of thing. So we told the guys, ‘Yeah,’ but waited until the last minute before informing Mikkey. Then it was, ‘Mikkey! Come and take a picture with these chicks!’ And he comes running out, ‘Hi, girls!’ and all that. Stopped him in his tracks. It was really funny, ’cause one guy’s skirt had no back and his ass cheeks were sticking out. But we had the picture taken anyway, and Mikkey was muttering, ‘Fucking queers,’ under his breath. And on top of that, we went out to some club on the bus, and Mikkey went somewhere else, then came back to the club. He didn’t know that after the rock show it turned into a gay disco! He got out of the taxi in a 20° below blizzard, and there was no bus. The only warm place was the disco, so he had to go in. He was stuck there for two hours with all the transvestites asking him, ‘Where do you get your hair done?’ I would have paid a hundred bucks to see that – it must have been fucking fantastic! Ho, ho, ho!

  One of the treks through the US was our second time out with Black Sabbath, and everything was going great until we were headed for Los Angeles and I got some horrible flu bug. Mikkey and Wurzel both had it in Denver. It started to hit me in the morning as the bus arrived in LA. I got this feeling like I had to lie down, then I realized I was terribly ill. It was the most virulent shit I’ve ever had. We were supposed to play the Universal Amphitheater that night, but Todd told me flat out we weren’t going on – ‘Lie back down. You’re not going anywhere.’ It was good of Black Sabbath to keep us on the tour after that, really, because for all they knew, I was malingering. Whenever I get sick, everybody always says I’m overdoing the drugs again, but I was really ill! I was up in a couple of days anyway – that’s how those flu bugs are. But of all places, it had to be LA.

  We also played in Argentina, in front of 50,000 people (we try to do South America every year if we can – depends on whether or not the armies are on the streets!). It was at a football field, with the Ramones, and I have to admit we stole the show from them, even though they are huge down there. I mean, most of the crowd was wearing Motörhead shirts and all 50,000 of them seemed to be stomping for us. You just couldn’t follow us that night. I don’t care who it was – I don’t think the Beatles could have followed us that night. That’s what makes all the other shit unimportant!

  Between Japan and Europe, we had a few days off, so our manager Todd, our drum roadie Pap and I went to Thailand. It was a very interesting trip, indeed, because life apparently means absolutely nothing there – if you pay $600, you and a group of people can see a chick get fucked, beat up and shot. They buy these girls off their penniless families in the interior, who need the money to feed their ten other kids. This sort of attraction (?!) is how businessmen get their kicks down there. We didn’t see anything like that, of course, but we did go to this club where there were about eleven girls on stage. They all looked about sixteen and all of them were the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen – terrific, large breasts, long legs and those Oriental faces. Any one of them was a guy’s dream come true in about six different ways. But what they were doing was so weird! They weren’t exactly stripping, because they were pretty much naked already, with just this cummerbund-type thing around the middle. But one would squat down and she was firing a peashooter out of her crotch and bursting balloons. Another one was in a sling and the other girls were swinging her at yet another girl with a dildo – she got knocked off the table twice. Another shoved a block of razorblades up there, and pulled them out on a string. The whole thing was a very strange experience. Erotic it wasn’t!

  Eventually we all came back home and once again we were without a record company in the States. I don’t recall how we parted ways with ZYX. I think we just left them and went to CBH, the head of which, Rainer Hansel, has been our German promoter for years. So that got us settled as far as Germany was concerned, but as for the States, we had nothing. Mikkey was in a panic, but then he always is. He sees his paycheck flying away over the horizon. It is fair, because he’s got a family to support, and so does Phil. I don’t, but still, I can never be bothered with all these panics people seem to like having. Everybody thinks it shows that they care if they panic all the fucking time, but it’s not true. You miss a lot of details when you panic. Eventually we did get a deal in the States, but by the time that came about we had already recorded our next album, Sacrifice. We had record deals in Germany and Japan, two big markets for us, and they wanted an album, so we had to keep going.

  Sacrifice is one of my favourite records of ours, especially considering the difficulties that were going on behind it. Howard was producing us again, but he’d also just gotten an A&R gig with a label called Giant. So his mind was in at least two or three different places, and half the time the engineer, Ryan Dorn, was holding it all together, following the direction Howard gave him. And it was becoming clearer every day that Wurzel was on his way out of the band. He wouldn’t extend himself at all, and usually just sat there while we were writing songs, with his guitar across his knees. When we stopped playing, he stopped playing and when we started again, he would too. The whole thing with him seemed like it happened overnight, but of course it had been building up for a long time. It was very difficult for me because for years he was my best friend in the band and then he became this person I didn’t know and hated me, and that can break your heart, you know?

  Still, we went in the studio with some great songs – we wrote ‘Sex and Death’ in ten minutes on the last day of rehearsal. I changed the lyrics once we were recording, but that’s always the way it goes. I altered ‘Another Time’ out of all recognition and I had three sets of lyrics for ‘Make ’Em Blind’. That’s what’s fun about making a record – you go in with one thing and come out with something completely different. I added a part in ‘Out of the Sun’ – I had to because it only had two and a half verses, and who can sing half a fucking verse? But when Mikkey and Phil and Wurzel were rehearsing it, they weren’t thinking of that, since they aren’t singers. Fuckin’ musicians! So one day when nobody else was around except for Jamie, my guitar roadie, I added a piece on my own. I played bass and Jamie played guitar and we tacked it in there secretly – complete subterfuge. Then I gave the others a tape of it – Wurzel played it in the rental car and when he heard it he nearly drove off the road! Sometimes in the studio something practically comes out of thin air – ‘Make ’Em Blind’ was like that. We improvised a lot of that in the studio, and Phil did this brilliant solo in one take. It sounds like it’s being played backwards, but he played it forward and he fell over halfway through it – right over the couch, flat on his back with the fucking guitar, laughing uproariously. We didn’t even need to think about doing it again – it was great.

  Sacrifice also has a lot more nonsense on it than most of the albums before it; the lyrics don’t mean anything you can really get a hold of. But they convey the mood all right, especially the title track and ‘Out of the Sun’. ‘Dog Face Boy’ was about Phil Campbell – I only decided it was about him after I’d written it, though. ‘Poor boy out your mind again/ Jet plane outside looking for another friend’ – as soon as Phil gets off that plane, boom! He’s gone. Most people are still in their shower after the ride to the hotel, but he’s already got the hired car and has been in two bars looking for fun. One time he came to LA and he grabbed the rental, which had zero miles on it at the airport. He showed up the next day and it had over 200 miles – he was driving to Sunset and Vine streets in Hollywood and he wound up in Pomona! That was miraculous. After that he got a map of LA and now he knows the city quite well – he could probably get a job here as a tour guide.

  It wasn’t long after we finished the record that we lost Wurzel. I had already talked him back into the band three times. I’d go to him, ‘Why don’t you hang in there, it might get better,’ etc. We kept trying to find out what his problem was so we could address it, but he could never come up with anything. Things would bother him but he’d keep quiet un
til he had worked himself into a frenzy, so you could never see it building up. For example, he’d begin carrying on, like, saying to me, ‘You get all the publicity!’ And I’d tell him, ‘But Wurzel, you stopped doing publicity. You and me were the top names in the band for years and then you suddenly stopped doing press, so your name is gone. Besides, I’ve been in the band nine years longer than you and people still remember me from Hawkwind. You haven’t done any publicity for five years and you’ve just been sitting at home with your wife and dog, so how do you expect anybody would hear about you?’ And of course nobody wants to be told that! But all the same, that was the reason. It’s not my fault. Wurzel’s attitude just went straight downhill and you can’t go on being defeatist. It finally got to him.

  It was an English TV show that apparently was the last straw, as far as Wurzel was concerned. It was called Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush, and although the show itself was awful – basically it was just a game show hosted by some horribly bouncy ex-DJ wearing silly clothes and a sillier haircut, and people would win travel packages – the music was great. Jools Holland, who used to be in Squeeze, was the band leader; he plays incredible piano and sounds like Ray Charles when he sings. Anyhow, he had this setup where the featured artist did two songs with the studio band backing him up. So I went on and we did ‘Ace of Spades’ – with a four-piece brass section! – and ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’. It was the first time I’d ever done ‘Ace of Spades’ without the rest of Motörhead, and because I did that, Wurzel blew up. Jem, his wife, was phoning the TV station while I was there, saying that Wurzel should be on instead of me! Christ. Then I got this fax from Wurzel saying all sorts of terrible things. He accused me and Todd of stealing his money – like I need Wurzel’s money (as I’ve stated before, I make more money off of royalties ’cause I get paid from the back catalogue). And he was convinced people were going around and plotting behind his back – I mean, how senseless is that? Wurzel told the others he’d left the band. He didn’t tell me, which was especially hard since, like I said, we were best friends in the band for a very long time. But the end was a nasty episode. I just hated it and I was glad when it was over. Somebody told me he came to one of our gigs in Brixton after he’d left and apparently he stood there through the whole show, crying while he was watching us. People always love telling you bad news, don’t they? That was a terribly sad thing to hear.