White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (25 page)

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!

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.