White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (26 page)

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 media 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!

Somewhere in the midst of all of this (and there’s even more to come!),
March or Die
got made. We used Pete Solley again, but – as often happens with our producers – he wasn’t as good the second time around. I think the title track to the album was the sticking point, ’cause he had his version of ‘March or Die’ and that was it. I wanted a few things changed and he didn’t help me at all. He just sat there, put his feet up on a chair and let the engineer work on it. I thought that was a bit crappy. That’s why ‘March or Die’ didn’t work. It should have: it was a tremendous track, and I have a couple of takes of it on tape that are much better than the version on the album. Other tracks are quite good, like ‘Stand’ and ‘You Better Run’. The record label wanted us to cover a standard and it was Phil Campbell, I believe, who came up with the idea of doing Ted Nugent’s ‘Cat Scratch Fever’. Frankly, I like our version of it better than Nugent’s – his is very thin, if you ask me. Ours knocked his out of the fucking loop – of course, nobody remembers ours. Overall, I think
March or Die
is underrated. I bet you think I’m going to put a good portion of the blame for that on the record company, and you’re right.

WTG was dying as we were making this record. Every time we came by their offices there were fewer and fewer people there, and by the time the album was released, only Jerry Greenberg and Leslie Holly were left. But the biggest indication about where we stood with our parent company, Sony, came when we released
March or Die
’s single, ‘Ain’t No Nice Guy’. That track had everything going for it: it was a great song, to begin with, and since it was a ballad it had serious radio
potential. Then I wound up having Ozzy sing on the track along with me. Initially, he wanted the song for himself, but I wouldn’t give it to him (maybe I should have let him have it – more people would have heard it), so I had him come in and put vocals on. And Slash from Guns N’ Roses contributed the guitar solo; he came in one day, had a few drinks and laid down a couple of guitar tracks. Incidentally, I like Slash quite a bit. Guns N’ Roses may have had a nasty reputation but he’s a very nice, very genuine guy. Anyhow, we had this great song featuring two of the biggest performers in heavy rock. Jerry at WTG knew it was a great song. There was no way it could lose – that is, unless our record company tried to purposely sabotage it. And that is exactly what happened. It was a band’s worst nightmare.

‘Ain’t No Nice Guy’ was actually a radio hit, but that was completely down to us, without any help from Sony, or its marketing department at Epic. We asked them to get it on AOR (album-oriented rock radio) and they wouldn’t do it. They said, ‘We asked AOR and they wouldn’t play it.’ That, we knew, was a blatant lie because our management got it on; one of our own men, Rob Jones, and another guy we hired made all the calls to the radio stations. With two phones, we got eighty-two AOR stations in two months. And all these stations told us that Sony had never pushed it – these people had never even heard of the track until we told them about it! ‘Ain’t No Nice Guy’ wound up No. 10 in the radio charts, and Sony didn’t make call one – imagine what would have happened if they’d given it just the slightest amount of effort! But no: they actually tried to
stop
it
from being played. One of the label’s radio guys called up a station in Kansas City and said, ‘I heard you’re playing “Ain’t No Nice Guy”. I wish you wouldn’t. We didn’t give it to you.’ What a fucking asshole! Here they had a hit song and they were going around trying to kill it! Our manager Todd rang this goon and totally lost it with him.

‘I’ve been kissing your ass for a year and a half to try to make you do your job,’ he told the jerk. ‘I’ve done
my
job and the only person who hasn’t is you! If that record isn’t back on rotation by ten-thirty tonight, I’ve got some cousins in South Central who’ll make sure you don’t write any more rejection slips for anybody!’

Of course, we were back on the air an hour later, but isn’t it sad that they make you go to that level? They give you no recourse: if you’re nice to them, they think you’re a pushover and ride all over you; if you’re an asshole, at least you’re dealing with them on terms they can understand but more likely than not you will be fired, which is eventually what happened to us. But being an asshole seems to be the only thing that will get a reaction out of these bloody suits.

Since we didn’t get any help from the record company at radio (to put it very mildly!), it won’t surprise you to learn that they also held us up at MTV. Here we were with this No. 10 song on rock radio and all we needed was about fifteen grand or so to shoot a video but they wouldn’t let us have it. So we took about $8000 of our own money and made our own – Ozzy and Slash, nice guys that they are, even came down and appeared in it. Although the video’s a bit jumbled, it didn’t turn out too badly. But MTV didn’t
play it for a while because Sony took three weeks to sign the release!

Let’s talk about another thing we did that Sony wouldn’t do for us: we got on the
Tonight Show
, and we were the first heavy rock band to appear on that show, ever. It was our manager, again, along with our independently hired publicist, Annette Minolfo, who used their connections to get us on. Of course, the day we were taping, the record company sent a couple of corporate types to keep an eye on us, but that didn’t disguise the fact that they’d done nothing to get us on. In fact, they had told us it couldn’t be done!

I really enjoyed being on the
Tonight Show
. Jay Leno was really a gentleman, much nicer than David Letterman, whom we never even met when we did his show. Jay came up to the dressing room two hours before the show and asked us, ‘Have you got everything you need?’ He didn’t have to do that. During rehearsal, people were running around, panicking over the usual nonsense – ‘You can’t have it that loud! It vibrates the cameras!’ So I said, ‘How did they shoot all those train crashes then?’ It’s bullshit. Nothing shakes those fucking cameras! They were saying the same thing at the BBC twenty years ago, and it was lies then, too! But the actual show was a lot of fun. After our first number, I had to give five bucks to Branford Marsalis, who was the
Tonight Show
band leader at the time. Todd had introduced me to him at a club in Hollywood one night, when he’d just started with Jay and the
Tonight Show
. I said to him, ‘You should have us on the show,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, we will.’ Ha! ‘I bet you five bucks you
don’t.’ He said, ‘Okay,’ and we
did
get on. The other guests included that kid, Neil Patrick Harris, from the TV series called
Doogie Howser
and character actress Edie McClure – she was a great girl. I had fun talking with Jay and joking around with Edie, we played two numbers and overall, it was a very good show – no thanks to Sony!