White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (7 page)

There were some great clubs in London, like the Electric Garden and Middle Earth. You’d go there and
everybody
would be tripping. There was a chick who used to stand in the doorway of Middle Earth, by the cash register, handing out acid. She’d give one to each person as he or she walked in, free. One thing we used to do was get a crystal of acid, which had a hundred trips in it, and dissolve it into a hundred drops of distilled water in a bottle. Then we’d take a dropper and lay the mixture out in rows on a sheet of newspaper. Then when it was dry, we’d put the page back in the paper, go out, rip off the corners and sell them to people for a quid. Sometimes, if you were lucky, you’d get a piece of the treated newspaper that had two trips in it; other times, a soggy bit of paper!

Real acid tripping, in those days, wasn’t all groovy-like, peaceful shit. The first trip I took lasted for eighteen hours, and I couldn’t really see. All I saw were visions, not what was actually around me. Everything, every sound – you could snap your fingers and it would be like a kaleidoscope – doomph! Your eyes would just turn into noise-activated, coloured strobes. And all the time your mind felt like you were on a rollercoaster, sometimes slow at the approach to the top of each drop and then –
wheeee!
Your
teeth would kind of sizzle, and if you started laughing, it was incredibly hard to stop. You could say I liked acid. But acid is a dangerous drug – that is, if you’re complacent because it will wake your ass up! If you were a little uneasy about yourself, you would either be catalyzed by it or you wouldn’t show up again – you know, they’d take your tie and shoelaces away, and your belt, and put you in a room with no windows in it and a lot of soft walls. A lot of people I knew went to the basket-weavers’ hotel on acid.

Everybody was taking pills, too. Uppers, like Blues, Black Beauties and Dexedrine. It was all pills – I never took powder for years and years. Really, if you’re in a band, or especially if you’re a roadie, you need to take them things because otherwise you can’t keep up with the pace. You can’t go on a three-month tour without being on something. I don’t give a fuck what they say – keep fit, eat your greens, drink juice – fuck off! It’s not true! I don’t care if you eat two hundred artichokes, you still won’t last through a three-month tour, doing a gig a day.

Everybody did downers as well. We were doing Mandrax (the same as Quaaludes in the States). Once we bought a canister of a thousand Mandrax, but when we opened it, they had all melted – they must have got wet somehow. There was just this mushy mess of Mandrax at the bottom of this thing. So we laid it all out on the breadboard, rolled it down with a rolling pin and put it under the grill and we wound up with this white sheet of Mandrax, and we’d snap a corner off and eat it. Sometimes you just got a mouthful of chalk (the binding) and sometimes you’d get three Mandrax – sort of opiate Russian Roulette! I had a
prescription for Dexedrine and Mandrax. In those days, there were a lot of doctors who’d prescribe you anything if you gave them the money. Harley Street doctors at that. And the doctor I went to took me off Mandrax, because a law had just been passed against it, and put me on Tuinol as a substitute. They were horrifying, really. Fuckin’ Tuinol was seven or eight times worse than Mandrax. Mandrax is a little baby boy compared to Tuinol! That was dumb as shit. As usual.

But back to the rock ’n’ roll part of my story, as opposed to the drugs (or the sex) parts. Eventually, I did start playing in some bands around London. At first, I got a job playing guitar for P.P. Arnold. She used to be one of the Ikettes, and she had a couple of hits in England. I was in her band for about two weeks, until she discovered I couldn’t play lead. So I lost that job. Then in ’68, I wound up singing for Sam Gopal. He was half-Burmese, half-Nepalese or something like that – I forget now. But he played tablas, which are impossible to amplify. They’re too boomy, see – at least they were for the equipment of the time. He’d had a band previously called the Sam Gopal Dream, which had been on a show called ‘Christmas on Earth’ with Hendrix in December of ’67. Some people think I played that gig, but I didn’t. By the time I met up with Sam, he’d dropped the ‘Dream’ and was just going on as Sam Gopal, in suitably modest fashion!

I was introduced to Sam by a friend of mine called Roger D’Elia. He played guitar and his grandmother was Mary Clare, a very famous English actress, a long time ago. I was living at Roger’s house and he told me he was forming a band with Sam
Gopal and this bassist Phil Duke, and they needed a geezer who could sing. The music was sort of a blend of psychedelia, blues and Middle Eastern rhythms meets the Damned! We recorded one album, did one tour through Germany and played a gig at the Speakeasy in London. That show at the Speak was standing-ovation time, so we thought we were gonna be stars, but it was actually all downhill from there on in!

Sam was determined to be a star. That’s what he really wanted. He was a real fucking poseur, but I didn’t mind that at all. I mean,
I’m
a poseur – what are you doing in this business if you’re not a poseur, right? So Sam was all right. He had his own ideas and all, but he let me write anything I wanted to. I wrote nearly all the songs that wound up on our only album. Back then, I was still using my stepfather’s name, so I’m listed as ‘Ian (Lemmy) Willis’. I credited ‘group’ on a few of the songs, but the truth is I stayed up and wrote them in one night. That was when I had first discovered this wonderful drug called Methedrine. The only two I didn’t do on the record were ‘Angry Faces’, which was written by Leo Davidson, and a Donovan song, ‘Season of the Witch’ – we did a fair version of it, actually.

The album,
Escalator
, was put out by this record company called Stable. That was a joke. It was run by these two Indian geezers who had no idea whatsoever how to run a record label. I don’t know how that whole deal came together. It was one of Sam’s projects – he knew the producer and all.
Escalator
wound up doing nothing, zero. Stable was too indie of a label, even for the indies. Eventually, it dawned on us that the band was going
nowhere, so we just gave it up. Funny enough, I ran into Sam Gopal in 1991, just before I left England to move to America. It was very strange, because he was just walking up the street, right around where I lived, and I hadn’t seen him for ten years. We chatted for a bit and he told me he was getting a band together – you know, all that fun stuff. Still!

After Sam Gopal, I spent about a year with my guitar hanging on the wall, and I just tripped out and dossed around, living in squats. It’s easy to do when you’re young, and I was twenty-three. It was around this time that I learned to hate heroin. It was always around, of course, but not very much at first – it started to be a real problem around 1970. I knew this guy, Preston Dave – he wasn’t even a junkie. He was getting there, but not quite. And a bunch of us were sitting with him at a Wimpy Bar, the early English attempt at, say, Burger King. It was in Earls Court Road and was open all night. Preston was shaking and shit, so he went off to Piccadilly – where you went to score heroin. So he came back and went to the toilet. A few minutes later, he came lurching out backwards. His face was black and his tongue was sticking out. Somebody had sold him rat poison – took his money, smiled at him and sold him certain death. I thought, ‘Hell, if that’s the kind of people who are hanging around with heroin, you can fucking have it.’ And I also saw people doing horrible fixes with old, blunt needles that would really fucking mess their arms up. You’d see people with embolisms in their arms the size of a cricket ball. And they’d be selling their asses for a fucking shot. It always looked like misery to me. No fun at all.

I’ve had so many fucking friends die from heroin, but the worst of it was that the girl I was the most in love with in my life died of the stuff, too. Her name was Sue and she was the first girl I ever lived with. She was all of fifteen when we first got together – most embarrassing if caught by the police, but there you go. I was just twenty-one when we met in 1967 anyway, so I wasn’t exactly some randy old geezer. More like two randy young ones! The big deal – at least to everyone else – was that she was black. We were ostracized completely. All our friends left us – hers
and
mine. And this was supposed to be the era of peace and love, you know! Everybody was listening to black music for the first time and all. Ha! It just proved how hypocritical they all were. Nobody knew how to deal with us. My friends left because I was associating with a nigger, which I thought was very bad news all around – fuckin’ assholes. Her black friends thought I was the oppressor, stealing a young black girl and making her my plaything and shit. Bollocks! I pointed out to them that when I left the house, I didn’t hold her by the wrist – she could come with me if she wanted and stay if she wanted. But Sue and I didn’t care, really. Hell, if you lose friends like that, they ain’t your friends anyway. Besides, we were in love, so no one else mattered anyhow.

Sue and I used to fight like cat and dog, though. She was a triple Gemini, so you never knew which personality you were talking to. We never had enough money, and then she started working at the Speakeasy. She kept getting offers from people – she was young and had only just discovered she was beautiful, so people took her for a ride. While she was working at the Speak,
we split up – one of the four or five times during the course of our relationship – and then she screwed Mick Jagger. I asked her afterwards, ‘What was he like?’ And she said, ‘Well, he was good, but he wasn’t as good as Jagger, you know,’ which was perfect! She meant, of course, that Jagger couldn’t live up to his own reputation. No way he could, even if he swung in, pole-vaulted into the room on his – well, you catch my drift.

Anyway, Sue eventually got a job in the Lebanon, dancing in Beirut. That was before it got demolished, and it was still a playground of the Western world. She returned with a staggering heroin habit, and it was never quite the same after that. I’d just gone back with her and she went up to her granny’s. While she was there, she got one of her friends to come around with some smack. So she went in the bathroom and shut the door. Did the shit, drew herself a bath and then she passed out and drowned in her own bathwater. She was all of nineteen.

I was in London when she died – I had joined Hawkwind by this time – but I didn’t go to the funeral. I mean, who wants to see them dead? I liked them alive. She had a sister, Kay. She was as pretty as Sue. I don’t know what happened to her but if she’s reading this, get in touch – we’ll talk about Sue a bit. Yes?

So I knew from personal experience that heroin was the most awful drug to get involved with, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t go through a few harrowing experiences involving the search for my own substance of choice. One time, about ’69 or ’70, I really came unstuck. A bunch of us were sitting around, waiting for the speed to arrive. This guy was going out with a nurse, see, who
worked at a dispensary, so he bribed her into getting us some amphetamine sulphate. Finally, she came in with a mason jar with what looked like amphetamine sulphate written on it. And we, greedy bastards that we were, dug in immediately. But it wasn’t amphetamine, it was atropine sulphate – belladonna. Poison. We’d all done about a teaspoonful of it, which is like 200 times the overdose, and we went berserk, the whole lot of us.

I was walking around with a TV under my arm, talking to it. Somebody else was trying to feed the trees outside his window. It was really interesting for a while, actually. Then we all passed out and somebody called Release, the firm with the free drug rescue van, and they loaded us all in the back like bundles of wood and took us to the hospital. I woke up in this bed and I could see through my hand. I could see the wrinkles in the sheet under it. Then I saw the institution walls. ‘Fuck me!’ I thought. I was convinced I’d landed in the loony bin. Then I realized it was a normal hospital because the sleeves on the jacket weren’t long enough. And I saw, across from me, my friend Jeff, just waking up.

‘Psst! Jeff!’

‘What?’

‘We’re in hospital.’

‘Wow.’

‘We’ve got to get out of here. Are you okay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Be quiet!’

So we got out of bed and I was just pulling up the jockeys when:

‘AAAAARGHH! THEY’RE ALL OVER THE FLOOR!’

And he was leaping and screaming, eyes like organ stops, ‘Worms and grubs and ants – WAAARGH!’

I got back in bed.

Eventually the doctor showed up. ‘If we’d got to you in another hour, you would have been dead.’

I was thinking, ‘I bet you’re sorry, you miserable bugger.’

He said we’d had the antidote, and that it would take a while to wear off. Well, it took two weeks and it was a really strange time. I mean, I would be sitting, reading a book, and I’d turn to page 42 – but there was no book. Or I’d walk down the street, thinking I was carrying a case and suddenly – oops! I’d have nothing in my hand. Weird . . . but interesting. Not interesting enough to do it again, though!

Finally, after dossing around for some months, I wound up in another band, Opal Butterfly. I met their drummer, Simon King, at a place called the Drug Store in Chelsea. The Drug Store was a big flash gaff, about three floors high. There was a restaurant at the top and a boozer on the ground floor and a record store in the basement. All these boutiques and other stores, too. It was one of the first mall-type places. It was rather expensive, but it was an all-right place. The guys in Opal Butterfly used to hang out there to drink, and I hooked up with Simon and just sort of drifted into the band. I don’t really know why I was hanging out with him – I never got along with him all that well. But you will be hearing more about Simon later.

Anyhow, Opal Butterfly was a good band, but they never went
anywhere. They’d been around for years when I got in and it was only a few months after that that they gave it up. One of the guys, Ray Major, went on to be in Mott the Hoople. The break-up turned out to be rather timely, because it was only a couple of months later that I wound up in Hawkwind.