White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (10 page)

‘Oh, right,’ he nodded. ‘Let’s have a look at your pockets.’

And there he was with the shit all over him – his mate didn’t notice, either! So he searched the both of us, but we didn’t have anything and they went away. How’s that for dense?

But we did get busted all the time. Cops would be standing outside your house, just waiting for you. Finally, we got pretty good at stashing our contraband – Nik would hide stuff in his saxophone. And the undercover cops never did get that hippie look right. You know, the guy would be standing there, wearing a
Nehru jacket with a big green medallion, thinking he was really hip. Then you’d look down and see plastic sandals. It was fucking terrifying, really, at times, but it certainly never stopped us.

The first album I made with the band was
Doremi Fasol Latido
, their third. I played on three other full albums: the
Space Ritual
double live album,
Hall of the Mountain Grill
and
Warrior on the Edge of Time
. A lot of Hawkwind’s best work came from the time I was with them. When it came to making the records, it didn’t matter, really, who the producer was – Dave was always the one who was in charge. I didn’t get any help, however, recording ‘The Watcher’, since it was my song, not Dave’s. He was like that. Somewhere between
Space Ritual
and
Hall . . .
we did the
Greasy Truckers
album, which also featured several other artists. It was recorded in London at the Roundhouse on 13 February 1972. One side of the album is entitled ‘Power Cut’, and it’s completely blank because the miners shut off all the power in England for about three hours that night – that’s how they brought down the government. Everyone sat around in the dark, smoking dope, until it was switched back on again, and the gig continued.

Dikmik left the band around this time; he got sick of all the power politics and shit that was always going on within the band. So he went off and lived with this bird who was a great friend of mine who’s living with Simon King now – London can be a very incestuous place. But while Dikmik was living with her, he became a pot dealer for ages until he got busted. He wound up spending six months or a year in jail and when he came out, he became a moocher, sleeping on the couches of his friends. He spent two
years on my couch until I finally threw him out. It was a shame – Mik had a very incisive mind, but prison knocked him down and he never recovered from it. I think he was profoundly shocked by prison life. He changed when he came out – you become a victim instead of a predator and that’s a terrible thing to see.

But the best thing about the band for me was that we got to play a lot outside of England, and I hadn’t travelled for a long time. My first gig abroad with Hawkwind was the Olympia in Paris. A German band called Amon Duul II played with us – they had the industrial sound way back then, and they were very well known in Europe. We caused a riot at that show: it was just kids going nuts, really, but the CRS (riot police) came out like the fucking Gestapo. Another gig I recall doing was at the Lem Club in Italy – that really pissed Dave off!

I got to America for the first time in 1973, after
Space Ritual
was released. I took to it from the start – unlimited whoopee! It was fucking El Dorado for an Englishman. You’ve got to understand how drab and awful England was to grow up in back then – even more than now! Then you get to Texas – you can get England into Texas three and a half times! You can drive through Texas for two days and still be in Texas. And the clarity of the air in places like Arizona and Colorado is incredible. The first time I was in Boulder, I looked out the window and there was this range of mountains that looked like they were right on top of the hotel, but they were fifty miles away! We’d never seen anything like that, and it was the same for any European band.

Our first tour started off at the Tower Theater in Philadelphia,
and then we went up to New York and played at the Hayden Planetarium – the comet Kohoutek was coming across, you see, and we were all very cosmically inclined. It came across all right, but it wasn’t visible to the naked eye – bit of a swizz and that was about it. But we had a party at the Planetarium and saw this programme about Kohoutek and shit like that. It was a huge party, where I met Alice Cooper for the first time, and Stevie Wonder was there. In the middle of the lobby, there was this big lump of moonrock, and Stevie’s minder brought him over, placed his hand on it – ‘Moonrock, Stevie’ – and led him away. Then during the show, I looked around, and there was Stevie Wonder again, with his minder telling him, ‘It’s going across now, Stevie, left to right.’ Who’s fucking nuts, me or them?

We took acid quite consistently all across America. In Cleveland, we were spiked three times with angel dust by three different sets of freaks before we went on, and none of us noticed. That’s how much acid we were doing!

Then you come to Los Angeles and you think you’ve died and gone to fucking heaven. It’s the palm trees. I remember our plane landing at LAX, circling around to descend, and I looked down – every yard had a blue pool and the palm trees were huge. And as we drove down Hollywood Boulevard, lined with all those palm trees, I thought, ‘Wow, this is something else, this place.’ And really, it was magical at that time, young men over from England. Of course, by the time I moved over years later, I knew it wasn’t – intellectually at least. But you never quite lose that feeling of wonder.

As a matter of fact, it was in Los Angeles I wrote my last song for Hawkwind. It was ‘Motorhead’. We were at the Hyatt on Sunset Boulevard – the hotel Led Zeppelin made famous with their tales of destruction. The Electric Light Orchestra were staying at the hotel the same time as us, and their guitarist, Roy Wood had an Ovation, which he lent me. So there I was on the balcony of the Hyatt, at 7.30 in the morning, howling away at the top of my voice. The cops seemed vaguely disturbed by my racket. They kept stopping their cars, getting out and looking up at me. But then they’d just shake their heads and take off. Maybe they thought they were hallucinating. Incidentally, on the original recording of ‘Motorhead’, the one for Hawkwind, there was a violin solo. If any of you out there think the violin is a sissy instrument, you’ve never heard Simon House. He played like a maniac and he ripped through that song. He did some great stuff, Simon. He ended up playing with David Bowie later on.

We toured America four times while I was in Hawkwind. Simon House, who played synthesizer and violin, came on just before the second tour. Eventually, he replaced Del Dettmar, but he and Del were both in the band at the tour’s start. Del quit in the middle and went to live in Canada, where he built a log cabin with his own hands – literally. And he was a little fella, too! He built it for his wife, who was pregnant at home in England. About seven months later, when the cabin was finished, she and the kid came out by ship – and the kid was half Pakistani. Nasty shock, eh? Went straight to him, too. I don’t think he immediately put her right back on the boat, but it was words to that effect. Very bad news.

Things with Hawkwind started to go downhill when the drum empire took over. That started in July, 1974, when Alan Powell joined. Simon King had injured himself playing American Football, and Alan filled in for him on our Norwegian tour. Then, when Simon came back a few weeks later, Alan wanted to stay because he was having so much fun, and he and Simon were mates and all that. So the two of them started playing together. That, as far as I’m concerned, was the end of Hawkwind because those two killed it between them.

I’ve seen a lot of pompous drummers in my lifetime, but when it came to this pair, it was ridiculous. Simon and Alan’s two drum kits were set at the centre of the stage in this huge semi-circle of percussive effects, which we never used. There was an anvil and several bells, tubular and the hanging kind, and all sort of things that could be hit. It was quite amazing, really – jolly well made sure that you knew your place! But not me, of course. I gave those two fuckers no peace. I’d be standing by the side of them, urging, ‘Hurry up you cunts! Slow – slow! Come on!’ They may have hated it, but it sure kept the band going. But it wasn’t just the goings-on with the drum empire that upset people. I was just too forward for the rest of the guys. During my years with Hawkwind, I really came out of any shell I may have been in, stagewise. I was always at the front of the stage and showing off, and since I wasn’t the leader of the band, it was considered most presumptuous. And I’d started to write songs, which I think pissed everybody off as well. Not to mention the drug thing. See, I was the only speed freak left in the band. Dikmik had been gone for a
couple of years, and I was a minority of one. I was the bad guy . . . as I still am today. So when I got busted going over the Canadian border for cocaine possession, they took that as an opportunity to fire me.

The really fucked up – but also lucky – thing about the whole situation was that I didn’t even have any coke. It was May of 1975. We had just played Detroit, and we left early the next morning for Toronto. Some chick at the show had given me some pills and I had about a gramme of amphetamine sulphate. Apparently, when you’re travelling from Detroit into Canada, you can go over the bridge or under the tunnel. The thing to do, if you don’t want to be hassled, is go over the bridge, but we weren’t paying attention. Under the tunnel we went and got a surprise awakening by the border police. ’Cause it was early and I wasn’t thinking, I stuffed my contraband down my pants. Not a good idea – they searched us to the skin, and the cops got my stash. They took the amphetamine sulphate and put some of it in one of those vials that you shake up – if it turns a certain colour, then you’re in trouble. But it doesn’t differentiate between speed and cocaine. Well, it turned the right colour – for the cops, that is. ‘This is cocaine, buddy, you’re going to jail!’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ But the bastards kept me and the rest of the band went off to Toronto.

So there I was, stuck with the Canadian police. They didn’t even bother charging me for the pills, but I was arraigned and sent down to jail on remand. This was, as you can well imagine, not a pleasant experience. I’d been locked up in cells overnight, but never in a serious jail like this one. I remember I was in the
delousing room, ready for the spray when this wonderful voice behind me said, ‘You’re bailed.’ Well, as I found out later, the only reason the band got me out was because my replacement wasn’t going to get to Canada in time. Otherwise, they would have just let me rot. I wouldn’t have rotted anyway – since what I had was amphetamine sulphate and not cocaine, the case was thrown out as a ‘wrongful charge’, and they couldn’t charge you again for the same substance. So I was free and clear.

The band had got me a plane ticket and they flew me over to Toronto. I got there just after they’d finished the soundcheck. We did the gig to tremendous applause, then at four o’clock in the morning, I was fired. I was doing the wrong drugs, see. If I had been caught with acid, those guys would have all rallied around me. I think even if I’d been doing heroin, it would have been better for them. That whole hippie subculture was so fucking two-faced, when you get down to it. It was all ‘Speed kills – wow, man, bad drugs’, and stupid shit like that (and keep in mind, all the people I know who said that are now dead or messed up on heroin). Well, all I have to say is that at least speed keeps you functional. Why else did they give it to housewives for all those years?

Hawkwind had very bad timing, kicking me out of the band when they did. They were on the verge of really making it in America when I got fired, so they must have been fucking insane. But it wasn’t because I was fired that they failed; it was because of who they got to replace me, in addition to firing me for all the wrong reasons. When I left Hawkwind, they got a guy called
Paul Rudolph to play bass. He used to be a great lead guitarist for the Pink Fairies, but he was a very, very mediocre bass player – the reverse of me, in fact. And he just saw the band straight into the Twilight Zone – it was a terrible fucking mess. They tried carrying on into Ohio, did about four more gigs and cancelled the rest of the tour. Dave, God help him, actually wanted to bring me back into the band, but the drum empire wouldn’t let him. So the drummers and the bass player took over and the band went in a bad direction. They made a couple of – well, they weren’t bad albums. Musically, they were excellent, but they were really naff. There was no nuts in ’em – when I left Hawkwind, the cojones came with me.

I
had my revenge on Hawkwind for firing me. By the time they got back to England, I’d stolen my equipment out of the band’s storage space. I don’t remember how we got in now, actually. We must have got somebody from the office to nick the key for me or something. In fact, I don’t even remember who came along with me – it was Lucas Fox, probably, who wound up drumming in Motörhead for the first few months. He was the only one I knew who had a car. We had just got my stuff in the van when Alan Powell caught us. That was a nice coincidence, since I’d just seen his wife! He was shouting, ‘Yeah, ya cunt! You thought you’d steal your stuff back!’ We drove off, laughing, and I yelled back, ‘Yeah, go and ask your wife!’ But I don’t think he did, because I saw her again the week after and she never mentioned it.

I was also busy doing other, more important things. Within
two weeks of getting back to London, I put together the band that was to become Motörhead. I wanted it to be sort of like the MC5, since that was the big hero band of most of the underground, and throw in elements of Little Richard and Hawkwind. And that’s more or less how it turned out. We were a blues band, really. Although we played it at a thousand miles an hour, it was recognizable as blues – at least to us it was; probably it wasn’t to anybody else.

It was pretty easy getting the band together, really – too easy, in fact. Within a very short period of time, I’d recruited guitarist Larry Wallis and Lucas Fox as the drummer. Larry I already knew – he’d been in UFO before they made a record, and he had been playing guitar for the Pink Fairies after the departure of Paul Rudolph, the guy who replaced me in Hawkwind. Pretty incestuous, eh? On top of that, the Pink Fairies and Hawkwind used to play on stage together billed as Pinkwind (Hawkfairies didn’t work, really). Lucas was introduced to me by my roommate at the time, a girl name Irene Theodorou, who I called Motorcycle Irene, after the Moby Grape song. I’d begun living with her before I went on my last tour with Hawkwind. She wasn’t a girlfriend of mine, just a friend, although we did have some wild times together. She was a very nice girl, and a good photographer. She did some shots of us in the early days. Lucas had been hanging around with Irene, hoping to fuck her. He never did, of course. He was a bit of a dork, but a very sound guy, really, and since he was always around, and a drummer,
and
had a car – he appeared very handy. I didn’t want to sing; I wanted
somebody else to do it. But the problem with that, of course, is you get stuck with a fucking singer! No matter – we never did find anybody else and I wound up doing the vocals.