White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (16 page)

‘You went straight in at number one,’ I was told.

‘Uhhh – call me back, will you?’ I mumbled and hung up. Then about ten minutes later it hit me and I was up like a shot. That was the height of our popularity in England. Of course, when you’ve peaked, there’s nowhere to go but down. But at the time, we didn’t know we’d peaked. We didn’t know anything.

S
o here we were in America, blissfully unaware that Motörhead had already reached its peak in Britain. And we did have a great time – Eddie and Phil had never been to the US before; I, of course, already knew my way around. But it’s always refreshing seeing a place through new eyes. Phil – Clumso – managed to go all the way across the US without suffering any major injuries, although the salad nearly killed him in Florida. He and Eddie, see, they were used to English salads where you get a leaf and a couple of boiled eggs. So at this restaurant in Florida they both ordered double salads – and I didn’t discourage them. I just watched as the waiters rolled up with two carts – an acreage of fucking greenery! Phil and Eddie practically had to fight their way out through this treacherous
Mugwambi swamp. Myself, I won’t go near vegetables – too healthy for the likes of me.

I’d never met Ozzy, nor anyone in his band before but I got to know them during this tour. Rudy Sarzo and Tommy Aldridge were nice enough guys, but they were quiet, like. They were just, you know, the bassist and drummer. Rhythm sections never get much attention, really, unless the band belongs to one of them. Randy Rhodes was Ozzy’s guitarist back then, and he was a much bigger deal. I believe he’d been writing songs with Ozzy. My big memory of him, however, was that he was terrible at Asteroids, so I wound up beating him at Asteroids all the way across America. I was quite friendly with Randy so I found it a terrible shame when he died in a plane crash a year later. Nevertheless, I have to say he wasn’t the guitar player he became after his death. As with Bob Calvert, a guy who was more or less ignored during his lifetime suddenly becomes a huge genius. Randy was a good guitar player, to be sure, but he wasn’t the great innovator he was later made out to be. God knows what people will say about me after I’m gone!

Ozzy was a nice guy – still is. Very twisted, but nice. Of course, you’re going to be a bit warped when people are throwing half a dozen doves with broken legs and wings on stage every time you play a gig. Other things landed at his feet too – frogs, live rattlesnakes, a deer’s head, a bull’s head, all because of that story about him biting the head off a dove during a meeting with his record label. I don’t know how he went on working after that tour. He must have been constantly freaked, never knowing what
was going to come flying up at him. Makes you kinda feel for the guy, doesn’t it?

Ozzy really was having a rough time on the tour we did with him. He nearly died on this trek: he was at the height of his nervousness and the depths of his despair, and he was just overdoing everything. We kept finding him flat on his face, passed out on the floor everywhere at the beginning of the tour. Finally his girlfriend (and later, wife) Sharon took over and pulled him out of it, and that was great. I’ve had some ups and downs doing business with Sharon since then, but I’ve got to give her that. You wouldn’t have any more Ozzy Osbourne records if it wasn’t for Sharon, and I think Ozzy would be the first to acknowledge that.

The Americans didn’t quite know what to make of Motörhead at first. We had quite a few jaws dropping to the floor during the Ozzy tour. Some places understood what we were about – we got a rousing response on the coasts, New York and LA. They also liked us in Detroit and Chicago, which are still a couple of our main areas today. Ohio was good, too, and we’ve won over Texas since then. But apart from that, we might as well not have bothered that first time around – they were baffled by us completely. I think a good portion of the Midwest was rather frightened by us; most of the audiences didn’t know who we were. An American label, Mercury, had picked up
Ace of Spades
, but nobody seemed to know about that. The label did absolutely nothing to promote the record (and what else is new?). So we were this strange, unknown entity every time we hit the stage.

We did have our few fans, though. One of them was Lars
Ulrich. He wasn’t Metallica’s drummer then – he was just this little teenaged kid living in LA. He loved us. As a matter of fact, he was in charge of the American Motörhead fan club, which, I assume, consisted of guys like him, who owned tons of import records. Those kids were big supporters of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal movement, which took off around this time. The NWOBHM was great for some bands – it sent Iron Maiden over the top. It didn’t do us much good, though. We came along a bit too early for it . . . and then our popularity resurged just a bit too late for the big metal and hard rock boom of the late eighties.

So our first American tour was a mixed bag, but the ironic thing is that when we got back to England, we headlined a huge show at Port Vale Football Club in front of 40,000 people,
over
Ozzy Osbourne; so that gives you an idea of how massive we were at the time in Britain. That was probably our loudest show ever, and by then we’d already earned a reputation for the sheer volume of our gigs. (Admittedly, we did like it loud – we couldn’t hear it otherwise because we were deaf!) At Port Vale, we built the entire stage out of PA – I mean everything: it was all speakers, everywhere, to the tune of 117,000 watts. At soundcheck, a guy rang up from four miles away to complain that he couldn’t hear his TV . . . and that was just Eddie’s guitar! Plus, there was the requisite spectacular publicity stunt that night. During our show, this plane flew low over the field and dropped these guys with Motörhead parachutes. Six of them landed smack in the middle of the field, but unfortunately one of them missed and went into the
allotments next door. This one old geezer witnessed the whole thing – he’d been standing there with a shovel, guarding his allotment from the hippies, you know. And he said, ‘Ay, that last lad came down like a sack of shit –
phoom
! On the ground. They took him away in a Dormobile.’ I assume that wayward paratrooper recovered from his injuries, because we didn’t hear any more about it.

We were also quite popular with the cops back home – they were always trying to bust us in those days. It was very different from what it is now: we couldn’t go out of the house – the cops were just waiting outside the front door or failing that, they’d bust you on the street. Around this time – August of ’81 – they caught Phil with about £5 worth of pot, and he ended up in court being fined £40. Stupid, petty shit, isn’t it? But it wound up making news because we were these famous, bad-ass rock stars. Motorcycle Irene was with Phil when he got busted and they found pot on her too. But she only got fined £20 – maybe because she had bigger tits than him!

Minor hassles aside, we had a lot of fun with our fleeting time at the top. One very satisfying moment was when we played the Summernight Festival in Nuremberg, Germany and we were billed over Blue Oyster Cult, who had so soundly screwed us over at our first Hammersmith Odeon gig. We didn’t do anything particularly nasty to them, though – after all, they were old news. We just didn’t lend them the PA, that’s all.

It was also around that time that I made a record with the Nolan Sisters. It was just a one-day gig – I got a phone call and
did it for a giggle. It was a song called ‘Don’t Do That’, and the band included me on bass, Cozy Powell on drums and ex-Whitesnake guitarist Micky Moody. Colleen and Linda Nolan sang, and Status Quo’s road manager Bob Young also added some vocals and harp. We called ourselves the Young and Moody Band, and made a video for the tune, too. The Nolan Sisters were great fun – we used to run across them quite a bit because they were on the charts at the same time Motörhead was. Everybody thought they were soppy little popster virgins but they weren’t. They’d been around – they’d played with Sinatra at the Sands in Vegas. They were tough chicks, managed by their father, but they were really great. And funny as shit. Once our manager, Douglas, was talking to Linda Nolan in the
Top of the Pops
bar, and he dropped some money on the floor. When he bent down to pick it up, Linda smirked and said, ‘While you’re down there . . .’ That was the last thing he expected out of a Nolan Sister! Maybe wishful thinking and he dreamt it up, but it shocked the shit out of him.

I don’t understand why people want to think that women don’t like sex, or that the ones that do are terrible and depraved. Everybody likes to fuck. We should have grown up to that extent by now, where we recognize sex for what it is – fun and recreation. I’ve said many a time that sex is the most fun you can have without laughing. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this book, part of the reason I got into rock ’n’ roll was for the chicks, and everyone in Motörhead has always had as many as they could get their hands on . . . or who could get their hands on us. One time at Bolton Casino, I was sitting at this table and this girl came up and
blew me right there. Eddie swung by to say, ‘We’re ready to leave, lad.’

‘Could you hang on a minute?’ I asked, very strained-like.

Then he saw the high heels protruding from underneath the tablecloth and got the idea. So he left us alone and I drifted back into the ecstasy.

Pleasant interludes like that happened all the time. When it came to chicks, we weren’t really worried about quality in my band. And, actually, quality is certainly in the eye of the beholder. What people call quality is usually better dressed, which doesn’t cut any ass with me. I’ve met chicks who look like bad ladies who have more brains, better conversation and are just all-around sexier than the best dressed models in the world. It’s true. Those model types are like fuckin’ thoroughbred horses – they look good but they’re dumb as shit. I’ve had a lot of what people would call slutty chicks around, and I like them because they’re honest and up front. They’re like me – they say, ‘I like fucking! Let’s go!’ And, really, that’s the way it should be.

Obviously, rock stardom has its ups (and you can take that several different ways!), but there was the occasional downside. At the beginning of Motörhead’s career, we used to hang out in the bar with the fans before the gig, but eventually it got to be too much. You start getting fans who think they’re in the band – they dress up as me and after a while when they look in the mirror, they see me instead of themselves. That can get very weird. There were guys all over the place called Lemmy, and loads of kids called Lemmy, too, poor little fuckers – one is a girl! Another guy
gave his son Kilmister as a first name. And there’s cats and rats and dogs and fucking parakeets, all named after me. We were inundated with adoring fans, not to mention the occasional nut, so eventually we had to stop being as accessible as we once were. That was a shame; I always missed that, because when you hang out with the kids you get an idea of what’s really going on out on the street.

A lot of bands divorce themselves from that as soon as possible and I think that’s a big mistake. Some bands never even meet their fans, don’t even know who they are or what they look like. They just see the spotlights shining in their eyes, then they go offstage into their own little world. Musicians who do that are missing out on a lot. I still like talking to fans today . . . except for the occasional drunk fucker who insists on singing ‘Ace of Spades’ in my ear nonstop! We have made a few albums since the
Ace of Spades
days, after all – if he’s drunk and starts singing something from one of our last couple of records, I might not mind so much!

Another problem with being very popular is that some people claim that you’ve sold out. But really, that’s more their problem, not mine. Commercial is whatever people are buying, that’s all. That doesn’t mean the music changes. For example, our first album didn’t sell very well, so we were still street credible. Then
Overkill
was a minor hit, and some of our fans left us because they thought we were ‘going commercial’. That was really stupid – couldn’t they tell the music was basically the same, just a little better because we were a tighter unit after playing together
for a few years? By the time
No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith
came around, there was a small backlash going on with the requisite cries of ‘Sell out!’ Since that was a live album of songs from when we weren’t ‘commercial’, it looked like they needed a damn good thrashing for being elitist, overfed snobs! We knew we were doing just what we wanted to musically, so that was easy to ignore.

It was Motörhead’s best year ever, 1981, but it ended on a very bad note. We spent the last part of the year touring Europe, and my flatmate, Andy Elsmore, got murdered. He was a little gay guy who used to run a porno cinema. Somebody came into my house while I was away and stabbed him fifty-two times in his face, neck and chest, then put a knife through his asshole and pulled it through to the front. And they cut his dick off, and shoved it up his ass. Then they set the place on fire in an attempt to disguise the murder. Still, poor Andy managed to crawl all the way down the corridor to the TV room before he died. That’s where they found him. It was a terrible fucking thing.

The media, of course, didn’t get it right – the headlines said things like, ‘Motörhead involved in drug slaying’, or some fucking bullshit. It had nothing to do with us, and I’d been gone a month so I didn’t know who Andy was mixing with. It was obviously some gay hate killing, otherwise they wouldn’t have bothered sticking his dick up his ass. That’s definitely an anti-gay thing. A tragedy.

But back to the band. At this point in our career, unfortunately but perhaps inevitably, we started getting complacent. Everything
we’d done up to that point had turned to gold. We thought it was just going to carry on magically. But
Iron Fist
was not the record to follow up an album that went straight in at No. 1. To be honest, we were screwed anyway.
No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith
was live, and you can’t follow up a live album that sold the way
No Sleep
did. We wound up getting a lot of mixed reviews, which didn’t surprise me in the least. It did surprise Eddie, who produced it with Will Reid Dick, and I think it broke his heart in a way. But the record didn’t do too badly sales-wise. It peaked at No. 4 – not as good as our previous couple of releases, but still quite respectable.