White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (23 page)

But back to the Yugoslav dates: we had two in Ljubljana. During the first one, Wurzel fell off the stage – one minute he was next to me and the next he was gone, straight down. That wasn’t the sturdiest stage that was ever built, either. I remember walking into a hole near the back. On the second night, something happened that was potentially far more disastrous. During the first song before the solo, some asshole threw a razorblade at the stage – the guy had even taped it between two coins to give it more thrust – and it cut my hand wide open. I didn’t really feel it, so I didn’t know what had happened until I began seeing all this red on the floor of the stage. Then I looked at my hand and realized it was gushing blood like a motherfucker. But I wrapped a rag around it and we finished the show. It was a terrible wound, though. When we came offstage, I took the rag off and blood spurted all over the walls, amidst cries of disgust from the rest of the band. So I went to this Yugoslav peasants’ hospital and got stitches, but over the next four days, my arm slowly began to turn black – blood poisoning. We stopped in Nuremberg on the way home, and I saw a doctor there, thinking German doctors were good, but this guy
really
fucked it up. I’d been asking our manager, Douglas, to fly me home so I could get this mess taken care of, but he didn’t want to pay for the plane fare. If it had been up to him, I would have had to take the bus all the way back to England. And when I say my arm was black, I don’t mean blue –
it was
black
, with a bit of red. I almost lost my thumb and a finger! It was so bad that our tour manager finally said, ‘Fuck this,’ and put me on a plane. I was in hospital in England for two weeks with my arm hanging in a sling – all because of some little fucker who thought it was smart to throw a razorblade at a band.

In fact, I’ll tell you exactly how smart that guy was – after he did it, he stood there pointing at himself, saying, ‘It was me!’ Naturally our crew headed his way, rubbing their hands together – ‘Oh really? A live one!’ They kicked the piss out of him, and when they were done, the Yugoslav police kicked the piss out of him as well, and
they
are professionals. And believe it or not, he was still there at the load-out, yelling, ‘Come on, man!’ and all that. A real diehard idiot. I’ll never understand that – I could see him hating me for some odd reason. I could see him premeditating the thing and doing it. But I can’t see him going, ‘It was me!’ to
my
people! I wonder where that guy is now – probably having a great time, running around killing women and children. Probably a cop.

Anyhow, the police loved me that night because I carried on playing. If I’d stopped in front of those 6,000 people, there would have been a riot. There were a lot of riots going on back then . . . but anyhow, I was their hero for keeping the show going – that year, at least. I don’t suppose I am now after the double whammy we got hit with when we came back to play again: Phil Campbell and Phil Taylor both wound up in hospital and we had to cancel that show. I remember going up to Wurzel’s hotel room.

‘Gig’s off, Wurz,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘Drummer, guitarist can’t do it. They’re in hospital.’

‘Have they been run over?’ Wurzel asked.

‘In a way, yeah.’

The both of them were flattened by some ‘brown speed’ – well, it wasn’t speed at all.
Brown
speed? – I said to Phil Campbell, ‘Didn’t you think?’ and he said, ‘No.’ Phil Taylor, too – they both should have known better; speed ain’t brown! But no – they wound up being carried past each other in the hospital corridor. What were they thinking? That was almost as stupid as that guy yelling, ‘It was me!’

In June, our fan club had its ten-year anniversary and threw a party at the Hippodrome. I met Wendy there – Naughty Wendy from Redcar. I was walking around a corner at the theatre and there was this bird with these fantastic eyes. She was just tremendous. I don’t remember anything about the party after that – I was with Wendy. She was a great girl, very supportive of me in all sorts of ways. I saw her not too long ago when I was in England and it was nice to see her again. I hadn’t seen her for eight or nine years – luckily she hadn’t changed into a drooling hag. Some of them do, you know!

The Hippodrome was a big venue in London – as indeed it still is! It was famous for dancing bears in the nineteenth century, but by 1985 all they could get was us! I used to go up there on ‘heavy metal night’ and try to hit on all the girls who came to see the good-looking bands! Well, you never know! I got more than I
bargained for one night when I went up there and ended up on stage with Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, and Dave ‘Snake’ Sabo, Rachel Bolan and Sebastian Bach from Skid Row. We did Creedence Clearwater’s ‘Travelin’ Band’ and ‘Rock ’n’ Roll’, the Zeppelin number, and it may well be released on the Lemmy Goes to the Pub label when we’re all dead!

Later on that summer, I made an appearance on this horrible TV show called
Club X
. The segment we did was great, though. It was all about black leather jackets, and I wrote a song for it, which was named, cryptically enough, ‘Black Leather Jacket’. We whipped out a scratch recording of the song for playback on the show. I played bass on the tape, but on camera I played piano. The sax player we had laid down three tracks, so he brought in two of his friends to mime the other parts. Phil Campbell was on guitar and Philthy on drums, and Fast Eddie was on my bass, which was stolen the night of the filming. I never did find out who took it, although there were several leading suspects. Aren’t there always?

I also played on a Nina Hagen record some time around here. I’d met her at a festival and I’ve always liked her. She’s a crazy woman, just great – besides which she’s very pretty. Anyhow, she asked me to play on her record and I didn’t happen to be doing anything that day so I said yes. I’ve appeared on a lot of different people’s albums – I have some free time, why not?

Motörhead was also spending time in the studio, working up songs for a new record. It was at that studio that I found Wurzel
feeding his dog with a spoon. I walked downstairs one day and there he was, on his hands and knees.

‘What are you doing, Wurz?’ I asked.

‘She’s upset,’ he said. ‘She thinks I’m leaving her.’

‘Why would she think that?’

‘She saw me packing my case.’

‘Wurzel,’ I said, ‘dogs don’t have the concept of suitcase. They don’t know about packing clothes for trips. Dogs don’t wear clothes!’

‘Well, she thinks I’m leaving.’

There was no talking to him. He called her Toots because she had a white line up her nose and she taught Wurzel to fetch sticks. He’d go outside with the dog and we’d sit and watch them. He’d throw a stick and the dog would look at him until finally he’d go and get the stick and throw it again. Actually, that dog was pretty smart.

Anyway, when we weren’t watching Toots teaching Wurzel tricks, we recorded demos of ‘No Voices in the Sky’, ‘Goin’ to Brazil’ and ‘Shut You Down’. These all ended up on
1916
, but by then we knew that whatever we did for a new album, it wasn’t going to be on GWR. We’d been very wary of Doug Smith for the past year or so. Our attorney, Alex Grower, was looking closely at him around this time, and it became clear that Doug and his wife, Eve, were not people who had the band’s best interests at heart.

So we spent several months extricating ourselves from Douglas’s management and finding someone new. Wurzel
brought this guy, Phil Carson, round to my house one day and we took him on as manager for the next couple of years. He used to be involved (if that’s the word I want) with Peter Grant and Led Zeppelin, and he managed Robert Plant for a while after that. Phil’s barmy like me, but with more string and/or discipline, as we say in the trade! I really liked him and still do. Phil would get us signed to Sony – after fifteen years, Motörhead’s first truly major American record deal. We went quite far with that; not anywhere near far enough (what else is new?), but that story’s for another chapter. In fact, it’s the one coming up next.

T
he real big news of 1990, as far as I was concerned, was that I moved to America. I’d started planning it in 1989, but a few months later, when it finally happened, it happened in a flash – one moment I was in London and the next I was living in West Hollywood, down the street from the Rainbow and the Sunset Strip. The Rainbow, for the few who don’t know, is the oldest rock ’n’ roll bar in Hollywood, and my home away from home – actually, it’s only two blocks from my home!

But quite a lot went on before that. I played a bit part in another Comic Strip special,
South Atlantic Raiders
. It was a parody on the Falklands War and I was supposed to be some sort of sergeant. Basically it just involved me speaking a few lines in a terrible Spanish accent and then falling forward on to a noisome mattress! Typecasting?! I was also cast as a river taxi driver in a movie called
Hardware
. That was a tedious experience. The director thought he was some Gothic artiste, and it was really a
fucking pain in the ass. We were standing around all day and they made the terrible mistake of giving me the whisky early – I was supposed to have a bottle, but they handed it over when I got there. So by the time they got around to my scenes, I was thoroughly wrecked and tired and emotional. I got paid up front, which was all right, but filming, like I’ve said, is just a fucking bore. On a more entertaining note, Mick Green – the guitarist for one of my favourite bands of the sixties and seventies, the Pirates – asked me if I wanted to do some recording with him, and of course, I said yes. We did ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, which wound up on some NME benefit album of Elvis covers. We were listed as Lemmy and the Upsetters. The song was later released as a single, and the flipside was a song Mick and I wrote together called ‘Paradise’. I enjoyed working with Mick – he’s one of my heroes. People don’t know about it today, but back in the early sixties, he was legendary, right alongside Clapton and Jeff Beck. It’s just that Mick was the one who didn’t get lucky.

And, of course, I couldn’t let too much time go by before getting Motörhead back on the road. During one of the British dates, some kid spat at me and this big gob of mucus landed on my guitar. I really hate that shit, so I walked to the front of the stage and said, ‘See this?’ and I took the gob of spit and smeared it in my hair – ‘I’m going to wash my hair tonight, but tomorrow, you’ll still be an asshole!’ That got a huge crowd response, and even got written up, but actually I pinched that line from Winston Churchill. He was at a dinner party and a woman said to him, ‘You, sir, are drunk.’ ‘Yes, madam,’ he replied, ‘and you are ugly,
but tomorrow
I
shall be sober.’ Ain’t that a beauty? Who says history’s dull?

It was after a tour through Europe that I moved. Phil Carson set it all up. His people found the apartment and I went over at the beginning of June. The rest of the band stayed in England, but my living on another continent didn’t really affect things. It wasn’t like we were hanging out with each other constantly – I mean, when you’ve been on a bus with somebody for six months, you don’t want to be around them on your time off. It was right about that time, though, that Wurzel started to hate America. Maybe it was some form of jealousy – I really don’t know. Living here wasn’t that big a change for me as I’d been coming to the States for so long anyway. I just didn’t realize the amount of corruption in the government, the extent to which the rot had set in, but that’s the same with any country, really. And it’s a lot more overtly racist here than it is in England – back home, they’re far sneakier about it. But I can get groceries delivered to my door, and there’s a lot more emphasis here on giving the customer what he wants, not what you think he needs. The only real trouble I had with adjusting to America was the sense of humour gap. The British have a very black sense of humour, see. It’s very vicious and Americans just don’t get it. I practically destroyed my entire social life within two weeks of coming over here. I’d say something that I thought was hilarious and I’d get these horrified responses – ‘How could you say that!’ They were outraged and hurt and all kinds of shit. Jesus, it’s not necessary to be that hurt! Cripples are funny – I’m sorry, it’s not my fault! I’m just an observer here.

Another thing people don’t understand is my collection of Nazi memorabilia, which really kicked in when I moved here. World War II artifacts have been around ever since I can remember – after all, I was born the year the war ended, and people were always bringing home souvenirs and shit. I had one dagger when I came over here, and two medals, maybe a flag and an iron cross, and that was all. And like with any hobby, the more you get into it the more interesting it gets, if it has any depth to it. So now I have a huge collection of stuff from wartime Germany – daggers, medals, flags, you name it. I like having all this stuff around because it’s a reminder of what happened, and that it’s in the past (for the most part – Nazism still exists, but at the margins). I don’t understand people who believe that if you ignore something, it’ll go away. That’s completely wrong – if it’s ignored, it gathers strength. Europe ignored Hitler for twenty years. We could have beaten him in 1936: the French army could have chased him out of the Rhineland and he would have been done. His people would have been toppled from power. But the French ran away – again – and let him in. As a result, he slaughtered a quarter of the world! And he was a non-smoker, non-drinker, vegetarian, smart suit, short hair, well turned-out. Would have been served in any restaurant in America, unlike Jesse Owens, the hero of the 1936 Olympics.

Jesse Owens came home, covered in glory and eight medals after showing Hitler the benefits of democracy and a multi-racial society, and they wouldn’t serve him dinner in a restaurant in his own town. What the fuck is that? That kind of double standard is
what really pisses me off. Do you know that there are still clubs in England and America where Jews aren’t allowed? This is a country of denial. Look at the model airplane industry – they won’t put a swastika on the model of a Messerschmitt 109, and that was the national insignia of Germany at the time. So does that mean that in the future, there will be no white stars on the side of a fucking Mustang kit because somebody in the planning room believes it’s a symbol of American imperialism? Are any Jews less dead because they won’t allow a swastika on a plastic model airplane? No! And let’s not even get into what so-called Americans did to the real Americans – the Indians. As you can probably tell, I’ve had my share of arguments over all this. Apparently people don’t like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, ‘Oh! Wait a minute – I was wrong.’ I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you.