White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (27 page)

A couple of weeks prior to our
Tonight Show
appearance, we also played three West Coast dates on the Metallica/Guns N’ Roses stadium tour. I’m not sure how we got on; it was probably Metallica’s work. They’re the only band who have ever acknowledged their debt to us. Those three stadium dates went well, especially the latter two. We got all the PA and were treated with a decent amount of respect, which is as it should be.

Speaking of respect, I suppose this is as good a time as any to get back to the ugly business with Sony, where we had no respect whatsoever. I can only conclude that WTG was used as a tax loss for Sony because of their attitude towards us. It seemed as if they did nothing at all to help us, and everything to damage the sales potential of our records, especially
March or Die
. When that album came out and only Jerry and his assistant were left, we knew that WTG was on its way out, but we figured that Sony would put us on one of their other labels, probably Epic, because that’s who was doing our marketing. That’s the sort of thing that usually happens, and with the Grammy nomination and the great reviews we’d got for
1916
– and on
March or Die
, for that matter – it only made sense. But no, they dropped us, and to be perfectly honest, I think they did us a favour. Those Neanderthal
corporate executives at Sony are all stupid, ignorant, fucking elitist twats. And that’s not sour grapes because I felt that way long before they dropped us! They’ve got no idea about music at all. They sell millions of records, but wouldn’t you if you had the Michael Jackson catalogue and Mariah Carey? Believe me, Mariah Carey is far better off without Tommy Mottola! Mottola was the one who wouldn’t even acknowledge me at his own fucking Grammy party. Fuck him and fuck the rest of them. They’re the most inept bunch of motherfuckers I’ve ever seen in my life. Oh, yes.

We did some headlining dates in Argentina and Brazil and then – before having to regroup and think about getting a new record company – we attended the CMJ convention in New York. CMJ is a college music trade paper and it holds a convention every year. Several organizations have these music conferences and I’ve been to quite a few of them. They’re odd affairs: there are generally a bunch of minor executives slapping each other on the back and spending their expense accounts at the bar, but there are also a lot of younger people, not much more than fans, who are just starting their careers in the music business (poor souls!). And of course the corporate suits have a few artists they’re trying to parade around. I was there, but nobody was
parading
me around – nobody dared! Wurzel and I were on a panel – those things are such jokes! Nothing meaningful ever gets said. At this particular one some woman metal singer who called herself the Great Kat wasted everyone’s time babbling on and on about how wonderful she was! Wurzel, meanwhile, was taking a piss in a bottle behind the tablecloth. But I do remember that particular
year’s convention fondly because Wurzel and I ran into a man I very much admire – guitarist Leslie West.

Leslie West is great, a complete maniac with these mad fucking psycho eyes. I introduced him to Wurzel, and he gave Wurzel this look and said, ‘Tell me, is that a name your mother heard of, or was it given to you later?’

Wurzel, who was a bit unnerved by Leslie’s mad stare, replied, ‘L-later, in school.’

‘Tell me, Wurzel, tell me the truth – do you take drugs?’

‘Y-yes, I do.’

‘Step this way.’

So they disappeared into the men’s room, both of them in one stall, which is not an easy thing to do, considering Leslie’s size. West dropped the cocaine on his shoe and he said, ‘I don’t want you to think the wrong thing of me, Wurzel, but you’re going to have to go down on me now!’ So Wurzel had to get down and snort it off his boot!

Leslie West didn’t have much patience with this convention. ‘I can’t stay here, Lemmy,’ he told me. ‘All these people are fucking peasants.’

‘I know that!’ I said. ‘I’m trying to get out of here myself.’

‘Well, I’m leaving,’ he said. ‘It grieves me, Lemmy, to leave you alone here, but I’m going.’ And he went out to his car and took off. I can’t say I blame him. They never did shit for him, any of his record labels. There’s a guy who should be number one, but he’s been ignored for years by the ‘hit machine’.

Anyhow, by the end of the year we were without a label once
again, but we were much better off, if you ask me. After hearing one too many lies from the powers that be at Sony, I finally asked one guy there, ‘Why didn’t you tell us the truth?’

And this was his response, absolutely verbatim: ‘That’s not the way this business works.’

Can you imagine somebody saying that! How could you be so dishonourable? People like that should be hung by their balls from a burning piece of wood. But after almost thirty years in the music business, I should have figured it out. I’ve always said that good business is theft – if you’ve had a good business day, you’ve stolen somebody’s money. These people treat music purely as a commodity, like selling cans of beans. Most of the people that promote bands have not even heard the bands they promote. They just got a name that came up in the shuffle. Nobody seems to believe in the music any more. The industry’s building all the time, but they’re killing the music. They’re trying to, anyway, but I won’t let them as long as I’m alive. Fuck ’em, you know. They are disgraceful, stupid, arrogant, forgettable bastards – that’s right, forgettable, because people are gonna remember me, but the suits will be forgotten. Fuck ’em. Who are they? Somebody who worked for Sony? Ha! You’ll have to do better than
that
!

A
s you can probably tell, I wasn’t exactly distressed at being dropped by Sony. We’d been in worse situations. Things like that don’t bother me at all – you just have to keep going and everything will sort itself out. It always does. You can’t run around panicking and giving up; you’ve got to have the strength of your convictions; you’ve got to know that somebody out there is going to recognize you as worthwhile and that you’ll still be in the picture. If you look like you’re beaten, then who’s going to come forward?

So we carried on throughout the last days of the Sony débâcle like we always do – we played some gigs. Not long before we got dropped we did about five dates with Ozzy Osbourne and Alice in Chains. Ozzy was doing one of his so-called ‘farewell’ tours –
like he’s ever really going to retire! He’d fucking go nuts if he retired! Ozzy is one of the most charismatic performers in the world; that’s what he does. Take that away from him and he’d go completely crazy. If he could see himself the way everybody else does, he’d never go on about retiring ever again. He
will
have to retire one day, I suppose, but not until he can’t walk any more. But anyway, we only played a few of those ‘retirement’ shows and then got thrown off the bill because we did the Guns N’ Roses/Metallica dates on our days off. That wasn’t very rock ’n’ roll, if you ask me, but since we were playing third, under Alice in Chains, I didn’t really care.

We also did some recording. We had a couple of songs on the soundtrack to Clive Barker’s
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
– ‘Hellraiser’ (perhaps not surprisingly) and ‘Hell on Earth’, which were recorded in the same session. In addition to those, we recorded ‘Born to Raise Hell’, on which I shared vocals with Ice T and Whitfield Crane, the singer from Ugly Kid Joe (he’s a nice guy . . .
now
he’s a nice guy! Hi, Whit!). The latter song was a last-minute thing – it played over the end credits, and didn’t appear on the soundtrack album. We actually did a video for ‘Hellraiser’, but Sony, of course, didn’t pay for it – I think it was the movie company’s doing. So as you can see, our career wasn’t at all dependent on anything Sony did (and thank God for that!).

Later we did some shows in Argentina and Brazil, with Alice in Chains opening for us. Some of those South American countries are virtually lawless, and you really have to watch your ass there. One year when we were down to do some shows in Brazil,
we got invited to the President’s son’s house, and the cops tried to railroad us on the way. That’s a great source of income for them, to arrest people like us and then ransom us for a lot of money. And of course, all rock bands are hugely wealthy – ha, ha! This particular time, we were playing with Iron Maiden and Skid Row, and after we finished, we walked up to the parking lot, and all these security guys were standing around the van we were supposed to use to get to the hotel, and one of them was inside fooling around with one of the seats. He came out looking really shifty and I thought, ‘Fuck that!’ So I went over to my guys and I said, ‘Nobody gets in the fucking van!’ and I insisted that we get another one. The guy tried to tell me, ‘Oh, there are no other vans,’ and I said, ‘Then we’ll stay here the fucking night. I’m sleeping in the dressing room. Okay?’ Another van was somehow found, and we dropped off the people who were staying in the hotel and headed for the President’s son’s house. About ten yards up the promenade, what do you know but we had a cop on our tail. The guy got us all out and went straight for that seat. There was nothing there, of course, and he didn’t know what to do! He asked us some lame questions – ‘How old are these girls?’ and all that – but he was screwed and he knew it. Then we had to wait (he said the van was ‘overcrowded’) until they brought us
another
van and I thought it was going to be the same scam again. I went walking off down the promenade to the hotel, with Todd following me – I don’t see why you should willingly put your head on the block! But the van came driving past and there weren’t any cops following them and they said, ‘Get in.’ So we got in and
finally arrived at the President’s son’s house. That was something else altogether! You get up there and all these soldiers suddenly walk out of the woods with their guns at the ready, asking for the secret password and all that. We had clearance so we were let in without any more hassle. We had an all right time but there weren’t enough girls there, if you ask me. Phil Campbell was running around drunk with the President’s son and all these large security guys, they ended up being a great bunch – not that you’d form a long-lasting friendship or anything.

We did the States again, too, this time with Black Sabbath. The peculiar thing about touring with them was that every day they had a nap in the afternoon; everything shut down, it had to all go dark in the dressing room and three of them sat side-by-side on the couch, nodded off like little rabbits. Bobby Rondinelli, actually, didn’t
want
a nap, but he was out there with Geezer and Tony! It was kind of boring for us in Milwaukee because we shared the dressing room with them – it was all one big room, divided up by a curtain. So all the lights were out and we had to sit in darkness for an hour. It was very fucking strange. Even if Motörhead’s around until 2035, I don’t think we’ll ever be ready for naptime. That said, I do have to say that Black Sabbath delivered every night. They were consistently good all through the tour.

The year ended on sort of a sour note. We were supposed to tour England but as I’ve already mentioned, it got cancelled because the promoters wouldn’t guarantee the money and we sure weren’t going to fund it ourselves – you know the story. We did go right through Europe, though, and did very well, as always.
See, we’re the only consistent factor in the whole scheme: we always show up and play our stuff, we’re always on time, and we’re always pretty reasonable (well, mostly). If the promoters did their job half as well as we do ours, we’d all be happy.

We spent a week early in 1993 playing a few low-key shows at this place in Anaheim called California Dreams that doesn’t exist any more, and figuring out what to do about a record deal. We had to have a deal, of course, and we ended up getting one with a German company, ZYX, which was a fucking disaster. But they offered us more money than anyone else – they offered us stupid money, up front – so we took it. And we were fucking broke: that’s what you do when you’re skint, you take the money. It did start off looking good, I have to admit. For one thing, Germany had been our best market for years, so it made sense to sign with a German label. And they made all kinds of promises and they flew across the Atlantic all the time to see us. Since ZYX was primarily a dance label (that should have tipped us off right there), they said we could do the distribution and have our own subsidiary label and all that. But in the end they insisted on doing it all themselves, which was a complete nightmare. They didn’t know anything about American marketing. Plus the guy that runs the place is the one who started the company back in 1926 or whatever. He was so fucking old he spit Noah’s Ark and all decisions had to run by him. I don’t recall how many times Todd went across the Atlantic to deal with them, but it was more than they did coming to see us! Todd had only been managing us for a little over a year during all this and those months were really a
baptism of fire for him. However, he rose to the occasion remarkably well.

Anyhow, we had no clue about what we’d gotten ourselves into, and we just went along making an album, like we always do. This was the first time Mikkey was in with us from the start and he turned out to be even better than we expected. He was very involved in the songwriting process for this album, which came to be called
Bastards
. Phil Taylor hadn’t been interested in the writing process for a very long time before we fired him. And Mikkey also came through when we got in the studio. He banged out the drum tracks in record time. He was amazing, and has continued to be amazing to this day . . . not to mention amusing!

We also got a new producer for this album. For the better part of our careers, it seemed like Motörhead changed producers every other album – Jimmy Miller did two, as did Vic Maile and Peter Solley. They never seemed to be any good for more than that. I think we wear them out! I don’t remember the name of the other guy we were looking at for the new record, but it was between him and Howard Benson and we went with Howard. Howard certainly earned the gig: he was keen and he came to all the rehearsals (though I have to say it was the last time he did
that
!). Howard was there, Howard was gonna do this record whatever fucking happened. He just came and hung around until we said yes. That’s really what he did – in the end, we just said, ‘Fuck it, let’s let him do it!’ He really wanted this album and we gave it to him and amazingly enough, he stayed with us for the four albums. I don’t know how he managed to break the two-album barrier but
he did and we were generally pretty happy with him in spite of some of his weird habits (I’ll get into those later, but don’t hold your breath – they aren’t that exciting). He did a great job on
Bastards
– I think it’s one of the best albums Motörhead has made so far. Every song on it is strong. ‘Death or Glory’ and ‘I Am the Sword’ are probably my favourites, along with ‘Lost in the Ozone’. Then there’s ‘Don’t Let Daddy Kiss Me’, which is about child abuse. I wrote that one on my own and I’d had it for three years in my pocket. I offered it to everybody – Lita Ford, Joan Jett – ’cause I thought a girl should sing it but no one ever took it up. They would hear the song and say, ‘I love it! I must sing it, you’ve got to let me have that song!’ and then three weeks later, the manager would call and say, ‘No.’ So I wound up singing it myself.