White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography (6 page)

Shel was blind as a bat. He did have some sight but it was pretty thin. He used to come into the studio saying ‘Hi guys!’ and immediately blunder into the drum kit. He was always walking into walls and doors and shit. He had minders lifting him up out of the debris everywhere, but he’d never admit that he couldn’t see – he just had friends who ‘happened to be there’ picking him up like it was an accident. His face was a constant mass of scar tissue about the eyebrows. But he was all right. He got the job done.

We never had a hit, but we were huge on the circuit in the north. South of Birmingham, nobody had ever heard of us, but we used to pull thousands in places like Bolton. There was this one place we played in Bolton which had a circular stage that would spin around, and we’d all be torn off stage by our fans before we were able to make the first rotation. The chicks would pull us down and tear all our clothes off us – the Beatlemania thing, you know. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Ha! Have you ever had a pair of jeans
ripped
off you? The seams split against the inside of your leg. It’s fucking agony, believe me. And the scissors. It was all the go then to get ‘locks’ of hair from your fave combo! If you’ve never seen forty serious, grim-lipped birds, all holding scissors, rushing at you . . .

At another gig, Harry went running out to grab the mic, like he always did to start the show, and these chicks had hold of the cord and they pulled on it. Well, he went running out and he never
came back, just went over this seven-foot-high stage straight into the crowd. Later on, he told us that as he was going down, a split-second thought ran through his head: ‘Ah, great! We’re really famous and I’m really popular and I’m gonna fall into all these chicks and they love me and it’s gonna be a sea of tits and legs and pussy.’ But these chicks parted like the Red Sea – he could see the nails in the floor planks coming up very fast. He also broke his nose in two places. And some girls broke his finger once, pulling his gold ring off. Another time, they took the boots off Ciggy while he was playing the drums! Ciggy ran through the hall barefoot, screaming, ‘Get that fucking chick! I haven’t got any spares!’

All this adulation sometimes went to Ciggy’s head. Once we were scheduled to play with the Hollies at Manchester University, and Ciggy insisted that we go on last. The Hollies were fucking huge at the time – they’d just done something like six No. 1 records in a row. And here was Ciggy – ‘We go on last, the Rocking Vicars,’ and the rest of it. And the guy running the show said, ‘I can’t tell the Hollies that! They’re the top of the bill! Don’t be unreasonable.’

‘Fuckin’ tell them the Rocking Vicars go on last and that’s it,’ Ciggy insisted.

So the guy went to the Hollies and they didn’t give a fuck – ‘Yeah! Go home early!’ So they went on first and when we came on, the hall was empty – after all, everybody came to see the Hollies, right? So we go out to the stage, which was actually in two parts, pushed together and locked. And the night before,
Ciggy had complained to Nod that the bass drums had been moving forward – ‘If those bass drums move tomorrow, Nodder, you know what’ll happen, boy.’ So Nodder freaked out about that, and he put the spurs for the bass drum right in the join between the two parts of the stage. The only problem was that someone had unlocked them. So we come on and Ciggy calls, ‘Ah one, two, three, four!’ Boom – WHAP! The whole fuckin’ stage separated and all his drums fell in the hole. There he was, left sitting on his stool with his sticks in the air. That was the end of the show. It was probably a good thing no one was there!

As if all this wasn’t surreal enough, I saw a UFO while I was with the Rocking Vicars. We were in our Zephyr, going home to Manchester from Nelson in Lancashire, across the moors, and this thing came over the horizon. It was a bright pink colour and shaped like a ball. It went
zhoom
and stopped dead. I don’t give a fuck what you tell me – a cloud of seagulls, a fuckin’ air balloon, forget it. It wasn’t any of them things. This object went
whuuum
like a bat out of hell and stopped like that. So we got out of the car and we were all looking at it. It hung there and it seemed to be pulsing, but that was probably the effect of the atmosphere, just like the stars appear to pulse. Then suddenly,
bang
, and it went right over our heads, from standing still to about a hundred miles a second.
Phoom
! And it was over the horizon within two seconds of starting off. Nothing we make can even produce a facsimile of that performance, right? Therefore, when you’ve eliminated all the possibilities, it was a UFO, however improbable that may seem. I’m sure it wasn’t
looking at us. It was probably more interested in America – it was probably there by the time we were back in the car!

A couple of times the Rocking Vicars got to play outside of England. One trip was to Finland (I never went back there again until I had Motörhead). The Vicars had a No. 1 record there – of course, you only had to sell about 30,000 45s to be No. 1.

The Vicars were the first British band to play behind the Iron Curtain. I’m not sure how that got set up – our manager was an enterprising geezer, despite the crockery. We played in Yugoslavia, which was sort of the crossover country of the Eastern Bloc. That area doesn’t have much going for it, really, other than that. Basically, its crops are rocks and scrub, and everybody’s poor. We played in Ljubljana, now the capital of Slovenia. Then we went down into Montenegro and Bosnia. And everyone would be bitching about everyone else. I mean bitching like these people really wanted to kill each other, apparently for historical reasons that have faded from their memory. It’s ingrained in the children from the time they’re a year old, it’ll take a miracle to ever stop them. The Serbs hating the Croats – that’s all you ever heard then, and it’s still the same now. Of course, I figured they all were the bad guys because the Communists were doing shit that I wouldn’t do to people. I didn’t know my own people were doing the same shit to them. I can’t say that Yugoslavian trip was particularly enlightening. We only got to see the good bits – you get the tour guide, you know, but in a Communist country, he’s the Tour Guide, right? If he says we don’t go down there, we damn well don’t go down there!

Finally, in early 1967, I left the Rocking Vicars. They were still going until seven or eight years ago, as a sort of cabaret act. But I had bigger plans for myself, see. Conquering the north of England wasn’t good enough for me any more. I wanted London.

I
left the Rocking Vicars, thinking I was going to be a star in my own right immediately. Everything was going to be wonderful and huge women would get a hold of me and do things to me with raw carrots – you know, shit like that. Of course, it didn’t happen quite that way.

The first time I went to London I lasted there for about a month – after waking up on Ron Woods’ mum’s sofa. I stayed with a friend of mine called Murphy, whom I knew from when he was living in Blackpool. He was a little Irish folk singer, fellow dosser. Nice character. We used to know these two gay tailors who would make all our clothes – they’d measure the inside of your leg four or five times. They liked Murph and Murph would go hang out with them now and again. He wasn’t fucking them, though – at least I don’t think so. But they made him a Batman suit, with a hood and batwings that went from the arms to the waist. He was going to fly off Blackpool Tower, see – publicity stunt, like.

Blackpool Tower is a scale model of the Eiffel Tower – it’s about a quarter the size! Still too tall to fly off it if you don’t make it, really. But Murph got all dressed up in his batsuit and we all went with him to the Tower and headed straight for the geezer at the ticket stand.

‘Hello!’ Murph announced. ‘I am Murph the Bat Man! Let me in!’

‘Why?’ the ticket-selling geezer phlegmatically inquired.

‘I’m going to fly off the top!’ Murph declared.

‘No you’re not.’

‘I am!’ Murph insisted.

‘No you’re not.’

‘Out of my way!’ demanded the five-foot-five batperson.

‘I’ll tell you what, mate,’ the guy told him. ‘You give me the money and then fly up there, and if you make it you can come back down and I’ll give you your money back. How’s that?’

He took the glory away from poor Murph, his fleeting chance of a claim to fame. Anyhow, Murph had already gone to London when I decided to head down there myself. He had this terrible rat-hole flat in Sunbury-on-Thames. Well, it wasn’t that bad a flat, except there were about twenty of us dossers living in its four or five rooms and there was no hot water. No grub and no money either. We were getting a band together, me and Murph and Roger, this drummer – he had no drums, but he played on cushions! I ran out of patience after a short while, so I went up north. I woke up one morning, sitting on a beach in South Shields eating cold baked beans out of a can with my comb. I thought, ‘There’s got to be
more to life than this.’ So I went back home and got fed for a bit. I didn’t see Murph again for about thirty years, and when I did I was pleasantly surprised to find that he’d weathered the years with his mind relatively intact (at least what was left of it after the sixties). He’s now an author; when I saw him he gave me a novel he’d written. When I get around to reading it, I’ll let you know how it is!

Not long after I’d returned home, the Birds were playing up in Northwich, near Manchester, so I got a ride down with them back to London. When I got there, I phoned the only number I knew in London (apart from John Lord!) – Neville Chesters. He had been a roadie for the Who and the Merseybeats. I asked if I could doss on his floor and he told me to come on over. At that time, Neville was working for the Jimi Hendrix Experience and he was sharing the flat with Noel Redding, Hendrix’s bass player. They needed a spare set of hands, so about three weeks after I landed at Neville’s, I got a job working for them.

Jimi Hendrix was huge in England at the time – he’d just had two No. 1 records – but no one in America had heard of him yet. I worked for his band for about a year on all the TV shows and the tours through England. I didn’t get to go to any of the foreign gigs, unfortunately, because I was only a fetcher and a lifter. Still, it was an amazing experience. Hendrix was the most startling guitarist ever, no doubt about that. Everything about him was great – his playing was truly astounding, plus he had a great stage act. He was like a cat, a snake! When he performed, he would drive the chicks fucking nuts. I’ve seen him go in his bedroom with five chicks – and they’d all come out smiling too. And of
course, the road crew got the spin-offs. A stud, Hendrix was; and I’m crass enough to think that’s quite a good thing. I don’t know what’s wrong with being a stud – it’s more fun than
not
being a stud, that’s for sure! Unfortunately I didn’t get to mix with him offstage much – I wasn’t part of his private life. I was just working for him. I do recall that he was a very gentle, very nice guy. But most people were nicer in those days. It was one of those ages of innocence, you know. Nobody had started dying yet.

I liked the other two guys in the Experience, too. Noel Redding was all right, only he used to wear a nightshirt to bed, and Aladdin-type shoes with the curly toes and a nightcap with a tassel. That was quite a sight. Mitch was nuts, as he still is today, in fact. One time I was standing on a traffic island in the middle of Oxford Street and Mitch bounced up to me, wearing a white fur coat, white trousers, white shirt, shoes and socks – complete vision, you know. ‘Hello, I don’t know who I am!’ he said and ran off again. I don’t think he knew who I was, either!

This period of time, the late sixties, was brilliant for rock ’n’ roll in Britain. There hasn’t been such a wealth of talent in one era since. The Beatles, the Stones, the Hollies, the Who, Small Faces, Downliners Sect, Yardbirds had all come out of the same three-year period. The ‘British Invasion’ had changed the face of rock music for all time, so in London we were sitting on top of the world. There was a lot of blues going on: Savoy Brown (which was much bigger in the States than in England) and Foghat started off as blues bands, and the jazz–blues thing came in for a little while. There were people like Graham Bond, who had Jack Bruce
in his band, and Ginger Baker, both of whom went on to be in Cream. The Beatles had just come out with
Sergeant Pepper
, so they were certainly flavour of the fucking month! Two of them had just gotten busted, too, so they could do no wrong – John Lennon as icon–martyr, and Yoko looking violated at his side.

Everywhere you looked, there were good bands coming up. It’s depressing nowadays because you have to dig to find a really great band, and there seem to be thousands of awful ones. There were thousands of bands then, too, but really, at least half of them were great. Just to give you an example, I was along for Hendrix’s second UK tour, which ran from 14 November 1967 until 5 December. Co-headlining were the Move, who’d also just had two No. 1s in a row; then Pink Floyd with Syd Barrett – his last tour; Amen Corner, who were then at No. 2; the Nice, featuring a young organ player called Keith Emerson; and the Eire Apparent, later to become the Grease Band backing Joe Cocker. All for an entrance fee of 7 shillings and sixpence (70 cents American). And that was normal for the era.

You didn’t think I’d get to talking about sixties London without mentioning drugs, did you? Oh no, not I. Our whole crew was on acid during the entire tour. And we all got the job done just fine. Orgasms on acid, by the way, are fucking excellent, really unbelievable, so I was doing plenty of that, too. As a matter of fact, acid was still legal back then. There weren’t any laws against it until the end of ’67. And as for marijuana – well, you could have passed by the average copper on the beat, smoking a joint, and he wouldn’t have known what it was. In fact, a friend of
mine once told a cop it was a herbal cigarette, and the guy went for it. It just seemed like all of London was out of their heads back then. We used to get high and go down to the park and talk to the trees – sometimes the trees would win the argument. We were told that acid didn’t work on two consecutive days, but we found that if you double the dose, it does!