Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers Read online

  Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers

  THE RISE OF MOTÖRHEAD

  by Martin Popoff

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  “Hang on, what drugs were we doing that day?”

  Chapter 2

  “A bullet belt in one hand and a leather jacket in the other.”

  Chapter 3

  Motörhead: “Like a fucking train going through your head.”

  Chapter 4

  Overkill: “He was a bit of a lad, old Jimmy.”

  Chapter 5

  Bomber: “They saw us as noisy, scary people.”

  Chapter 6

  Ace of Spades: “It wasn’t that it was the best we did; it was that it was the best they heard.”

  Chapter 7

  No Sleep ’til Hammersmith: “The bomber, the sweat, the noise—it was an event.”

  Chapter 8

  Iron Fist: “It was hard work getting Lemmy out of the pubs.”

  Chapter 9

  Eddie’s Last Meal: “A bottle of vodka on the table, a glass, and a little pile of white powder.”

  Chapter 10

  The Aftermath: “God bless him, little fella.”

  Selected Discography

  Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Is aging a bad topic with you?

  “No, I don’t care, you know? I’m all right.”

  No big health problems right now?

  “No, no small ones either.”

  Introduction

  First thing to get off my chest is that I’d been formulating plans for a Motörhead book months before even dear Phil Taylor had died, and I had signed the papers with the good folks at ECW Press three weeks before Phil passed on, let alone any time after the tragic demise of Mr. walkin’ talkin’ Motörhead itself, Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister. I would hate for people to think I was glorifying or capitalizing on death—when I was finishing up this book, everybody was very much still with us, and it’s only the stretched timelines and strict sales schedules of publishers that make it look otherwise.

  Which, incidentally, speaks well of ECW themselves, having the sophisticated taste to order up a book on Motörhead before anybody died (and I happen to know for a fact that there are deep-track Motörhead fans on the staff of that fine institution).

  Okay, that little bit of unpleasantness dispensed with, I have to say that I’m proud to avow that I was a Motörheadbanger from somewhere around the beginning. I can’t find my materials or membership card, so I’m not sure what my number was, but I’m pretty sure I would’ve been in the first handful of Canadians ever to sign up, having joined the Saxon Militia Guard or whatever it was called at the same time. It was like magic sitting in my bedroom in Trail, B.C., receiving newsletters and black-and-white glossy photos from and about Motörhead and Saxon, materials that looked very much like the stuff I got from being part of the Buffalo Sabres fan club a little earlier than that, I suspect. Not sure who my favorite power trio was, Motörhead or the French Connection, but we don’t have to fight that battle.

  But yes, Motörhead came to me as a lad of 14, with the imported debut album, and I can’t say I got it right away. Sure, hearing that tangled mass of distortion, I couldn’t help but like them, clinging to anything heavy that crossed my path (and of course nothing that was not heavy). But on the strength of Motörhead, who in their right mind would call these squatters and street rats their favorite band? At 14 years old, I liked Motörhead exactly as much, and for the same reasons, as I liked Raw Power, not the least of which was I partly felt sorry for the bands that had to live with these records as the best that they could do.

  It wasn’t until my purchase of Overkill that Motörhead would indeed lodge themselves forever into my list of favorite 10 or so bands. But I suppose, one should clarify and not lie: Motörhead would be one of my favorite bands two times and with a gap: one, the period covered by this book, namely the classic lineup (you will notice throughout the following chapters that for expediency I also use the term original lineup although, of course, there was an original, transitional lineup that we do indeed recognize in this book), and then very much the band as it existed for about the last 15 years.

  Now, we don’t talk throughout this book about the heroic and heartbeating music that Lemmy, Mikkey Dee and Phil Campbell slammed together like a hundred clap push-ups, so I just want to say, in the here and now, it does cause me some pain not to extol and explain the great records that version of the band made, especially sort of the last half-dozen (and Bastards) before Lemmy’s death at the very end of 2015. So yes, in summary, I love and appreciate and I am inspired by Motörhead as it existed in the 2000s, and as it existed in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and not particularly so much in between, the nadir being the band’s cover of “Cat Scratch Fever.” And yes, for the goddamn record, Another Perfect Day is my favorite Motörhead album of all time.

  So to reiterate, this book celebrates what is known as the classic Motörhead lineup, and the six records—five studio and one live—that Lemmy Kilmister, Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor and Fast Eddie Clarke created between 1977 and 1982.

  Joining the Motörheadbangers is a filmy memory, but the fondest memory of these three guys and what they meant to me as an angry headbanger, exclusively headbanging during their reign, was the purchase of Overkill.

  My fellow encyclopedic buddy, Forrest Toop, and myself had embarked upon one of our life-highlight trips to Spokane Washington, from our homes just north of the border in Canada, in Trail, B.C. We were by this point egregiously obsessed and knowledgeable metalheads, and we lived for these purchasing excursions into the Mecca that was shelves-stocked America. Spokane was just big enough to have a few tiny, perfect record stores that could fulfill our every obsession concerning our hobby. There was Eucalyptus Records, a bright and airy place walled with windows, a welcoming headquarters that had all the new domestic releases and a few imports. It was a cheery, somewhat corporate stand-alone building on Division, and it just made you feel good to be there—like Peaches must have been, or even Tower at its peak. But more important were the paired head shop/record emporia known as Magic Mushroom and Strawberry Jams, each, as I recall, with two locations during their incense-fumed reigns as the places we could buy Sounds and the NME and Tygers of Pan Tang singles with the patch still in them.

  Now, I’m positive that I bought Overkill in the original, somewhat cramped location of Strawberry Jams. But I’m not sure that this is the time that I jumped up and let out a howl in the store and almost hit my head on a crossbeam, or if that happened when I flipped through the racks and found The Damned’s Music for Pleasure a year and a half earlier. But I know for sure that the endorphin rush was the same. With Music for Pleasure, there was the added delayed reaction of making out the fact, through Barney Bubbles’s vision, that this was a copy of a new Damned album. With the Motörhead record, it was more like being whacked in the face with an exploding baseball filled with paint. The debut album’s front cover was almost miserable in its black-and-white-ness, and a little bit scary in that it looked like a biker patch, which was actually Lemmy’s intention with the design. Overkill, on the other hand, was like Motörhead—and Motörhead—coming to life with a roar and a flurry of karate moves. It was Snaggletooth suddenly rendered in dramatic and violent color, and Motörhead as a trio of malnourished moochers in leather jackets was off to the races.

  Soon would come the equally awesome Bomber and Ace of Spades (both, again, on import) and a live album that I really didn’t give a shit about, and then Iron Fist,
which I, as it turned out, clutched to heart more than most people did. By this point, Motörhead had insidiously become part of my sullen teenage personality, getting me through lonely high school years, serving as a body core-strengthener, knocking me out of the encouraging family home into university at 18 years old, and then onward into . . . whatever, quite a bit of life as a fan who, like the 99%, did other things for a living, and then, for a good 15 years now, a fan who gets to think about and fawn over all sorts of bands like Motörhead as his full-time job, if you can call it that.

  And then Phil dies, and seven weeks later, Lemmy dies, and there’s only Fast Eddie left to provide comfort and connection back to those magical days when Motörhead were the baddest bad-asses in heavy metal.

  The tale of those great years, essentially, for purposes and purloin of this intimate and happy book, 1976 to 1982, was for the most part whacked together when all three of these hot-rod rock heroes were still alive. The finishing of it, with two of them dead, was much more of a mixed feeling experience. I have no idea if the reading of this book is going to make you happy with punk pride or sad with heavy metal heaviness, but I would hope that the communion with these words serves as a great re-living of those times, or for the youngsters, an entry point to six full-stride, wide-stance classics plus “Please Don’t Touch” and assorted B-sides that inflamed our imaginations as teens.

  Of note, you certainly are going to be cast right back into the making of all this great music, and through much first-hand accompaniment from the guys themselves, Eddie very much alive and telling me great stories, with Phil and Lemmy coming to life, because I’ve talked to all of them at length. The other reason why, hopefully, you will wind up feeling well inside this hurricane of great recorded music is that the recorded canon is my main concern; it’s of the utmost importance and it’s is all we have, plus our memories if we were ever there with them in the flesh. Writing the book, it was very much like sitting around the pub with these sociable, smart, funny guys perennially plunked into a surreal world lacking in REM sleep, and it is my hope that reading the book feels that way as well to you, rather than creeping you out from all the death.

  So let’s move on, shall we? I’ve never had any idea what these introductions are supposed to be for, specifically. I’ve certainly written enough of them, having bulldozed through close to 60 books now (and here I have to use a bit of time travel, because I know before this book actually hits the shelves, barring my own death, I’ll write another four or five). And so I think I’ve knocked down all those conversational, reminiscing, book-keeping, clarification-type things I usually want to knock off. So yeah, let’s get started. Without further ado, here’s the tale of the classic Motörhead lineup, with the overarching theme being very much an exploration of why these three guys were loved so much, why, in effect, no one has a bad word for the original Motörhead, and in fact, really, anything denigrating to say about Motörhead at all, excepting scrutiny perhaps of those too corporate and commercial albums from ’87 to ’92.

  In other words, I think it’s safe to say that with the death of Lemmy went any possible chance that Motörhead would go to its grave with anything other than an unassailable reputation as the purest expression of the magic of hard rock—and, yes, heavy metal—that we’re ever likely to experience ever again in our lifetimes.

  Martin Popoff

  [email protected]

  CHAPTER 1

  “Hang on, what drugs were we doing that day?”

  Born on the dole, born in the land of misfit rockers and always—always—born to lose, Motörhead was also born of a burn, its rank figurehead, Lemmy Kilmister, on fire to avenge his firing from the ranks of Hawkwind through the assemblage of a sonic force that would deafen all naysayers. Its name would be Motörhead, and the classic lineup this book celebrates—Fast Eddie Clarke, Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor and lynchpin Lemmy his bad self—would grind up seven years’ worth of posers and pretenders. Motörhead would create a contrast against the industry, one that will live forever as the potent realization of punk ethics applied to original rock ’n’ roll and a bastard format called heavy metal, a genre nomenclature curiously dismissed by all three soldiers as mirage, but ultimately so much a part of their legacy, their home and hearth, their final resting place against a pop culture that rarely cared.

  One mustn’t forget or diminish the accomplishments of lineups after the classic trio—most notably the band as it existed for the near quarter-century with Phil Campbell and Mikkey Dee—but one also mustn’t forget that the classic lineup was not the original, and that the original . . . well, this is one of those happenstances where technically the original, or most salient, “lineup” just might consist of an army of one, namely Lemmy Kilmister.

  Born on Christmas Eve in 1945 (and dead three days after Christmas 70 years later) in Stoke-on-Trent, England, Ian Fraser Kilmister, an only child, seemed destined for a life of independence and defiance. His father, an ex–Royal Air Force chaplain, left his mother when Lemmy was but three months old, and his mother, after nine years of single motherhood, took up with a footballer and washing machine factory worker who arrived with a couple of kids of his own, neither of whom Lemmy cooperated with. Stridently resentful of his father, conversely of his mother, Lemmy says, “She was a good mum. She was fair enough. She had a lot of good ideas.”

  Later, living on a farm in north Wales, Lemmy says he “used to breed horses when I was younger, before I got into rock ’n’ roll.” He also was an enthusiastic reader, having been encouraged by his English teacher, and he worked the carnival when it was in town. But he soon discovered girls and rock ’n’ roll, at its birth in the ’50s. The only English kid among seven hundred Welsh children, Lemmy needed an edge against the inherent territorial resentment he suffered there. Always strategizing, Lemmy took his mother’s Hawaiian guitar to school to impress the girls. “It worked like a charm too,” recalled Kilmister to Classic Rock Revisited. “I saw this other kid with a guitar at school. He was immediately surrounded by chicks and I thought, ‘Oh, I see.’ Luckily, my mother had one laying around the house, so I grabbed it and took it to school. I couldn’t play it. Eventually, they expected me to play so I had to learn a couple of chords. It turned out all right.”

  Lemmy recalls how, as a young boy, he used to have to go to the “electrical appliance” store and order records, after which they would arrive in three weeks’ time. Early favorites included Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Tommy Steele, Eddie Cochran, Elvis and Little Richard, who he always called the greatest rock ’n’ roll singer of all time.

  But it was the Beatles that really lit the fire—Lemmy, all of 16, hitchhiked to Liverpool to see what the fuss was about and watched them live at the Cavern Club before they even had a record out. Our hero soon would play guitar in bands like the Sundowners, the Rainmakers, the Motown Sect and the mildly legendary Rocking Vickers (sometimes spelled Rockin’ and sometimes spelled Vicars), who managed to tour Europe and distinguish themselves as the first western band ever to play Yugoslavia.

  “The Beatles had an influence on everybody,” Lemmy told Goldmine magazine. He admired the Beatles as hard men from Liverpool against the Stones, suburban Londoners in his estimation. “You have to realize what an incredible explosion the Beatles were. They were the first band to not have a lead singer in the band. They were the first band to write their own songs in Britain because we always just covered American songs before that. Everybody was singing at the same time and the harmonies were great. Daily papers in England used to have an entire page of the paper dedicated to what the Beatles had done the day before. When George died, the guards at Buckingham Palace played a medley of George’s songs during the changing of the guard; that sort of thing never happens.”

  Lemmy says that his Rocking Vickers were as famed and respected in Northern England, north of Birmingham, as the Who and the Kinks were down in London, but that the other guys in the band seemed to conte
nt themselves with playing a predictable circuit, while he had grander plans. But even though the money was good, at £200 a week each, they couldn’t get a foothold in London themselves. And so, dispensing with the Rocking Vickers—which Lemmy ultimately describes as less of a garage band, more of a show band—he left the band house in Manchester empty-handed. “When I left the Vickers, the guitar stayed,” noted Lemmy to Classic Rock Revisited. “It was a band guitar. When people left that band then the instruments stayed and I think that really made a lot of sense. If you need a guitar player but he hasn’t got a guitar then you have one for him to use. When he leaves, you have one for the next guy so you don’t have to run around.” Traveling light not for the last time in his life, Lemmy found his way to London where his mind was about to get expanded through his apocryphal internship as a Jimi Hendrix roadie, living for a brief spell with bassist Noel Redding and road manager Neville Chesters.

  “Lemmy has been my friend since 1963,” explains Chesters, who also worked with both the Who and Cream. “The story goes, and I can tell you, we have a different one on how the story goes but it ends up the same. I actually took Lemmy to London. He came to see us at the Odeon in Liverpool. He wanted to go to London; he asked me if I could give him a ride to London and I said yes. He slept on the floor of my room and then the next day I took him down to London via his house, which was inconvenient. He grabbed a few things. Gone to London, I said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ And he said, ‘Well I don’t really have anywhere; I was wondering if I could stay with you?’ His band then had been the Rocking Vickers, and I’d known him since then. So I happened to have a basement hovel that had three beds. One of them was given over to Noel when he was supposed to share the rent. And I had a spare bed, so Lemmy was in there. And then the next day it was . . . he couldn’t get a job at all. He couldn’t get anything, so I got him a job as my assistant to roadie for Jimi. And that was, at the time, his big claim to fame. In fact for years it was his claim to fame. It was a story that used to come out in many of his radio and TV interviews. But we have a different way of describing how he got to London.”