Beer Drinkers and Hell Raisers Page 17

  “I know them all in West London,” snorted Lem, when asked about the coppers in 1982. “They can’t surprise me anymore. It’s usually, ‘Hi Lemmy. Phil, what have you got on you? It’s just a quick search. You aren’t doing anything for a few minutes. Are you?’” Added Phil, when asked if he’d ever done time, “I have. Three weeks in a mental and psychiatric ward for getting busted with 1.9 grams of absolutely useless grass. They couldn’t find enough to test.”

  So coppers and jail couldn’t stop Phil—he had to do himself in. “That’s correct,” affirms Eddie, on what would be Phil’s most grave physical miscue. “We were in Ireland. We used to go to Northern Ireland. Not many bands would go to Northern Ireland because back in those days it was a trouble spot. Because the IRA, they had sort of a semi-war going on. But we always wanted to go because the fans are starved for music. Because a lot of bands were scared to go there. And of course, we said, we fucking ain’t, we’ll go. So it was one of our main places we used to love playing. And of course they treated us like bloody gods over there. We used to stay at the most bombed hotel in Europe, which was the Europa. And it was a wonderful hotel; we used to party all fucking night. It was a wonderful place.

  “So we partied all night and Phil, about five in the morning, he’s having a weightlifting contest with one of the guys that loaded out the equipment. Not one of our crew, but it was sort of a fan that we had working on setting up the equipment in Belfast. And they were playing pick each other up, hauling each other above their heads. And so Phil picked him up, you know, like a dumbbell and pushed him above his head. And then the guy picks Phil up, and he lost his balance, fell over backward with Phil up in the air, sideways on, like if he was pushing iron, and he’s tipped over, and as he’s gone down, he’s tipped down onto Phil’s head. So Phil’s head hit the ground, but of course, it shattered his neck.

  “So yeah, I didn’t know anything about this. At the time I was already in bed shagging or something. I got a phone call in the morning—well in the morning, about lunchtime—and, ‘Listen, man, I’ve got to tell you something.’ ‘Well, what?’ ‘We just . . .’ ‘Well, go on and fucking tell me.’ He says, ‘Phil’s in hospital. He’s broken his neck.’ I went what?! Because when you hear broken neck, you think end, you know what I mean? And so I thought, fucking hell, off we go, we have to go fucking right through no man’s land, which is like bandit country, to get to this fucking hospital, Victorian Hospital, and it’s got all sorts of troops and fucking gunmen and all sorts. Every guy in there’s got a security officer sitting by the bed with a shooter, you know. And there’s Phil being filmed for local telly. His neck in a fucking brace, and he’s lying there, and I’m saying, you little cunt, what have you done now?”

  As for the guilty party himself, Phil’s first-hand explanation was, “I was drunk out of my mind at 6 o’clock in the morning waiting for the slowest elevator in the world. I picked a couple of guys up and fell over. Everyone else got up and I couldn’t. I broke my neck.”

  Fast Eddie contemplating a future with less mania and encumbrances.

  © Wolfgang Guerster

  “We had more trouble with Phil on the road,” continues Eddie. “We had to cancel two other tours because of Phil. Once because he . . . well, twice, actually, we nearly lost our first break, which was supporting Hawkwind. Only the night before, he punched a bloke. Broke his hand. We got a new drummer in, just to play the gigs, but it was the ex-Hawkwind drummer, Alan Powell. And Hawkwind comes in, and what’s his name, the fuckin’ guitarist, Dave Brock, he saw the drum kit, and he said, ‘If that guy’s drumming for you, you ain’t on the tour.’ Because he had obviously fell out with Alan Powell. So we said, well, what we going to fucking do then? So that’s when we gaffer-taped the stick to Phil’s hand. Well we had to—it was that or no tour. We were desperate in those days for work. That was our first big break, the Hawklords tour. So anyway, we managed to get away with that one.

  “Then we got the first album out and we got this big 40-date tour booked with Girlschool supporting. We took off around the country. Well, after the third show, Phil had a fucking punch-up with the tour manager over a bird, broke his hand, and we had to cancel the fucking tour. So it’s all back on the bus, back to London, tour canceled. So fucking, I lost it, you know. And many other occasions when Philip . . . good ol’ Philip, I remember we were in the Pyrenees coming over into Spain from France. He lost it on the bus. The coffee machine didn’t work or something. We were parked. He got the coffee machine and kicked it all over the car park, right? Of course, by the time we get to Madrid, his foot’s swelling up like a fucking football. So of course, we’re looking to cancel the show. But there’s ten thousand angry kids out there. If we cancel the show, we’re not going to get out of there, or our equipment isn’t. So they get a hold of the football guys. You know, they’ve got this magic spray stuff that they put on it and it deadens everything? We got some of that off the trainers from the football team, and they gave us a couple of cans, and the fucking drum roadie had to spray it on his foot every ten minutes. So Phil was an absolute fucking nightmare. So him doing his neck was just another Phil thing. So God bless him. Oh, he was a fucking nightmare, Philip. He was a lot of trouble, Phil.

  “But no medical stuff that cost us a lot of money,” chuckles Eddie. “There were a couple of moments . . . he’s a drummer. You know, he could get a bit uptight. But I can only think of really a couple of occasions when anything got damaged, and it was nothing bad. He might break a chair or something. I think that happened in a hotel once in Italy, and there were a couple of incidents, but they were very few and far between. We cared about, you know, not doing that. A lot of bands went out, ‘Oh, let’s do this.’ Especially Rat Scabies and the boys. They used to go, ‘Oh, what can we smash up?’ It was sort of on their list of things to do. Our list of things to do was, let’s chop one up, roll a joint, open a beer and go to the bar, find a chick. You know, we had a totally separate set of things we wanted to do. And you can’t take a chick back to your room if it’s completely destroyed, can you?”

  Manager Smith confirms that Phil’s misdeeds didn’t often find the band out of pocket. “No, we were very lucky, because we’re British, and we have something called the National Health Service. I mean, he broke his hand and we had to tape the drum stick to his hand, and he often sprained it. And as you know, broke his neck in Belfast. Being an idiot.”

  So the elders of the band, Eddie and Lem, managed to stay out of much trouble. In fact, one looks back on the history—all of it—and Motörhead, by dint of good luck more than anything, remained quite scandal-free. “No, we were pretty good,” muses Eddie. “We were pretty good, I have to say. Lemmy and I managed to sort of get out of there unscathed. We never had to cancel a show because of me or Lemmy. It was only Phil. But Phil’s neck was gone, so we couldn’t do much else anyway. That’s why you look at the cover, he’s got the brace on.”

  Plus an old suit, a stylish hat, and a machine gun in his hand. The St. Valentines Day Massacre sleeve was additional fodder, on top of the amusing music enclosed, for those who thought Motörhead was having too much fun away from the menacing main music that the metalheads found manly. As Eddie alluded to, the general concept of the EP would come back to haunt the band two years later when Lemmy befriended Wendy O. Williams. More on that later, but the pattern is one that Lemmy defends with the attitude that you can call him sexist all you want, but he’s obviously proven that any time a girl wants to join the lads in this business, she’s got his full encouragement. Girlschool, Wendy, Skunk Anansie, Evanescence . . . these names would crop up in conversation with Lem, sometimes shoehorned in as if Lemmy was making a point to put in the good word before your time on the phone with him was up.

  “That was Christmas, and I think it was about March, April,” figures Eddie, on how long Phil was out of action. “Probably four months. But it was that period there from Christmas to after,
obviously, St. Valentines Day Massacre came out. They weren’t actually sure whether he was ever going to be able to play again at one point, in the beginning. It was, oh we’ll have to see when you get back together. I don’t know if you know, but Phil, on his neck, he had a lump the size of a golf ball. Maybe slightly bigger now. This lump, over the years had got bigger and bigger and bigger. And it’s where his spine had protected itself and created all this stuff. He’d grown all this cartilage, and it was this big ball on his neck. It was really funny. I think on the Ace of Spades video, he talks about it and says he’s going to have a face tattooed on it. But he never did.”

  Thinking again about the timelines, Eddie consults his diary entry for me and cites, “Yeah, this is interesting. ‘The Ulster Hall, and the Dublin Fiesta, Phil was inadvertently bounced on his head by a friend.’ So, no, he was only out of action for three months, well, four months. According to this, December 2nd we played the Ulster Hall and that’s when he bounced on his neck. When we came back from Ulster that time, I remember coming through the fucking airport at eight in the morning, because the police busted us on the way in. And then when we came out, they said, ‘Oh, come back and see us tomorrow. We’ll have a drink.’ They were going to bust us but we ended up chatting and having a laugh. But we had to go back and I remember them waiting for us at the airport, eight in the morning. They gave us a glass of potcheen; that’s the Irish homemade stuff.”

  Indeed Phil was back for a tour that raised the stakes for the band, an intensive campaign throughout North America supporting Ozzy Osbourne, April 22 to July 15 of 1981, marking Motörhead’s first time across the pond, with, really, even their mainland European touring having been not that extensive to this point.

  May 7, 1981, Danforth Music Hall, Toronto.

  © Bill Baran

  “Oh, fuckin’ ’ell, shit,” swears Phil, “I think probably the best tour, at least from a music point of view, was the first time we toured America supporting Ozzy, Ozzy’s first tour with Randy Rhoads. And it was just great to see Ozzy back, and the band was so awesome, and the audiences were great. It was an electric atmosphere. From that point of view it was great, and to be on that tour was just marvelous, and it was such a shame that poor Randy died. And as regards mischief and mayhem, there are far too many that I can possibly remember. There are way too many—mayhem and madness went on on just about every tour.”

  “We met when Motörhead opened for him on the Blizzard of Ozz tour,” says Lemmy, asked when he’d first struck up what was to be a long friendship with the famed Black Sabbath singer. Of note, some of the best money Lemmy made in the business would came from his co-writes with Ozzy and appearances on Ozzy’s smash solo albums. “That was a great tour, with Randy Rhoads. I got to know him; he was a nice guy. He was small. He was a little fellow about the size of Ronnie Dio. He couldn’t play Asteroids worth a fuck. I beat him right away across America! But he was really a good guy. I never could get over how incredibly little he was. Randy had small hands. Boy, could he play guitar. He became an even better guitar player after he died. It is a well-known mystery that guitar players suddenly get better once they are dead. Buddy Holly was the first. Stevie Ray Vaughan is known by a lot more people than had ever heard of him when he was alive.

  “Ozzy’s only problem was that he couldn’t get any more!” quips Lem, on Ozzy’s drug problem, offering a comparison to his own more scientific techniques. “I have a personality that rejects loss of control. Even when I was in my acid days, I was taking ten at a time at the end. We had heard that acid won’t work two days in a row but we found out that if you double the dose then it does. Even in those days, I used to always have what I call my window on the world. I could always stop and look out of it to see what was really going on. Ozzy didn’t have that. Ozzy was doing a lot of downers, which I never did much of. I have always been a ‘Let’s be present at the wedding’ kind of guy. I didn’t want to be outside in the graveyard.”

  Ozzy, who thinks the world of Lemmy and has called him the ultimate rock ’n’ roller, remembers that all Lemmy had with him on the tour was a plaid bag with a notebook in it and three books to read—conspicuously absent was a change of clothes. As for Lemmy’s rider, Ozzy remembers it as being nothing but vodka, orange juice and bourbon.

  “Randy was a really good guy,” adds Eddie, on Ozzy’s virtuosic axe prodigy. “He was very quiet and modest for such a great player. We talked a fair bit, as you would over three months, and I watched the shows whenever possible. He was a pleasure to watch. He played the L.A. speed style a bit but he had the ability to make it fit with the tune and he still had bags of feel, whereas a lot of the later speed guitarists were just quick with no real feel. I used to think guitar playing was becoming an Olympic sport all about who is the fastest—not really my idea of guitar playing. But we owe Ozzy a big one for that. His office got in touch and said Ozzy wants you to support him in the U.S.A. Without that, we might never have got there. My memory is a little faulty now, but I can say it was a lot of fun and we were really excited to be in the U.S.A. for the first time. I have to say we did not go down well everywhere, which was a big change from Europe. I think we came back a bit damaged by the experience and should have taken a little longer before our next album, Iron Fist.”

  Support from Tank, who were, in so many ways, the baby Motörhead.

  Preceding the Ozzy dates, however, is where we get the material for what would become the band’s first and only U.K. No. 1 album, the live No Sleep ’til Hammersmith, issued June 27, 1981. The dates culled for the seminal live stand would come from a short tour with Girlschool called the Short Sharp Pain in the Neck Tour, celebrating Phil’s return from near death by misadventure.

  Aside from a fall 1980 performance of “Iron Horse” (NWOBHM hopefuls Weapon supporting on the night), the rest of No Sleep consisted of selections from shows at the West Runton Pavilion, Norfolk, on March 27, 1981, Queen’s Hall, Leeds, the following night, Newcastle City Hall on the 29th and 30th, and then Maysfield Leisure Centre in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The brunt of the album was recorded at Newcastle given the superior sound from those two shows over the other dates.

  “We had a full month there, a gig every night,” recalls Eddie, accounting for how on fire the band was, playing these songs with an unmistakable authority that ensured that the record would be seen as one of the greatest live albums of all time. “And this was after the layoff, then, which was December, January, February and then Phil was back in the saddle for March. So it wasn’t so bad then. And then of course earlier, on the Ace of Spades, we played four Hammersmiths, and that took us to the end of November [Note: of which none are featured on the album titled as such]. As it says in my diary, ‘The three gigs were recorded by Vic Maile on the Manor Mobile, which was to be the June 1981 live album,’ No Sleep ’til Hammersmith.”

  ~

  Motörhead’s first live album is a frightening document of this most egregiously powerful of power trios at the height of their power trio dominance, despite Phil having just returned from a life of toddling around in a neck brace. In fact it is Phil that ensures the record is high octane from start to finish, exemplified by his amusing two tries and two different tempos of high-hat count-in on the band’s landmark song, “Ace of Spades,” which opens the album. Chaos is averted for this landmark opener as the traditionally trained Taylor switches to lock-perfect snare and the band is off to the races. By the time we get to track two, “Stay Clean,” Phil executes the signature drum roll flourish that opens the song perfectly and then lays down a driving groove that is eclipsed only by his performance on track three, “Metropolis,” which Phil elevates eons o’er and above the murky studio version, aided and abetted by Lemmy’s gorgeous and top-shelf bass line.

  Lemmy dedicates the fourth track on the album, “The Hammer,” “To Little Philbert,” after which comes the older performance, “Iron Horse.” Once more
it is Phil that gets—and gives—the most spirited workout, but this one’s got probably the best bass sound from Lemmy on the album, making it a huge improvement over the version on the crusty debut.

  Concerning the dedication on the last track of side one on the original vinyl, Lemmy quips that, “Because Phil’s already had one, this one’s for me and Eddie” after which “No Class,” the band’s NWOBHM update on ZZ Top’s “Tush,” gives new heavy metal meaning to the term shuffle.

  Onto side two and the band absolutely tear it up on “Overkill,” injecting new violence and speed, Phil impossibly bashing harder, Eddie hitting his marks aggressively, arguably setting the tempo, pushing Phil harder with every revisitation of the riff. After roadie Ian “Eagle” Dobbie does his scheduled roaring into the mic, Lemmy dedicates “(We Are) The Road Crew” to “a fine body of men” and then croaks his way painfully through the song, his voice on the ropes.

  “We just recorded it as it was,” recalls Eddie on the transition of these headbanging anthems from stage to the vinyl that made physical the performances. “We did do a little bit of fucking about in the studio, I seem to remember. I think there were a couple of vocals that needed just some tightening up. There might’ve been a couple of bits and bobs we fucked with. As you do. But the crowds were fucking great. We didn’t need to add any crowds as far as I can remember.”

  “Capricorn” is next (“a slow one so you can get mellowed out,” says Lem), and once again it is Phil who proves his prowess most with tasty fills and a display of strength that propels the track way beyond the original. “Bomber” follows at light speed and with punk rock fury, with Phil’s double bass drumming prominent, leaving only “Motörhead,” which is preceded by Lemmy’s cryptic, “Just in case,” a subject of controversy and query over the years. Just in case of what? Just in case the plug gets pulled on the gig? Just in case they keel over and die onstage? The mystery continues.