White Line Fever: The Autobiography

by Janiss Garza

I gave up dancing when the twist came in because it offended me – you couldn’t touch the woman any more! Who wants that when you’ve just discovered adolescent lust? I needed to get close and warm; tactile, hands-on, experiencing, giving and receiving and counter-groping and stuff like that, you know!

My association with Hawkwind began with Dikmik. The ‘instrument’ he played in the band was a small box with two knobs that sat on a card table. It was called a ring modulator, but it was actually an audio generator that went out of human hearing at both high and low end. If it went up, you would lose your balance and fall down and vomit; if it went down, you shit your pants. You could make people have epileptic fits with this contraption. On stage, Dikmik could pick out the audience members who were susceptible. When we were playing in Hawkwind together, I’d go up to him and say, ‘Any good ’uns?’ He’d say, ‘Yeah, that guy there. See that?’ And he’d twist the knob – hrum-mmmm – and the guy would start flopping about. Amazing things you can do with sound. But of course, we could never tell for sure if it was the audio generator or if it was because we’d spiked all the food with acid before the gig. But as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’d seen Hawkwind before – not at the beginning, when they were known as Group X, though. The entire audience looked like they were having an epileptic fit, all six hundred of ’em doing the same move. I remember thinking, ‘Well, I have to join them – I can’t watch them!’ I wanted to get a spot playing guitar. Their lead guitarist, Huw Lloyd Langton, had just left the band – disappeared, really. They had been doing a gig at the Isle of Wight festival. They weren’t really playing at the festival, though; they played outside of the festival – how’s that for being alternative? Anyway, a bunch of them were sitting around a campfire and Huw had done something like eight tabs of acid. ‘I’m going for a walk, lads,’ he told the others, went over a hill and nobody saw him again for something like five years! That’s the way things were in Hawkwind – loose, very loose. Huw did re-emerge a few years later, in a band called Widowmaker (not Dee Schneider’s 1990s project, which we’ll come to later).

That was a great time, the summer of ’71 – I can’t remember it, but I’ll never forget it!

I mean, if I go to see Little Richard, I want to hear ‘Long Tall Sally’, and if I don’t I’m gonna be thoroughly pissed off. Even though I’m sick to death of it, Motörhead should do ‘Ace of Spades’ – people want to hear ‘Ace of Spades’ and you can’t fight that. To refuse to play it – or those other tunes – is very bad news.

We were supposed to begin 1988 by touring through the US with Alice Cooper, but we missed a month of it because the fucking American immigration department took so long to give us our work permits. It was just a lot of bureaucratic bullshit. I mean, we bring foreign money to America and they don’t give a fuck about that. They’d rather give amnesty to all illegal immigrants. Actually, I missed out on that by one year – I had been living in America for six months when the amnesty was granted in 1991. If I’d known it was coming I could have stayed out beyond my work permit and then got amnesty and a green card.

So I finally got a hamburger and I was just starting to eat it when he said, ‘Right! Vocals!’ ‘Oh, you cunt!’ I said. ‘Why don’t you let me eat my fucking hamburger?’ But no – ‘Come on, come on, we’re on a deadline!’ Howard being a bitch in the studio, you know. So I did the logical thing; I shoved the burger’s contents into the mixing board. I figured it was fair. Howard’s eating habits, incidentally, leave quite a bit to be desired – he eats all these terrible vegetarian things, fruit and nuts. That shit’s not healthy! Human beings are carnivores – just look at our teeth! Our digestive systems are not made to handle vegetarian food. It makes you fart all the time, and you get intestinal flora. Vegetarianism is unrealistic – that’s why cows have four stomachs and we have one. Think about it. (Hi, Howard!) And don’t forget – Hitler was a vegetarian!

The thing that got me the most was she claimed I insulted her sexually! Do you know what I said? I said, ‘You’re the best-looking representative we’ve had from a record company in years.’ That was it! If telling someone they’re looking good is harassment, then the world has truly gone out of its fucking mind.

Incidentally, I have to say that some of the Japanese translations of my lyrics are incredible. On our first record, one song has the lyric, ‘We came across a bad vibe/ Naked, grinding fear’. Their version of it was, ‘We came across a pipeline and they kept trying to interfere’ – fantastic! It’s better than the original! It’s wonderful stuff, like fucking Shakespeare. Almost.