White Line Fever: The Autobiography

by Janiss Garza

I didn’t always have the moustache . . . I’ve only had that since I was eleven.

Buddy Holly never did a bad track, as far as I could hear. Eddie Cochran, too, was an idol of mine.

He and Holly were the ones who inspired me to play guitar.

Robbie had lived in Manchester and had very long hair, which we thought was a Very Big Thing.

She was a great girl, my first love. I didn’t see Cathy again, I don’t know why.

And the Mods used to wear eye make-up too, especially the boys. The crowd of people I was in disliked them, but in retrospect, it was no worse than what we were doing. I mean, we thought they were sissies, and they thought we were yobs – and you know, we were both right.

And the Beatles were hard men, too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia – a hard, sea-farin’ town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time that’d beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo’s from the Dingle, which is like the fucking Bronx.

The Beatles opened the door for all the bands that came out of that area. It was like Seattle became in the early nineties – the record labels came up and signed everything that moved.

Whether a guy was going to play bass for you rested mainly on if he had a bass or not, not if he was a good player. And if he had an amp you could all plug into, he was definitely in. It was primitive shit.

And finally we found a large bass player called John, who was a remarkable rarity in that he had a Fender bass and an amplifier – so he was sort of the Bill Wyman of north Wales, I suppose.

I mean, I’m a poseur – what are you doing in this business if you’re not a poseur, right?

They weren’t really playing at the festival, though; they played outside of the festival – how’s that for being alternative?

So I was hoping for the guitar slot, but I wound up on bass instead. In fact, the day I joined Hawkwind was when I first started playing bass.

When he was around, he’d read his poetry on stage, or that of sci-fi writer Michael Moorcock, which added to the band’s mysterioso space warrior aura.

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

We were a blues band, really. Although we played it at a thousand miles an hour, it was recognizable as blues – at least to us it was; probably it wasn’t to anybody else.

That show earned us a new reputation and our own category in the Sounds poll for that year! We were voted ‘Best Worst Band in the World’!

I quite liked drifting about like that, really – you go and live with chicks for a week and disappear. That was quite fine.

I used gambling metaphors, mostly cards and dice – when it comes to that sort of thing, I’m more into the slot machines actually, but you can’t really sing about spinning fruit, and the wheels coming down.

To be honest, although ‘Ace of Spades’ is a good song, I’m sick to death of it now. Two decades on, whenever people think of Motörhead, they think ‘Ace of Spades’.

The NWOBHM was great for some bands – it sent Iron Maiden over the top. It didn’t do us much good, though. We came along a bit too early for it . . . and then our popularity resurged just a bit too late for the big metal and hard rock boom of the late eighties.

To this day, metal is one of the bestselling types of rock – in fact, it is true rock ’n’ roll. And it takes as much talent and determination to get anywhere as just about any other form of music. And it’s fun – so what more could you ask for?

I was standing around when I heard this voice behind me say, ‘Hello, Lemmy. I’ve always wanted to meet you.’ I turned around and it was Eric Clapton.

A lot of performers from the eighties haven’t fared very well – that’s obvious from watching The Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years.

He’d go outside with the dog and we’d sit and watch them. He’d throw a stick and the dog would look at him until finally he’d go and get the stick and throw it again. Actually, that dog was pretty smart.

The Rainbow, for the few who don’t know, is the oldest rock ’n’ roll bar in Hollywood, and my home away from home – actually, it’s only two blocks from my home!

And it’s a lot more overtly racist here than it is in England – back home, they’re far sneakier about it.

The only real trouble I had with adjusting to America was the sense of humour gap. The British have a very black sense of humour, see. It’s very vicious and Americans just don’t get it.

I don’t understand people who believe that if you ignore something, it’ll go away. That’s completely wrong – if it’s ignored, it gathers strength. Europe ignored Hitler for twenty years.

Apparently people don’t like the truth, but I do like it; I like it because it upsets a lot of people. If you show them enough times that their arguments are bullshit, then maybe just once, one of them will say, ‘Oh! Wait a minute – I was wrong.’ I live for that happening. Rare, I assure you.

And in spite of our efforts, they still screwed it up – you’ll find all the flags of Europe on the cover of 1916 except for France. And the whole point of the title song is that it’s about a battle that was fought in France!

(Those viral things are gonna keep getting stronger, ’cause every five years a new strain comes out that they didn’t plan on, and someday one of those bugs is gonna kill half the planet.)

And we never did meet David Letterman; in fact, he got the name of our album wrong. He called it Motörhead! But we did see a lot of Paul Schaffer, the band leader – he was great. All in all, though, the David Letterman experience was not that impressive.

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.

Everybody thinks it shows that they care if they panic all the fucking time, but it’s not true. You miss a lot of details when you panic.

Metallica is one of the few bands that has consistently given us credit, and I hold them in high regard for that.

But obviously nothing has really changed since the tsars’ days – the guys at the top do anything they want and everybody else pays for it. It’s always been that way in Russia. Fucking Lenin, for all his blather, changed nothing for the peasant.

We chose Germany because the Germans have been such loyal fans of ours. They always rescued our ass when we were going down for the third time. They stuck with us, and we knew Hamburg would be a great audience.

In my life so far, I have discovered that there are really only two kinds of people: those who are for you, and those who are against you. Learn to recognize them, for they are often and easily mistaken for each other.