Sunday, Lemmy and Me, Part One
Flashing back on my epic encounter with Motörhead's legendary frontman
December always makes me think of Motörhead.
Maybe it’s because I once gave a girlfriend a copy of the band’s 1984 compilation No Remorse as a Christmas present — there was a festive hype sticker on the shrink-wrap that urged me to “Give the Gift of Metal”… so I did.
But mostly it’s because December was the month that brought Lemmy, the legendary Motörhead founder, bassist and frontman, into this world, and the month that took him out of it again. Born Ian Fraser Kilmister on Christmas Eve, 1945, in the ancient West Midlands town of Burslem, he died 70 years later, almost to the day, in West Hollywood, California.
In between those two fateful Decembers, Lemmy firmly established himself as a true rock n’ roll icon — the elemental embodiment of all that was ugly and hairy and sweaty and brutally loud, who marched at all times to his own strict internal metronome.
I became a fan of Motörhead in the summer of 1981, when a friend played me their Ace of Spades LP while we were traveling in Greece. To be a Motörhead fan was to be a Lemmy fan, since his raspy wail, his punishing bass runs and his “tell no tales/give no fucks” approach to lyrics and life essentially defined the band.
By the time I first interviewed him nearly 21 years later, Lemmy had attained such larger than life status that the prospect of sitting down with the man made me gave me butterflies in the way that interviews rarely did. I knew that he wasn’t the sort to suffer fools gladly; and while there was no way I was going to approach our conversation in anything less than a respectful and well-prepared manner, you never knew what might set a rock star off — after all, I’d once been totally chewed out by Love leader Arthur Lee just for having the temerity to phone him at a time when he was trying to watch re-runs of The Beverly Hillbillies.
Still, there was no way I would pass up the assignment. On a Sunday in late January 2002I showed up at the Bel-Age Hotel in West Hollywood, where Revolver magazine had booked a small suite for a photo shoot and our interview. I showed up a little before noon, figuring I’d be leaving the hotel in less than an hour — hopefully with a decent 30 or 40 minutes of conversation about Hammered, Motörhead’s 16th and latest album, in the can, along with whatever other pithy bon mots Lemmy might deign to offer.
I figured wrong. I wouldn’t wind up leaving the Bel-Age until four or five hours later, and only then at the behest of hotel security. And by the time I finally sobered up enough to drive home, it would already be well into Sunday evening…
The tale of my Sunday hang with Lemmy is a truly epic one, and one which I’ve told several times over the years in various formats. A few years ago, I took the most extensive version of it off-line while I looked into the possibility of turning it into an e-book; however, numerous factors — including having to give Amazon a major cut of the sales, and the suspicion that it would probably just get lost among the hundreds of thousands of other e-books out there — ultimately kept me from pulling the trigger on the project.
Instead, in honor of what would be Lemmy’s 78th birthday in a few weeks, I’ve decided to share the definitive version of it here with my paid Jagged Time Lapse subscribers. Part One of our interview will run today, and the remaining three or four parts will be emerge throughout the rest of this month. Even if you just subscribe to JTL for one month in order to read the whole thing, I guarantee it’ll be absolutely worth your five bucks…
I arrive at the Bel Age to find the photo session already in progress — just Lemmy and the photographer, no managers or publicists — and an already-open handle of Jack Daniels resting on the suite’s coffee table, along with a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola. In his his cowboy boots and cowboy hat, Lemmy appears to be about ten feet tall, and he seems more than a trifle annoyed with the photographer, who keeps trying to “bro down” with him on such manly subjects as motorcycles and barroom brawls. Judging by the way he’s grunting monosyllabically and glowering at the camera in response, Lemmy is having none of it.
I’m quite expecting Lemmy to be similarly short with me, as well — I know I’m the last obstacle he has to clear today before he can head up the street to the Rainbow Bar & Grill. Lemmy has lived in L.A. for about a decade at this point, and the Rainbow has long been established as his favorite local watering hole, a place where he can drink and play video games in peace.
But once the photographer starts packing up his gear, Lemmy pulls a couple of chairs up around the coffee table and cordially waves me over to join him. “Drink?” he inquires, gruffly yet pleasantly. I'd woken up too late this morning to have a decent breakfast — only downing a couple of bites of leftover potato salad on my way out the door — but I’m sure not going to refuse a drink from Lemmy on the grounds of an empty stomach. Jack and Coke in hand, I roll the tape, and suddenly we’re off like a runaway stagecoach.
ME: Did I overhear you tell the photographer that you’re getting your facial moles removed?
LEMMY: Yeah. I’m tired of ‘em. They get bigger as you get older, and I’ve been shaving around them long enough. But they’re deep, you know; it’s gonna be difficult to get ‘em out…
You should donate them to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Yeah, in a block of lucite! [laughs] I could sell ‘em on the internet, like that [porn star] chick Houston who sold her labia.