By the Summer of 1981, Motorhead had already become something of an institution in Britain and Europe with a string of genre defining albums under their bullet belts. This was not the case in the US since the inherent conservatism of the Stateside music industry resulted in zero exposure of the American public to Motorhead's brand of rock 'n' roll. This finally changed when the record company executives at Mercury took up the option to release 'Ace of Spades'. It was on the back of this that Motorhead first visited the US, in the capacity of Ozzy Osbourne's 'Blizzard of Oz' tour support.
Here's a despatch from that US tour from long time Lemmy associate, Mick Farren, writing in the New Musical Express.
New Musical Express (6th June 1981)
SCUMBAGS OVER USA
IT’S WHAT'S CALLED cracking it in America the hard way. Three months trailing up and down the country, 80 odd dates, God knows how many miles and more Holiday Inns than regularpeople get to see in a lifetime. Booze, drugs, exhaustion. Disorientation, arguments, fist fights, damage and strange, frequently neurotic young women.
There can be few adventures that are more brutal, not to say brutish, than an old fashioned American rock 'n' roll tour, The kind of thing that burns out young minds and ,turns human beings into Joe Cocker. Bands destroy hotel rooms, managers have breakdowns and roadies discover how it feels to be Rommel.
Indicative of what old fashioned touring is like is that the only people who still do it thafway are British heavy metal and Southern Boogie bands. But, then again, as Lemmy puts, it, "It's better than sitting at home with yourthumb up your ass and your brain in neutral."
The first leg of the tour is made doubly brutish by Motorhead having to open for Ozzy Osborne's Blizzard of Oz. Let's dispose o{ Ozzy before-we get down to business. I know some of you out there have the firm opinion that there is something redeemingly cute about Ozzy's brand of terminal stupidity, but I find him to be the man for whom the word prat was invented. Witness his now near legendary behaviour at the pre-tour press conference. Lips still curl at the way Ozzy sauntered in and how, after regaling the assembled media people with remarks to the effect that punk rockers were charmless, ill mannered suckheads who don't know one end of a guitar from a shovel, he whipped out a live pigeon and chewed off its head. Some David Niven, our Oz.
Blizzard of Oz are slow, ponderous and bloated. They wear tight spandex pants and layered hair. They know just enough not to be wearing gold platform boots. The show opens with taped Wagner and dry ice. (The Wagner is that bit of Parsival that they use in the movie Excalibur. It's about to replace Also Sprach Zarathustra as the number one pretentious pop classic) Ozzy rushes out, arms outstretched, flashing peace-signs to the assembled hordes. It's ... I can't go on with·this.
As far as Motorhead are concerned, their problem with Ozzy is that they're playing on Ozzy's turf. In fact, they are not doing a bad job with what has to be a hard core of Sabbaff lovers. On this circuit, you're ahead of the game if you can even get the crowd to stop bawling for the heariliner long enough to pay you any -attention at all. Motorhead go a few better than mere attention. Once they sledgehammer the yanks with their highspeed wall of noise, they make enough of an impact to cause some dark mutterings in the Ozzy camp. There is no doubt that they are on the way up.
The current position of:Motorhead in the USA is an anomolous one. They are something of a myth and a minor league legend but in no way do they enjoy the success-that they have become used to at ho'me and in Europe. A lot of this is the responsibility of the overwhelming cowardice of the US record industry. Almost unanimously the moguls decided that there was no place in the USA for such a loud, scumbag band. One company declined to sign them with the remark that they'd be a "disgrace to -the label". Others-passed them over out of the simple but real executive fear that one day Lemmy and Phil Taylor might stop by their offices. Even a string of English hits couldn't break the seemingly impassabJe barrier.
Finally, last year, Mercury decided that maybe they might just chance the fall of civilization and actually sign the band. Accordingly, last fall, they released Motorhead's 'Ace Of Spades' album but, seemingly managed to conceal the fact from the majority of the record buying, public. The few individuals,who did happen across a copy were probably totally confused by the spaghetti western cover. Without a prior awareness of the band's background it was all too easy for the average yank headbanger to look at the cover and assume that Motorhead was some sort of Mexican, ZZ Top threepiece from darkest Arizona.
Mercury's almost total inactivity has ensured that all the US interest in the band has remained on a grass roots and word of mouth·level. The corporate executives don't know but the street scufflers understand.
I'M PLAYING CHESS with Lemmy in the bar of the Holiday - Inn in Passiac, New Jersey. We're waiting for someone to organise cars for a 45 minute drive to the New York nightlife. It's something of a reunion. We haven't seen each other for almost two years. Normally I loath the kind of buddy-buddy writer who likes to tell everyone what great pals he or she is with the subject of the piece, In this instance; though, there's no way out. Lemmy and I go back so unthinkably far that it has to colour anything I say about him.
Briefly, we first met up in psychedelic clubs at the end of the '60s. Since, at the time, we both had a clinical interest in how many weeks the human body could go without sleep, the twitch and the babble and appointments with a dubious (and now defunct) Shaftesbury Avenue doctor who wrote prescriptions for methedrine if you handed him a fiver, caused us to recognise each other as kindred spirits. For a while, we were even on the same larcenous record label, me in The Deviants and Lemmy in a raga-rock combo called the Sam Gopal Dream. (You collectors out there - find a copy of their album 'Escalator' if you dare).
Since those days we've written songs together, played on the same stage, outwitted the metropolitan scuffers on more than one-occasion and logged many thousands of flying hours in the Ladbroke Grove Air Circus. The night before I went off to exile in New York City, he took me and my wife to one of those restaurants where they reconstruct hail-ye-wassail medieval feats for American tourists. After we'd bizarred out on the minstrels and boars' heads, we went off to the pub and got drunk. I hadn't seen Lemmy since.
Back at the chess board, I found that he was beating me every game. Admittedly I couldn't remember a Sicilian Defence if my life had depended on it, but that shouldn't have made all that difference. Lemmy had, after all, consumed at least as much as I had plus he'd also just finished a show at the Capitol Theatre. We shifted ourselves to another table that had a built-in Asteroid game.
I swear to God that Lemmy has two brains. He'd have to, it'd be the only way to avoid burn out. With one brain he's chatting about old times·and how good it is that we've both managed to survive since we last saw each other, how good it is not to be poverty stricken any more, and how getting to this first foothold in the USA had, over the years, required a powerful amount of faithkeeping on the part of all concerned. The second brain is keeping up an advanced game of solo Asteroids.
You can say what you like about Lemmy, but not even the strongest of his detractors can deny that he has a truly amazing rapport with his audience. It's a benign kind of control based on a knowledge of the real power balance inside of a rock & roll concert. Everything stems from the absolutely basic premise - "there are three of us" and X thousand of you but you've got to' pay attention to us 'cause we can make much more noise than all of you.put together." It's the same statement that is made by every band that has a predeliction for excessive volume. In Motorhead's case, though, it is simply stated, with an earthy candour that is truly refreshing after the lumpen grimacing of (say) Ted Nugent, the pervoposing of Judas Priest or the self absorption of Rush. It's this directness that is the strength and mass magic of Motorhead in general and Lemmy in particular.
Whether critics or corporations love or detest them is pretty. much immaterial. They have somethin,g that is easily recognised and easily assimilated by large nurmbers of young people who have-spent a whole week having the·piss bored out of them in a factory, warehouse, supermarket or school or being shortchanged by unemployment. The popularity of the band has proved beyond doubt that there is a need and a communication that is very, very necessary. The only question on this first American phase of their careers is whether the same kind of kids in the USA have the same kind of needs. From first observations it looks as though they do, even the ones who have predominently turned out for Ozzy Osborne.
PHIL TAXLOR has been on the receiving end of a bizarre occurrence. It's the morning after the band played two shows at New York's Palladium. He's sitting in the bar of the 'Gramercy Park Hotel looking at a breakfast vodka and orange. The Gramercy Park is generally thoughtof as a rock 'n' roll hotel. It even upped its prices by ten bucks just after Bob Dylan had been a resident during a pre-conversion bout of drinking and fornicating. Part of being a rock 'n' roll hotel is a high incidence of bizarre occurrences.
"I'm lying in my bed, just trying to get to sleep and the night operator calls up and tells me she's going off duty and will come I down and settle my 'phone bill. I ask her what 'phone bill, and she says the $700 call to Tokyo."
This is something of-a puzzlement to Animal Taylor, not to say a source of the kind of annoyance that might, had he been home in the UK, led to some serious hotel destruction. Not only has he not made.any call to Tokyo, but he doesn’t even know anyone in Japan. On further examination, he also discovers that there is blood and junkie garbage in the bathroom. As far as he can peice it together, it would seem that someone has conned a spare key out of the nightclerk, gone into Phil's room, shot up in the can and then ripped off the Tokyo call, leaving Phil to pay the bill. It doesn't improve Filthy Animal's' disposition that people keep telling him how that's New York for you.
Eddie-Clarke is hanging out on the sidewalk outside the hotel looking for a yellow cab and drinking from a fifth of Jack Daniels. Someone (I think it was probably me) points out that what he's doing is technically illegal in New York. You have to keep your booze in a brown paper bag. He ducks inside the hotel and comes out with ·a yellow plastic carrier bag.
"Will this do?"
We assure him it will. For Eddie and Phil both, it is the first time in the USA and, so far, they are treating it with a measure of respect. There is little of the arrogance and capacity for property damage, tales of which filter across the Atlantic. Eddie and Phil are on unfamiliar ground and they are taking it one step at a time. It's only the beginning of a three month tour. There is plenty of time to build to mayhem. At one point, Eddie grins at. me.
"You must really enjoy living in New York, Micky." He'd just been drinking vodka and pina colada mix with Tish and Snooky, fashion arbiters of the Lower East Side and at one time, two pieces, along with Deborah Harry, of the three-piece Stilettoes.
THE LAST TIME that I saw Motorhead was at the 1979 Reading Festival. This was their first shot at Reading, and the point where they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had the total fealty of the vibrating Conanheads who really do the mass thumbs up and thumbs down at that most metallic of open air engagements. On stage in.the USA they seem to have returned to just before that point. They are forced to struggle again. The flying bomber and all the other special effects have been stripped away by the economics of being an opening act. They still have to prove their point. Some of the tunes are unfamiliar but the point was exactly-the same as it was those two years ago. In fact, it's the same as it's always been.
In Toronto, Canada, Motorhead are headlining. Ozzie's itinerary does not permit him to cross the border. Motorhead none-the-Iess tear up the town. The Canadians love them. A friend from up there calls me and tells me how it went.
"The best sound was out on the parking lot. It was more manageable. Jesus, are they·loud. Everyone loved them."
Backstage at the New York Palladium, The.Plasmatics come to pay a courtesy visit. They walk into the dressing room with ' all the visuals of the baddest punkers on the planet, all black leather, shaved heads and bright blue Mohican·scalplocks. That, however, is only the first-impression. A second glance reveals something quite incredible. With the exception of Wendy O’Williams herself, they are actually diffident, tongue-tied. I think the word might even be nervous. If they wore flat hats they'd be twisting them in their hands and scuffling from one foot to the other in the presence of Lemmy. It's almost forelock touching time.
Lem and Wendy chat about Motorhead's fortunes and Wendy’s recent acquittal from an obscenity charge in. Cleveland. Every sexist eye in the room is fixed on her black leather pants and spike heels. As the saying goes, they might have been painted on. She asks Lemmy why he sings with the microphone tilted down from above his head. He grins.
"It's to hi tthose high notes."
After two shows in the same evening, Lemmy's voice is little more than a husk. Wendy's departure is marked by an outbreak of ribald macho comment. There is an American booking agent, record company person or whatever hanging out in the dressing room and drinking the band's beer. He has no discernable purpose in the scheme.ofthings, but he's hanging out and drinking the band's beer all the same. He is at a loss to understand why The Plasmatics should want to visit Motorhead and why when they do they should seem so in awe. He files Motorhead under heavy metal and The Plasmatics under punk and sees no reason why the twain should complicate things by wanting to meet. It's an attitude that makes Lemmy mildly indignant.
"We're not heavy metal. We're a rock 'n' roll band."
The obvious implication is that The Plasmatics are also a rock 'n' roll band and it's perfectly natural that they should want to pay their respects on Motorhead's first night in New York. The booking agent, record company person or whatever isn't buying it. He likes his rock 'n' roll strictly categorised and, in a nutshell, his attitude sums up a lot of what is wrong with the American music business. His imagination doesn't stretch to very much.
Lemmy and others, myself among them, attempt to explain how, from the very start, Motorhead have never had any trouble getting across to punks (or any other of rock's myriad minorities, except perhaps the pretentious and overeducated who prattle on about "good music").
We tell this American about the unique relationship between Motorhead and The Damned, how it wasn't an unusual sight to see Lemmy in the company of Cook, Jones or even Sid Vicious. How Sid and Lemmy even once played together at the Electric Ballroom. Wasn't the whole secret of Motorhead that they made heavy metal noises but they made them at punk speed? The booking agent or whatever can't get a grip on any of this. He clings to his preconceptions.
"That may be true in England but I don't think you'll find it's the case in the USA".
Lemmy mutters under his breath.
"Bollocks."
Interestingly, US writers who have already latched onto Motorhead tend to talk about them more in terms of Blue Oyster Cult or The Dictators or even The Ramones rather than (say) Blackmore's Rainbow or Ozzy's aforementioned Blizzard. Everyone seems to see them as modern rather than a sop to those who grieve the passing Led Zep.
ST MARK'S PLACE is a two-block strip of clothes stores, punk emporiums, head shops, bars, bookshops, not too covert drug vendors, ice cream parlours, damage cases, .Japanese tourists and health food cafes on New York's funky Lower East Side. This shabby, gaudy miracle mile has served at least four generations of bohemia. The beatniks were-there, the hippies were there and now Motorhead are there. On a warm Sunday afternoon, it's nothing short of a scuzzy carnival.
Lemmy and I are standing on the corner of St Mark's and Third Avenue watching some.of the world's most unattractive hookers hitting on depressed looking Puerto Ricans while we wait for Phil, Eddie and Joe Stevens to show up for a photo session. Each time one of the girls scores she takes the john to a flea-bag hotel next door to a building with a brass plaque that proclaims it to have, once been the home of James Fenimore (Last Of The Mohicans) Cooper. The home of James Fenimore Cooper has been converted into a gay bathhouse and swing club. This also is New York for you
The picture session quickly disintegrates. It's virtually the first time since the band arrived that they haven't been confined to the environs of concert hail,-hotel, airport or car. They are like kips out of school. Phil is on one side of the street peering into the window of a biker store called The Pit, Lemmy is on the other side buying a sterling silver skull ring from a sidewalk silversmith. Eddie has seemingly vanished into a bar. They immediately attract attention.
"Hey Motorhead, how ya doing?"
"Alright."
"You staying in town long?"
"Nah, sorry."
Punkettes with pink hair yell at them. Tish and Snooky invite them in for drinks in their boutique Manic Panic. There are greetings, conversations, the odd autograph. The trio are instant celebs and they love it. They radiate a sense of being totally at home. Of course, Motorhead aren't that easy to miss. They are wearing T-shirts, tour jackets, something with the logo emblazoned on it. Johnny Ramone happens by, promenading with his girlfriend. There is one of those polite rock 'n' roll encounters with hand shakes and photographs. Lemmy takes it all in his stride but Phil Taylor has a determined gleam in his eye.
"We're coming back here for a bit of a holiday after the tour."
From St Marks we stroll on down the Bowery, easing past the winos who've gotten mellow from the afternoon sun and a pint of Thunderbird or Nightrain pear wine. Everyone is starting to become very conscious that the cars have to leave the hotel at five to get to Poughkeepsie, New York by showtime. Suddenly, on the corner of Bowery and Houston, Lemmy becomes every inch the authoritarian.
"We've got to get in a cab,
right now."
The three of them flag down a checker and pile into it. School has been out for barely two hours, now it's back to business. The car pulls away. The sun's going down and it's kind of sad that they can spend so little time in the outside world, but that's the nature of cracking it in America the hard way.
Mick Farren