- Grindline:
- So, we have a few different themes we could talk about; hippies, liars, dogs.
- Lemmy:
- Hippies are all liars but I've never met a dog who was a liar. I never met a dog who was a hippie either. I won't tell a lie. I met a dog who ate a half pound of dope once, he became a hippie instantly. We had a cat once called Overdose it walked out the window, luckily it was only two floors up.
- Grindline:
- I've seen it in a couple tunes like "Traitor" and "Don't Lie To Me." What kind of experiences have you had that have embittered you to liars?
- Lemmy:
- We've got one called "Liar" as well. Most people in this business are fucking liars. You haven't noticed that?
- Grindline:
- Yeah, we had a hell of a time getting in here. We had to sneak in under the fence.
- Lemmy:
- And you're supposed to have a fucking pass, right? Can't fucking believe it. All of our interviewers today didn't have passes.
- Grindline:
- I wanted to ask you about that song "Stone Deaf Forever?" What's that mean exactly?
- Lemmy:
- "Stone Dead Forever?" We do "Stone Dead Forever" and "Stone Deaf Forever." It's just playing with words. It's like "Snake Bite Love" is about snakes. "Ace of Spades" is just about gambling. I just like fucking with words.
- Grindline:
- We were thinking it's like going through life oblivious to all the bullshit. Just being stone deaf to all the crap around you and perservering with your goals.
- Lemmy:
- Well there's that too. That's an interesting riff on it. I wasn't thinking that when I wrote it. I was thinking about somebody who was washed up and fucked because of their own actions. Time has come to pay/Turns out your feet of clay/What happened to your life?/Stone dead forever. Like they've exercised all their options and fucked up.
- Grindline:
- It seems like even though there's all this bullshit in the music biz you just keep on doing it, no matter what.
- Lemmy:
- Well, we're doing good stuff, see? I don't really see any reason to change that much. We change within our genre. We change, we do a lot of different things within it. It's like Hendrix or the Beatles. If you get a vision. Then, if you have the same vision. If it's a vision worth having you never change it. Why? If it's a good vision it's worth keeping. So while we do change a little bit we never change the general direction, cause we've got to keep it alive, man. Rock and roll deserves to be kept alive and we're some of the only motherfuckers that seem to care. A lot of them people out there certainly don't.
- Grindline:
- Yeah, you got all these alternative dork bands playing the head stage and you're over here in Area B.
- Lemmy:
- What can you do man? The only band that's worth being on the head stage is Sevendust if you ask me. They're very good, anyway.
- Grindline:
- What about the Ozzman doing it up there?
- Lemmy:
- I don't like the band he's got right now. He didn't like the band he had and changed two weeks ago.
- Grindline:
- How do like these crowds out here? They're really doing it.
- Lemmy:
- They're great for us. I just wish we could get in front of a few more of 'em that's all.
- Grindline:
- You got any kids yourself?
- Lemmy:
- Yeah two. The youngest is thirty-one. So they're not really kids anymore.
- Grindline:
- When they were teenagers were they out there going to rock and roll shows, drinking and doing things kids do?
- Lemmy:
- The first one was adopted at birth so I never saw him. The other one's an extraordinarily talented guitar player.
(By this time his coughing is interminable)
- Grindline:
- These Marlboros are really good for you.
- Lemmy (looks out the window):
- Never seen so many cops in my life.
- Grindline:
- Yeah, Jersey's finest all over the place.
- Lemmy:
- If they're gonna bust the Ozzy Ozbourne tour they're gonna get fuck all off these bands.
(Continues coughing) Anyway, now that my TB is over where were we?
- Grindline:
- We were talking about kids and how a lot of kids are pretty fucked up out there, loaded, really going for it.
- Lemmy:
- They always were, you know? Even back in the twenties and 1800s kids
were loaded on whatever. I mean cocaine was legal until the 1920s. And heroin was a cure for morphine addiction. That fucking boomeranged on 'em didn't it? And then we got methadone, which is now found to be addictive too, as a cure for heroin. So the cure is worse than the fucking disease in most cases and yet we keep trusting these scientists. In England they bring us thalidomide so we got all them kids back in the sixties born with no arms nor leg, just rudimentary hands on their shoulders, a whole generation of kids born without arms or legs, just flippers like seals. Fucking horrible. You don't see them cause they're all stashed away.
- Grindline:
- I saw a hippie band play a while ago and this whole hippie thing fronts to be a big "we" thing but it seems more like a hedonistic "me" thing. Heavy metal doesn't make that sort of pretense, but there still seems to be more comraderie at a show like this one than at a hippie gig.
- Lemmy:
- The hippie thing used to be comraderie a long time ago. Then it got twisted around cause of like Haight-Ashbury where it started, and I'm talking from memory, I'm not talking from an opinion based on what I found out, I was there, you know, I used to work for Hendrix on his road crew so I saw a lot of them people. And I was in a band called Hawkwind which was one the quintessential fucking hippie bands. Most hippies were just wasted. They didn't have a philosophy, they were just getting wasted and having fun. Which is what we're doing now. Except these days to have fun you get a gun and go and shoot your classmates. Which don't seem very productive to me, either. So there will always be assholes out there. You can't avoid 'em. There's more of them born than good people everyday. Right? I mean you never have any trouble finding a fucking dickhead do you? Just go what, five yards? Just take your notepad out with you in the morning and a pencil and you come back you'll have full book if you're gonna write down every dickhead you meet. But good people are like fucking chicken's teeth, you can't find 'em. So if you find a good person or a good friend you treasure 'em cause it doesn't matter what kind of haircut they got, an asshole is a fucking asshole — black, white, long hair or short hair, an asshole is a fucking asshole. There's black assholes, white assholes, red Indian assholes, Japanese assholes, you can't trust anybody. You know all that bro shit?
(gives a friendly ethnic high five to the air) And then they sell you crack which is gonna' ruin your fucking life, but he's your bro so it's okay. Well, fuck that for a philosophy. Good guys are good guys and assholes are assholes. It's the truest thing I ever said.
- Grindline:
- What do think about all this recycled music, hip hop, sample thing going on?
- Lemmy:
- Well if you're going to be a musician you don't need samples. You can do it yourself. All of them first rap records used John Bonham's fucking snare drum. About ten bands used it. I mean if you can't hit a fucking snare drum yourself you're in a lot of trouble, if you're going to be a musician, supposedly. I mean it's not that difficult, right? Whack! If you could just learn to do that it might be productive. Maybe you'll hit one of the other drums eventually.
- Grindline:
- The crowds really seem to be going for this electrono-jungle whatever you call it music.
- Lemmy:
- I don't know what to call it. I just call it samey. It all sounds very similar to me. I hear my father talking, that's what he used to say to me about our music. Then again I'm the age of my father so I guess that's it. They're supposed to piss me off. That's how it works. So they must be doing it right I guess. Young people's music is supposed to piss older people off. That's why we're still playing cause our music pisses a lot of people off. And if their music pisses me off I guess that's probably right.
- Grindline:
- Unfortunately, it doesn't get better every time.
- Lemmy:
- That's the thing, it doesn't improve. At least I really don't believe that it's improved. I would think for myself that maybe it has improved and I just haven't realized cause I'm older or something. But I've looked at it and I've really thought about it, and music isn't getting better, it's getting worse. The stuff they play on MTV is a joke. Three quarters of the bands in this country you never hear or see on MTV or the radio. The people that pull the most crowds you never see on MTV or the radio. They put all these people up who have one hit and then disappear. They're obviously manufactured bands like the Spice Girls. They're the Monkees. They put auditions in the paper, "Wanted 5 foot 6 fucking girl with big tits and nice looking." It's like advertising for a call girl.
- Grindline:
- It seems like Motorhead plays ton of shows and makes tons of records but never really makes that big hit.
- Lemmy:
- We never get bought by the public, they don't buy our records. That's why you come to the show cause it's always a good show and that's always been our strength. Cause when you see a Motorhead show you know you're seeing the real fucking thing, it ain't no question about it.
- Grindline:
- My friend here saw y'all like ten years ago.
- Lemmy:
- Yeah, but that was ten years ago, we're a lot better now. It doesn't have your adolescence in it anymore. Cause that's usually why people remember music with fondness because it was when they were sixteen, right, and they get their first fuck, and they smoke their first cigarette, or first joint, or whatever it was, and they had a good time for the first time with that music in the background. We can't do that for you no more, nobody can actually, so stop trying.
- Grindline:
- We've been riding skateboards to you guys for over a decade.
- Lemmy:
- Apparently it's good music to ride skateboards by, apparently, so I'm told. (Motions like riding a skateboard.) King of the fucking world, Baby. I never ridden a skateboard. I knew it was a mistake for me. I knew I was going to go straight on my fucking back and break my neck immediately and be paralyzed from the waist down forever.
- Grindline:
- You never stop falling, though.
- Lemmy:
- Everybody can't do skateboarding. Otherwise it would be really boring wouldn't it, if everybody did it. It's yours, right? And you own it and that's it. And none of them motherfuckers will ever understand, right? And that's the secret of a great thing. We are what we are. Same as you are what you are. We all have to do the best we can, that's all. We have to treat people like you would want them to treat you. And I will tell you what a real friend is. A real friend is a guy who will hide you if you are wanted for murder. That's what a real friend is. How many of them do you know?
- Grindline:
- A couple.
- Lemmy:
- That's it. All the rest of 'em, out the window.
- Grindline:
- By the wayside. Do you get a lot of people glomming on to you, psychic vampires trying to suck off your energies?
- Lemmy:
- Well if it's a woman I don't mind her sucking me off. But you learn to recognize it too. There's an extent, but you never really know, though. Some guys are really convincing. People come up to you and present this face like you would trust forever and you would never think they would fuck you over and then there they are with the knife in their hand again. A handful of hello and a mouthful of nevermind.
- Grindline:
- What do they want, money?
- Lemmy:
- No, they just want to be in the reflected whatever they think it is. I don't know. If you're famous then people glom on to you. They don't want anything from you. They just want to be there when you're there. The reflected fucking glory or something. Although there ain't much glory in Motorhead the last few years.
- Grindline:
- What do you think motivates people to behave that way?
- Lemmy:
- Cause they got nothing themselves. Cause they got nowhere to come from so they want to come from where you're coming from, so they glom on to you. That's why everybody wants a picture nowadays. If you become a top skateboarder you'll get 'em, too. There's skateboard groupies, too. Christ All Mighty there's even snooker groupies. I mean that's got to be a fucking thin time, isn't it? You know, click,
(motions like shooting pool) I love you!
- Grindline:
- At least with rock and roll you got drugs and booze and chicks.
- Lemmy:
- Nothing wrong with that. I never found anything better to replace it with. If you offered me to forget the sex and drugs and rock and roll and instead have...
(A pregnant pause fills the room) I never saw them come up with nothing better. (We break and Lemmy pages through a Playboy) Seen this Downtown Julie Brown in Playboy? She look fucking good though boy. She was an old friend of mine. Not bad for a VJ.
- Grindline:
- Nothing fake about that one, its all real.
- Lemmy:
- Who cares if it's fake? You wanna see some real tits going down around the waistline? You don't wanna see them like a bowl full of cold porridge. Who needs that? Give me some silicone.
(We start to leave) You've seen us now you've got the disease. I always like when black people come to the shows. I never understood that when Hendrix played there were never any black people and the black people all hated him cause they thought he sold out to whitey but it wasn't fucking true, he was just playing.
- Grindline:
- Yeah, they hit him with an egg on his head in Harlem that time.
- Lemmy:
- Right, they did do that.
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