Read Online White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography by Lemmy Kilmister - Free Book Online

two weeks, until she discovered I couldn’t play lead. So I lost that job. Then in ’68, I wound up singing for Sam Gopal. He was half-Burmese, half-Nepalese or something like that – I forget now. But he played tablas, which are impossible to amplify. They’re too boomy, see – at least they were for the equipment of the time. He’d had a band previously called the Sam Gopal Dream, which had been on a show called ‘Christmas on Earth’ with Hendrix in December of ’67. Some people think I played that gig, but I didn’t. By the time I met up with Sam, he’d dropped the ‘Dream’ and was just going on as Sam Gopal, in suitably modest fashion!
    I was introduced to Sam by a friend of mine called Roger D’Elia. He played guitar and his grandmother was Mary Clare, a very famous English actress, a long time ago. I was living at Roger’s house and he told me he was forming a band with SamGopal and this bassist Phil Duke, and they needed a geezer who could sing. The music was sort of a blend of psychedelia, blues and Middle Eastern rhythms meets the Damned! We recorded one album, did one tour through Germany and played a gig at the Speakeasy in London. That show at the Speak was standing-ovation time, so we thought we were gonna be stars, but it was actually all downhill from there on in!
    Sam was determined to be a star. That’s what he really wanted. He was a real fucking poseur, but I didn’t mind that at all. I mean, I’m a poseur – what are you doing in this business if you’re not a poseur, right? So Sam was all right. He had his own ideas and all, but he let me write anything I wanted to. I wrote nearly all the songs that wound up on our only album. Back then, I was still using my stepfather’s name, so I’m listed as ‘Ian (Lemmy) Willis’. I credited ‘group’ on a few of the songs, but the truth is I stayed up and wrote them in one night. That was when I had first discovered this wonderful drug called Methedrine. The only two I didn’t do on the record were ‘Angry Faces’, which was written by Leo Davidson, and a Donovan song, ‘Season of the Witch’ – we did a fair version of it, actually.
    The album, Escalator , was put out by this record company called Stable. That was a joke. It was run by these two Indian geezers who had no idea whatsoever how to run a record label. I don’t know how that whole deal came together. It was one of Sam’s projects – he knew the producer and all. Escalator wound up doing nothing, zero. Stable was too indie of a label, even for the indies. Eventually, it dawned on us that the band was goingnowhere, so we just gave it up. Funny enough, I ran into Sam Gopal in 1991, just before I left England to move to America. It was very strange, because he was just walking up the street, right around where I lived, and I hadn’t seen him for ten years. We chatted for a bit and he told me he was getting a band together – you know, all that fun stuff. Still!
    After Sam Gopal, I spent about a year with my guitar hanging on the wall, and I just tripped out and dossed around, living in squats. It’s easy to do when you’re young, and I was twenty-three. It was around this time that I learned to hate heroin. It was always around, of course, but not very much at first – it started to be a real problem around 1970. I knew this guy, Preston Dave – he wasn’t even a junkie. He was getting there, but not quite. And a bunch of us were sitting with him at a Wimpy Bar, the early English attempt at, say, Burger King. It was in Earls Court Road and was open all night. Preston was shaking and shit, so he went off to Piccadilly – where you went to score heroin. So he came back and went to the toilet. A few minutes later, he came lurching out backwards. His face was black and his tongue was sticking out. Somebody had sold him rat poison – took his money, smiled at him and sold him certain death. I thought, ‘Hell, if that’s the kind of people who are hanging around with