White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography by Lemmy Kilmister Page A

that is. ‘This is cocaine, buddy, you’re going to jail!’ I said, ‘I don’t think so.’ But the bastards kept me and the rest of the band went off to Toronto.
    So there I was, stuck with the Canadian police. They didn’t even bother charging me for the pills, but I was arraigned and sent down to jail on remand. This was, as you can well imagine, not a pleasant experience. I’d been locked up in cells overnight, but never in a serious jail like this one. I remember I was in thedelousing room, ready for the spray when this wonderful voice behind me said, ‘You’re bailed.’ Well, as I found out later, the only reason the band got me out was because my replacement wasn’t going to get to Canada in time. Otherwise, they would have just let me rot. I wouldn’t have rotted anyway – since what I had was amphetamine sulphate and not cocaine, the case was thrown out as a ‘wrongful charge’, and they couldn’t charge you again for the same substance. So I was free and clear.
    The band had got me a plane ticket and they flew me over to Toronto. I got there just after they’d finished the soundcheck. We did the gig to tremendous applause, then at four o’clock in the morning, I was fired. I was doing the wrong drugs, see. If I had been caught with acid, those guys would have all rallied around me. I think even if I’d been doing heroin, it would have been better for them. That whole hippie subculture was so fucking two-faced, when you get down to it. It was all ‘Speed kills – wow, man, bad drugs’, and stupid shit like that (and keep in mind, all the people I know who said that are now dead or messed up on heroin). Well, all I have to say is that at least speed keeps you functional. Why else did they give it to housewives for all those years?
    Hawkwind had very bad timing, kicking me out of the band when they did. They were on the verge of really making it in America when I got fired, so they must have been fucking insane. But it wasn’t because I was fired that they failed; it was because of who they got to replace me, in addition to firing me for all the wrong reasons. When I left Hawkwind, they got a guy calledPaul Rudolph to play bass. He used to be a great lead guitarist for the Pink Fairies, but he was a very, very mediocre bass player – the reverse of me, in fact. And he just saw the band straight into the Twilight Zone – it was a terrible fucking mess. They tried carrying on into Ohio, did about four more gigs and cancelled the rest of the tour. Dave, God help him, actually wanted to bring me back into the band, but the drum empire wouldn’t let him. So the drummers and the bass player took over and the band went in a bad direction. They made a couple of – well, they weren’t bad albums. Musically, they were excellent, but they were really naff. There was no nuts in ’em – when I left Hawkwind, the cojones came with me.

CHAPTER SIX
built for speed
    I had my revenge on Hawkwind for firing me. By the time they got back to England, I’d stolen my equipment out of the band’s storage space. I don’t remember how we got in now, actually. We must have got somebody from the office to nick the key for me or something. In fact, I don’t even remember who came along with me – it was Lucas Fox, probably, who wound up drumming in Motörhead for the first few months. He was the only one I knew who had a car. We had just got my stuff in the van when Alan Powell caught us. That was a nice coincidence, since I’d just seen his wife! He was shouting, ‘Yeah, ya cunt! You thought you’d steal your stuff back!’ We drove off, laughing, and I yelled back, ‘Yeah, go and ask your wife!’ But I don’t think he did, because I saw her again the week after and she never mentioned it.
    I was also busy doing other, more important things. Withintwo weeks of getting back to London, I put together the band that was to become Motörhead. I wanted it to be sort of like the MC5, since that was the big hero