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The same time Lemmy Kilmister was dying, I was on the treadmill at the gym and the Motörhead song “I’m So Bad (Baby I Don’t Care)” randomly started playing. This may not sound unusual on the surface – I am a fan along with having collaborated on Lemmy’s autobiography, White Line Fever. But it is odd because it’s only one of maybe two Motörhead songs I have on my playlist, mainly because I’ve been lazy about adding tunes. It rarely shows up on shuffle, but there it was, between Nirvana and Joan Jett, driving me to kick up the treadmill speed a couple of notches. It was only when I came home and found out the news that I was able to backtrack and do the math. I wasn’t surprised. My association with Lemmy has always been about timing.

I got to work with Lemmy on his autobiography because I was in the right place at the right time. It was fall 1994, and I was at Foundations Forum, a heavy metal rock conference that was held yearly at the height of hard music’s popularity. There I was, in the lobby of the Burbank hotel where it was held, chatting with a publicist friend. The conversation turned to Motörhead, and to Lemmy, as it often did at a conference like this one.

“Lemmy should write his autobiography!” I blurted out. “He’s got so many stories – he even roadied for Jimi Hendrix. This should all be in a book… and I’m just the one to help him do it!” Never let anyone tell you I am modest or humble.

My publicist friend saw my bluff. “The band’s manager, Todd, is in the hotel restaurant right now,” she said. “Why don’t you tell him that?”

“OK, I will!” And I did. I already knew Todd Singerman because I’d written a couple of feature stories on Motörhead for RIP magazine, where I was senior editor at the time. And Todd knew me because I was a big supporter of the band. I even gave Motörhead’s 1991 album, 1916, an A+ in Entertainment Weekly – a grade I had once sworn never to hand out. But the blend of sheer power, fun, and the moving title track about the tragedy of war all blew me away. They still do. So when I sat across from Todd at the hotel restaurant and pitched myself as Lemmy’s collaborator, it was an offer that made sense.

“I’ll set up something between you and Lemmy,” Todd said, “and if he thinks you can work together, great, do it!”

So a few days later, I showed up at Lemmy’s West Hollywood apartment, just a couple of blocks down the hill from the Rainbow on the Sunset Strip, recorder in hand. It was a well lived-in place, cluttered madly with Nazi memorabilia. (Lemmy’s fascination with WWII artifacts was famous, but other than liking the uniforms, he was no fan of the Nazis. He always explained that the more people remembered, the less likely history would repeat itself.) The coffee table was overflowing with full ashtrays, rock and porn magazines, WWII catalogs, a bottle of Wild Turkey and a liter of Coke. I looked over some of the material he already had – there had been a couple of attempts by other writers to help him put together his memoirs, but nothing had ever gotten farther than a couple of chapters or a basic outline. We chatted, I recorded our conversation, and then I went home, transcribed it, and fashioned some sort of narrative out of his words. He scrutinized the pages when I brought them back to him, and found them satisfactory. And so our collaboration began.

Over the next several years, I interviewed Lemmy on tape cassette about 37 times, covering his life up until the point the book got submitted to publishers. It was not easy getting the book done between Motörhead albums and touring. The band went practically nonstop, and Lemmy had very little downtime. The downtime he did have was sometimes spent recreationally, and I had to take a back seat to parties with friends or his girl of the moment. More than once (a lot more than once), Lemmy would tell me to give him a call when I was on way to his place, but when I’d call, his voicemail would be on. With anyone else, it would have been frustrating, but every time Lemmy kept his appointments, he gave me so many good stories, so well told, that I was happy to take what I could get. Every moment with him was a treasure, and I always remembered that.

Flaking out on meetings aside, Lemmy was a gracious if rather unusual host. Although I rarely drank (I’m a notorious lightweight and it was a 45-minute drive home), I was always welcome to share his alcohol. Once he offered to make me a hamburger.

“No thank you,” I said, “I don’t eat red meat.”

“You DON’T?” he said, his eyebrows raised. “Well – why NOT?”

Lemmy demanded nothing less than total honesty, so I told him the truth.

“Meh, I never liked the taste of it, really. I eat chicken sometimes.”

He nodded, satisfied. “Good. I hate them people who don’t eat things ‘with faces.’ People weren’t meant to be vegetarians. It’s bad for you!”

I didn’t do speed, so he never offered me any. Often he ate it off a knife tip. I don’t think he had air conditioning in his apartment. In summers, the fan was always turned on and he’d wear nothing but speedos, sometimes with a kimono. Occasionally when we were taping, we’d be interrupted by the UPS guy, who would show up with some more vintage knives to add to his collection. Other times a girl would show up, and usually she would quietly disappear into the bedroom until we were done interviewing – and in those instances, usually we’d be done sooner than later.

A lot of my friends have crazy stories about Lemmy – wild parties, backstage adventures, drug-induced mania. I have none of that. My relationship with Lemmy was friendly but all business. It was my job to pick his brain, and then create a narrative out of all of it. I learned his speech pattern well enough so that when he read the pages I faxed him, he couldn’t always tell when he was reading direct quotes, or I had paraphrased what he said.

Lemmy was a far more complex character than he wanted anyone to know. He had a public persona and it was inviolable. He refused to break from it, ever, although I tried a couple of times for the book’s sake. When he was fired from Hawkwind, for example, it was devastating. I found one magazine article from that era in which it was clear he was falling apart emotionally, and I tried to dig into that. He wouldn’t let me. In his mind, he had bounced right back and instantly formed Motörhead.

“Of course I wasn’t that upset,” he asserted. “C’mon, Janiss, you know me better than that.”

Lemmy never let his guard down… except for Sue Bennett, his girlfriend from the 1960s who died of a heroin overdose. He never forgot her, and I don’t think he ever got over her. In fact, White Line Fever is dedicated to her. If there is an afterlife, I’m sure the first thing he did was go looking for her.

As I scrolled down my Facebook page after Lemmy’s death, it seemed strange to see so many people write “RIP, Lemmy.” I’m sure Lemmy would want to do anything but rest in peace. He would much rather be looking back at us, laughing uproariously at our foibles and raging over our stupidity, just like he did in life. Peace? When it means no war, that’s a good thing. But otherwise, perhaps it’s overrated.

By Janiss Garza
Janiss Garza runs FitCat Publishing (http://www.fitcatinc.com), a boutique book company.

https://www.yahoo.com/music/aftershock-remembering-my-my-time-with-lemmy-175426270.html

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