White Line Fever: Lemmy: The Autobiography Read Online Free PDF Page A

address.’
    ‘Oh, no, dear, he’s on tour in Denmark!’
    Why hadn’t I considered this possibility? I was young and dumb, that’s why.
    ‘Ah . . .’ I said.
    She looked at me. I looked at her.
    ‘Er,’ I said. Silence grew between us.
    Then she said something for which I will be eternally grateful, star turn that she was. ‘Oh well, never mind dear, you can sleep on the couch and we’ll see in the morning.’ You don’t get much of that in our brave new world!
    So I awoke to find Ron Wood, with three of his mates, hanging over me, going, ‘Oi, wot you a-doing on my mum’s sofa, eh?’ So she was Mrs Wood, mother of Ron and Art, and Jon was living there. Coincidence, eh? I got to go to a Birds gig that night, and then I went to Sunbury-on-Thames – but more of that later.
    Back in those days, the most impressive band, hands down, was the Beatles. They were the best band in the world. There will never be anything like the Beatles, and you really had to be there to understand what I’ve just said. Nowadays younger people think the Beatles were just a band, but they weren’t. They were a huge phenomenon all over the world. Everybody changed because of the Beatles, even politicians. The Daily Mirror in London ran a page every day about what they were doing. Imagine: a big, national fucking newspaper devoting a page each day to a band? They were more than huge.
    The Beatles revolutionized rock ’n’ roll, and they also changed the way everyone looked. It seems ludicrous now, but for those days, they had very long hair. I remember thinking, ‘Wow! How can any guy have hair that long?’ Really, it was just combed forward, with a slight fringe over the collar. We all had quiffs then – before the Beatles, it had been ducktails and Elvis.
    I was lucky enough to see them play the Cavern club in Liverpool, back at the beginning. They were really fun, eating cheese rolls while singing, and they used to tell a lot of jokes. They were hilarious. They could have been a comedy team. And they had weird guitars that none of us had ever seen. John had his Rickenbacker and Paul had that violin-shaped bass. All the rest of us had Stratocasters; I mean, a Strat was the ultimate you could wish for, Gibsons weren’t even around. And George, I believe, was playing a Hofner Futurama, God help him. Later on, he got a series of Gretsch’s. It was like, what ? These weird guys with long hair and these funny guitars and they’re posing in their shirt sleeves with their ties pulled out! Everybody else was wearing these horrible, rigid suits, encased in these terrible, ten-button, suffocating Italian jackets. So that was quite a revelation.
    And the Beatles were hard men, too. Brian Epstein cleaned them up for mass consumption, but they were anything but sissies. They were from Liverpool, which is like Hamburg or Norfolk, Virginia–a hard, sea-farin’ town, all these dockers and sailors around all the time that’d beat the piss out of you if you so much as winked at them. Ringo’s from the Dingle, which is like the fucking Bronx. The Rolling Stones were the mummy’sboys – they were all college students from the outskirts of London. They went to starve in London, but it was by choice, to give themselves some sort of aura of disrespectability. I did like the Stones, but they were never anywhere near the Beatles – not for humour, not for originality, not for songs, not for presentation. All they had was Mick Jagger dancing about. Fair enough, the Stones made great records, but they were always shit on stage, whereas the Beatles were the gear.
    I remember one gig the Beatles had at the Cavern. It was just after they got Brian Epstein as their manager. Everyone in Liverpool knew that Epstein was gay, and some kid in the audience screamed, ‘John Lennon’s a fucking queer!’ And John – who never wore his glasses on stage – put his guitar down and went into the crowd, shouting, ‘Who said that?’ So this kid says, ‘I