Takin' A Ride

I saw Motorhead so many times before and since meeting him at the Alice Cooper show in ’88. But the only other time I was able to talk to him was at Canes in Mission Beach. There was a skateboard convention going on. And various clubs around town for hosting bands to play for the convention. One of those bands was Motorhead. At Canes. A small club that maybe held 500 people (not including the back bar which was in a totally separate room).

You could get in if you had a convention badge, but I called ahead and asked if they would let any of the public in. They said “line up around 5pm and if there’s room to let you in, we’ll let you in”. I did so with about 100 other people. Two nice bikers next to me who had never seen Motorhead before and were pretty excited about the show. Eventually we all got in!

One of the promotional items that the skate convention was handing out were white Motorhead jerseys which were specially made for this one particular show:

I really wanted one and I tried everywhere to find one. Mainly because I liked jerseys and this one was white, so I could actually wear it in the hot California sun. I always kept missing out on the t-shirt handouts that night. So I saw Lemmy outside Motorhead’s dressing room door talking to a couple women. They left and so I went over to Lemmy. Lemmy was WASTED. I mean holding up the wall wasted. Could barely stand wasted. Oh boy. So I asked him “Hey Lemmy, when’s your book coming out?” He had been talking about in interviews about writing a book that was coming out “soon”. Between Lemmy’s accent and his drunkenness, I really couldn’t understand one word he was saying. Ok. Uh… Oh boy. How do I get out of this conversation? So I asked him about the shirts and if he could get me one. More unintelligible garble. But this was a little more understandable. Basically it was “I don’t have one of those, but you can buy one of mine right there!” and pointed to the t-shirt booth which was just about 30 feet away. I said “Ok thanks Lemmy!” and he gave me a very strong and hearty pat on the back as I walked over to the booth.

I kept wondering man, he has to be onstage in about an hour. How’s he going to do it? Well it took a lot longer than an hour for him to get onstage and somehow (I’m not going to say that some substances were involved, but I did read later that Motorhead refused to go onstage without some sort of “pick me up”) when they finally did get onstage, Lemmy was his typical self and Motorhead rocked the place. The band was LOUD. One of the loudest I’ve heard in a small club. And made louder in the fact that a lot of the skater kids that were there for the convention didn’t really care about Motorhead! They were in the back bar! So while Motorhead was used to playing in front of thousands of people (tens of thousands in the UK and South America), here they were playing Canes in front of about 250 people.

California had just posted a “no smoking in bars” law that went into effect earlier in the year. I remember Lemmy taking a puff on a cigarette during the show teasing the audience saying that “You guys can’t do this here. But I can.”