White Line Fever - Lemmy Kilmister

WHITE LINE FEVER -

LEMMY KILMISTER

Well, it starts off with an anecdote about being thrown off a plane after being spotted sipping from a bottle of Jack Daniels by a stewardess, and Lemmy's explanation for boarding a plane with a pint of Jack Daniels in his pocket is that he finds it helps with the sobering up. And it continues in the same vein from there, really.

There's a knack when it comes to writing an autobiography and whilst some people have it others clearly don't have it at all. 'A man needs to know his limitations', as Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry says in The Enforcer, and Lemmy against all the evidence clearly knew his which is presumably why he got in writer Janiss Garza to help out? Lemmy might well have been a God as Dave Grohl once stated but he was also a professional who knew he owed it not only to his fans but also to his reputation to not present a badly-written book. You only write one autobiography in your life (unless you're John Lydon) so it should never be a half-arsed one.

White Line Fever reads as if you're sat down in your living room at the end of an evening and Lemmy's there with you, laid out and relaxed on your sofa, drinking double brandies and pulling on a cigar as he regales you with the story of his life. It's very personable, very friendly and very entertaining. But what would we want from a Lemmy Kilmister autobiography? Well, we would want things we never knew before. Little facts and details to fill the gaps and flesh out the bigger picture. And we would want anecdotes and good ones too about 'huge women doing things to him with raw carrots', as an example - and those are Lemmy's words, not mine.

'Motorhead', of course, is American slang for speedfreak so with such a blatant drugs reference from the get go, it's no surprise that Lemmy has a lot of drug anecdotes. His time in Hawkwind in particular is an example of drug taking on an industrial scale with tales of three-week speed binges, going berserk on belladonna, and of talking to trees on acid, with the trees sometimes winning the argument.

Come 1980 Lemmy put in for a blood transplant, the same process Keith Richards is rumoured to have gone through. After some blood tests, however, his doctor informed him that it's not going to be possible because he no longer had human blood anymore. 'Pure blood will kill you,' his doctor told him 'And you can't give blood either. Forget it, you'd kill the average person because you're so toxic.'

So Lemmy was a medical phenomena. Half man half pharmacy. 

Drugs do things to a person, and according to Lemmy they certainly did something to Mitch Mitchell, the drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience who bounced up to Lemmy one day in the middle of Oxford Street and exclaimed 'Hello, I don't know who I am!' before running off again. Drugs also might have done something to Dave Brock of Hawkwind who Lemmy says developed a habit of leaning out of his car as he drove along and yelling at schoolgirls 'Spank! Spank! Spank! Hello, girls, spanky-spanky!' As for Nik Turner, let's just not go there, shall we?

When it came to a lot of things, Lemmy was totally unreconstructed. Some of his more lurid tales in regard to his relationships and backstage conquests are questionable and though his attitude toward women was one of macho hyper-sexuality he always held women in much respect and love. Interestingly and thankfully he always remained very perceptive, at one point in the book when talking about him getting gastric flu even going into Nostradamus mode: 'These viral things are gonna keep getting stronger, 'cause every five years a new strain comes out that they didn't plan on, and some day one of those bugs is gonna kill half the planet.' He was saying this in 2002.

White Line Fever is a good read and is definitely one of the better rock autobiographies. Though seeing as it's the autobiography of the once snorting, drinking rock god legend that was Lemmy Kilmister, you really wouldn't want or expect anything less.

John Serpico