It didn’t last, though, and in ’67, after the demise of the band, Lemmy got a job working as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix. As you might have read in our cover story in K!1582 back in August, Lem began taking acid during this time. But then, everyone was. And when Hendrix is buying, you don’t say no…
“Everyone was on acid, man!” he laughed. “Everybody was tripping. We’d hang out with Pink Floyd, ’cause they always had some. But everyone was fucked up! It was normal.”
So began a relationship with drugs and life on the road that would last until 2015. Acid, coke, speed, grass, booze, uppers, downers… Lemmy took it all. But in all that time, he still kept one thing out of his system.
“I didn’t get into heroin, which was the strange thing, ’cause I’d have become addicted immediately, y’know?” he mused. “I didn’t fall into that trap, I was a speed freak. I wanted to be up and at ’em. And that was what I did. I was up and at ’em and that was that. I sped through the downs and that was about it.”
With sex and drugs taken care of, Lem continued to rock’n’roll, first with psych outfit Sam Gopal, then in 1972 with space-rock legends Hawkwind, whom he got into partly because of a love of speed he shared with some of his future bandmates. It was a gig that would change everything.
Having never picked up a bass before, Lemmy was chucked in at the deep end. He swam by using chords instead of standard single notes, making him louder and fatter, perfect for Hawkwind’s infamous all-night, LSD and speed-fuelled gigs (check out their mind-bending Space Ritual live album for proof). But the problems also started early on. Lemmy wasn’t the singer, and when he sang on the single Silver Machine, something unexpected occurred.