Heavy Metal Memories: First Time I Saw Motörhead

During my freshman year at NYU, I had a roommate named Chris who liked to spend Sunday mornings listening to WFMU, a college radio station out of New Jersey. Sundays were special, because they would play hours of low-fi garage rock ­— flailing, erratic, brash and monotonous— during times that I felt better suited to a more tranquil, post late Saturday night, dormitory laziness.  

Some of the music was actually good, and a more clairvoyant person might have envisioned the near future with improved production value and the label of Alternative, but the lackadaisical banter between audible barrages of static and muffled, indecipherable squealing always grew to the point of unbearable. On one particular Sunday, I spent the morning in and out of our dorm room desperate to find a more social, if not quiet, place to get some school work done. I had a Sociology midterm paper due and few ideas on a topic.

Bursting back into our room to snag a notebook and retreat, my ears caught the languid DJ say, “So the next caller can win those tickets if they call now at…”

Now my other roommate Mike and I got along okay with Chris despite his refusal to don headphones or change the station after the fifth hour, and at that moment I looked up to him, lying like a bearded, beached whale on his loft bed over his cluttered desk and asked, “What are those tickets for?”

“I dunno. I wasn’t listening.”

Infuriated by the futility of it all, I grabbed the phone and dialed the number.

“WFMU.”

“Hi. I’m calling about the tickets.”

“Oh. Yeah. Right. You’ve won. Just be there at the ticket booth by seven to pick them up.”

“Where?”

“The Capitol Theater in Passaic.”

“Um. And who’s playing.”

“Motörhead.”

I had become familiar with Lemmy Kilmister and his band years earlier after a coming-of-teenage screening of AC/DC’s concert film “Let There Be Rock”. Projected at deafening volume through stacks of amplifiers, it had raised the hair off my head and broadened my musical horizons to the sheer power of hard rock and heavy metal. Benefitted by older siblings, my musical appreciation ranged from 50’s doo-wop, through everything revolutionary about ‘60’s rock, and well into New Wave and a bit of punk. But metal was mine, and Motörhead’s “Iron Fist” and “Ace of Spades” albums were on an umlaut-adorned cassette tape I’d made for myself to bring to school.

“Chris, do you know how to get to Passaic?” I asked my roommate.

“No idea.”

“It’s your radio station, so you’re coming with me.”

The bus from Port Authority took almost two hours and the deserted streets of Passaic, New Jersey in the chilly winter wind didn’t bode well for the evening. We walked several derelict blocks of dilapidated row houses, until we came upon the isolated Capitol Theater, a leftover from better days. Chris and I approached the classic ticket booth at the entrance, still decorated with a red velvet curtain behind the attendant.

“Hi. We’re here to pick up tickets we won through WFMU,” I said, hands tucked under the arms of my rough wool Eisenhower jacket.

“From who?”

“From WFMU. It’s a college radio station,” added Chris, shivering in his Army field coat.

The ticket-taker looked around the booth, bewildered. “We don’t have anything here.”

“But you must.” Chris was crestfallen and bemoaned his beloved station betraying their sacred bond. But after I reminded him of the quality and nature of the broadcast, he adjusted his view and admitted that he wasn’t really all that surprised.

“How much are tickets?”

“It’s sold out.”

As the flow of concertgoers increased and show time neared, we pleaded our case from usher, to security, to theater manager. No one had heard of the radio station or the ticket give-away, but eventually our persistence won over any suspicion of lies, and we were allowed to enter, restricted to standing room only, with no getting any closer than halfway to the stage.

As we entered, the opening act, a three-piece outfit with a singing drummer called Exciter, was already playing. They wore spandex and studded leather and performed metal in a Judas Priest vein. It gave me time to survey the crowd, which seemed to be grouped in pockets of cliques among the seats. Punks with Mohawks, straight-edged hardcore kids, leather clad metal heads, and old stoner rockers.

The second band had more of a following. Merciful Fate played tunes that reminded me in a good way of Iron Maiden, and their lead singer, King Diamond, black and white makeup streaking his face, sung into a microphone shaped in an upside-down crucifix. The highlight for me was the introduction to a song called ‘Melissa’ when the frontman held out a human skull to cheers.

“This is not Melissa’s skull. We lost Melissa’s skull somewhere in Amsterdam. This is someone else’s skull.” King Diamond paused, scanning the crowd with a sinister glare. “But she too was a gypsy.”

As they launched into the tune, my heart swelled with the happy confirmation that the comedic, ‘mockumentary’ ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ had indeed accurately captured this world.

By the time Motörhead hit the stage, the theater was packed. The lighting was sparse and the trio were backed by only a single row of tall Marshall stacks. But this simplicity complemented the music; fast and intense, blitzing through songs that for all their ferocity, never shied away from declarations honest, profane and humorous. Lemmy, seemed like a giant, all in black with his long-necked signature Rickenbacker bass, and microphone raised so that he had to hold his mutton-chopped whiskers high for his gravel voice to be heard. He sang equally of violence, drugs, sex and a life lived on the periphery, but never ignorant of the real world around him. As in songs with choruses of ‘Teenage, Backstage, Sex & Outrage’, and declarations that, though born to lose, ‘that’s the way I like it, baby. I don’t want to live forever.’ And in the song “I Don’t Need Religion’ he warns the powers that be: ‘don’t save no kneepads for me up there’. The Devil may grip with an iron fist, but there was no doubt Lemmy was going to go out his way.

At the encore, Lemmy told us that this was the final show of a long, hard tour.

“Last time we were here, we opened for Ozzy. Now he’s playing the Meadowlands and we’re still here. Why don’t you buy our albums?” he beseeched the audience then shrugged. “This next song is called ‘Bomber’. We used to have a big plane of lights fly out over the seats, but we can’t afford that anymore.” As the song played paper airplanes started flying in from side stage, roadies perched on other’s shoulders throwing them into the crowd, then precariously invading the stage. And Lemmy smiled, amused, and played on.

It was a great, rocking show and the long Metro bus ride home filled with punks insistent that everyone sing Dead Kennedy songs the whole way back to the city, was clear evidence of the bonding power of music. The next day I wrote my Sociology essay on the diverse crowd united by a single band. I got an ‘A’.

Thanks Lemmy (1945-2015).

12/31/15