MOTORHEAD GIVES GOOD SHOW!

Sure ain't no Howard Johnsons. There's a woman in the lobby looks like a Kentucky Fried Chicken leg let loose in Freddie Mercury's wardrobe; all flesh, bone, leather and tastelessness, and her fingernails are heading straight for the desk clerk's eyes. A bunch of guys dressed like recent flood victims, not like any Tupperware Convention-ites I've ever seen, are cooling their heels by the door. And there's no way they're getting up to her room unless she coughs up the 300 big ones she owes, which doesn't look like happening in the 15 minutes I've got before the band is ready for the interviews.

High Noon on Sunset, and the usual collection of whores, winos, Mercedes owners and other Hollywood reprobates are trying to rub the smog from their eyes and earn an honest cent. The woman in the leather hotpants is having a tough time doing so. So's the Polygram Man who's trying to get order where none should rightly exist. So am I, forced out of bed at an hour when most self-respecting rock fans haven't even put on their studded leather pjs yet. The only people having fun in the cash-earning department are Motorhead, smiling like gurus and sitting under a hotel pool umbrella chatting and signing autographs and looking like a martini commercial from Hell. When a cluster of fans—Motorheadbangers as they are so accurately known—are moved along by the Polygram Man to make way for the CREEM interview, leaving just a pile of strange people with loud transistor radios who've pulled up their beach chairs to see what's going on, Lemmy offers me a screwdriver—confirming my belief that he is a practical sort and a gentleman. We begin.