‘Dave Grohl’s Not Available’: How Lemmy Hired Matt Sorum for Motorhead Tour
Former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum recalled the brutally frank way Lemmy Kilmister called him up to tour with Motorhead in 2009.
He was asked to stand in for Mikkey Dee for 13 shows that year, and admitted he was quite surprised about how Lemmy’s invitation came about.
“He actually texted me, and I could hear his voice through the text,” Sorum told SiriusXM’s Trunk Nation (via Blabbermouth). “‘Matt, I need you to play drums.’ And I actually texted him back. I wrote, ‘Why me?’ I don’t know why I said that. And he wrote back, ‘Dave Grohl’s not available.’ Lemmy wasn’t a guy to mince words; he’d tell you the truth. I loved that about him.”
Another surprise soon followed: “I texted him, ‘When are we rehearsing?’ And he wrote back, ‘We aren’t.’” Instead, Sorum received a DVD of Motorhead’s appearance at the Wacken Open Air festival in Germany in 2006, with instructions to “learn the Wacken show,” which he did.
“And then I met them at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C.," he recalled. "We soundchecked and I played that night … and it was amazing. … It was a very energetic, high-energy set, and I loved it. And I still remember it like yesterday.”
One of his favorite parts of the experience was being on the tour bus with Lemmy. “He's just got great stories," Sorum said. "He knew everything there was to know about every civil war. We'd be driving down the highway through the Midwest, or in the South, where they had battlefields. And he'd point. He'd go, 'Over there was the battle of … ' -- you know, whatever, and he knew everything about it. Not only the Second World War, First World War, but the American Civil War."
Sorum described touring with Motorhead as “one of the greatest experiences that I ever had. “I had so much fun with those guys,” he added. The drummer now a member of Deadland Ritual alongside Geezer Butler, Steve Stevens and Franky Perez.