White Line Fever

The Autobiography

By: Janiss Garza, Lemmy

Narrated by: Anayssa Garcia

Ian Fraser Kilmister was born on Christmas Eve, 1945. Learning from an early age that chicks really do appreciate a guy with a guitar, and inspired by the music of Elvis and Buddy Holly, Lemmy quickly outgrew his local bands in Wales, choosing instead to head to Manchester to experience everything he could get his hands on. And he never looked back.

Lemmy tripped through his early career with the Rocking Vicars, backstage touring with Jimi Hendrix, and as a member of Opal Butterflies and Hawkwind. In 1975, he went on to create speed metal and form the legendary band Motörhead. During their long history, they released over 20 albums, were nominated for a Grammy, and conquered the rock world with such songs as “Ace of Spades”, “Bomber", and “Overkill”. Throughout the creation of this impressive discography, the Motörhead lineup has seen many changes, but Lemmy was always firmly at the helm.

White Line Fever, a headbanging tour of the excesses of a man being true to his music and his pleasures, offers a sometimes hilarious, often outrageous, but always highly entertaining ride with the frontman of the loudest rock band in the world.

©2003 Lemmy, Janiss Garza (P)2022 Douglass Timpraise

Critic reviews

"The heaviest drinking, most oversexed speed freak in the music business tells his story: 'An emblem of rock ’n’ roll endurance.'" (The New York Times)

Great Story!

The story is amazing; the narration is god awful. She mispronounces words, names, places constantly. Very distracting. She sounds like Marcy from Peanuts and comes off like a middle school kid reading a book report. Lemmy is God! May he smite this nitwit from beyond the grave.

Great book, not so good audible book

The book itself is great and Lemmy is a fascinating character! But the audible production sounds like it was recorded as a junior high project. Who gets a soft spoken teenage girl to read a book as if she is Lemmy? I’m sure any male rock star would have loved to read this! And all the mispronounced names. Sebastian Bach is now Sebastian Batch. Mikkey Dee is pronounced Mikey not Micky. Just to name a couple. There were many more mispronunciations. Several bad edits and ljnes read twice. The producer should have caught and corrected all this. It should be re-recorded by professionals.

Worst narration of the more than 200 audible titles I have listened to

The book is fine - it’s Lemmy and he tells it the way he sees it. No frills, no real introspection but also very honest. But…

The narrator does a terrible job here. You could have just grabbed any random person off the street and it would probably have been better. Some of the mispronunciation is appalling - I get that some of the words are weirdly pronounced in British English so while phonetically “Chiss-wick Records” rather than “Chizzick Records” is understandable, the fact that Eric Clapton becomes Eric ClaMpton at least three times makes no sense.

I slogged through, but this was not the light experience it should be!

Love Lemmy, didn’t love the narrator

I understand that we cannot hear Lemmy voice his own autobiography but could they please have gotten someone with some knowledge of the rock/metal scene to narrate? Anayssa mispronounced several words, that should’ve been caught by the producer. Her attempt at accents were awful. Great story but the choice of narrator took so much away from it. I missed so many parts of the story and had to rewind because of how distracting the narration was. Again great book. Great story. If this wasn’t a book about Lemmy,I would’ve returned it and gotten something else.

Read the book

This is a great story and reads as though Lemmy is telling his story to you over a couple glasses of JD. The narration is cringe, Whoever hired a woman to read a man’s autobiography should be fired, before you get too triggered I feel the same way if it’s a woman’s story. Absolutely awful audiobook, it should be re-recorded with a rough male voice.

Would have done well with a British narrator

As a huge Motörhead fan I very much appreciate hearing Lemmy’s life story in his own words. But the narration leaves a lot to be desired. There are lots of mispronunciations, that could have been easily avoided if the narrator was a native speaker of British English (or with some better research). There are also quite a lot of mistakes in the editing. Many sentences are repeated.

wasted potential

I'm not sure if this is an AI reader or someone who just has terrible pronunciation does not research the source material. The production is sub par with obvious edit points clearly audible on the recording. I would venture to guess that I am far from the only Motorhead fan who is seriously dissatisfied with this. There are people who love Motorhead and could and would do a much better job than this. If you can't treat the source material with the respect it deserves, don't do it.

Couldn’t get past the narrator!

I absolutely love this book. I read it years ago and was excited to give it a listen on a long road trip. But the narration! She was the worst. Especially because she’s reading Lemmy’s words. He had such an distinctive voice. This woman’s terrible fake accents and cheesy voices killed it for me. Not to mention the mispronunciation of so many words. What a joke.

Great story, bad narration

I love Motorhead and have had this on my reading list for a while. I should have just picked up the book. Who gets a teenage girl to narrate a story about Lemmy??

Terrible fake British accent, repeated lines, and just bad all around. I will still buy the book because the story is great but Audible should have this re-recorded.

Worst narration EVER!

This audiobook is so bad, it's almost funny. The narrator and editor did a terrible job. They mispronounced words, names, and places, and the narrator's fake British accent when worrying someone was just awful.

The recording and editing were also terrible. Sound quality randomly jumps from decent to really bad throughout. Sentences are repeated more than should be acceptable.

But the book itself is actually pretty good. It's full of great Hawkwind and Moterhead stories, and Lemmy's unfiltered opinions about life.

So, if you're interested in the book, I recommend reading it instead of listening to the audiobook.