Metal Edge: Lita Ford talked to Metal Edge about ‘Kiss Me Deadly,’ partying with Lemmy and that time she gave a dude $100 for his pants.
You can read the entire interview @ this location. An excerpt from the conversation can be found below.
What do you recall about filming “Kiss Me Deadly” because that video is one of the most iconic from that era?
Lita Ford:
It definitely was. So, “Kiss Me Deadly” was done by Marty Callner, video director, and we filmed that in downtown Los Angeles in some huge warehouse somewhere. They brought in these great big blocks of ice. We were trying to do the fire and ice effect and just play around and not try to have any large effects and stuff.
You know, I do have a pretty cool story, though. One of the things in the “Kiss Me Deadly” video was my jeans. Those jeans have a story. I mean, my mother hated those jeans because she was a European woman who had gone through a lot in the war and she didn’t like anything that was torn, or anything that was old or faded. She wanted everything to look new, especially on her daughter.
I was in the front yard of her house. And she yelled at me through the door, and she said in a very thick Italian accent, “Lita! Get in the house” And I’m looking around, I’m like, why? What happened? And she said, “I don’t want the neighbors to see you in those jeans. And I thought, Well, Mom, they’re already on MTV.
And I have to tell you where I got those jeans. I was coming from Lemmy’s house in Hollywood when he lived over by the Rainbow, and Lemmy and I had partied a little bit that night and I couldn’t drive and so I call my girlfriend to come pick me up. And she comes and picks me up and starts to drive me home. And all of a sudden, I see this young man who was a construction worker, climbing the telephone poles, working on the telephone poles. I’m sitting in the passenger seat, and I said to her, “Pull over. I need to go talk to this guy.” She says, “What do you want to talk to him for?” and I said, “I need to buy his jeans.”
His jeans were all shredded down the front. And they were naturally shredded. It wasn’t done by a machine or a knife or anything because he wore them when he worked construction, climbing the telephone poles. They had this natural worn look to them, and I had to have them. And he was kind of a little guy and I thought those are gonna fit me, so I got out of the car and after partying with Lemmy all night I was like, “Hey dude! I’ll give a hundred bucks for your jeans.”
He looks down and goes, “Hang on, I’ll be right there.” He hops down off the telephone pole, and he says to me, “A hundred bucks for these? I’ve got a second pair in the back of my truck. So, I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll take those two.” I gave him a couple hundred bucks and he gave me a couple pairs of naturally shredded, torn up jeans and I took them home. I ended up giving them to a woman that was doing some clothing designs for me, where she touches stuff up and puts leather on things and beads and strings of suede and velvet. And so, she took these jeans, and she rocked them out and put all this cool stuff on them, and I ended up wearing them in the “Kiss Me Deadly” video. And then everybody started doing the torn jeans and now we pay a ton of money for them.
You mentioned Lemmy, and on the Lita album there’s the song “Can’t Catch Me” which you cowrote with him. What do you recall about putting that one together?
Ford:
Yeah, God. I mean, the song has the energy of Lemmy in it, you know? And I remember him writing …What’s the hell’s the line? [sings] “Don’t try to put the strong arm on me.” Because he was always like, “Lita’s a badass” and back in the day people didn’t really want to accept the fact that you were a female guitar player or that you are a female front woman. And they try to continuously pin me as a sex symbol, and I’m really good with being a sex symbol. But I was also trying to be a musician and wanted to be noticed as a musician and Lemmy noticed me as a musician. And he wanted to make a song that was basically saying, you know, you can’t catch me, because I am a badass and I’m off and running. I mean, [quoting another lyric from the song] “I’ve seen shit and paradise.” [laughs] I mean, you can see what kind of mood we were in when we wrote that. It was just a lot of fun.
Motörhead’s first official graphic novel “The Rise of the Loudest Band in the World” will be released on September 7th. 
