Gary James' Interview With The Author Of
Lipstick And Leather: On The Road With
The World's Most Notorious Rock Stars.
Kim Hawes



She's been a Merchandiser, a Tour Accountant, a Tour Manager and a Trouble Shooter for some of the most notable names in the music business. We're talking Motorhead, Black Sabbath, Elvis Costello, Rush and Chumbawamba. And now she's written the story of life on the road with these people in her book Lipstick And Leather: On The Road With The World's Most Notorious Rock Stars. (Sandstone Press) Her name is Kim Hawes and she spoke with us about her life and adventures.

Q - Kim, this book of yours is as much about your life on the road as it is about philosophy and positive thinking. On page 79 of your book you write, "Attitude is everything. Once you truly believe it, you can use it to your advantage and the world is yours." So, would I be correct then when I say your book is about positive thinking?

A - It is. The book didn't begin like that. It began actually through anger. I know myself I had to change that because it was not doing me any good. And the reason why it was anger was because I was reading on the internet all those young girls and young women saying, "Why can't I get a job in the music industry?" That hurt because I'd just been given an honorary fellowship from my local university for being a pioneer for women. So, it was like if I can do what I did in 1979, this is the 2000s, so why are you saying it's so hard and so difficult? So, that's how it began. Then part way through I myself decided, no, I'm going about this all wrong. I should be giving something back and helping these people, helping them to realize that if you want it bad enough you can have it. So, that is what I wanted to do and in fact so much so that I took myself back, at the age of 63, to university and I'm studying Coaching and Well Being. I want to put that into the music industry itself. I wanted to put in what I'd done in the book, but I then I also wanted to put in some input to help others.

Q - On page 3 you credit luck as playing a part in your story. Tell me how you would define luck.

A - I define luck as being in the right place at the right time, but I also believe that whatever happens in life, you can use to your advantage or disadvantage. I had the most wonderful teacher in life, my mom. You probably realize that too in the book. My mother was on her own. She divorced my father in 1962. So, as you can imagine, that was a big no-no in those days to be divorced at such an early age with a young child. She gave me the inspiration that anything was possible if you wanted it, as you could see later on when she let me go on tour. She knew she had a choice that when I was invited to go on tour with Elvis Costello that I would either go and she wouldn't know where I was, or I would go with her blessings. So, that's how she paid for me to go and how I ended up on tour, but she knew exactly where I was. She paid for my hotel rooms, all the food I needed and everything else, but knew I was safe that way because I was so naive. (laughs) I was so naive when I started. I did have a great teacher to begin with. So, luck, when people ask me nowadays how to get in, I was in the right place at the right time. I was actually studying to be a swim teacher. I was going to teach kids how to swim. That's how far away it was.

Q - Well, not really when you think about it. In the music business you have to learn how to get around the shark infested waters.

A - Yeah. I like that one. I might actually use that one if you don't mind.

Q - Go right ahead. On page 26 you write, "I didn't kike Heavy Metal. Hated it in fact." What did you hate about it?

A - I was a Punk, or as I called myself at the time, I was a wanna-be Punk. And I loved Disco. I loved it, which I never admitted to anybody, especially Rush 'cause they hated it. (laughs)

Q - Dick Clark loved it.

A - I loved it. I guess it was because of my age. Punk was all the "thing" in the U.K. and I wanted to be one of the cool kids. So, I loved Punk, but I didn't love Punk Rock. Elvis Costello wasn't Sex Pistols. I liked The Stranglers, but not their later stuff, more of what they started with in the beginning. So, it wasn't extreme Punk. I just wanted to be in with the "in" crowd, which was very difficult in my town 'cause it was small. So, we kind of made it up as we went along I guess. But, I've loved music all my life. I bought my first record when I was four.

Q - Which was what?

A - Manfred Mann, "54321" was the very first single I bought. My grandma had a market store and opposite her market store was a guy who sold records. That was obviously on Saturdays. I would go to the market store and had been since I was a very young age. I would always spend most of my time looking through the records. And then of course I wanted to be in a band like many people. But, to give you an example, I've never been able to play a musical instrument. I don't know what it is about me, but I just can't do it. I tried. The best I've ever gotten is my mother's pots and pans turned upside down, which I banged with a wooden spoon. I joined a choir at high school and they were very short on numbers and I couldn't imagine why 'cause it was a way of getting out of lessons, which was my way of thinking. But, I started to sing and the music teacher just asked me to mime because I was that bad. So, I've always said I've had the greatest career in music without playing a single thing. (laughs)

Q - You were just slightly ahead of your time Kim. These days you don't necessarily have to have a good voice. As a matter of fact, in the 1950s there were singers around who couldn't sing. So, it's been going on for a long time now.

A - I've always said that the powers to be in music are just like the powers that be in fashion or interior design. They know what color you're going to be wearing in three years time or what sofa you're going to be sitting on in three years time and to what you'll be listening to, not more so now, but it was back then. It was what you'll be listening to in few years time which is quite sad that you can be the best player or whatever and you might miss out because it wasn't what they were looking for at that moment in time.

Q - You also write, "Touring is a great way of seeing the world." But how much of the world did you actually get to see with the job you had?

A - I will say I did when I was selling merchandise because I had time to go outside and look around. So, I did then. But, later on when I first came to America I went up to the bus driver and said, "Tom, please tell me when we're gong to get to San Francisco 'cause I really want to see the Golden Gate Bridge. I don't know if we're going anywhere near it, but I really want to see it." And this is the third time I'm going to San Francisco. And Tom just turned around to me and went, "Kim, we were there three days ago." (laughs) After that, I was like, "You know what? I know you have the itinerary in front of you, all the information, you know where you're going. But once you're inside that hole, sometimes it's hard to remember where you are." But I made a promise to myself then, that day, that whenever I went anywhere of significance or somewhere where I wanted to go, I would pay more attention to where we are and then I would just take twenty minutes, time out, which was okay to do 'cause not much would happen in twenty minutes. I'd just hire a cab and go, "You have twenty minutes. Show me everything. Go!" (laughs) And that's what I did. Just a fleeting glance at the Golden Gate Bridge and the wiggly road and that kind of stuff in Chinatown I remember we did. Another one was in Geneva, 'cause I just wanted to see the famous fountain in Geneva. Yeah. I did that and went straight back to the venue. So, it's just putting that time out and fitting as much as I could in twenty minutes.

Q - You toured with Motorhead.

A - I was with them all the way through from the beginning from "Overkill", the very first tour. "Overkill", "Ace Of Spades".

Q - Motorhead was a headlining act in Europe, but not so much in the States, correct?

A - Correct. Yeah.

Q - So, how could that group have made any money playing a club? Was it worth it?

A - Probably not. Motorhead were not that good at making money. Lemmy (Kilmister) used to spend it as quickly as he got it, I think. He loved to live the lifestyle of a Rock 'n' Roll person.

Q - Should we call Lemmy a Rock star then?

A - If I speak with people my age, maybe a bit older or younger, they all know who Lemmy was. If I speak at schools and universities, even they know who Lemmy was. Lemmy reached and still reaches generations. And that can only be a good thing and something only Rock stars achieve.

Q - When I interviewed Lemmy he was bragging to me about all the beautiful women he had been with. Did you ever see Lemmy with a beautiful woman?

A - No. (laughs)

Q - I didn't think so.

A - All the women that came about were usually famous themselves, so the got photographed with him. Later on you used to see him with a lot more women. But, the love of his life he lost at a very early age and I don't think he ever found anybody after that.

Q - The way Lemmy put it, he had all these beautiful "groupies."

A - Of course there were "groupies" all over the place, but I never saw any gorgeous ones with Motorhead. He made sure they were okay. There was an instance with two young girls in Germany and they'd run away from home to be on tour with Motorhead. They were underage as well. So, when he found this out, I ended up taking them with us and I gave up my hotel room for them so they could spend the night. Then we took them straight to the station and put them on a train back home. He was like, "We've got two girls who say they're eighteen, but they're not. They can't be with us. They're not here with us. They need to get home." My Mum had a conversation on the phone with him, my very first tour of going away with him, and he said, "She's fine. I'm gonna look after her." He respected women so much that he wouldn't do anything if it wasn't consensual. He would never dream of it.

Q - Do you know how much money the merchandise company you were working for had to put up to sell the merchandise for bands that were performing at all the venues? Back in 1990, Winterland Merchandising had to put up one million dollars to sell Van Halen merchandise. Hard to believe a company could recoup that kind of money, but I guess they must have. It take it your company that you worked for made money.

A - Oh yeah, absolutely. It was in the 1980s that I did this. I know they stopped because of the amounts of money that had to be put forward. The biggest people I ever sold for was Rush. It was a well known fact that a group of people would come to watch Rush and they would nominate one person to buy all the merchandise because you could guarantee that they would que to buy a shirt or whatever as soon as the doors opened. There was one evening in Glasgow that we were still selling merchandise at 3 AM in the morning. The trucks had been parked. Everybody else had gone, but we were still selling shirts at 3 AM. By that time it didn't matter what size they were, what we had left, or anything because they just wanted x amount of shirts or whatever we had left. They took them. We had a plane delivering merchandise to us. We had Gerry Bron of Bronze Records. He had a plane and every day the plane flew out to wherever we were and delivered more merchandise. The poor printers were on 24/7 when it was Rush.

Q - On page 83 you write: "I once made the mistake of explaining a Tour Manager's job by saying it was like glorified babysitting." I was once told a Personal Manager's job is a babysitter.

A - I did say it was glorified until I realized that you know what? It's not. When you're babysitting you get to go home to your own bed and leave. You get to raid the fridge if I remember from my babysitting days, or they've left you food to eat. You get to lie on the sofa and watch TV. You get to invite your friends over. And that's babysitting. So, I think it's the worst part of babysitting actually. You don't get any of those things really. Sometimes you're lucky if you get to eat because something could happen and the show is the most important thing there is. So, until you're satisfied with everything, absolutely everything, and all appears to be running smoothly do you get to sleep. You're always hurrying so you get indigestion and ulcers. The stress can sort of get to you. Once I got a job as a Tour Manager I quit drinking as well as everything else. I did that on purpose because as one of the road managers, you are not taken lightly by crew members ever, that wanted our job and didn't think you should be there by anybody. So, you had to be one hundred per cent of the time. So, I never let anything interfere with that. That's when I quit everything.

Q - Once you found out how hard life was on the road as a merchandiser and/or a tour manager, why didn't you try your hand at something else?

A - I've never packed a trunk in my life. Sound-wise I couldn't do anything like that. I'm totally tone deaf. Apparently my singing says that. So, I didn't do anything like that. I did do other things after I finished tour managing and that's when I went into crisis management. I had my little girl in 1995. I tried touring for two weeks after she was born and I cried every night I was away. I hated it completely. So I resigned. I phoned the managers and everybody I worked for and said, "That's it. I quit." At the same time I quit, about two months later a band called Chumbawamba were at the Brit Awards. They were playing at the Brit Awards. In the audience, in the first table was John Prescott, who was the Deputy Prime Minister at the time. One of the guys from Chumbawamba threw the ice bucket full of ice all over the guy's head. And there was complete and utter uproar. The Tour Manager they had at the time made the wrong decisions on that night. They must have been so stressed and overwhelmed that was going on. But, they made the wrong decision. I got a phone call at 2 AM in the morning from Doug Smith, who managed Motorhead and Chumbawamba and he said, "I know you quit, but I've just found you a new job." I was like, "Okay. It's 2 AM. What is it?" He said, "You're booked on a flight at six o'clock in the morning from Manchester down to London. You're gonna come and sort this out." And that is when I became a crisis manager. I'm doing that and it's easy for me. I could go in for a couple of days, come back out, go home, go out for another couple of days, sort out whatever was going on at that particular tour or help somebody out. It's not the usual drink alcohol or drugs that was associated back in those days with quite a number of numerous other things that went on in people's lives. It was just to make the show go on basically. I was then employed by record companies if they were having a problem with an artist fulfilling their contract. And contrary to belief, some record companies were actually nice and wanted to help the artist through the commitments. Just get through to the other end. So, that's what I went on to do after that. It was great. It helped. It meant that I could take my daughter to school during the week and pick her up from school and then Saturdays and Sundays she was looked after by Grandma.

Q - In 1992 you were getting $3,000 a week plus $200 for expenses, plus a per diem for being Concrete Blonde's tour manager. Typically, how much does a tour manager make on a weekly basis?

A - Well, this is a really interesting question because I don't know. I never knew. You know how there was a thing a few years ago how women never get paid the same amount as men. I would never know that because I was just ecstatic that the Pound was really good against the dollar at that time and I was making more money than I could spend if I hadn't had an alcoholic husband at the time. I did like a six week tour and I was going to do up my house, put new windows in. As alcohol is such a bad, bad, awful thing people suffer from, I came home and he'd spend everything.

Q - How'd he do that? Did you have a joint bank account?

A - Yeah, unfortunately. Apparently he would go to the local pub and buy everybody in the local pub drinks all night, which is sad. Apparently he hasn't drunk for the last twelve years. So, I'm happy for that.

Official Website: www.KimTM.com

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