Former Guns N’ Roses drummer Matt Sorum revealed to Trunk Nation that Dave Grohl turned down a Motörhead offer to became a touring member in 2009. Read it here:
“Lemmy called me up… He actually texted me, and I could hear his voice through the text: ‘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. And I texted him, ‘When are we rehearsing?’ And he wrote back, ‘We aren’t.’
“I got a DVD [of Motorhead’s performance at the] Wacken festival. It came in the mail, like the next day – FedEx. And he said, ‘Learn the Wacken show.’ And I learned it.
“And then I met them at the 9:30 club in Washington D.C. We sound-checked and I played that night… And it was amazing.
“For a drummer, though… it got confusing, ’cause there’s a lot of Motörhead songs that have that sort of thunderous rock kind of beat happening underneath, and I just needed to kind of decipher that.
“But, obviously, playing ‘Overkill’ and ‘Ace of Spades’… Then I had to learn the newer stuff that Mikkey did, like ‘[In the Name of] Tragedy,’ which some of that stuff was, like, ‘Wow!'”
“It was a very energetic, high-energy set, and I loved it. And I still remember it like yesterday. Especially being on the bus with Lemmy. He’s just got great stories. 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. So he was a history buff.”
