‘Under the Knife’: Motörhead’s dark tribute to a dismembered pornstar
It is difficult to neatly encapsulate the life of Motörhead’s gruff-voiced frontman, Lemmy Kilmister. From being booted out of space-rock pioneer Hawkwind for being caught with too many amphetamines to appearing on the cult BBC sitcom The Young Ones, the life of the rock and roll star was multi-faceted, to put it lightly. Expectedly, for a man who spent the majority of his years surviving on a cocktail of drugs and alcohol, Kilmister made some pretty questionable decisions, too. Among them is his decision to appear alongside the abuser John Wayne Bobbitt in a 1994 porno.
Back in the early 1990s, America had been gripped by the strange tale of John and Lorena Bobbitt. The story goes that, in 1993, Lorena severed her husband’s penis with a carving knife while he slept before going for a drive and throwing it from the window of her car. During the trial that ensued, Lorena Bobbitt claimed that her husband had been consistently abusive towards her, and the catalyst for the mutilation came when he raped her after coming home that evening.
In the wake of this, John Wayne Bobbitt was charged with rape but was eventually acquitted. Meanwhile, Lorena was acquitted of her assault charge by reason of insanity – with the defence claiming that John’s constant emotional, physical, and sexual abuse had led his wife to eventually “snap”. Lorena Bobbitt was also suffering from clinical depression and potential PTSD as a result of the continual abuse she experienced at the hands of her husband.
After an extensive search, Bobbitt’s severed penis was located by authorities and was surgically reattached to his body following a nine-and-a-half-hour operation. Although you might expect this experience to be fairly traumatic for the former US Marine, Bobbitt almost immediately sought out ways to capitalise on the publicity he had garnered during the press coverage of his story and subsequent trial. Most notably, he starred in the adult film John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut, released in September 1994.
If re-telling the story of John and Lorena Bobbitt in the context of a pornographic film seems in bad taste, it’s because it is. Bobbitt had abused his wife to the point of mental illness and was now effectively able to capitalise on those effects. After meeting porn star Ron Jeremy during an event at the Playboy Mansion, the pair began working to adapt Bobbitt’s story to porn, with Bobbitt telling Vanity Fair, “A porno seemed like the best way to show my penis worked.”
The film, in general, is incredibly bizarre in its content and the fact that it was produced in the first place. Perhaps the most unbelievable aspect of the film, however, is the fact that it features a cameo from Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister. Appearing on screen for a handful of seconds, Kilmister’s inclusion in the film seems very superfluous and, above all else, odd.
“As Loreena Bobbitt drives away, she throws the dick out the window,” Lemmy later recalled to Hot Press, explaining his role in the heinous film. “I’m sitting in this park, for whatever reason, it goes by me and I go, ‘What’s that? A fucking dick? At least it ain’t mine!’ And I walk out of the picture.” However, Lemmy’s contributions to the porno were much more substantial than that small cameo.
For the soundtrack of the porno, Lemmy and Motörhead wrote ‘Under the Knife’. Lyrically, the song shares little in common with the story of John Wayne Bobbitt, although its title and construction are clearly a reference to the extensive operation that the abuser had to undergo in order to reattach his severed penis. Neither the song nor Kilmister’s cameo appearance formed particularly highlights in his long and varied career in music. In fact, in the years since, both the film and cameo have become something of an obscurity, known only by die-hard fans of the hard rock outfit.
Bobbitt himself went on to star in another adult film, Frankenpenis, and further capitalised on his notoriety by appearing on WWE Raw during the late 1990s. Since then, he has attracted multiple abuse allegations and has been arrested on numerous occasions for the battery of his then-wife, Joanna Ferrell. Meanwhile, Lorena Bobbitt set up a domestic abuse charity, Lorena’s Red Wagon, in 2007.
