Anything I could say about one Lemmy Kilmister has probably already been said. The dude saw The Beatles perform in a bar in England back in the day. He was a roadie for Jimi Hendrix. His time with Hawkwind was not only that band's best years, but probably the absolute most perfect swirl of hippie energy with outlaw biker alpha male machismo that ever got etched into wax. I am still to this day amazed at Doremi Fasol Latido any time I dig the album out and put it to the turntable. And shit man, everyone knows about Motorhead. But the simple fact that the same guy who was singing and thunk up Hawkwind's "The Watcher" also came up with "Ace of Spades"... I don't know if anybody has ever been so goddamned perfect at very different ends of a spectrum.
Personally, in high school I rocked a jean jacket for a while with a Motorhead back patch. Of all the old Oui magazines my dad had stored under his bed, when I knew they were overlooked and I could embezzle a couple to keep in my room, inevitably the one with a long Motorhead interview was one I chose. This was an interview from the early '80s, and Lemmy was snorting lines of crank off a giant knife then, saying he had been doing it for 20 years and obviously nothing was wrong with him. The pictures had him and Philthy Animal Taylor rubbing motor oil all over a naked chick, and in the interview, Lemmy said, "Sex, drugs, and motor oil," which has been a phrase I toss out ever since. I don't know if anybody has ever known where it came from.
To this day, apparently, even as an old man, Lemmy still lives in the same shitty little Hollywood apartment he's been in since the '80s, and still drinks whiskey like a goddamned hellion. Still has the long hair and scowl, but oddly enough, probably knows more about music than most living human beings. I mean seriously, look beyond the drugs and mayhem and ultimate rock-n-roll persona, and you're talking about a guy that was living with Jimi Hendrix when Jimi still dabbled in soul. You're talking about a guy that sat in a bar and saw The Beatles play before that was an impossibility. You're talking about a guy that was a veteran of the early '70s festival circuit long before he became a 1980s rock icon. He has had his finger in a number of eras, and pretty much has sat on the mountain like a crazy hermit and witnessed the entire birth, growth, sprawl, and stagnation of rock-n-roll music itself.
And he's still unrepentant. There's no regret in him looking back at all. That's a good lesson - that all the fucked up shit you do, the mistakes and screw ups, it's all part of a process. And if you run from yourself, you're just gonna run yourself into another wrong turn. It's best to just soak it in, and move on. The natural world doesn't change drastically, so why should we? Sure, it's constantly changing, and Lemmy's career discography is about as wide-ranging a collection as you could probably get. And actually I had a partial MP3 of him doing "Ace of Spades" for a German commercial acoustically, like a return to those early Hawkwind roots. Why not? It's all part of what he is. We all have to just be what we are. There are always gonna be people that typecast and try to fit us into one mental photographic angle of how they view us, regardless of whether we fit that 24-7/365 or not. Just keep on being though. Sex, drugs, and motor oil.
And man, I wonder whatever happened to that jean jacket I had with the Motorhead back patch? The things I did in that jacket as a young aspiring rock-n-roll delinquent in Farmville, Virginia...
No comments:
Post a Comment