While many rock stars have come and gone throughout the history of the genre, there’s only going to be one man who embodied the genre as Lemmy did.
Many icons have been able to leave an impact with only a few songs, but the silhouette of Lemmy’s mutton chops holding his bass guitar is practically as identifiable for hard rock fans as Jagger’s tongue or the iconic David Bowie makeup. But even with all the storied history of his career with Motorhead, Lemmy could acknowledge when the perfect rock song had already been written.
Then again, he was never planning to reinvent the wheel with his band, either. From the minute that he left Hawkwind, Lemmy wanted the kind of group that could stand alongside the likes of the MC5, and while he got his wish to an extent, songs like ‘Overkill’ were more than people bargained for. This was garage rock taken to the absolute max, and hearing the pure thunder of Lemmy’s bass and Phil Taylor’s double-bass drums practically gave birth to thrash metal as we know it today.
You can talk all you want about him being a trailblazer of the genre in many respects, but that’s simply not how he saw it. He wanted to be the greatest rock and roller that anyone had ever seen, and given his bullet belt, his endless supply of Jack Daniel’s and smokes, and the badass cowboy hat, he truly lived the life of what a rock and roll version of an outlaw was supposed to be.
When Lemmy was coming up in the world, hard rock was slowly starting to morph into metal, whether he knew it or not. All of his friends back in the day were people like Ramones, and while he had a healthy respect for what Ozzy Osbourne was doing, nothing could compare with the pure heaviness that Led Zeppelin had. They weren’t heavy metal, but it’s impossible for any metalhead not to stand at attention when ‘Immigrant Song’ comes on.
The band was clearly using every tool in their arsenal to make their songs heavy, and even if their music was heavily based on acoustic material with a strong backbeat, the best moments of their career were when they coasted on pure swagger. And for Lemmy, he knew they had hit the nail on the head for rock and roll the minute that ‘Black Dog’ leapt out of the speakers after the ominous sounds of string noise started on their fourth record.
The frontman was the last person to reach for those Robert Plant high notes, but he had to admit that the song was as close as anyone got to rock perfection, saying, “I was always impressed by Page. The bass player is great, too, John Paul. He was for years a really well-known session bass player. Plant is the original ‘Oopsy Daisy’ vocalist. [‘Black Dog’ is] because it’s the perfect Rock and Roll number. You start off with that screaming, it’s brilliant. It’s like an old Rock and Roll song played by people in 1970.”
Most of us were probably spared having to hear Lemmy try to hit those high notes with that gravelly voice, but he still knew how to turn out a great rock and roll tune if he wanted. Whether it paying tribute to his contemporaries like covering Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ or even years after their prime on records like Inferno and Motorizer, Lemmy seemed to take all that pure rock and roll abandon that he heard from Zeppelin and channel it into something that had a lot more grit behind it.
He may have inadvertently set the stage for everyone from James Hetfield to Axl Rose, but securing a legacy was the last thing on his to-do list. The mission of any great rock and roll band is to play with attitude as loud as possible, and whether that’s Motorhead or Zeppelin, they both understood what their audience wanted.
