Lemmy
By:
December 24, 2009
I confess: I have a personal stake in lauding LEMMY (born 1945), Hawkwind alumnus and Motörhead frontman, and celebrating his status as a hard-living, hard-playing stalwart of British rock. One of the first albums that I owned, thanks to my heavy metal indoctrinator of a father, was Motörhead’s Bomber (1979) and the impact it had on this six-year-old — Lemmy’s sludgy bass, his gargle-with-gravel-and-vodka growl and the fact that he and his bandmates appeared to travel everywhere in a giant, really cool aeroplane — has remained psychically entrenched ever since. But vested interests aside, Lemmy unquestionably deserves ordainment as the high priest of hedonistic heaviness. He is an immovable colossus of the metal canon and, if he needed anyone to vouch for him on this point, he would have a legion of famous adulators queuing up to do so. He has spent nearly 35 years, a millennium in the hard rock world, at the helm of Motörhead, roaring, thrumming his Rickenbacker, necking amphetamines, and grinning demonically upwards through the hairy W that adorns his face.
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