"We are Motörhead. We play rock and roll."
Close your eyes and think of your favorite heavy metal band. Now think of a second, third, and so on, until you’ve thought of every metal act you can fit into your skull. Now picture each member of that band doing something mundane, liking serving french fries or cleaning up horse manure at Disneyland. All of your musical icons and gods would be regular folk with regular jobs and no one would know who they were. That is exactly what every rock, punk, thrash, and metal act would be doing if it wasn’t for Motorhead.
Over 35 years ago, Lemmy Kilmister spent a week hitchhiking across Michigan before being imprisoned in Canada. He was released and was immediately fired from the spacerock band Hawkwind. This could have been the moment in The Time Machine or Butterfly Effect where history could not be altered no matter who screwed up one tiny detail, but instead, he took Motorhead around the world for nearly four decades, smoking a million cigarettes and drinking a ton of liquor on the way. Their most recent tour ended in Los Angeles tonight, where Lemmy currently resides, and it was a sweet home-away-from-homecoming.
It has been 30 years since Motorhead’s entry into the Great Metal Songbook was recorded and “Ace of Spades” will never be forgotten. As long as kids ride skateboards, guys drive trucks, and people play poker, the chorus will ultimately creep from your subconscious into the forefront of your musical mind. The mix of revved-up bass, gruff vocals, and a solo that justified a decade’s worth of videogames that required plastic guitars creates the legend that is “Ace of Spades.”
Lemmy also brings honest attributes and a personality that has never wavered. Dylan went electric, The Beatles tried drugs, Elvis got fat, while John Bohnam, Sid Vicious, and Keith Moon all died, leaving millions of fans devestated by these tragic bumps in the road. He never stooped to the sad depths of Ozzy’s twilight years or grew an ego the size of Axl, while still delivering a level of musical weight and speed that nobody else has matched yet. Only The Rolling Stones lived up to their moniker and never gathered moss but Lemmy has transcended his band and has become a one-word verb of metal. The mustache, the cowboy hat and boots, the mole, the profile: it's the mold all others poured themselves into. Ok, maybe not the mole.
Record sales and awards are meaningless when discussing the measure of a band, but with over 20 albums and countless EP's, live recordings, and best-of compilations, it's fair to say they are more prolific than those convinved "Ace of Spades" was all they ever did. You often see Motorhead and Lemmy used as interchangeable phrases to mean the same legacy and library but it always has been a group effort. Guitarist Phil Campbell and Drummer Mikkey Dee have been around for over half of the band’s illustrious career and the current line-up feed off of each other better than any trio in the business. Since their debut in 1975, nobody has been louder, faster, or harder than Motorhead and until they finally call it quits, nobody will even come close.
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