(Credits: Far Out / Alejandro Páez)
Lemmy never once minced words about the kind of music that he played.
While Motorhead have a reputation of being one of the first official thrash metal bands or the ones who started punk, he held the firm belief that they were a traditional rock and roll band that played a bit rougher than others. After all, he was a student of rock before the genre started taking over the world, but he knew enough to realise when someone was playing the worst take on the genre possible as well.
And when I say that Lemmy was there before rock and roll, that doesn’t mean that he was a fossilised version of a rockstar that saw it happen in real time. No one really had any idea of what rock and roll was when ‘Rock Around the Clock’ came out, and when it came to what popular music was, it was usually centred around the kind of music that housewives put on at a cocktail party. But Lemmy wasn’t listening to any Rosemary Clooney records or anything.
He knew that what he heard in Elvis Presley was unlike anything that he had ever heard, and any chance of him getting anywhere close to that would have been more than enough for him. But when he started working on his Little Richard and Eddie Cochran chops, there was a distressing time when all of the rockabilly and early rock and roll artists were either dead or disappearing before everyone’s eyes.
If you think about it, there were a good few years when rock and roll seemed to be completely dead, and the ones that were popping up weren’t all that great. Presley already had to deal with getting drafted, Little Richard had found Jesus and started moving on to a life in ministry, and Jerry Lee Lewis was under fire for the controversy of marrying his cousin, and now all the kids had to be proud of was people like Frankie Avalon.
And to Lemmy, he knew that things were going in the wrong direction when he heard artists like Bobby Rydell. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with Rydell’s music per se, but when listening back to any number of his songs for a while, it would have only felt anaemic compared to the visceral sound of Chuck Berry. The old guard grabbed you by the throat, but this was a much more gentle approach that was never going to work.
So once The Beatles came in, Lemmy knew that they couldn’t have picked a better time, saying, “The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis – all them people. And they were gone within two years. Chuck Berry was in jail. Jerry Lee’s career had been destroyed by the British press. Elvis was in the fucking army. And then we got Bobby Rydell and all them cunts. It took us a couple of years to get rid of them, then the Beatles showed up. That was all right.”
Judging by the rest of the rock scene around that time, though, Rydell was the least of people’s troubles. It was safe and inoffensive, but he looked like a true bad boy next to the likes of Pat Boone, who seemed to invent his entire career out of posing the question ‘what would Elvis Presley sound like if they took all of the danger out of his music?’
That’s not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, but that’s not what the real rock and rollers were listening to. That needed something that lit a fire in their belly, and Lemmy understood that every single time he got up onstage and opened that mouth full of gravel to sing ‘Ace of Spades’ or ‘Overkill’.
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