An ode to one of rock ’n’ roll’s most grizzled survivors

Lemmy Kilmister, who died at 70 Monday, played hard, partied hard and lived hard

A voice like shrapnel and a bass tone to match. A steady diet of rock ’n’ roll and rebellion fuelled by, until not so long ago, a bottle of Jack Daniels per day and sexual escapades too numerous to count. Plus: mutton chops.

Lemmy Kilmister, singer and bass player of Motorhead, somehow lived to be 70 before a surprise cancer diagnosis killed him on Monday. He played hard, he partied hard and he lived hard; and he leaves a venerable oeuvre eclipsed only by his reputation as one of rock’s most grizzled survivors. For sheer durability in a field where many a legend is undone by substances or suicide by age 30, only Ozzy Osbourne and Keith Richards come close to Lemmy, and neither is as frequently referred to by only his first name.

Kilmister’s story is a familiar one for young men growing up in postwar England: born with nothing, saved by the Beatles. Christened Ian Frasier Kilmister on Christmas Eve of 1945 in industrial Stoke-on-Trent — noted for its coal slag and filthy air — Lemmy was the son of a librarian and an RAF pilot who quickly made tracks.

Music was an inspiration, particularly early rockers such as Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran. But man cannot live on music alone.

“I decided to pick up the guitar partly for the music, but girls were at least 60 per cent of the reason I wanted to play,” he wrote. “I discovered what an incredible . . . magnet guitars were . . . That’s the only thing that ever worked so immediately in life. And I never looked back.”

Playing in bands through the 1960s, Kilmister was soon at the periphery of a scene revolutionized by the Fab Four, whom he saw perform at the legendary Cavern Club in their native Liverpool as a teenager.

After roadying for Jimi Hendrix, Kilmister got his first taste of fame in the early 1970s with the psychedelic space-rock band Hawkwind. Though the band was nowhere near as famous as Motorhead would become, it created a legend of its own.

Alas, Kilmister was a self-described “speed freak” during his time in the band and was fired from Hawkwind after getting busted for possession on the Canadian border in 1975.

Fortunately for Kilmister, a band would soon exist where everyone’s drug-taking habits were attuned or, at least, whose members could be replaced at Lemmy’s whim. This was Motorhead — slang for “speed freak” — formed in 1975.

“Lemmy was at the beginning of heavy metal,” Alice Cooper said. “Maybe even pre-Black Sabbath.”

Kilmister, less interested in genre distinctions, would insist that Motorhead was just a rock ’n’ roll band.

Motorhead would go on to record more than 20 records and tour endlessly. Though best known for its hit “Ace of Spades,” the band’s catalogue was far deeper. And the sound came with a lifestyle.

Asked in 2008 what songs were inspired by substance use, Kilmister replied, “All of them.”

Kilmister’s penchant for German and Nazi memorabilia also was often remarked upon. “I like having all this stuff around because it’s a reminder of what happened,” he wrote. “I don’t understand people who believe that if you ignore something it’ll go away.”

This was not a pose. Offstage, Lemmy was still Lemmy.

“It was not a facade, not an act,” Greg Olliver, co-director of Lemmy, told the Washington Post. “He would walk around his house in tight jeans with a bullet belt, a rock-show belt. There was no Lemmy in sweatpants.”