People think rock & roll is glamorous when, in actuality, it is comprised of brief bursts of glamour interrupted by long, soul-crippling hours spent inside your own head on a bus or in a van with the rest of the band as you travel to the next town.
When you were a kid, there was nothing cooler than driving to some far away land and getting to sleep overnight in a motel, but one imagines the charm is lost when you do it so often that you wind up peeing in the bathtub because you forgot this was a different room from the one the night before.
My point being: Imagine every day after a strenuous workout, you're put on a bus for 5-15 hours, dumped into a strange hotel room where you try to sleep but mostly just listen to Mike & Mike argue on TV, and then are forced to run errands all afternoon (press, in-stores, etc.), only to be dropped off at the venue where you work out strenuously again, and then it's back on the bus to the next town,
Most of us would go mental in the first week, but not Lemmy.
Not only was he made to be a bass player, he was an absolute road warrior. That's a lot of sitting on your ass, ladies and gentlemen. When I saw Lemmy standing tall to sing into a microphone positioned above him, it always looked to me like the man just wanted to stretch out after all that time on the bus.
Thing is, nobody will remember the miles. You don't get jack shit for the amount of time and effort it actually took getting to the fucking show each and every night.
But Lemmy was a guy who took that all in stride. If he'd been born centuries ago, he'd have been a pirate, and a damn good one at that. Why? Because, sure, the raping and the pillaging is great, but if you want to get anywhere in life, you've got to put in the miles.
That's what I hear when I listen to Motorhead: the long, hard trudge and the victory of living to fight another day.
Whatever majesty the name Motorhead came to have was earned the hard way. There was no million-dollar media buy or full-scale PR blitz, there was just a man who built himself into a bigger-than-life hero to millions not by taking the world by storm all of a sudden, but inch by inch, town by town, until nobody can imagine Lemmy not being there.
Today is the first day of Lemmy not being here and the only solace I can find is in imagining that Heaven and Hell are probably still fighting over who gets him, as if they have any say in the matter
well said. I like the part about the microphone...
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