Lemmy Kilmister played his bass like a rhythm guitar. Strummed it with a pick, cranked it through a Marshall stack designed for guitars, and produced a sound that was technically incorrect by every standard of bass playing and became the foundation of an entire genre. He did this for forty years without changing his technique, his tone, his whiskey brand, or his opinion about anything.
“I don’t understand people who play bass with their fingers,” he said. “It sounds like a fart.” He wasn’t being diplomatic. He was never diplomatic. Diplomacy requires caring what the other person thinks, and Lemmy had decided around 1965 that other people’s opinions were interesting but irrelevant.
The Dare
Talk to Lemmy and within thirty seconds he’d assess you. Not your music taste — your constitution. He’d offer you a drink. Jack Daniel’s and Coke, his daily fuel for four decades, consumed in quantities that his doctors described as “incompatible with life” in everyone except, apparently, him. If you declined, he wouldn’t judge. He’d just note it, the way you’d note someone wearing a coat indoors.
He was a roadie for Hendrix before he was a musician. He took so much amphetamine that Hawkwind — a band whose other members were not exactly abstemious — fired him for it. He formed Motorhead the next day. “Born to lose, live to win” was the band’s motto. He meant both halves literally.
He lived in a two-room apartment on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles for the last fifteen years of his life. The walls were covered in Nazi memorabilia — not because he was a Nazi, a distinction he made constantly and that constantly failed to land. He collected it because it was the most dangerous-looking stuff he could find. The aesthetic was the point. He wanted his living space to look the way his music sounded: uncomfortable, aggressive, and impossible to ignore.
His Credentials
He played bass on over 22 Motorhead albums. He never took a year off. He never “experimented with his sound.” He never made a quiet record or an acoustic record or a record designed to win critical approval. Every album sounded like Motorhead because Motorhead sounded like Lemmy and Lemmy didn’t change.
He voted. He read. He had a vast collection of books on military history and could talk about the Western Front with the specificity of a historian and the perspective of someone who believed that wars, like bar fights, were best understood from the ground level. He played video games — slot machines, mostly, for hours at the Rainbow Bar and Grill in Hollywood, where he drank every day and where the staff installed a video poker machine at his spot at the bar.
He was 70 when he died, four days after being diagnosed with cancer. He’d played a show two weeks earlier. The doctors told him the cancer was terminal. He said: “I’ve had a good time.” He went home and died in his apartment, in his chair, with his boots on.
He played bass wrong, drank whiskey that should have killed him, and never changed his mind about anything. The consistency wasn’t stubbornness. It was integrity.