tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3020960402708303830.post6491880169100893345..comments2024-03-28T10:05:08.122-04:00Comments on BLCKDGRD: Before We Go Any Further Here, Has It Ever Occurred to Any of You That All This Is Simply One Grand Misunderstanding?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3020960402708303830.post-21972281061439267222015-12-30T09:45:40.128-05:002015-12-30T09:45:40.128-05:00Lemmy: Killed by death after a hard rock life
Lud...<b>Lemmy: Killed by death after a hard rock life</b><br /><br />Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, <i>Financial Times</i><br /><br /><br />Ian Fraser Kilmister — his birth name — died on Monday in Los Angeles aged 70, and was lionised as the spirit of rock and roll. But he wasn’t quite that. Too obdurate to be the spirit of anything — the only spirits he recognised were the drinkable variety — he was rock and roll reduced to its hardest, most refractory element. The bass lines he played, forcing along his band Motörhead’s songs, summed him up: unapologetic, unstoppable, the distillation of heaviness.<br /><br />Although Motörhead never had the commercial success of contemporaries such as Iron Maiden they were more important, a bridge between different eras. Founded in 1975, the band arose from the wilder fringes of London’s hippy counterculture, epitomised by the group Hawkwind, which Kilmister joined in 1972 until leaving to start Motörhead.<br /><br />Despite his hippy background, he and his brutal new hard rock band were adopted by the punk generation, which otherwise affected to despise everything the likes of Hawkwind stood for. Successive waves of heavy metal bands proceeded to idolise Kilmister over the coming years, from the “new wave of heavy metal” scene in Britain in the late 1970s to US thrash metallers a decade later. Like a warped kind of national treasure, Kilmister became known to all by his nickname — Lemmy.<br /><br />Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1945, he came from the English Midlands, traditional home of heavy industry and also, not uncoincidentally, the birthplace of heavy metal. But unlike fellow Midlander Ozzy Osbourne, whose group Black Sabbath provided Motörhead with a powerful sonic model, Lemmy, who moved to north Wales as a child, had a strangely placeless bearing. He showed little nostalgia for his country of origin, and, having moved to LA in 1990, boiled his Californian life down to its least sunny essentials. His final home was just two blocks away from the bar where he spent most of his time.<br /><br />Motörhead’s songs were equally unvarying. The model was the self-titled single “Motorhead”, released in 1977 — an imposing juggernaut of a track, with crushing guitar riffs, rampant drumming and Lemmy’s guttural roar. “Don’t know how long I’ve been awake,” he rasped, while his band battered alongside him like a primitive but immensely forceful machine. The formula would not change over the next four decades. Instead it reached further stages of refinement in classics such as “Ace of Spades”.<br /><br />Motörhead were showing no signs of slowing up as Lemmy approached his 70th birthday on Christmas Eve. A new album, Black Magic, came out this year and a UK tour was due to begin next month. Kilmister was the only remaining original member. Although forced by illness to give up his beloved Jack Daniel's whiskey a few years ago, his lifestyle was as cussed and unalterable as his music.<br /><br />Amphetamines were his fuel, a drug that promoted in him a grim, ceaseless kind of hedonism — not so much pleasure as duty. He was a womaniser who supposedly slept with more than a thousand women, yet none of the dubious charm of a Don Juan attached itself to his warty features. He made no effort to look attractive — he was a toad from which no prince would emerge — and was heedless about his health. He had such a nihilistic outlook that his principal hobby was collecting Nazi memorabilia (although he insisted he had no such sympathies).<br /><br />He was intelligent — the song “Motörhead” features an inventive use of the word “parallelogram” — but chose to project a barbarian-like image. No one would choose to live like him nowadays, the biblical three score years and ten being no kind of achievement today, yet there was something exemplary about him. Unyielding to the end, he faced the prospect of mortality with heroic indifference. As one of Motörhead’s songs put it, with magnificent tautology, he was “Killed by Death”.mistah charley, ph.d.https://www.blogger.com/profile/06303695341246058680noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3020960402708303830.post-54948844901814328502015-12-29T10:45:15.445-05:002015-12-29T10:45:15.445-05:00The opening Gaddis quote reminds me of Mike Nichol...The opening Gaddis quote reminds me of Mike Nichols' 1970 film version of 'Catch-22', and Buck Henry's screenplay: Yossarian (Alan Arkin) goes to the whorehouse to tell Natley's Whore that he's been killed; he runs into Milo Minderbinder (John Voight), the sociopath running the black-market 'Syndicate', who observes that Yossarian's refusal to fly more bombing missions is "stupid. Nately never would have done that; Nately wouldn't have done anything that dumb." <br /><br />"He's dead," Yossarian says. Minderbinder nods. "Yes; but he died a rich man. He had over a thousand shares in the Syndicate." <br /><br />"He can't use them; he's dead." <br /><br />"Then his wife will get them," Minderbinder replies. <br /><br />"He wasn't married," Yossarian says. "Then his parents will get them." <br /><br />"They don't need it," Yossarian says. "They're rich." <br /><br />Minderbinder looks at Yossarian with a small, condescending smile. "Then they'll understand."Mongo, At The Momenthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00973606827337262084noreply@blogger.com