Lemmy - The embodyment of rock n' roll

Okay so I know it's been a while since I wrote anything and to be honest I've sat down and wrote like 20 different half entries and then deleted them cause I wasn't feeling it. I've even watched a ton of movies lately its just been sooooo incredibly hard to find the motivation with everything going on in my life. So I figured that I would just force myself to write about one of movies I saw recently; the 2010 documentary Lemmy.

Okay so, the focus of this film is the front man of the pioneering thrash metal band Motorhead; Lemmy Kilmister. Any one who is into metal has a clear picture of Lemmy in their head: long hair, welcoming mutton chops, a giant witchey looking mole on his cheek and a gravely cigarette and booze infused voice. But it wasn't until I saw this film that I really realized how seasoned and epic this dude really is.

So basically this film is about his past as well as his present. Through the old footage of him playing in the 60's through to the 2000's and the plethora of interviews from rock and metals most important figures you see just who this guy, who's old enough to my grandfather, really is. In the 60's he rolled as a guitar tech for freaking Hendrix and toured as was around the biggest acts of the time. Through the 60's Lemmy was in a fairly big band at the time called the Rockin' Vickers who had a few big singles in Europe. In the 70's he joined a popular space rock band called Hawkwind where he developed his bass style of using chords and double stops as apposed to alot of the bass players at the time who would stick to the single note basslines, this style (as well as the insane loudness and the sheer chunkiness of it all) basically became the signature sound of Motorhead. In 1975 tho Lemmy was fired after being arrested at the US-Canada border in Detroit on cocaine charges (that were dropped eventually because it wasn't coke, it was speed).

That year Lemmy met up with a group of meth addicts that he connected with and started the first incarnation of Motorhead. They were of course well known for their song Ace of Spades which has been in like 14,00 different videos games (one of Lemmy's hobbies is gaming). Of course over the years they switched out and fired members and now Lemmy is the only origional member in the band, but he is still rocking like his counterparts in their 20's.  Lemmy is now an aging rocker living in a shitty little LA apartment, living the hard life, and jamming with greats like Metallica and Dave Grohl

He lived his life for rock and roll and all of the party favors that came with it: lsd, weed, meth, JD and his always present Marlboro red's. You would expect that after like 40 years as a rock star constantly drinking and doing drugs would have destroyed his body and his brain like many of the other rock stars who hardly made it out alive.

This film was really really well filmed well researched and well developed. The interviews with some of rocks greats were great and you really got a feel of the amount of respect the music community gives him. I absolutely loved this doc and give it a speed-infused 9-10.