Lemmy passes away

[godofthunder]

   EXPOSE was a volatile band in it's short history they had like 4-5 drummers even more bass players. They called me Stumpy peeps (Spinal Tap) just another in a long line of bass players lol. I never felt comfortable wedged in between the  guitarist and drummer, it shows.  My predecessor Glenn Gaudin (awesome bassist in his own write with a storied career in the Boston music, we have since become friends and members of a elite fraternity) plays bass on the track, I got the video, I'll take it.  Hell I never saw it until about two years ago when I tracked my band mates down.  A pre Scott EXPOSE once opened for Motorhead, were basically booed off stage by Motorheads rabid fans. Ha!

[Highlander]

Missed him in Hawkwind... saw the next tour where they had Paul Rudolph on bass... knew of "Motorhead" from the Kings of Speed single so when it came out under the same name snapped it up and everything else that came out too... Saw the "original" line up  quite a few times from clubs to (No Sleep Til) Hammersmith, which was my "local" venue... about 15 minutes on the train... I met him a few times but my fondest memory was an early Motorhead gig in Cambridge (tour in support of the Chiswick release) when I played pinball with him... he'd been whipping everyone that played him (including me) and he left me his games to get ready to go onstage... it was pretty much the entire LP with City Kids, with Motorhead first and last number...

More stories, Gents...

[Dave W]

More about Lemmy's diagnosis and last days. Sad.

He was given two to six months to live and only had two days.

[Basvarken]

In this interview taken in november this year his speech already sounded very slurred. I can hardly understand what he says sometimes.

[gweimer]

Cancer took my dad after three years, a partial lung removed, as well as a kidney.  He was in a lot of pain, and the pain medication took away his sense of taste.  They offered him "maybe" five more years if he went to chemo, and after one session, he said screw it.  He got a couple more years anyway.
To give you, and most of us probably have a story like this, an idea of how quick some cancer can be - a 10 year old boy in the school where my kids were complained of stomach pains one day, and couldn't keep food down.  Ten days later, he had died of cancer that basically overtook his body.

To be honest, once the disease is going to take you, I consider it a blessing to have it come quick and be done.  Seeing prolonged suffering is much harder than a sudden death.

[nofi]

its advanced cancer that is found too late that makes it seem fast acting.

[Highlander]

Dad had skin cancer... diagnosis to death was 5 weeks... His doctor told us (privately) that it acts so quickly when it takes hold that he'd prefer to have this one if he had to have one... might sound odd but I got what he meant...

[Nocturnal]

RIP Lemmy. This has hit me harder than I expected. He was one of those rockers that you just expect to last forever. A one of a kind character.

[Highlander]

It's our age, Andy... all our musical heroes (or most) are just that little bit older than us, and their lifestyle is not the most beneficial for good health, and reaching 70, actively, is rare... Stones are the exception to all rules, especially Keef... but even he will pass...

[Dave W]

Lemmium?

[Basvarken]

Lemmy did not consider his music Heavy Metal.
He announced it every night as Rock n Roll...

[uwe]

It's only rock'n'roll if women can dance to it. That happened rarely at the three Motörhead concerts I witnessed over the decades. They had less chicks in the audience than Judas Priest.

But more than Rush! 

[Alanko]

I share the belief that this didn't exactly come out of nowhere. I thought Lemmy looked visibly weaker and smaller for much of 2015. I watched their Glastonbury set online, and there are two longish sections where Lemmy is offstage; during a guitar and drum solo respectively. The melodic and overly-lengthy guitar solo seemed oddly placed, creating a lull after the first few songs. I thought Lemmy looked ill there, with hollow cheeks and oversized aviators. Then there came the video of Lemmy stopping proceedings onstage after only playing a couple of songs. I thought his voice sounded shot there, like an emphysema patient really. I wasn't convinced he was only experiencing a transitory illness.

I guess Lemmy ultimately demonstrated that English rock stars really are just another strand of British eccentric.

[nofi]

i agree, not metal. like led zep, deep purple, scorpions and other hard rock bands that get tagged with the metal moniker. buncha' loud marshalls does not a metal band make.

[uwe]

It's a bit like the differentiation between erotic art and porn: "I know it when I see it!"

But it's difficult to determine a set of criteria that will always give you the right answer. I heard the newish Queensryche (post-Geoff Tate, the new singer is great, so was Tate, that rhymed ...) in the car today and I thought to myself that these guys are generally lumped together with others as thinking man's heavy metal, prog metal or melodic metal, but are they really?

Twisted Sister were regularly billed as heavy metal, but their music was actually light-weight. The Scorpions were sometimes tagged with it, sometimes not, but is their music so fundamentally different to Accept's which were always billed as heavy metal?

Manowar is of course (the one and only) "true metal"  and I guess most people agree that Judas Priest, Saxon, Anthrax and Iron Maiden are (though Maiden's music is much more progish in nature than Priests), but what about Black Sabbath? Bill Ward wasn't really a heavy metal drummer at all and what's so heavy metal about the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album (admittedly the Sgt. Pepper in their canon)? Even Priest would frequently stray from the recipe.



OTOH they sure knew how to turn rock'n'roll into heavy metal too, to many a sacrilege of Mr Berry's most famous work, but I think that is one of the most daring covers of an old chestnut, love the harmony guitars  :



The Heavy Metal Kids weren't heavy metal at all and the first band I read about that openly described itself as heavy metal in the mid-seventies was BÖC, yet for all their dark image Bloom's men were more of a versatile pop group, adept at many styles.





And before they were discovered as godfathers of punk, the MC5 were filed as heavy metal too (though really only their live album could be called that in places).



Ok, Metallica and Megadeth are metal. Dio said he was.

Essentially, heavy metal is a child of hard rock/heavy rock of the 70ies and that was in turn a child of the blues rock (they have that focus on riffs in common) boom of the late 60ies. The ingredients of Sunshine of your Love and Enter Sandman are not that different.

As I said: Whether girls dance to it gives you a pretty good clue!