LEARNED ELDERS: Lemmy Kilmister

Anything I could say about one Lemmy Kilmister has probably already been said. The dude saw The Beatles perform in a bar in England back in the day. He was a roadie for Jimi Hendrix. His time with Hawkwind was not only that band's best years, but probably the absolute most perfect swirl of hippie energy with outlaw biker alpha male machismo that ever got etched into wax. I am still to this day amazed at Doremi Fasol Latido any time I dig the album out and put it to the turntable. And shit man, everyone knows about Motorhead. But the simple fact that the same guy who was singing and thunk up Hawkwind's "The Watcher" also came up with "Ace of Spades"... I don't know if anybody has ever been so goddamned perfect at very different ends of a spectrum.
Personally, in high school I rocked a jean jacket for a while with a Motorhead back patch. Of all the old Oui magazines my dad had stored under his bed, when I knew they were overlooked and I could embezzle a couple to keep in my room, inevitably the one with a long Motorhead interview was one I chose. This was an interview from the early '80s, and Lemmy was snorting lines of crank off a giant knife then, saying he had been doing it for 20 years and obviously nothing was wrong with him. The pictures had him and Philthy Animal Taylor rubbing motor oil all over a naked chick, and in the interview, Lemmy said, "Sex, drugs, and motor oil," which has been a phrase I toss out ever since. I don't know if anybody has ever known where it came from.
To this day, apparently, even as an old man, Lemmy still lives in the same shitty little Hollywood apartment he's been in since the '80s, and still drinks whiskey like a goddamned hellion. Still has the long hair and scowl, but oddly enough, probably knows more about music than most living human beings. I mean seriously, look beyond the drugs and mayhem and ultimate rock-n-roll persona, and you're talking about a guy that was living with Jimi Hendrix when Jimi still dabbled in soul. You're talking about a guy that sat in a bar and saw The Beatles play before that was an impossibility. You're talking about a guy that was a veteran of the early '70s festival circuit long before he became a 1980s rock icon. He has had his finger in a number of eras, and pretty much has sat on the mountain like a crazy hermit and witnessed the entire birth, growth, sprawl, and stagnation of rock-n-roll music itself.
And he's still unrepentant. There's no regret in him looking back at all. That's a good lesson - that all the fucked up shit you do, the mistakes and screw ups, it's all part of a process. And if you run from yourself, you're just gonna run yourself into another wrong turn. It's best to just soak it in, and move on. The natural world doesn't change drastically, so why should we? Sure, it's constantly changing, and Lemmy's career discography is about as wide-ranging a collection as you could probably get. And actually I had a partial MP3 of him doing "Ace of Spades" for a German commercial acoustically, like a return to those early Hawkwind roots. Why not? It's all part of what he is. We all have to just be what we are. There are always gonna be people that typecast and try to fit us into one mental photographic angle of how they view us, regardless of whether we fit that 24-7/365 or not. Just keep on being though. Sex, drugs, and motor oil.
And man, I wonder whatever happened to that jean jacket I had with the Motorhead back patch? The things I did in that jacket as a young aspiring rock-n-roll delinquent in Farmville, Virginia...

J.J. Krupert Top 13 Countdown - June '10 #12: "The Watcher" by Hawkwind

The ability to think is overrated because when you contemplate the entire universe and how there has to be other forms of life and how they not only do exist but have probably already interacted with us, and then you see people like Al Gore or that Elana Kagan Supreme Court bitch and how they look like reptiles in human form, and you sort of realize you are no better than the cows down the road behind the barbed wire, except at least the cows are like, "Fuck it man, I'm gonna chew some grass the fuck up all day long. And if everybody else walks that way, I'm gonna walk that way too. Hell yeah." But we are all self-important and righteous and like to pretend our life has some sort of higher purpose or that we need to do this or that or acquire a thing or leave things for our offspring or an endless myriad of confusing tangents running through the fucking brain that is so blessed to have the power to do so.
I sit in a room with four computer monitors aimed at my head, and a $100,000 microscope lumbering over my right shoulder, and I can feel the effects of these things inside my brain. My once sharpened billowing puffs of brain matter are dulled down and lacking focus and lacking just lacking all the way around overall. So because of this I have taken to going to the railroad tracks and just sitting there, looking at nothing, for at least four hours. I keep a 5-gallon bucket in the back of my truck for this very purpose, to flip over and sit on at the end of a walk, and look around, and whatever wonderful things I saw on my trip in, I keep in my brain to try and remember to fill the bucket with on my walk back, to try and sharpen the mind's edges again. But mostly I just sit there and look at things. That is the important part of this self-meditation. Smart phones and wi-fi beams and everything else you already know about, it does things. Pendulums don't just swing one way.
Also, I was somewhere lame recently, perhaps the tire store getting a new set of shoes put on the family Subaru (from 1997, in case you think I be rolling fat, which I am, but not the way you think), and I read an entire Rolling Stone article about Lemmy, who is really about as fucking great as you would think he is. And at the same time, I’d never want to be Lemmy, because I’d hate that life. But good goddamn, am I ever thankful there is a Lemmy in this crummy ass world.
STEAL "The Watcher"
NEXT UP: Perhaps my most favoritest example of DJ Screw's awesomeness ever.

(7s) LPs I Be Lusting After #4 - Space Ritual by Hawkwind

For some reason now that it’s gotten warm out and I drink beer like beer, I have hit a stoner rock phase. Tonight, right before bedtime, the two-year-old was rock-n-roll dancing with me naked (I was still wearing clothes), which consists of holding my hands and doing crazy bounces and jumps, to Kyuss. I said, “Hold up,” and went over and cut the stereo up louder, and she just giggled crazily and bounced higher. Having kids is the bestest thing you can do to make the world not be so goddamned sterile and fucking white. Anyways, the thing about the whole stoner rock genre, which credits itself springing from Black Sabbath basically, is that there used to be that whole British Space Rock genre that dabbled in this darkness, but Sabbath took the furthest. Uriah Heep has some wacky shit. And of course Hawkwind, when dialed in appropriately, is the fucking best shit there ever was. It’s really a shame they lived long enough to suck it up. I think they’re still touring, as old men acid casualties. But this live album, which I don’t even rightfully know if it was an album at any point, is the fucking shit. I am so bored with doing rap music now that I usually just want to do retarded shit like make ten songs of long two to three minute Hawkwind loops and pitch shift lyrics about spaceships made of granite.