The gigs Lemmy said made Jimi Hendrix sound terrible: “The worst stuff you’d ever heard in your life”
The year is 1967, and the character later to be known as Lemmy is just beginning to reach his final form.
Most people won’t know what hit them when Motörhead first crashed the charts, but every single person who ever picked up a guitar and wanted to make some noise will forever be indebted to hearing songs like ‘Ace of Spades’ for the first time. Lemmy never claimed to be one of the legends of his time by any stretch, but sometimes becoming a rock god means following in the footsteps of other musical icons.
It’s not like Lemmy didn’t have a healthy diet of rock and roll, either. From the first minute he heard Eddie Cochran play, he knew that he wanted to play guitar. Sure, it was to see if he could get laid, but it was all in service to turning every show into a party as well. And no one could have found a better place to start than listening to The Beatles when they first started playing clubs around England.
While Lemmy always admired the Fab Four’s garage-rock roots, it wasn’t until he heard what bands like MC5 were doing that he had a real conversion moment. He wanted to take that kind of chaotic sound and combine it with the visceral shout of Little Richard, and judging by the number of times that he redefined what heavy metal was going to sound like, it’s not like he didn’t give us all a lot to chew on.
But before any of the garage rock acts started making waves, Lemmy was a hippie working in, shall we say, the recreational pharmaceutical industry. He was selling any drugs that he could find, but when he got the chance to become a roadie for Jimi Hendrix, he jumped at the opportunity with both hands. And when you look at what Hendrix did to the guitar, can you really blame him?
Hendrix was a one-off that no one had ever seen before, and the kind of things that he did on one guitar is still unheard of to this day. All the theatrics of playing the guitar with his teeth and behind his head were mesmerising for anyone to see, but when listening to his off days, Lemmy remembered that Hendrix did have his fair share of moments where all of that magic seemed to clock out for a little bit.
Although Lemmy was the first to say that there would never be another like Hendrix, he knew some of those audiences were getting excited over absolute garbage, saying, “He’d just walk on stage, and people would go ‘Ahhh’, even on his bad nights. A lot of the time, Hendrix was rubbish, the worst stuff you’d ever heard in your life. He’d be out of tune, stompin’ on his fuzz box. He’d be terrible, but he’s still in command. Some people carry themselves.”
As far as rock and roll is concerned, though, that’s practically a compliment. Hendrix was always the consummate showman whenever he was onstage, and while not every solo was one of the most incredible sounds in the world, seeing him make love to his guitar almost every night was what the people were really coming for, which came in handy when Lemmy started adopting his own approach to the stage by setting up his mic as high as possible.
If nothing else, the fact that this was a story about Jimi Hendrix is almost reassuring for many guitarists. Here is someone known as one of the greatest musicians to ever live, and to know that even they have their off days when things aren’t going according to plan is a better way of remembering him rather than this untouchable deity.
