The “nonsense” music legend Lemmy thought was a conman
If Lemmy didn’t like something, the whole world would know before nightfall… and he spent most of his mornings asleep.
Any rock and roll fan can tell dishonesty a mile away. Even though any artist will try to get their audience on their side and listen to what they have to say, there are only so many times that someone could sell out before they start looking like a salesman who happens to play guitar. Although Lemmy never minced any of his words whenever he sang, he felt that some rock icons were the biggest conmen he had ever seen.
Because looking at where Motörhead went, there wasn’t one lyric that came out of Lemmy’s mouth that he didn’t mean. Even if he was talking about living on the edge and working the rock and roll lifestyle to its very extreme, there was no doubt that he, in fact, did behave like an outlaw and swigged more booze than anyone else could have.
And looking back on his resume, it’s almost expected that he would have that wild reputation. This was a man who served as a roadie for Jimi Hendrix and helped guide psychedelic rock act Hawkwind to stardom, so it was a pretty safe bet that he wasn’t spending every night after the show with a pair of slippers and a glass of milk before going to bed.
But rock and roll wasn’t only about the good time spirit that Lemmy talked about. People wanted to challenge themselves when listening to lyrics, and compared to the other wordsmiths of the late 1960s, no one came close to Bob Dylan. If The Beatles dared to ask us what it sounded like to think outside the box, Dylan went beyond rock altogether to talk about the greater problems with the world.
As David Bowie would later explain, “It was Bob Dylan who brought a new kind of intelligence to pop songwriting.” He moved the likes of The Starman, the Fab Four, Brian Wilson, and an array of other luminaries to reach further than the typical platitudes of pop and see how their songs could reshape a more liberated society.
At the same time, not everything Dylan said seemed to fit within the folk tradition. Outside of people chastising him for going electric, he wasn’t above throwing together songs that were full of nonsense from back to front, usually following up some of the greatest moments in his career, like Blonde on Blonde, with more lighthearted tracks off of Nashville Skyline or deliberately making something off-kilter on Self Portrait.
Even though Lemmy had a great deal of respect for what Dylan had done, he thought that he was a master at conning the audience as well, telling Louder, “I did like Bob Dylan, I thought he was great, but he was a great con man! He strung a lot of nonsense together and made it seem like it was really important.”
The thundering Mötorhead frontman continued, “‘Masters Of War’ was my favourite because that was straight down the line, right in the bollocks, but stuff like ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’, about going to America with Columbus, that’s just nonsense!”
Then again, that kind of approach usually works a lot better with Dylan behind the microphone. Sure, he might not have come over with Columbus like Lemmy said, but going through his discography, he puts himself in those situations as if he’s posing the question to the rest of us, as we contemplate what we would have done if we saw the darker side of American history that he was talking about.
Moreover, this was pioneering stuff. Nonsense of not, nobody had ever heard it before, and that spirit would soon result in the likes of ‘I am the Walrus’, the wail of psychedelia, and other branches of experimentalism. In fact, you could even argue that Lemmy’s own output is indebted to the anti-pop approach of his quirky ways.
There are moments where Dylan asks his audience to be a bit flexible with him, but Lemmy was never going to have to worry about that. He did exactly what it said on the tin as a rock and roll star, and even though some of his songs sounded similar, there was no doubt that he was speaking his truth, no matter how twisted and strange, whenever he looked up to sing.
As Dylan put it himself, “All I can do is be me, whoever that is.” Perhaps there’s more honesty in that ‘conman’ quip that anything more rudimentary that other songwriters try to peddle.
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