“The godfather” of rock, according to Dave Grohl
No genre is really off the table when it comes to Dave Grohl.
Although he may have his favourites, Grohl’s love of everything from ABBA to Thundercat to Led Zeppelin has made him the unofficial best friend of every single musician who has come after him. While the former Nirvana drummer may have helped carve out his own path in rock and roll, he admitted that none of his contemporaries would be making art if not for Lemmy Kilmister.
When Grohl was finding his sea legs as a musician, his first love began with The Beatles. Armed with a songbook of all their best tunes, Grohl would spend hours trying to dissect every chord in the song, eventually claiming that he learned the basics of harmony by listening to the Fab Four.
Once the punk revolution got underway, Grohl found his voice that existed beyond his bedroom. While he may have already been a fan of hard rock acts like Led Zeppelin and Kiss, the entire point of punk was being able to make the loudest music you could and saying how you felt with no regard for what anyone else thought.
Somewhere in between the sounds of punk and hard rock was Motörhead. Dating punk by a few years, Lemmy had already been a veteran of the scene, having turned in time in the psychedelic rock outfit Hawkwind. Wanting to create his own band in the vein of Detroit rockers the MC5, half of Motörhead’s discography feels like old-time rock and roll played at machine-gun speed, especially with Phil Taylor’s roaring double-bass drum.
Although they would often get painted in a corner as having only a few songs in their arsenal, Grohl was convinced that he wanted to make music from the minute that he heard them. First seeing them on an episode of The Young Ones while playing ‘Ace of Spades’, Lemmy was already the epitome of cool, looking like the kind of rock and roll troubadour who never took shit off anybody.
Despite the fact that punk would bring mayhem to the masses, Grohl still thought that Lemmy was the true architect of hard rock, telling Behind the Music, “Lemmy is the godfather. He’s the one where, if it weren’t for Lemmy, we wouldn’t be here.” Outside of the leather-clad rock and roll badass that most of us know, Grohl also remembered how warm the frontman could be as well.
First striking up a friendship with him in the late 1990s when Foo Fighters were getting off the ground, Grohl remembered the first thing Lemmy did was empathise with him, saying, “The first time I ever met Lemmy, I was at a strip club. And he leans over to me and says, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry about your friend, Kurt’. And for me, it was the perfect thing to say.”
That would be the beginning of a major friendship between Grohl and Lemmy, eventually asking the rock legend if he would collaborate with him on the heavy metal project Probot. In the documentary Lemmy, Grohl would also be seen lending his talents to some of Lemmy’s tracks, working on a hard rock version of ‘Run Run Rudolph’.
While Lemmy passed away in 2015, Grohl never stopped caring about his idol, eventually making songs on the album Concrete and Gold specifically to make him proud. Many artists have horror stories about meeting their idols, but from the first time he picked up the instrument to the final Motörhead show, Lemmy was always human at his core.
Who did Lemmy think was the greatest?
Well, when it came to Lemmy picking his own favourite members of the rock society, he was happy to share praise and gave the accolade to both a bassist and a guitarist separately, calling them the best on the planet in their field. His favourite bassist was none other than the wildly talent John Entwistle from The Who. A performer so bullish in his powerhouse displays, they nicknamed him The Ox.
But when it came to the guitar, it was only ever Jimi Hendrix who would take the crown. While Lemmy got the opportunity to roadie for Hendrix a handful of times, he never thought that anyone could come close to what he did on guitar, telling Louder Than Hell, “By the time he got to where he was going, he was the fucking best. You’ll never see a guitar player like him, ever. Van Halen and all them guys don’t even get close. The man would do a double somersault and come up playing. I learned a lot about performing [when] working as a roadie for Hendrix.”
