The singer Lemmy said made musical nonsense: “Complete balderdash”
The cult that was built around Lemmy was never something that he wanted for himself.
To him, Motorhead was like any other rock and roll outfit, and he wanted to make sure that he gave the fans what they wanted rather than be put on a pedestal as an icon among men. The rest of the world may have had other plans for how they treated him, but Lemmy felt that even the greatest artists of all time had their fair share of periods where they proved themselves to be fallible in the studio.
Then again, it’s not like Lemmy had the greatest track record of multi-platinum records or anything like that. It took forever for Motorhead to get acknowledged by the masses, and even if we look at their presence in the cultural zeitgeist to this day, there aren’t that many people going out of their way to listen to the songs that aren’t named ‘Ace of Spades’ if they’re a fairweather metal fan.
But that’s part of the beauty behind Lemmy as well. From day one, he has always been the underdog, and he was willing to go up against any challenge if it meant that he could keep playing rock and roll. At the same time, the true tastemakers of the world were far more likely to go towards the artists that had something real to say like Bob Dylan or songs like ‘Killed By Death’ and ‘Love Me Like a Reptile’.
It’s not hard to see why, either. Dylan had been around for decades and has remained one of the most consistent songwriters of his generation. Even though every one of his albums has a much different tone going for it whenever he puts one out, you can never say that he phones it in whenever making a record, even to this day when putting out songs like ‘Murder Most Foul’. That doesn’t mean that Lemmy has to like everything he’s done, though.
The bassist would be the first to admit that Dylan has written some classic tunes, but he wasn’t about to treat every record he made as gospel, either, saying, “Fuck me, when Bob Dylan first came out he wrote a load of nonsense, complete balderdash! It was good balderdash, but it was still balderdash, and everyone used to go, ‘Oh, so deep!’” And at the risk of turning in my own credentials, he does have a point.
Like it or not, there are countless moments throughout Dylan’s career where everyone had to be wondering what the hell he was doing. His reinvention as a born-again artist was always going to be polarising, and even when he reached the 2010s, legends like Roger Waters were wondering what the hell he was trying to do when he started covering the classics on albums like Triplicate.
It’s not easy to hear, but the fact is that Dylan would have probably agreed with everyone calling him out for being fallible. He made Self Portrait with the intention that he would lose some fans in the process, and after being known as one of the leading figures of songwriting, being able to take his foot of the gas for a little while actually managed to benefit him in the long run by setting up boundaries between him and his audience.
Both he and Lemmy were each treated like gods in their prime, but the fact that they both could make albums that weren’t solid from front to back is a lot more human than making classic after classic. No one wants to be put on that pedestal for the rest of their lives, and after being on that musical merry-go-round, Lemmy knew that sustaining a good track record was a lot better than burning out far too quickly.
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