The three artists Lemmy claimed started rock and roll: “You can’t really tell who did the first one”
Lemmy was part of one of the last generations of rock stars who could remember the birth of the genre. Even though Motörhead didn’t blow up until well after the golden age of rock and roll, he knew the moment when the world was set on fire by people brandishing guitars and singing songs about wanting to party until the crack of dawn. There was definitely a hierarchy around the best of the best, and Lemmy had three pioneers in mind when sculpting the architects of rock.
Then again, Motörhead’s music doesn’t exactly sound like old-time rock and roll when you think about it. Aside from being one of the most badass frontmen in the world, Lemmy wrote the kinds of songs that felt like they were teetering on the edge of chaos half the time, usually making something that was closer to hard rock and metal than anything rock and roll.
Once you start digging a bit deeper, though, you start to see the cracks a little bit more. Sure, there are influences from people like the MC5 and even The Stooges in some of their material, but there are as many traces of everyone from Jerry Lee Lewis to Chuck Berry to Little Richard as well.
For Lemmy’s money, he was convinced that Little Richard helped break the door down for his style of singing, saying in the documentary Lemmy, “He was the best rock singer ever. Him, Elvis, and Jerry Lee Lewis. You can’t really tell who did the first one, but all of them started rock and roll.”
While it’s a lot easier to call all of them rock and rollers in the early days, the one common thread between Richard, Lewis and Elvis was their ability to shock the people. Compared to the more refined artists of their day, people legitimately thought people like Richard and Lewis were batshit crazy for what they were doing onstage, usually letting the music carry them and laying into their pianos.
Out of every rock star of the 1950s, Elvis seemed to be the one person who made it okay for middle America to like the genre. Since the racial tension in the US was still alive and well during the 1950s, hearing a white man actually cutting loose to this kind of music while shaking his ass singing ‘Hound Dog’ helped launch thousands of other rock and roll bands afterwards.
In reality, all three of them should be commended for spearheading the British Invasion before it even had a name. While The Beatles were still schoolboys listening to music, hearing songs like ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ and ‘A Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ warped their DNA into rock and rollers overnight.
That rough-and-tumble attitude also bled into virtually every Motörhead release they ever made. They might have put on a lot more distortion and played as loud as possible, but when you listen to songs like ‘Overkill’ and ‘Ace of Spades’, there’s still that bluesy edge that had one foot trailing back into the sounds of old time rock and roll. The originators can get same-y-sounding after a few tracks, but the reason why music sounds so eclectic today is because of the barriers they broke down.
