“The purest voice”: Who did Lemmy consider the king and queen of rock and roll?
There’s a certain hierarchy when it comes to rock and roll. No matter how many times people try to reinvent the wheel and make something that is beyond anyone’s comprehension, there’s a good chance that someone else has either already thought of it or made something even better years before. But making something off the wall is for the adventurous, and Lemmy was content to do exactly what it says on the tin whenever he counted off one of Motörhead’s tunes.
Then again, Lemmy’s power trio is far from the one-trick ponies that people make them out to be. Lemmy’s voice may have stayed the same throughout every single album, but not many people can claim to go from pure metallic fury on Overkill to making an adventurous concept album on 1916 to even slip in a handful of straight blues songs in the latter half of his career like ‘Whorehouse Blues’.
But listening to where Lemmy got his education from, he wasn’t listening to anything that many of his friends hadn’t heard at the time. There was a great rock and roll scene when he started, but Lemmy also had a greater appreciation for it because he knew of the moments before rock and roll existed.
Before Chuck Berry or Elvis Presley came along, most people of his generation only had to worry about people like Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby to listen to. Music was solely made for enjoyment at a cocktail party in most people’s eyes, but the minute that the kids heard music that deliberately pissed off their parents, they knew it was far from evil. This was the next generation coming in, and Little Richard was at the forefront of everyone’s minds whenever he sang.
If you look at anyone from Paul McCartney to Mick Jagger, everyone from the 1960s had that moment where they heard Richard’s throaty scream launch out of the speakers on tunes like ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Tutti Frutti’ and decided that they wanted to do that too. But if there’s one thing that Lemmy could thank Richard for, it’s bringing androgyny into the picture and letting people be free to be themselves whenever they perform.
Despite having many rock and roll monarchs, Lemmy felt that Richard was fit to wear both crowns, saying, “Little Richard inspired me for vocals. He had the purest, most joyous rock’n’roll voice. He certainly wasn’t into girls — he was the king and queen of rock’n’roll. There was great music then, and it all seems to have gone to shit now. I know it sounds like I’m an old, miserable, crotchety bastard — and believe me, I am — but it’s true.”
But as much as people consider the 1950s style of rock and roll passé, Richard’s voice has become immortal because it never truly disappeared. Because if you look at every single rock vocalist that has come after him, they are only seeking to copy what Richard did, whether that was Robert Plant turning it into the sounds of Led Zeppelin or Chris Cornell turning it into an air raid siren with Soundgarden.
And while Lemmy has developed a reputation as the clearest example of what rock and roll should be, he was never looking for that kind of title. He was only a student of what had come before, and Richard may as well have been his musical teacher when he was strumming his first songs.
