After some woodshedding and the recording of an aborted album, On Parole (which also came out in 1979, when the record label wanted to cash in), the group put out their real debut, Motörhead, in 1977. Taylor had taken drum lessons at the Leeds College of Music, and Clarke had played with Jimi Hendrix associate Curtis Knight in the group Zeus. Taylor and Clarke already knew each other and, according to Lemmy, they fought like brothers. Lemmy originally wanted a five-piece but settled for a trio. “If I had been caught with acid, those guys would have all rallied around me.” He formed Motörhead later that year, and shortly thereafter replaced the first lineup with Clarke and Taylor. “I was doing the wrong drugs, see,” he wrote in his autobiography (which, for the record, is Essential Rock Reading). He joined space-rock pioneers Hawkwind in ’71 but was kicked out after getting busted for possession of amphetamine sulphate in 1975. As Lemmy sings on that album’s acid-rock love song to himself “Capricorn,” “When I was young, I was already old.” Kilmister grew up a die-hard rock & roll fan (his hero to the end was Little Richard), and, in the late Sixties, he was a roadie for Jimi Hendrix and a member of the costumed group the Rockin’ Vickers. It’s not a total 360 view of the band that year (their live-in-Paris Peel Sessions are missing, as is any video content), but it’s holistic enough to show how and why they became one of the most important forces in hard rock, inspiring Metallica, Ramones, Mudhoney, and the black-metal group Immortal, among countless others.Īlthough Overkill was the band’s second official album, the band were seasoned pros when they recorded it. Then there are two live recordings, where you can hear the lineup that diehard fans call the Three Amigos - vocalist-bassist Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clark, drummer Phil “Philthy Animal” Taylor - in their most natural habitat, the stage, at two key points of the year, and a smattering of B sides. (When asked why he put the umlauts over Motörhead’s name, Lemmy said, “I thought it looked mean.”) In the box, there’s March 1979’s Overkill, the band’s most perfect single LP, in all its sleazy, knuckleheaded glory, and its slower, scuzzier sister, that October’s Bomber, which showed that three musicians could play as heavy as any larger-sized band. The highlights of Motörhead’s Year of Radical Thinking now comprise a new box set, 1979, which is a smart title since Lemmy would’ve wanted it plain and raw. In another time and another land, Lemmy would have been an outlaw country hero, a folk legend, but in London at the dawn of Thatcherism, he was a drug-fueled heavy-metal prophet. The lyrics ranged from lubricious (“Damage Case”) to ludicrous (“Over the Top”), and yet Lemmy was also the king of metal maxims: “The only way to feel the noise is when it’s good and loud” (“Overkill”), “The only proof of what you are is in the way you see the truth” (“Stay Clean”), “Dead men tell no tales” (“Dead Men Tell No Tales”). It was the best of metal, punk, and Capital-R Rock & Roll sledgehammered into half-hour wallops. The two records they put out that year, Overkill and Bomber, smacked of gritty, unpredictable, throbbing riffs and frontman Lemmy Kilmister sounded as if he had been huffing macadam and was coughing it up kernel by kernel. In 1979, Motörhead became the one band headbangers and punks could agree upon.
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