How I became hooked to Motorhead....The Story Of An Insignificantly Significant Part Of My Life....

Rajarshi

When it comes to perfection there are bands which have a great content but lack in performance or they lack in content but have a great performance. The either kind doesn’t please me anyways.

However when it comes to Motorhead, things are different. You know what…I have been listening to rock bands almost from the time I left school....however there was always this thing of looking for more….as I seemed to be not getting enough.
I say Bryan Adams rocked me alright, and so did Bon Jon Jovi.
There was this Metallica guy who seemed to deliver a strong content with a lot of passion but the dash of abstractness, sort of kept me hanging in the same damn feeling of something more.
Ozzy Osbourne seemed to be cool with real distorted guitars, though it seemed Zakk Wylde his guitarist was doing most of the job, and who has now parted ways with the band and formed Black Label Society which to me is like Ozzy Osbourne Part II, though this part seems to be more real…Ozzy fans would kill me for this…
Iron Maiden always seemed to take me off from the bed, with this sudden sparkle of dynamism and Judas Priest with the great Rob Halford seemed equally great.

I have been listening to Metallica most of the time, but you know, suddenly one fine day when I couldn’t keep myself flunking from a computer programming test, it seemed I accidentally stumbled upon a weird, nasty, demon featured guy with a scary looking guitar (I didn’t know that it was a bass) appeared on a wiki page.
I started to flood my mind with all possible things the guy could do, like ripping apart human fingers or butchering animals with his demonic stature and all stuff like that… and I left the page immediately.
The hand of destiny shows me a youtube clip of this guy roaring in some sort of a crackle type of voice, uttering something, and the audience, in the front was going crazy. Are they nuts? Is the guy cooking up an evil prayer or something? Is everyone doped…my perception of the guy’s nature...just graduated to the next level of notoriety. No!!! I can’t see this. By the way…the song (if that was a song) was Rock Out…!!! From Motorizer album.

No…No…Never...Urgghhh…Ugly... Back to Metallica…declared James Hetfield as the ultimate God as if to counteract “that” newly found demon on earth. This went on.
Almost of the same time when I saw the clip of Orgasmatron from the ‘Live In Brixton’ videos (that seemed to be one of the best and iconic performances of Motorhead…which I corresponded later...but anyways…), I was convinced that this guy was a true messenger from hell and following him was sure to bring wrath upon my humble life..

But......!!! There was this something…this weird something which kept me revisiting that wiki page...again and again…
At this point I must tell you, that my flunking of the programming test continued and chances of getting promoted in my office went from an insignificant haze to a half-baked dot. Better jobs…I can’t think of it…distant dream for sure….

Then it happened!!! Big Bang in my humble universe…you see…

It was a decent summer morning, when the blinds were drawn in my room and I was desperately looking for something to get through the test, like a brainwave or something.
And an unknown hand pushed me into this youtube clip where the man enters the scene, speaks in a gravelly tone(as if he just swallowed a glass of nails)… “This song is the best song from Inferno(album) in my opinion and so does my colleague and that’s why I **** play it. It is called ‘In The Name Of Tragedy’ (with reference to William Shakespeare, it seemed) and he swears and points out to this another guy who sort of looks like a pirate but holds a decent looking guitar (at least better than the other one), who acknowledges the same, while rubbing off his sweat.
Then the guy looks up at the sky, closes his eyes, a few starting taps of the drums in the background and Brrrumm Brrrumm Brrrumm Brrrumm Brrrumm Brrrumm Brrrumm Brrrumm… …….lights flashing vigorously, eyes still closed (as if he just dived deep into a sea of creativity, where a single eye contact with the world, might jeopardise everything…..), by the way…his microphone also does the same thing…(pointed high and angled towards the sky…while he speaks to it without even looking) and thereby comes the song “In the Name of Tragedy” crashing in my room.
You know what how it sounded? For the first time in my Rock N Roll Listening sessions, this seemed to be totally different….

At this point of time I must tell you that as a child I always had a fascination for railway engines, especially the ones which made a chugging noise, like the steam engines, like the diesel engines (I hated the electric ones...somewhat). As a child I was fascinated by the powerful rhythms they had (jug jug jug jug jug jug jugggg….) the power it had…and the force that thing goes with, across the landscape at night, with the echoing tooooooooot or the blunt Pommmmmmm…....to knock out my dreams, shaking my bed (The house where I was brought up is located close to the railway tracks….and I could easily differentiate as to whether a metropolitan train or a freight train or a powerful unstoppable express passed by….based on the frequency my bed got rocked and which was proportional to the train’s speed or the sheer weight it was carrying….).

To you, I might seem to digress, but the reason I tell you this is because…
What if a same locomotive of the chugging type, puffing smoke, with an endless trail of compartments and with an infinite horsepower comes rushing to your room through a big hole in the wall, your floor dancing, your walls shaking, then a sandstorm starts to brew in … and the train, blasting its siren rattles past you, and makes its way out through another big hole at the other wall…and once it passed away....you are once again left alone, null and void…struck in awe, thinking what just happened, as the walls start to reorient itself again, preparing for a fresh impact….

Damned!!! What was that…??? And I had to experience the same number again and again. Each time the same feeling….
I was hooked…

This was Motorhead to me. Experiencing it was synonymous to confronting a powerful locomotive driven in a sandstorm…puffing its way to glory.
That’s Rock N Roll!! That’s Motorhead. That is it…..I have found it…..and this was what I had been looking for, I believe..

Well at this point, he no longer looked like a demon to me and when I got through the lyrical content, I was overwhelmed with the literary aspect it possessed…..The man must be well read for sure…so let him be inducted to my hall of fame….and so be it…..
(I learnt that he used to gobble PG Wodehouse like no one else before…so you see…where all that stuff comes from…right…and he was a well read World war II historian too as he could tell easily, the make of the tanks, bombers and artilleries used in the war….enough to prove a professor wrong…
Hitler and the ways of the Nazis, interested him the most, though he never promoted the same…He used to say…if you ignore something…it gathers strength…just like the way, world ignored Hitler in the beginning and one fine day, there he came and slaughtered half of the world. )

Oops...and I digress again!!

Well stage appearance was the best part. Especially the entry and the closure as well.
The entry was like, the man makes this Brrrumm Brrrrumm sound in his bass (OK!! This is the famous Rickenbacker bass), and enters the scene puffing on his cigarette and growls the words “Good Evening!! Are you doing all right!! < A pause>
Will soon fix that!! We are Motorhead.. and we play Rock N Roll” (As if all the other bands plays everything, other than Rock 'N' Roll. Sarcasm!! Hmm... OK...Noted...)
And that’s it, the man blows out his cigarette and starts vigorously strumming his bass, just like one play rhythm on a lead guitar (even faster than that…) and that’s it!!!
Here comes the crushing song….Doctor Rock!!! And the world just fades away…

The closure was terrific too. You see, this was almost like a tradition that he used to close the ear shattering, jaws dropping show with the same number all the time - Overkill.

Once the number approaches the end, he would lift up his bass and point it like a machine gun towards the audience (as if to give a pink slip to all... office goers, lunch box carriers, watch out for this), and does this shooting act while still strumming at his bass. A 'Jimmy Hendrix' influence or a 'Chuck Berry', not sure.

Later he would lift the bass further high, and slam at it thrice, then bump it on the floor against the amps, tuning those at full volume, huddle up with his "colleagues", take a bow towards the thunderstruck folks, wave his hands and "whoosh" he's gone....

(Dear Readers: You must kill the lights in your peaceful room and watch the next video...Make sure to turn on the brightness and the volume of your computer to the max...Full Screen...It's Motorhead folks and you have to crank it all up to do it justice...).

The effect was, that I had been looping through these videos again and again and I was hooked.
I started to feel a sense of power, seriously, a power of thousand locomotives chugging vigorously around me…hooting intermittently…and I seemed to gather speed in my endeavors. Surprised? Trifling fact? Childish? Its true.

You know what, I started to put a tremendous “loco-effort” on my career and I cleared the test and a couple of interviews too…Thanks Lemmy!!! You had delivered me from STAGEFRIGHT…..!!!

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THE ART OF GROOMING