Dave Grohl is open to exploring any genre. Although he has his favourites, Grohl’s appreciation for everything from ABBA to Thundercat to Led Zeppelin has made him the unofficial best friend of every musician who has followed him. While the former Nirvana drummer may have helped forge his own path in rock and roll, he admitted that none of his contemporaries would be making art if it weren’t for Lemmy Kilmister.
Dave Grohl fell in love with The Beatles when he was just starting out as a musician. With a songbook of their best tunes, Grohl spent hours dissecting every chord. Eventually, he claimed to have learned the basics of harmony by listening to the Fab Four.
Once the punk revolution began, Grohl discovered a voice that existed beyond his bedroom. While he may have been a fan of hard rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Kiss, the entire point of punk was being able to make the loudest music you could and say whatever you wanted without caring what others thought.
Motörhead’s sound fell somewhere between punk and hard rock. Lemmy had been a punk veteran for a few years, having spent time with the psychedelic rock band Hawkwind. Desiring to form his own band in the vein of Detroit rockers the MC5, half of Motörhead’s discography feels like old-time rock and roll played at machine-gun speed.
Despite frequent labels of having few songs, Grohl knew he wanted to make music when he first heard them. When I first saw them on an episode of The Young Ones playing ‘Ace of Spades,’ Lemmy was already the epitome of cool. He looked like the kind of rock and roll troubadour who never took shit off anyone.
Despite the fact that punk would cause mayhem among the masses, Grohl believed that Lemmy was the true architect of hard rock, telling Behind the Music, “Lemmy is the godfather. We wouldn’t be here without Lemmy.” Outside the leather-clad rock badass, Grohl remembered the frontman’s warm side.
Grohl first met Lemmy in the late 1990s, when the Foo Fighters were just getting started. He recalls that the first thing Lemmy did was empathise with him. He said, “The first time I ever met Lemmy, I was at a strip club.” And he leans over to me and says, ‘Hey, Kurt, I’m very sorry about your friend. And it was exactly what I needed to say.”
That marked the start of a close friendship between Grohl and Lemmy. Eventually, the rock legend asked Grohl to collaborate on the heavy metal project Probot. In the documentary Lemmy, Grohl was also seen lending his talents to some of Lemmy’s tracks, working on a hard rock version of “Run Run Rudolph.”
While Lemmy died in 2015, Grohl never forgot about his idol. He wrote songs for the album Concrete and Gold specifically to make him proud. Many artists have horror stories about meeting their idols. But from his first guitar strum to the last Motörhead show, Lemmy was always human at heart.
