KILLED BY DEATH: THE LONG AND BOISTEROUS LIFE OF LEMMY

"BLUE" JIMMY:  MOTORHEADBANGER

BLIND DOG OZZY:  NEUROTIC CHIHUAHUA

"BLUE" JIMMY:  I was on my way to the liquor store when a friend called me and told me that Lemmy had died.  Needless to say, I grabbed a little more adult refreshments than I had planned.  Not because I was so sad, but because I wanted to celebrate the life of a man who had given me so many blown stereo speakers, so much irreparable hearing damage and so much joy in my life.

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Thanks,  Lemmy!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  I don't need to write any kind of long biography here.  The life of Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister has been well documented in books, film and the truckload of recordings he left behind.  He played in a few groups in his early days but it was as the voice and bassist of the band Motorhead that he and his bandmates took Hard Rock/Heavy Metal to another level in the late 70's and early 80's.  Sounding like Blue Cheer jamming with Iggy and The Stooges in the MC 5's garage, they scared the s**t out of a lot of people who thought Loverboy and The Cars were exceedingly hard rock.  They later opened the gates for New Wave Of British Heavy Metal bands like Iron Maiden, Saxon, Venom, Raven, Angelwitch and any others who dared to be heavy at a time when musical tastes were leaning toward more commercial sounds.

BLIND DOG OZZY:  When I heard the song, "Overkill" I thought the record player was stuck on the wrong speed!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  But Lemmy was a one-of-a-kind rocker even in an era of colorful personalities.  His voice was more Neanderthal Man than pretty boy pop idol and he was unique in that he played a Rickenbacker bass through a distorting Marshall amp and often played "lead" bass that often overpowered his guitar playing band members.  

BLIND DOG OZZY:  And you couldn't hear s**t except ringing in your ears for hours after the show!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Some memorable Lemmy moments I remember:  Watching  the original Motorhead open for Ozzy with Randy Rhodes on his first tour of America and blowing the first few rows off the face of the earth; Lemmy playing with a ripped speaker cone at the Santa Monica Civic and stopping the show and threatening to punch misbehaving skinheads and punkers at The House Of Blues.  He was older, wiser, uglier, nastier, meaner yet nicer, than any of his contemporaries.  He had a sense of style that everyone in Rock has imitated.

BLIND DOG OZZY:  And he made it cool to have warts on your face!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  But what I really respected about Lemmy was that unlike Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and others, he was no Rock 'N' Roll Casualty.  He had many women, smoked, drank, did hard drugs and hard tours yet paced himself, handled his fame, did what he wanted, lived a simple life and lived to be 70 years old while still recording and touring until the end of his life.  The only thing that could kill Lemmy was Death itself and he probably lived exactly as long as he was supposed to.  We will never have to see a video on YouTube of an old, fat, gray-haired, pathetic Lemmy trying to do a "reunion" tour!

BLIND DOG OZZY: Thanks, Lemmy!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Sake's Alive!

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Wow!  Wow!

bluejames61@hotmail.com

ADVANCED BLUES 101: SLIDE GUITAR -- FORGOTTEN ART OF THE LOWDOWN BLUESMEN

"BLUE" JIMMY:  LOWDOWN BLUESMAN 

PLAYING SLIDE GUITAR WITH  THE NECK OF A WINE BOTTLE

BLIND DOG OZZY:  NEUROTIC CHIHUAHUA

"BLUE" JIMMY:  What it is?  The art of Blues Slide Guitar has been around in America for more than 100 years!

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Longer than anyone YOU know!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Like any good thang, Lowdown Bluesmen adapted, improvised extrapolated, borrowed ...

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Stole!!!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  ... This technique of playing the guitar from Hawaiian guitarists who invented this style of playing and toured the United States in the early 1900's.

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Most folks don't know that Hawaiian music was the most popular type of music in the U.S. at that time!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Traveling medicine shows which featured all manner of exotic entertainment (musicians; magicians; freaks; ventriloquists; strongmen; acrobats) kept the crowd entertained while smooth-talking snake oil peddlers sold their goods.  Down South, many early Bluesmen were in the audience and were mesmerized by the sound of Hawaiian guitarists in these shows who laid steel bars against the strings of their guitars and made some mind-blowing sounds!

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Woooooooo!!!  

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Out of this tradition, came slide guitar playing Bluesmen like Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie Johnson and Tampa Red.  One of the most accomplished of  these early Bluesmen was The Great Muddy Waters, who came straight off the plantation with an acoustic guitar and a bottleneck and ripped through popular music history right up to his death in 1983, jamming with the likes of  Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones.

BLIND DOG OZZY:  And had girlfriends young enough to be his daughters!!!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Slide guitar of course, made its way into the the Rock era with players like Johnny Winter, Duane Allman, Rory Gallagher, Jimmy Page and Joe Perry  raising goosebumps with some nasty slide licks on their recordings.  Contemporary  Blues players like Bob Brozman,  Sonny Landreth, Dave Hole, and Eric Sardinas take slide into places Robert Johnson would be proud of!

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Don't forget the most famous slide riff of all time -- "B-B-B-B-Bad to the Bone!"--- George Thorogood!  He stole that s**t from Muddy Waters!`

"BLUE" JIMMY:  But starting around the 1990's, when rock musicians stopped listening to The Blues, slide guitar got reduced to a "sound effect" and became a novelty used by some alternative rock guitarists for a laugh.  

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Listen to those half-assed records from that era -- The joke is on them!!!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  My style of slide guitar is based on what the early Delta Bluesmen started and continued right on up to Muddy, Elmore James, Hound Dog Taylor, and J.B. Hutto, using mostly a cheap guitar with high action and a slide made of various materials.  The example in the photos is a Fender resonator guitar which is an inexpensive version of the National and Dobro guitars used by early Bluesmen who were lucky if they could afford one of these contraptions.  Made mostly of brass with a shiny chrome finish, these guitars were ingeniously invented with an acoustic speaker cone that amplified the sound of the guitar without the use of electricity.  This was a big deal for guitarists in the early days before electric guitar, who had to compete with vocalists, strings and big-ass, noisy horns in an orchestra setting!  My resonator used to be shiny like a mirror but after spilling beer, sweat and spit all over it for years, it kinda looks like something Blind Boy Fuller played back in the 30's!

BLIND DOG OZZY:  You should clean that goddamned thing!!!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  The slide I mostly use is a tapered brass slide which combines the nasty sound of a rusty jackknife early Bluesmen used with the slippery tone of a glass slide which gets you all these pretty boy tones that modern players use.  The photo below is just a sampling of all the types of  slides  you can use:   

           

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Left to right you got:  A Zippo lighter; a heart-shaped aluminum tube; a Pyrex glass slide; the neck of a wine bottle (why slide guitar is sometimes referred to as "bottleneck" guitar); a deep purple dome-end glass tube; a ceramic skull & bones slide; a spark plug wrench; an old Coricidin cold medicine bottle; a polished wooden dowel; a heavy brass slide fat on one end and tapered on the other; an old-fashioned jackknife.  

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Some folks have even used a dildo!!!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  My pick is a heavy, Herco thumbpick which is unique in that it's basically a flatpick with a thumb ring attached.  It allows you to let go of the pick for brief periods to mute the guitar's strings in artful ways.

BLIND DOG OZZY:  You ain't gonna play no slide guitar without being an expert at muting the strings!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  To get a good sound on slide guitar, you gotta use an open tuning that allows you to use open strings and get that big fat sound with sliding chords and what not.  Here is a chart of open E tuning:

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Looks like some math s**t a college professor uses to confuse students!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Once you get this tuning, which you can learn from you local certified Bluesman, a whole world of guitar sounds will open up to you and you can quit sounding like one of those British wankers who tried to copy slide riffs off of American Blues records back in the 60's without realizing that Bluesmen were using a slide and an open tuning!

BLIND DOG OZZY:  This really happened and they f***ked it all up and embarrassed themselves!!!  

"BLUE" JIMMY:  This lost art makes very few appearances on today's pop records but those like me who consider The Blues as a religion, have a sense of duty to keep it alive for God-knows-what reason.

BLIND DOG OZZY:  When you electrify it and play it through a blazing Marshall amp and you watch the first few rows of the audience lose control like they're at a holy roller church -- you know the reason!!!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Maybe some young boy or girl will read this blog and decide to carry on the tradition and keep this art alive.

BLIND DOG OZZY:  But beware, boogie chillun!!! ... When you play these type of Blues, you'll play 'em 'til you're dead ... You can't never stop!!!

"BLUE" JIMMY:  Sake's Alive!

BLIND DOG OZZY:  Wow!  Wow! 

bluejames61@hotmail.com