Devils in my Head
Ten years ago, Lemmy passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. It was the most heartbreaking death I’d ever experienced — not just of a musician I admired, but of someone who felt closer to family than a
PART ONE: 2013
I’ve been a Motörhead fan since 2013. I got into the band late — there’s no denying that. I blame The Walking Dead, specifically the episode No More Sorrow. There’s a moment where Merle Dixon sits alone in a stolen car, bourbon in hand, Motörhead blasting through the speakers. The song is Fast and Loose.
I was nineteen at the time, always hunting for new music, and completely mesmerized. I remember thinking: Who the hell is this band? I’d never heard anything like it before.
I had to hear more. Knowing the song came from Ace of Spades, I figured that was the place to start. From there, it spiralled. Once Motörhead got its hooks into me, that was it. I needed to hear every album, every song. I wanted to understand the band, the sound, the man behind it.
Before long, Motörhead became my refuge — the place I went when I felt entirely out of place in the world. Their music helped me disappear into my own head, letting my thoughts wander. I’d imagine what it must feel like to be onstage like Lemmy, belting those songs out at full volume. Who cares if I lost my hearing? I’d be having the time of my life.
Music had always been that refuge for me. It may have had something to do with my Autism diagnosis. I know that whenever I listened to music, I would daydream in vivid images. The visual imagination was definitely part of my Autism.
I’m not much of an instrumentalist. I can play a bit of bass, and I’ve dabbled with guitar, but I’m nothing special. As Lemmy himself once said, “I was a rotten guitar player.” Bass-wise, I’d call myself mediocre at best.
Still, Lemmy is the reason I picked up a bass in the first place. I’d always been aware of bass players — how they’re often the forgotten members of a band despite how much they shape the sound — but Lemmy played differently. He didn’t play bass like a bass player. He played it like a weapon.
The first time I really noticed that, I was blown away. Years later, I now own four bass guitars, including a Rickenbacker 4003. I mean, I had to. That’s what Lemmy played.
In 2013, life wasn’t great. I was depressed, struggling, and regularly in therapy trying to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life. Around me, I watched others move forward — go off to university — while I felt like I was standing still.
One of my biggest frustrations at the time was not having a girlfriend. I didn’t feel good-looking. On top of already feeling out of place because of my Autism, I also felt out of place in my own body. I didn’t know how to read myself, let alone anyone else.
Looking back, there were things I could’ve changed about myself. At the time, I was brushing up against ideas that would later be packaged and sold online as the so-called red-pill movement. I wasn’t angry at women — I was confused, insecure, and desperate to understand why I felt invisible or never good enough. I can say honestly now that I could have gone down a very different path if I hadn’t eventually chosen to grow instead of retreat.
That change didn’t happen overnight. It came slowly, through experience, reflection, and — in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time — through Lemmy himself. For someone often mislabeled from the outside as a sexist or a womanizer, Lemmy consistently spoke with respect about women, especially women in rock. He didn’t posture. He didn’t preach. He just treated them as equals, which in hindsight mattered more than any slogan ever could. See the article: Lemmy Kilmister: Rock’s Great Undervalued Feminist Hero
Music gave me something resembling purpose — or at least the dream of purpose. The idea that maybe, somehow, I’d figure things out one day was enough to keep me moving forward.
At the time, I was attending Centre High in Edmonton — the place you go when you’ve technically graduated but still need to upgrade courses because you don’t quite know what comes next. It was the first time in my life that I truly felt like a failure. For one thing, I was still living at home. That might sound trivial to some, but at nineteen, I felt like I should have been further along by then.
I was also working a dead-end job at a liquor store. My dad had remarried the year before to a woman none of us got along with, which only added to the tension already hanging over everything.
It was just before my second year at Centre High that I found Motörhead. I didn’t realize it then, but I would soon be completely lost in their world. Hard rock and heavy metal gave me something to believe in when everything else felt dark and grim — at least from where I was standing.
Around that same time, Lemmy’s health was already beginning to fail. My love for Motörhead coincided with the infamous 2013 Wacken Open Air show. Watching footage of it later, what struck me wasn’t the struggle itself, but the fact that Lemmy even tried. He could have cancelled. No one would have blamed him. Instead, he took the stage anyway, even if he only managed a handful of songs before calling it quits.
That mattered to me more than I realized at the time. A man in obvious pain, pushing through not for ego, but for the people who showed up. I’d never seen anything like it before. On some level, it was deeply inspiring.
It would be almost a year before Lemmy retook the stage. Tours were pushed back again and again. Each delay carried the same quiet fear: Was I getting into another artist I loved just in time to watch him fade away?
Then Aftershock was released. The title itself was a nod to Lemmy being fitted with a defibrillator for an irregular heartbeat — the lifestyle finally catching up with him. I bought the album the day it came out, almost late for class.
And it was great.
Continued in Part Two
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