TWILIGHT OF THE HEADBANGERS: How long can the legends of heavy metal keep on rocking?

Where’d Lemmy go? The stage is empty: vacated mics, cooling drum stool, the blocky, buzzing statuary of amps and speakers. Motörhead, the legendary Motörhead, is not there anymore. I’m in a heavy-metal hangar in Salt Lake City in late August, and singer/bassist Ian Fraser “Lemmy” Kilmister has just walked off, shakily and in evident distress, after only four songs, anxiously pursued by his drummer, Mikkey Dee, and guitarist, Phil Campbell. A man in a bandanna approaches me, pop-eyed with dire foreknowledge: “He’s not comin’ back, man! He’s not comin’ back! He’s too old!” Then he reels away, into the hormonal half-smoke and press of bodies in front of the stage. Should we riot? Are we sad? Is it possible that Lemmy—69 years old, pacemakered, diabetic—Lemmy, the great survivor, opposer, grizzled odds-beater, humanity’s middle finger, was crying? “Listen,” he’d said to us before exiting, in his familiar English roar-gasp, that voice of fiery exhaustion. “I’m really sorry—I can’t tell you how sorry I am—but my back’s gone. I’ve got this bad back and … I can’t breathe up here either.” Then he covered his face with his hands, and he left us.

A sadly prescient Atlantic article from last month, given the announcement of Lemmy’s death yesterday. Motorhead wasn’t my cup of arsenic (Led Zep and The Who are about as hard as my mp3 collection rocks), but as more and more rockers exit the stage, increasingly I wonder about the future of pop music. Or the lack thereof.

(Via Sonny Bunch.)