The Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas will open an exhibition dedicated to MOTÖRHEAD and Lemmy Kilmister on Friday, October 2.
The centrepiece is not behind glass. Alongside personal items from Lemmy's collection — photographs, handwritten lyrics — the museum is putting his bass and the actual Marshall stack he played it through on the floor and letting visitors use them. You pick the bass up, plug in, and hear the rig that built one of the most recognisable sounds in heavy music. It is a considerably more direct way of meeting a band's history than reading a placard next to a roped-off amplifier.
A MOTÖRHEAD show at a punk museum is less of a stretch than it sounds, and the museum makes the argument openly. Lemmy came up through HAWKWIND, but he was a fixture of the British punk scene, and MOTÖRHEAD's speed and sheer intensity fed straight into the generation of punk bands that followed. The band spent forty years being claimed by both camps and refusing to settle the argument.
The volume is part of the legend. Lemmy ran his bass through Marshall stacks and treated the amplifier as a lead instrument rather than a foundation, and countless people who saw the band still describe MOTÖRHEAD as the loudest thing they have ever stood in front of — a sound they did not so much hear as absorb.
To mark the opening, Three Star Punk Bar is hosting a special evening with Brian Slagel of Metal Blade Records DJing, giving anyone in Las Vegas that week somewhere to raise a glass. MOTÖRHEAD albums will be stocked at Vinyl Threat, the museum's record store, with exclusive band merchandise in the gift shop.
The Punk Rock Museum sits at 1422 Western Avenue in Las Vegas and opened on April 1, 2023. It bills itself as the world's most comprehensive attraction dedicated to the history, culture and general absurdity of punk rock.
Lemmy died on December 28, 2015, at the age of 70, days after being told he had cancer. His ashes are on permanent display in a columbarium at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Hollywood. A biopic, announced in June 2020 and directed by Greg Olliver — who made the 2010 documentary "Lemmy" — has been in the works since.