Dee Snider recently sat down with VintageRock Pod and shared fond memories of his time with Lemmy Kilmister. The Twisted Sister frontman recalled that the entire music world gathered at the Motörhead frontman’s funeral, along with a family who held a special place in Lemmy’s heart:
“We’re at the memorial, and I’m sitting with my wife, and everybody was at the Lemmy Memorial. You know, Ozzy was there, Slash and Foo Fighters were there, and it goes on and on. But beyond that, his shoemaker was there. Pascal Cooper, a family that followed him around Europe and Lemmy would always invite them backstage because they followed him everywhere. They were there and they all got up and spoke.”
Dee then went on to share his wife Suzette’s theory that Lemmy might have been a celestial being, and he explained why it resonated with him:
“My wife is very spiritual, and she leans over me and says ‘I think Lemmy was an angel.’ I said ‘What?’ She goes ‘They say that they send angels down to Earth to guide us along on our journey.’ And I said ‘I think Lemmy may have been sent down.’ Listen to these people talking.
Everybody has a story with Lemmy affected their lives, changed their lives, helped them along the way. Every single one of these people is getting is getting up there and everybody’s got a tale to tell about how Lemmy touched their lives.”
Snider also revealed that although he initially approached the idea of a biker pirate being an angel, Suzette convinced him:
“And I said ‘So you’re telling me that God sent down a biker pirate to guide me on my way?’ And she said to me ‘Would you have listened to someone with long flowing robes?’ I just looked at her and then I looked listening to the stories people saying. So I’m not the spiritual guy but that was Lemmy.”
As Dee said, Lemmy influenced a long list of people’s lives, one of whom being Motörhead drummer Mikkey Dee. In 2016, Mikkey revealed in an interview that once he got sick, Lemmy became overprotective of both his own health and the wellbeing of people around him:
“I don’t know if I want to sit here and say what [drugs] he was and wasn’t doing. I can say this: he quit doing everything for quite a long while, because he was actually shocked when he became ill [in 2013]. I just know that he told me: ‘The day you try drugs, you’re f*cking fired.’ [Laughs] I’ve never tried drugs. I drink my beer, but he made sure that I would never try drugs. If I’d done that, the whole thing would’ve crashed.”
In a separate interview in 2022, The Prince of Darkness shared his thoughts and feelings about Kilmister:
“I think about Lemmy all the f*cking time. He was a great guy. He’d go, ‘That record you just made was fucking shit’, or ‘I really like that one.’ His favourite [line] was, ‘Your best record was ‘No More Tears.” Yeah, because you wrote on it, you c*nt!”
Ozzy also revealed Lemmy’s last words to him, and how impactful they were:
“‘I’m probably going to die, I suppose. Never thought I’d make 70, so I did good.’ His exact words were, ‘I could have lived a lot longer and taken care of myself, but I lived my life the way I want to live and I ain’t got no regrets.’ Fair enough!”
You can watch the whole interview below.
