James Hetfield made a recent appearance on “The Metallica Report” podcast, where he talked about some of his new tattoos. Hetfield paid tribute to the late, great Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead by getting a tattoo that contained his ashes.
Hetfield explained: “I guess downtime, you get a little creative in more than one way besides writing songs. It’s like drawing or, I got my Photoshop back up and working and fiddling around with shirt ideas and stuff like that. And, yeah, tattoos is just something I’ve always loved. I’m a logo dude, as we all know. So, yeah, getting the hands done. And then Adriana, my girlfriend, her best friend passed away. And we had just talked about the ability to put ashes in the ink to represent someone who you carry around in your life. So thinking up of ideas of what would represent that person and memories for their life — I mean, that’s really what they are; they’re memories — and remembering that I had been given some ashes of Lemmy and a little silver bullet that was like a necklace and using that to get my — yeah, the Iron Cross and the ace of spades. So Lemmy is able to still fly the bird to the world via me. And just a reminder of what an inspiration he has been in my life — what to do, what not to do. And for me paying respects to him in maybe lieu of him being in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, which still continues to (p*ss) me off.”
Hetfield went on to say that Lemmy’s exclusion from the Rock Hall is disrespectful. “The most rock and roll lifestyle-living person on this planet is not in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, which is a travesty, a shame,” he said. “It’s kind of a disrespect to rock and roll, basically. So this is me paying homage to him.”
Hetfield also jokingly said that Lemmy’s ashes could contain some of the substances the Motorhead frontman was known to indulge in. He said: “The obvious joke with my buddy, tattoo artist Corey Miller, who’s done a lot of my stuff, he said, ‘Are you sure you wanna do this? Did you check with your doctor? There could still be high amounts of speed in his ashes or,’ you know, whatever — I don’t know — screwdriver. ‘Did you check with your sponsor? Are you okay with this?’ And, yeah, hopefully most of that shit got burned off. And, yeah, the obvious jokes.”
“He stood for rock and roll, and whatever moniker you wanted to put on it — heavy metal, punk, blah, blah, blah — ‘We are Motorhead. We are rock and roll.'”
