Despite being eligible for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for more than 20 years already, the late Lemmy Kilmister and his band Motörhead are still noticeably absent from its list of inductees. It’s a glaring oversight that Metallica frontman James Hetfield lamented in a new interview.
“The most rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle-living person on this planet is not in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which is a travesty, a shame,” Hetfield told The Metallica Report podcast. “It’s kind of a disrespect to rock ‘n’ roll, basically.”
Earlier in the interview, Hetfield opened up about important Lemmy was to him personally. As we previously reported, Hetfield recently got a tattoo with Lemmy’s ashes in the ink, which he also elaborated on.
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“Adriana, my girlfriend, her best friend passed away,” Hetfield said [as transcribed by Blabbermouth]. “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.”
Hetfield was among those who received some of Lemmy’s ashes in a silver bullet necklace after the passing of the late Motörhead legend. The ashes were then infused in the ink for Hetfield’s middle-finger tattoo of a spade inside an iron cross.
“So Lemmy is able to still fly the bird to the world via me,” said Hetfield of the tattoo with the ashes. “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 piss me off.”
As for the health risk of mixing Lemmy’s ashes in the tattoo ink, Hetfield remarked, “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.”
Metallica resume their “M72 World Tour” with a European leg that kicks off Friday (May 24th) in Munich, Germany. They’ll return to North America beginning August 2nd in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Tickets to the European shows are available here, while tickets to the North American concerts can be purchased here.
Below you can listen to the full podcast with Hetfield.