Lemmy’s Last Days: How Metal Legend Celebrated 70th, Stared Down Cancer
Singerman was inclined to keep the diagnosis private and announce only that Lemmy was gravely ill and needed to be left alone. “He was like, ‘No, no. You go ahead and put out a press release. I want people to know it was cancer. It’s a bad thing and they should know it.’ That’s how he felt.”
Plans were to put out a press release after informing close friends and family. Nurses were hired to be at his condo in shifts. A morphine kit arrived in preparation of coming pain. A favorite video-game console at the Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Strip that Lemmy loved to play at the corner of the bar was brought over.
Singerman and others began calling friends and family. Lemmy told his partners in Motörhead on Sunday night, and travel plans were being made for them to visit immediately.
“Here’s the shocker for me and everyone else: He’s been to a thousand doctors and hospitals throughout the world, but nobody caught this,” says Singerman. “To be told you have terminal cancer with all the blood tests he’s taken in his life and everything else? It’s very hard to grasp that. It’s not like he had a fucking chance here. This was outright: ‘You got no more than six months.'”
A doctor visited early Monday. Ozzy Osbourne would be coming by that day or the next. Lemmy spent hours on the video-game console, as Rainbow owner Mikael Maglieri paid a visit. Then Lemmy nodded off and never woke up again.
“Mikael called to say, ‘My God, he just died right in front of me,'” Singerman says.
The reaction was immediate on social media from Lemmy’s many friends across generations of rock. Kiss singer-bassist Gene Simmons emailed Rolling Stone a cell-phone snapshot of him and Lemmy backstage somewhere in the recent past: “Behind the Man and the Legend was a kind man who went out of his way to make you feel special,” Simmons wrote. “The Lemmy I knew and loved always held out his hand to help new bands. I will miss him.”
Words of wisdom from Motorhead‘s Lemmy Kilmister. Watch below.