Jan. 29 

You can get your Lemmy live and in person at Lowell's Tsonas Arena Jan. 29 as the 65-year-old king of speed leads the Motorhead assault on your eardrums. Or, you can get your Lemmy on your flat screen, with the DVD, "Lemmy: 49% Motherf**ker, 51% Son Of A Bitch," which hit #1 on the Billboard music video chart. Both the DVD and Bluray disc landed in the top 10 best seling documentaries on Amazon.com. Hey, JSInk recommends you just Lemmy out and do both, catch the mighty steamroller of punk-metal-rock in concert and spend time on the couch with the DVD (and while you're at it pick up the new CD, "The World Is Yours," it's one of their best. It's also got some clever self-referential stuff. Old song titles pop up in new songs.)
   About 11 years ago, Lemmy Kilmister - Motorhead's founding and sole remaining member, bassist, singer and songwriter - and I were backstage at the (now defunct) Axis club. Thinking of metal as being a young man's game, I asked how long Lemmy thought he could keep slamming away at a mega-decibel volume, touring clubs. He looked at me quizzically. "What else am I gonna do? A fucking talk show?"
   Point taken. "We don't known when to quit/We don't have room/But we'll get over it," Lemmy barks in "Get Back in Line," on the new disc. In "Rock 'n' Roll Music," he sings, "Rock 'n' roll music is my religion/I don't need no miracle vision/I don't need no indecision ... do it til the day I die."
   I talked to Lemmy in 1998 when I was at the Globe. Once again, asked about perseverance. "The main secret of surviving," Lemmy posed, "is not stopping, right? It's just what I want to do. I don't want t do nothing else and I don't want to stop doing it, 'cause I'm enjoying it. Also, my facial presentation doesn't lend itself to a lot of other jobs." The survival thing also has to do with Lemmy's intake of drugs and drink, and while he's never shied away about taking things that make him go fast, he wrote one of the sharpest, most devastating anti-heroin essays I've ever read in the defunct Nerve magazine some years ago.
   Is Motorhead a metal band? Not exactly, but they're loved but many metalheads and every metal band worth its salt. Metallica even dressed up like four Lemmys and played his 50th birthday bash - "bullet belts, black shirts and trousers, shades and wigs on," Lemmy told me, "they looked more like me than I did, but then they had the tattoo on the wrong arm."
   Lemmy is a collector of Nazi memorabilia, which he gathers not because he's a neo-Nazi but out of fascination with the weaponry of war and the pleasure of possessing the accoutrements of Hitler's evil machine. Some years ago, Lemmy wrote, "1916," a WWI-set ballad (!) that is one of the most wrenching anti-war songs you can hear outside of Eric Bogle. No glory in war, just guts - pools of flesh and blood. On the new record, there's "Brotherhood of Man," he sings of the warmongering lords, their soldiers and mercenaries: "We are worse than animals/We hunger for the kill/We put our faith in maniacs/The triumph of the will/We kill for money, wealth and lust and money, for this we should be damned/We are disease upon the world, Brotherhood of Man."
   Lemmy, who grew up on the Beatles, roadied for Jimi Hendrix and got kicked out of Hawkwind, always calls what he does rock 'n' roll. "We're just offshoots of the original rock 'n' roll," he said. "What Elvis or Eddie Cochran would be doing if they were 18 now."
    I covered Motorhead last year at House of Blues and here's an edited take of what I wrote for the Boston Herald:
    Phil Spector had his “wall of sound.” Motorhead has theirs. Motorhead’s is not layered and lush. Motorhead’s is a big towering slab of speedy, aggressive rock situated somewhere between heavy metal and punk.
     Their motto, as you could spot on t-shirts at House of Blues, is “Everything Louder Than Everything Else.” Before their set in front of a packed house, I asked their soundman Stejan Sjoland – he of six years and  500-plus gigs – if the mixing board was the best vantage point. He laughed and replied, “It sounds like [expletive] everywhere.”
      Fair enough, It’s not the cleanest sound you’ll ever hear. You put your earplugs in and let the accelerated steamroller of sound flatten you. In a good way.   
      The best description I’ve read concerning Motorhead’s lineup was this: “Lemmy and two or three guys who are not Lemmy.” That is, seven other members have held spots in the band, but it’s always revolved around the sound and vision of barking 63-year-old singer-songwriter-bassist Ian Kilmister, always referred to by his nickname, Lemmy.
   However, the lineup that played Boston – including guitarist Phil Campbell and drummer Mikky Dee – has been together 17 years. That’s as close to permanent as it gets. (Dee now embarks on a two-week hiatus to film the Swedish version of "I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!” Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum, who was at the show studying for his temp job, will fill his spot.)
    Things don’t evolve in Motorhead’s world. Their latest album, “Motorizer,” could have been made at any point over the past three decades. They played just two of its songs, “Rock Out,” a celebration of all things loud, and “The Thousand Names of God,” an anti-war thrasher. Motorhead is not up there to move product. They’re there, as Lemmy said at the beginning “to play rock ‘n’ roll” At the end he summarized, “Don’t forget, we are Motorhead and we play fucking rock.” Just in case you missed it.
   They began with “Iron Fist,” ripped through “Over the Top” and “Another Perfect Day,” and closed the regular set with classics, “Killed By Death” (showing a Spinal Tap level of cleverness), “In the Name of Tragedy” (dedicated to William Shakespeare) and “Bomber.”  Encores included “Whorehouse Blues,” their best-known rocker “Ace of Spades” and “Overkill.”
     Like AC/DC, evolution is not in Motorhead’s vocabulary. Supplying a bludgeoning sound and a ferocious, cathartic release is.

Oh yeh, Megadeth headlines. Also on the bill Volbeat and Lacuna. Tix: $49.50-$39.50.