Their fathers' children

Natalie Cole and Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister died within three days of each other in late December at the ages of 65 and 70 respectively. What they didn’t have in common vastly outweighed what they did.

Cole was the privileged daughter of Nat King Cole, the Jackie Robinson of American pop music. Lemmy (the mononym by which Kilmister came to be known) was the son of a British air force chaplain and blue collar to the bone.

Cole sang R&B, pop, jazz, and the Great American Songbook in a gauzily sweet voice that was as lithe as it was resilient. She publicly exuded class even when she was privately addicted to heroin. Lemmy, whose voice The Daily Telegraph accurately described as a “bronchial rasp,” looked like a Hell’s Angel and led a band called Motörhead that was for 40 years the loudest, leanest, and meanest heavy-metal act in the world. Heroin was one of the few intoxicants from which he refrained.

Cole’s best-known recordings bore titles such as “This Will Be (an Everlasting Love),” “Our Love,” “I’ve Got Love on My Mind,” “I Live for Your Love,” and “Miss You like Crazy.” Lemmy’s best-known recordings included “Overkill,” “Bomber,” “Killed by Death,” “Snaggletooth,” and “Deaf Forever” and sounded like war on steroids.

Cole, her three unsuccessful marriages notwithstanding, was a practicing Baptist for most of her adult life and credited her faith with enabling her to survive the hepatitis C and kidney failure that beset her during middle age. Lemmy found Christianity untenable and ate, drank, and sought merriment by bedding, according to his own estimate, over a thousand women.

What Cole and Lemmy had in common, however, relatively scant though it was, bears considering.

Cole was just 15 when her father, whom she adored, died. She dealt with her subsequent sense of abandonment by becoming self-destructively rebellious. Lemmy was just 3 months old when his father abandoned him and his mother and in so doing warped Lemmy’s attitude toward love, marriage, and religion.

Cole finally established closure in 1991 with the Grammy-winning Unforgettable: With Love, the first of two albums that she’d record as a tribute to her father’s momentous musical legacy. Lemmy sought resolution with his military father more subconsciously, becoming a fanatical collector of World War memorabilia in general and of Nazi memorabilia in particular. The title track of Motörhead’s Grammy-nominated 1916 was inspired by the Battle of the Somme.

And then there’s the significance of 2010 for both Cole and Lemmy. During that year appeared Cole’s autobiography Love Brought Me Back: A Journey of Loss and Gain (co-authored with David Ritz) and the Greg Olliver–Wes Orshoski–directed documentary Lemmy. Neither artifact gives any indication that its subject thought for one moment that her or his end was just five years away.

It’s also obvious from the book and the film that, as different as they were, Cole and Lemmy inspired love and respect from their peers. Chief among Cole’s admirers was Frank Sinatra, who went out of his way to include Cole in his inner circle whenever their paths crossed. Among Lemmy’s admirers was practically every heavily metallic hard rocker from James Hetfield (Metallica), Dave Grohl (Nirvana, Foo Fighters), and Slash (Guns N’ Roses) to Ozzy Osbourne, Alice Cooper, and Joan Jett.

Regardless, in other words, of their iconic statuses or their flaws, both Cole and Lemmy demonstrated a genuine humanity that retained traces of the image of the God in which they were made no matter how hard they sometimes (Cole) or often (Lemmy) tried to deface it.