Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, founder and leader and sole constant member of Motörhead for 40 years, died December 28, 2015, four days after his 70th birthday and four months after the release of the band’s 22nd studio album, Bad Magic, on August 28, 2015.

Over the course of 40 years, Motörhead released 22 studio albums, plus On Parole (a previously rejected album that a label they weren’t on anymore pushed out when they seemed to be taking off) and No Remorse, a double-LP compilation with four new songs. During Lemmy’s life and after, there have also been a seemingly endless stream of live recordings, some of which are excellent (No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith, The Birthday Party) but most of which are superfluous, except as reminders — or hints, for those who never saw them — of what was.

I first heard Motörhead when I was 13 or 14. I was just starting to develop my own musical taste, and like most boys that age was drawn to loud, aggressive music. The first band I really loved was Judas Priest. But a slightly older friend had been converted to punk by his older brother, and one day loaned me a copy of No Remorse, saying (I’m paraphrasing; it’s been 40 years), “This is the only metal band worth listening to.” He was wrong about that, of course, but it’s a common enough sentiment — back in the ’80s in particular, Motörhead existed as a bridge between the worlds of punk and metal. Everyone from either “side” who heard them got it right away.

I didn’t get around to seeing Motörhead live until many years later, but I saw them six times between 2002 and 2012. Sometimes they were the headliners, sometimes the opening act, sometimes in the middle of the bill. It seemed like Lemmy would never turn down a gig. But they never half-assed it or phoned it in; he always preferred to play new songs, leaving “Ace of Spades” and “Overkill” for the encores, and when he busted out something from decades past, it would often be something you’d be surprised to hear.

I got to interview Lemmy four times. The first, in 2003, was a quick phoner for Alternative Press, the hook being to get his advice for young bands. “When you’re young, 18 or 20, and all these nice people from the record company are sending cars around, you don’t realize you’re getting the bill for it all… And when the label says, ‘We’ve got an accountant for you,’ laugh loudly and exit.” Not long after that, I spent a couple of hours with him for a men’s magazine, an encounter that came close to going very badly wrong.

You see, the magazine had sent a photographer and two models with me, and the (WWE-owned) venue’s publicist was very concerned that nothing untoward go on with corporate logos in sight. I assured her that the article would not mention the theater — we’d just say we’d met Lemmy “in New York” — and she was mollified. (When it was all over, the models elected to hang out in the dressing room with the band, but an hour or so later one of them texted the photographer, You need to come get us — they’re doing crystal meth back here!)

We spoke by phone again for Relix in 2009, when the documentary Lemmy was about to be released. The following spring, the movie’s director, Wes Orshoski, asked me to come down to South by Southwest and attend the movie’s premiere… and interview Lemmy onstage, in front of a live audience. How could I say no? I flew down on my own dime and had a blast. Before we walked out, I shook Lemmy’s hand backstage and said, “You probably don’t remember this, but…” and mentioned our 2003 encounter. He laughed and said, “Oh, I remember.” The onstage conversation (which lasted about a half hour; 10 minutes’ worth is preserved above) was great, and later that night, I watched Motörhead perform outdoors at Emo’s.

Lemmy was a very smart guy, with a good sense of humor and an unshakable personal ethos that could probably be summed up as “libertarian with integrity.” Although his appetites (for booze, drugs, cigarettes and sex) were legendary, it was entirely possible to spend hours in the man’s company without being coerced into doing any of those things. Teetotalers were welcome at Lemmy’s party. And he was antiwar and anti-clerical for classist reasons — war and religion were ways in which the poor got fucked over by their masters.

It’s always impressed me that while many, many people have Lemmy stories, nobody seems to have a bad one. He didn’t get into fights; he didn’t shit-talk other musicians; and none of the women he slept with came out, during his life or afterward, with stories of being exploited or mistreated. Raised by a single mother, Lemmy grew up to be a guy who wrote songs with female artists, performed duets with them, toured with them, produced tracks for them, and talked them up to the press. He liked women, and enjoyed their company — not just as sexual partners, but as creative spirits in their own right.

The last time I saw Motörhead play was in 2012, and they were as strong as ever. Their next album, Aftershock, was released in 2013, and they headed out on the road as always. But Lemmy’s health was starting to falter. For decades, he’d been a legendary drinker, filling tall glasses with Jack Daniels and Coke and doing speed backstage. (It was being the lone speed freak in a band full of acidheads that got him fired from Hawkwind, after all.) But in the early 2000s, he’d been diagnosed with diabetes and even slipped into a coma (unreported at the time), so he’d had to switch to… Diet Coke. He had a cardioverter-defibrillator (a type of pacemaker) implanted in 2013, and actually had to cancel some 2013 tour dates due to a severe hematoma. By the time he was doing interviews for Bad Magic, he admitted having given up Jack Daniels in favor of vodka, and cutting his smoking down to a pack a week, from two packs a day.

So ten years after his passing, how does the last Motörhead album hold up? Well, one thing must be made clear from the start: it’s not some calculated farewell statement in the manner of David Bowie’s Blackstar (itself released in January 2016). Although its last track, a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil”, has a heard-over-the-closing-credits feel, the album opens with the roaring “Victory or Die”, and the 11 songs in between often rock as hard as anything in the band’s catalog.

Many fans love the “classic” lineup of Motörhead best — the trio version with guitarist Fast Eddie Clarke and drummer Philthy Animal Taylor that was active from 1977 to 1982, recording the albums Motörhead, Overkill, Bomber, Ace Of Spades, and Iron Fist, as well as the live No Sleep ’Til Hammersmith. But the band’s longest-running lineup first began to come together in 1984, when guitarists Phil Campbell and Würzel joined, along with drummer Pete Gill. Drummers — including Taylor — came and went, until Mikkey Dee joined on 1993’s Bastards. Lemmy, Campbell, Würzel and Dee made one more record, 1995’s Sacrifice, and then Würzel was out, but the band continued on, a trio again. They made ten more albums, and became an absolutely ferocious live unit just by doing it, night after night, anywhere and everywhere.

There are no truly bad Motörhead albums. Every single one has at least three or four songs that’ll take the top of your head off. Usually, when a Motörhead album slides off the rails, it’s because some of the songs are uninspired rehashes of previous work or dragged down by unnecessary guest appearances. But their catalog is much more varied than you might think. Over the course of those 22 albums, and particularly the last dozen or so, they played (their versions of) blues, rockabilly, speed metal, grunge, punk, and virtually every other kind of loud, aggressive rock ’n’ roll. And even their ballads weren’t necessarily terrible!

So Bad Magic is in all the important ways just one more Motörhead album. But it’s a good one. Lemmy had been writing songs that hinted at a philosophy of life for a long time, some combination of fatalism and self-reliance, and that comes through on “Victory or Die”, “Thunder & Lightning” (as close as he ever came to a “why I do this” song), “Electricity” and others. But there’s no nostalgia, no sense that it was better in the old days. And anyway, as sharp and witty as Lemmy was, Motörhead weren’t a band you listened to for the words. They were a band you cranked up as loud as you could stand it, and on a purely musical level, he, Phil Campbell and Mikkey Dee were in raging form all the way to the end. The thundering drum intro to “Shoot Out All of Your Lights”, the bass break on “Fire Storm Hotel” (Lemmy played lead bass, an absolutely mind-scouring distorted roar), and the guitar solos like hot needles being shoved between your toes on damn near every song — that was Motörhead.

There’s a popular theory that the world started going to hell when David Bowie died in January 2016. I mean, look at who died after him: Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire; Pierre Boulez; Keith Emerson and Greg Lake; Merle Haggard; Tony Conrad; Prince; Bernie Worrell; Scotty Moore; Alan Vega; Juan Gabriel; Bobby Hutcherson; Sharon Jones; Leonard Cohen; George Michael… it was an absolute apocalypse of a year, a real clearing of the decks. And yeah, things have been pretty shitty this last decade. But I think it’s arguable that Lemmy’s death, three days before the end of 2015, was the real harbinger. A world without Lemmy is a dark place. And we’re coming up on a decade therein.