Graffiti Artist Arrested for Mural of Lemmy

MetalSucks readers, I want you to meet a goodamn American hero. His name is Wes Winship, he’s an artist from Minneapolis, and in 2015, when Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister finally told this world to fuck off once and for all, he felt compelled to pay homage to the metal legend. He was visiting his dear old mother in San Francisco at the time, so he to Ocean Beach with a bud, found a massive surface that was already covered in graffiti anyway, and created this A-fuckin’-plus sixty-foot-wide mural in Lemmy’s honor.

Winship probably should have won a fucking award and been given the key to the city for this stunning piece of work, or at least gifted a few drinks on the house. Instead, it ended up getting him arrested.

According to SFGate.com, this past December, the forty-year-old Winship was once again visiting his seventy-one-year-old mother when he and a friend, Cory Weisskirk, decided to go touch up the mural, because Lemmy was “looking worse for the wear.” They were both subsequently arrested by the National Park Service; Winship says the officers gave him the option to wake up his mother in the middle of the night and go free, but for self-explanatory reasons, he didn’t wanna do that (he National Park Service denies the allegation). And even though “a Superior Court judge dismissed the case in a settlement” last week, Winship and Weisskirk didn’t exactly get off the hook altogether: the report says that the pair “must pay $2,560 in restitution on top of the bail fees, plane ticket costs and other expenses they’ve racked up in the past two months.”

Says Winship of the arrest:

“I was really pissed at the absurdity of it. It was graffiti on top of graffiti, and there were definitely a lot of fans of (the mural). This is a tribute to a dead man.”

A dipshit representative of the National Park Service retorted that “We take any case where park property is being defaced or damaged seriously,” but that’s obviously a crock of shit, because nobody had bothered to paint over or scrub off the Lemmy mural in the two years since it had been put up. In fact, it’s still up as of now. If anything, Winship’s touch-ups were only gonna help.

This is obviously a shitty situation for Winship and Weisskirk. I’d say they can take comfort knowing that Lemmy is waiting to do a few lines with them in Heaven, but we all know there’s no life after death. Hopefully they’re satisfied with an idiot blogger praising them online.

Thanks: Brian B.