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An
excerpt by BP Fallon from the book My Generation
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BP
Fallon and Johnny Thunders at the New Inn, Dublin in April 1990
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The
New York Dolls, particularly their gutter peacock guitarist Johnny Thunders,
they were gods to
the whole of 1976 punk, and The Sex Pistols, The Clash, they carved
themselves from the shadows
of Iggy And The Stooges, Lou Reed and The Velvets, Bolan and Bowie and
The MC5 and a boy called
Johnny.
You meet Johnny in 1972 in the after midnight of a dentist's surgery
in Harlem. He's a flash peacock
in rags of glitter, platform boots and a jet-black plumage of shoulder-length
backcombed hair as if a
buzzard has been nesting on his head. On-stage upstairs at Max's his
streetwise Italian face pouts
as he poses, a cross between Keef Richard and an urban subterranean
gutter glam outlaw. A punk.
Plus of course Johnny plays the bestest, most exciting, powerful vicious
guitar in town.
Come
'76 The Dolls have collapsed in a storm of too much drink and too many
drugs, rejected at
large for their Neanderthal rock'n'roll, and Johnny is in England fronting
The Heartbreakers, he and
The Dolls' second drummer Jerry Nolan. The first, Billy Murcia, he accidently
OD'd on Mandrax.
Johnny and Jerry, they're junkies and they celebrate their stupidity
with songs like 'Chinese Rocks'
and 'Too Much Junkie Bizness'. The Heartbreakers collapse.
At a party for Patti Smith, Johnny Thunders asks you to be his manager.
Listen, heroin is the horrors,
the darkest of darknesses, a hole into which junkies pour their very
life. If you wanted an ad against
heroin, Johnny Thunders was it to a T. A rock'n'roll genius turned into
shambolic mess.
We managed some gigs at The Speakeasy, Steve Jones and Paul Cook from
The Sex Pistols playing
with their hero. Sid Vicious got up once. He idolized Johnny and wanted
to form a group with him
called The Junkies. One gig was billed as 'The Living Dead'.
In
interviews, Johnny has kindly said that I was responsible for putting
together his best LP, the
album So Alone. Loyal musicians who lent their support came from The
Sex Pistols, The Only Ones,
The Heartbreakers, even Traffic. Chrissie Hynde sang backing vocals.
On the storming version of Derek Martin's R&B classic 'Daddy Rolling
Stone', first Johnny, then Phil
Lynott, then Steve Marriott sing a verse. Phil, he was concerned at
Johnny's health. 'He's too out of
it, knowarramean?'
And then there was Johnny's most beautiful, sensitive tragic song. It
was titled 'You Can't Put Your
Arms Around A Memory' but Johnny, he always sang it 'You can't put your
arm around a memory'.
Christ, Johnny.
Sunday afternoon at the tail-end of April 1990 and Johnny is over at
your house. He's been in
Ireland a week or so and the previous night appeared in Dublin at the
New Inn. Naturally, it was
chaotic. And sad. And brilliant sometimes, like when Johnny's into a
rambling blues and he's saying
"And there's you kids, the reason, the reason why. I tell ya, if
it wasn't for the kids!" and the guitar,
it cries, a flurry of notes weeping the blues. Johnny is playing his
heart out.
Sunday afternoon, sunny, we sit here and play records and talk and Johnny
plays a tape of some
new stuff he's recorded.
Heroin? Naw, he's just on methadone now he says, gets it on prescription.
Doesn't do heroin,
no not never. Well ... hardly ever.
He's
hoping for a record deal somewhere.
His wife Julie is back in Michigan with the kids, has been for years.
He'd been living with his
girlfriend Susanne in Sweden but that ... well, that isn't happening
either.
And then you put on The Shangri-La's song Give Him a Great Big Kiss
from Johnny's So Alone
album and Patti Palladin, her voice all Noo York sass like all of The
Ronettes chewing gum, she
teases "Well I hear she's pretty bad" and Johnny, he responds
"Well she's good bad but she's
not evil", and sitting here now Johnny's lived-in face, the mouth
grins lopsidedly and there's a
twinkle from under the drooping eyelids and for a moment he looks so
happy and so vulnerable,
the wounded artist touching the sunlight for a moment and you understand
again why you love
him.
Johnny's leaving now, leaving for the airport. He has no home, no number.
Says maybe he'll go
to New York after he's played in London, maybe go back to Paris. Says
he'd like maybe to live in
New Orleans.
Johnny gathers his plastic bag of medications and in the street we hug.
Once, he'd had a muscled
torso like Iggy. Now underneath his pinstriped suit he seems suddenly
frail. This battered artist
who sings from the slums of his soul is on the home run.
Six days short of a year later, Johnny Thunders is in New Orleans. He's
just done a tour of Japan.
Two days ago he's recorded with the group Die Toten Hosen, recorded
his Heartbreakers favourite
Born to Lose. He's thirty-eight years old. And he's dead. The police
find vials of methadone, and in
the toilet a syringe. The coroner's report says the cause of death may
have been drug-related.
Bye bye Johnny.
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