by (epub)
“Wait a minute. You’re not going anywhere—just hold on. Nobody’s going to hurt you, but just don’t move!” I said, terrified and hoping he couldn’t see it too much. After all, this guy had just stabbed Jerry with a broken glass, and my balls were all the way up in my stomach. We calmly brought the guy back inside to be identified, but of course the cops were never called and he was able to go on back to Studio 54 in no time. He hadn’t quite reached Jerry’s balls, like we’d feared, but he’d struck an artery less than an inch from them, at the top of Jerry’s right inner thigh. After a few days in the hospital, Jerry was back at Max’s, although he couldn’t play the drums for quite some time.
Bruce and Johnny at Johnny and Julie’s wedding, 1977
Phil, Jorge, Reedy, and Steve, 1976
BOOGIE CHILLEN
New York, April 1976
JOHNNY INTRODUCED ME TO STEVE SHEVLIN, one of his closest friends.
Steve had been a boxer for five years—three as an amateur and two as a professional. He’d actually been a Golden Glove Champion twice in a row. You would have never guessed it from looking at him. Tall and thin, he had tons of class. He was always dressed in tight sharkskin suits that he got custom-made from a Puerto Rican tailor on Avenue B, and he wore them with magenta shirts with high tab collars and four buttons on the cuffs. He looked right out of West Side Story, a real New York dandy circa 1958–1960. He was the only person more fully in that style than Willie DeVille. They didn’t come cooler than Steve, and all the girls adored him.
I started hanging out at his place more and more. Steve had an impressive record collection, especially when it came to old rhythm and blues: T-Bone Walker and Wynonie Harris, stuff like that. He also had a drum kit and a bass amp. He’d spend his afternoons playing bass along to records, and before long, I was sitting at the drums, backing him up. Soon after, two friends of his—Reedy and Jorge—started coming by regularly, guitars in hand. Jorge came from Mexico, Reedy from Liverpool. There weren’t two of us from the same country; we were very international!
The four of us formed a band, and thus The Senders were born.
Soon we were playing every day at Steve’s, and Johnny would often drop by to join in and smoke a joint. We were there practically every night listening to old R&B: a whole bunch of stuff like Bo Diddley, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and especially Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, Slim Harpo, Little Walter. In other words, the Bible of Cool.
Reedy was incredibly funny, in a very British Monty Python kind of way. He was good friend with Max Blagg, and Max actually helped out with some great lyrics when we started trying to write songs.
Right away, we geared the band’s sound and look toward old African-American rhythm and blues, menacing and aggressive. That style seemed way more punk rock than punk rock itself. On the one hand, we were inspired by sixties British bands like Them, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things, and the Animals, and the American bands from the same era like Mitch Ryder & the Detroit Wheels, Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, the Mysterians, and the Sonics, and on the other hand, by all the rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly from the fifties: Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Johnny Burnette, Billy Lee Riley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Jackie Lee Cochran, Link Wray, Dale Hawkins, and all the others. But above all we loved all the black rock ’n’ rollers like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Arthur Alexander, Rufus Thomas, Larry Williams, Andre Williams, Jackie Wilson, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Percy Mayfield, Benny Spellman, Esquerita, Don and Dewey, the Coasters, Ernie K-Doe.
We all started dressing in clothes from Steve’s tailor on Avenue B. Tight black suits, Puerto Rican magenta shirts with high collars and four buttons on the cuffs, thin ties, pointy shoes, greasy DAs. Like sophisticated rockers with a few broken teeth. Elegant dandies in slightly wrinkled suits quickly starting to look like a gang of insane Teddy boys who slept in their clothes. …
In October 1976, after a few months of rehearsals at Steve’s, we made our big debut at Copperfield’s, a club on 8th Street. Then the next day, we played at Max’s. We played at two or three parties—one in the street in Soho, one in a loft in Chelsea—then at CBGB, Great Gildersleeves, then again at Max’s.
Bruce, who was doing odd jobs here and there, decided to become our manager. But he found it too boring and quit after only six months.
We were scheduled to open for Blondie at the Elgin Theater, an old movie house on 8th Avenue. Arriving at the sound check, Debbie and Chris asked if I could help them with some French lyrics they were working on. “Oh, Philippe, we were looking for you,” she said, beaming. We sat down in the middle of the room, and Debbie took a piece of paper out of her pocket and showed me. They were doing a cover of “Denise” by Randy & the Rainbows, but Debbie, being a girl and not wanting to appear to be a lesbian, had changed it to Denis.
Feeling that it sounded very French, they had decided to add a French verse or two to give the song a sort of “retro-French-Francoise-Hardy-beatnik-chic” feel. They needed my help, because I was probably the only French person that they knew in the scene.
She told me they were thinking of something along the line of, “Denis, Denis, avec ton yeu est bleu?”
“No, try … avec TES yeux SI bleus,” I said.
“Okay, si … bleus. … How do I say ‘I am crazy about you?’”
“Je suis folle de toi.”
“Um … no, it’s too short.”
“Je suis SI folle de toi.”
“Okay … a kiss?”
“Un baiser.”
“Baisez-moi ce soir? Kiss me tonight?”
“Hahaha! No, that would mean ‘fuck me tonight,’ Debbie! Try EMBRASSE-MOI ce soir.”
“Okay, it works: ‘Denis, Denis, je suis si folle de toi. Denis, Denis, embrasse-moi ce soir, Denis, Denis, un grand baiser d’eternitee.’”
In the end, “Denis” was an international hit, and I think it’s fair to say that without my help it would have been a complete flop!!!!!!
After our set, we learned that Blondie had just canceled due to a money matter and things were badly degenerating in the room.
Since we were performing in a movie theater, the organizers of the event instead put on a movie about a British band we’d never heard of before: the Sex Pistols.
It was great. There was clearly a punk movement starting in England as well.
So the Heartbreakers went to England to join the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and all the others. They called it the Anarchy Tour. Before they left, they were developing a really cool look: sharkskin jackets, cuff links, black-and-white shoes, real New York rock ’n’ roll chic. When they came back, on the other hand, they looked like clowns: big pink-and-green mohair sweaters and “bondage” pants with strips of fabric tying the legs together. They were completely “Sex Pistolified,” which I thought was a shame. It was a little like they were now copying the band that had been copying them. Besides, I liked the new style much less than the old one. All these punks were starting to look pretty silly with their safety pins and their swastikas, and that style was becoming way too commercialized to still be cool. Everybody had a fake razor blade hanging around their neck now, and you could already find pink spandex T-shirts covered with zippers at Macy’s. It was becoming a cliché. As soon as punk became acceptable, it wasn’t punk anymore. How could you be rebellious and different if you were wearing the same uniform as everyone else? We, on the other hand, thought it was way more punk to dare to be something else. If you were punk, you weren’t, and if you weren’t, you were. …
It was complicated!!
After a show at Max’s one night, we were asked to appear in the magazine High Times. We did a five-page spread in their fashion section, for their special punk edition, with Johnny Rotten on the cover. Although it would have given us a huge publicity boost, when we got to the photo shoot, we refused to put on the Day-Glo green crochet sweaters adorned with pink pom-poms, and the other
crap they wanted us to wear. Our defiance both annoyed and amused the magazine guys, so they finally settled for having four punk girls surrounding us, striking different poses in various punk outfits, while we stayed as we were, in our sharkskin suits, looking like classic rockers. Haha! Pink pom-poms! Please …
That was around the time when I first saw the Cramps.
They played psychobilly! Ultra primitive rockabilly played by and for the insane. They had this way-cool girl guitar player, Poison Ivy, who didn’t move an inch. Their other guitarist, Brian Gregory, was armed with a Flying V covered with black polka dots, and he spent most of his time onstage spitting lit cigarettes into the audience—his personal roadie immediately lighting another one each time.
The singer, Lux Interior, looked like Frankenstein witnessing a car accident. He stuck the whole microphone into his mouth—disturbing! They did great versions of “Domino,”,”Love Me,” and other old unknown songs from the fifties, as if they had the same record collection as Bruce’s brothers. After having played about ten such songs, the drummer, Miriam, got up in a fury, and told the band to go fuck themselves before attempting to storm off the stage. Lux blocked her way and told her to, “Play your fucking drums and shut the hell up!” She sat back down, still complaining, but started playing again. Everybody in the audience looked at each other in bemusement. The second time I saw them, the exact same scene occurred at exactly the same point in the show, and I realized it was part of their act and a complete setup. I laughed twice as hard that time!
I immediately fell in love with the Cramps and went to see them at least fifteen times over the next few years. I soon befriended them, especially Lux and Ivy, the politest, the strangest, and the most fantastic couple I’ve ever met.
Meanwhile, Nancy Spungen was growing more and more miserable because no one wanted to go out with her. She dreamed of dating a cool musician, like all her prettier friends were doing, but none of those guys gave a flying fuck about her.
She was the reject of a society made up of society’s rejects. Not least, one must admit, because of the way she talked: “Fucking bastards only fucking interested in my fucking dope.” To top if all off, by now, she was completely hooked on heroin. Nancy liked me and Babette a lot. It’s true that we were probably nicer to her than most. One night she called me in tears to say, “I called to say goodbye, Philippe. I just slashed my wrists.” She lived only a couple of blocks from us, so I ran to her place as fast as I could. Once I got there, completely out of breath, I found her with nothing more than a Band-Aid on her wrist. No blood. Nothing. I figured she must have been bullshitting me, and I asked her to show me what she had done. She refused. With that, feeling more and more sure like she was full of shit, I grabbed her arm and pulled off the Band-Aid. Holy shit! Not only there was a cut, but it looked serious, deep and wide. Ugh … horrible! I couldn’t believe she could do that to herself. I tried to talk her into calling a cab to go to the hospital with me, but she didn’t want to. Purely by luck, she had missed the artery and the bleeding had mostly stopped. I lit a joint to try to calm her down a bit, and she started to tell me why she wanted to die.
“None of those fucking bastards will go out with me,” she said, sobbing. “Nobody can stand me … fucking assholes. Not a single one of those fucking guys will go out with me.”
“None of them will go out with you ’cause you’re a junkie, Nancy,” I told her. “First, you’d have to stop taking that shit. You’re a great girl, and you could very easily find yourself a boyfriend if you weren’t a druggie. It is kind of repulsive, you know—especially for a girl. You need love, not heroin.”
“I need heroin! I can’t stop. Fucking shit, fucking motherfucking shit,” she howled.
“You should leave New York for awhile. It’s too easy and too tempting for you to get it here.”
“Where would I go?”
“Anywhere, as long as it’s far from your dealer. Go to France. Do you know Paris? It’s beautiful.”
“What the fuck am I gonna do in Paris? I don’t even fucking speak French.”
“How about England? They speak English in England. You should go to London. That’s a cool place, London.”
She calmed down a little and started thinking about it. After all, the Heartbreakers had just left for London, and she had a major crush on Jerry.
She could go over there, get rid of her terrible addiction, and become his girlfriend, in England. That was it, she had a plan.
I apologize to the Sex Pistols for having convinced Nancy Spungen to go to London. Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea, after all.
So Nancy left her little basement apartment on 23rd Street and flew off to England. She called me before leaving to ask if I could take care of her records and her cat—a huge black cat she didn’t know what to do with. Unfortunately, the cat was a junkie too! He was completely hooked on heroin—I’m not joking. Nancy told me she had left her dirty spoons in the sink too often, and the poor creature must have been attracted by the smell, or the taste, or something. It would go lick the spoons as soon as she was done with them. If heroin can hook a person so easily, it must have not taken much for a cat, and before long, he was desperately looking for dirty spoons everywhere.
We already had a cat, a very cute little black-and-white kitten named Poof. When Nancy dropped hers off, he didn’t look too happy. He needed a fix, quickly, and was in no mood to play with Poof. That first night, he hid somewhere, but the next morning I was awoken by cat screams. I ran into the kitchen. Nancy’s cat was holding a bleeding Poof by the throat and was about to finish him off. I grabbed the junkie cat by the back of his neck to restrain him—bad idea! He whirled around as if he was packed with dynamite, like the monster in Alien, and immediately plunged all his teeth and claws into my arm with incredible force. I almost passed out but instead started screaming. There were sixteen claws and I don’t know how many teeth impaled deep into my forearm; he was gripping me extremely tight.
Unbelievable. I would never have imagined a cat could attack a person with so much violence, but a junkie cat … that’s different.
He had been all right at Nancy’s, but now he was going through withdrawal and was completely flipping out. I tried to pry him off my arm, but it was impossible—his hold was so strong, my arm would have been completely ripped to shreds. But I had to do something. The only thing I could think of was to knock him out—which I accomplished by hitting his head against the wall. I had to do it five or six times before it finally worked. He fell to the floor and I ran to the hospital. He got me pretty good, and thirty years later I still have the scars. It took a long time, and it was a sad sight to witness, but Nancy Spungen’s cat finally managed to kick the habit. He grew into a good old cat, nice and all. Even his fur seemed to change and became full and shiny. As for me, I was all right. I needed a few stitches but I survived. Poof, too. We couldn’t hold a grudge against him for too long, and in the end everyone got along fine.
Well, almost everyone. Babette and I were unfortunately getting along less and less and were using drugs more and more.
We were at Max’s one spring night when, much too stoned, Babette suddenly got real nauseated and decided to step outside for some fresh air. There were always some disco lamos who came by Max’s to check out that new thing they’d been hearing about: punk rock. One of them was just entering the club, wearing a white suit with his shirt open and a few gold chains around his neck. He looked straight out of Saturday Night Fever. He was starting to come up the stairs when Babette, standing at the top, right above him, suddenly threw up with surprising force, showering him with puke from head to toe. Uuurrgh! He stood there, completely shocked. It was running down his hair—he was covered in it.
“Oops, sorry!” Babette said with a little embarrassed smile. He was so shocked that he couldn’t even answer. He slowly turned around without saying a word, walked back down the stairs, and went home. That was enough for him. At lea
st, if he’d wanted to see punk rock, he got it!
That same evening, still at Max’s, I met Phyllis, a very cute little brunette, and we chatted for some time. A few days later, I ran into her on the street, and she invited me to come up to her place. We started making out, but as I was still dating Babette, I was worried about getting caught. … I’d never done that before. So I decided to call home to see if Babette was there waiting for me, but when she didn’t pick up, I concluded there was no rush and jumped into Phyllis’s bed. After fucking for an hour or so, we got to talking and I told her how sick I was of Babette. Noticing the time, I decided to call home again to see if she’d come back or if we could hang out a bit more. I tried to dial the number but wasn’t getting a dial tone. Suddenly, I had the troubling feeling that there was someone on the other end of the line.
“Are you having fun, Philippe?” asked a very familiar voice. It was Babette!!! Apparently I hadn’t hung up the phone properly and it must have kept ringing. When Babette got home—probably only a couple minutes after I called—she picked up. She had been listening all this time … as if I had put a microphone next to the bed. Fuck!
At least, there was no reason for me to be nervous about getting caught anymore.
I went home to get my stuff.
Steve offered to put me up on 10th Street until I found somewhere else.
Steve’s loft was great, but unfortunately, it was located between Avenues C and D, deep in the heart of Alphabet City. It was definitely a dangerous place to get to. You had to go through the jungle that started at Avenue A—dope house territory, no man’s land. Between B and C, it got real cutthroat, and it was a terrifying place to venture into. Beyond Avenue D, forget about it—nobody ever came back from there alive! Once there, between 10th and 16th Streets, the scenery suddenly changed, becoming something of a huge esplanade where the New York Power Plant stood. This was the enormous complex that fed all of East Manhattan, the Lower East Side. Gigantic and majestic, it reminded me of the cover of that Pink Floyd record the name of which I forget. It was surreal … and imposing. That’s where Steve lived. Well, not in the power plant, but right across the street, separated only by an old neighborhood swimming pool, which was all fucked up but still operating. To get to Steve’s without getting a knife in your back, you were advised not to linger, to look like you knew where you were going, and to pray to God.