by (epub)
“And you?”
“Rebop. Shoes, everything, Rebop!”
“Me too,” I said, winking at them.
The Village Voice was also the paper in which all our shows were advertised. The Senders took out the paper’s very first color ad—black and magenta, of course—a quarter-page advertisement for a three-day weekend with the Contortions at CBGB.
There was also Punk magazine, a fanzine run by Legs McNeil and his pal John Holmstrom. Legs was really funny, and his magazine was pure genius.
But most of all, people read Creem, New York Rocker, and Rock Scene, a local magazine almost entirely dedicated to Max’s and CBGB. Each page was covered with little black-and-white pictures of all the bands that performed at these venues. It was all pretty corny, with ridiculously bad little stories told in photo/comic-book style: “The Ramones take the subway,” “Robert Gordon gets a haircut,” “Blondie goes to the beach,” “Cherry Vanilla goes to the supermarket,” “David Johansen does some painting.” Bob Gruen, a really great guy, took most of the photos. The Senders were in it quite a few times. I’m pretty sure the only people who bought Rock Scene were the people in it, but that was everybody!
We found an ad in there for a Long Island heavy metal band called Americazz, with a ridiculous photo of a bunch of hairy fatsos in spandex, trying to copy Kiss. Their respective names were under the picture: Keith, Davy, Alvin, JP, and Animal.
We were trying to decide which one was Animal and after a short debate, we all voted for the drummer—who was fatter and hairier than the others. The ad listed a phone number, so naturally we decided to call to verify.
Bill improvised, pretending he was a rock critic: “Yes, how are you? Bob Bijnveium, Creem magazine. I recently saw Americazz on stage and was extremely impressed. I would like to do an interview.”
“Really?!”
“Yeah, yeah, it’s a fantastic band, especially the drummer: Animal, he’s unbelievable!”
“You mean JP? Animal’s the guitar player. JP’s the drummer!”
“Are you sure?!!”
“Well, yeah. I’m Davy, the bass player!”
“Ah! I thought Animal was the drummer. Oh well, never mind then, it doesn’t matter, sorry. Have a nice evening!”
Calling Americazz became our hobby for a couple of months. We all did it one at a time, every two or three days, with a new variation on the same scenario, and it worked every time! As soon as Davy would say that Animal was not the drummer, we’d cancel everything. I claimed I was a journalist for the French music magazine Rock and Folk. Marc called himself the president of Columbia. Davy must have killed himself—or switched Animal to the drums!
One afternoon, I was walking up 2nd Avenue to meet the band for a sound check at Max’s, when I noticed a dog tied to a tree. This wasn’t too strange, but what was unusual was that someone had left him a can of dog food and a bowl of water. He was still there, tied to his tree, when Risé and I came back after the show, around five in the morning. I figured he must have been abandoned. We approached him slowly. He seemed well behaved, a small German Shepherd or something similar—a cool mutt. I got closer and reached my hand out to pet him. He stood up, all happy, wagging his tail.
“Should we take him?” I asked her, immediately seduced by his happy, smiling face. He seemed to be saying, Take me home! Come on!
“He’s cute,” said Risé, like me crouched down on our knees, petting him.
I untied his leash—an old rope—from the tree, and we started to lead him down the street. He strolled between us, staring up at our faces, looking absolutely delighted. At home, he politely sat in a corner on the kitchen floor, and we went to bed. The next morning, Risé went to the store, and I woke up to the dog licking my face.
“Oh, shit! There’s no more coffee!” I told him, as I opened the kitchen cabinet. “I’m going to get you some food, and I’ll bring back some coffee, too, okay, Doggie-dog? You stay right here. I’ll be right back. We’ll have breakfast together and then we’ll go for walk. I’m going to buy you a brand new leash and dog shampoo, and tonight I’m going to give you a beauty bath. Cool, right? So don’t move, all right? See you in a sec.”
When I came back, only five minutes later, pot was scattered all over the floor. I ran to my desk, only to discover that the plastic bag in which I had left it was missing. I found it shredded to pieces on the other side of the room. There was nothing left in it. “Fuck!” I yelled, trying to gather all I could find while down on all fours. There wasn’t much left. He must have eaten at least half of it, and I’d had enough for about twenty joints in there!
I told myself I shouldn’t have left him alone in the apartment; it was my fault, and I would just have to train him. I found him in the kitchen, looking guilty. I had read somewhere that you can train a dog with a rolled-up magazine, so I grabbed an issue of Rock Scene from the kitchen table, rolled it up, and went over to him with an unhappy expression on my face. “Bad boy!” I said loudly. “Not good! You must not eat my pot—bad boy!”
Cornered against the wall, the dog got scared and he started to growl. Shit! It looked like I had a real problem now! He looked pissed—ready to bite me. I guessed that he was pretty stoned and the pot was making him paranoid. Or perhaps his previous owner had beaten him. I had no idea; I didn’t know that damn dog at all! So I tried to defuse the situation, saying in a soft voice, “It’s okay—good doggy dog. It doesn’t matter.”
GGGGGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!
Fuck! Now he looked more and more like a fucking werewolf, with these diabolical red eyes and drool everywhere and teeth that were suddenly huge. Sure, I had some experience with junkie cats but none with poteating dogs. I had no idea what to do. Going really slow, I took two or three steps back and grabbed a broom. I put it between us to keep him off me. Using the broom, I guided him to the front door, as he continued growling more and more aggressively. Opening the door, I led him through the corridor to the elevator, then nudged him in it with the broom. I quickly pressed the ground-floor button as the door was closing, then ran down the stairs as fast as I could to show him the way out.
He took off running like a bat out of hell and disappeared down the street.
“Go, crazy dog, go! Good luck.” At least he could have taken the food I’d just bought for him—in a doggy bag!
We had a show in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The crowd was especially rowdy that night, and the whole front of the stage, which was pretty high up, ended up collapsing under us, taking all of our equipment with it. We kept playing like that, on a slant, with our amps and cymbals on the floor, which almost caused a riot. We played every song we knew until the entire stage finally fell down.
After the show, we thought the owner was going to throw us out for breaking everything, but surprisingly, he was so knocked out by our performance that he immediately hired us back, promising us a sturdier stage.
That night, as we left the little town of Bethlehem at around five in the morning—wasted, of course—we were stopped at a red light when I noticed this white porcelain cat hanging on the wall of a pretty little house on the corner. Thinking it would make a nice present for Risé, I decided to go get it, asking the other guys to stay quiet and wait for me. I jumped the little picket fence, then tiptoed to the house and grabbed the cat, but it wouldn’t come off. It must have been hooked on real good, and I was pulling on it as hard as I could, when suddenly Bruce started honking as all the other guys opened their windows and began shouting, “Hey, mister! He’s stealing your cat!” “Hey, wake up in there, goddamn it!” and other stuff like that.
Another disaster was imminent, but I refused to give up and kept pulling on the porcelain cat until it finally came away … with a whole chunk of the wall! I sprinted back to the car with the guys still howling and honking, and just as I reached them, they took off, leaving me with nothing else to do but run after them, clutching a porcelain cat and a chunk of wall, hoping no
one was going to open fire.
Johnny invited me and Risé to Thanksgiving at his mother’s place.
He and Jerry picked us up, and we all left for Queens. Mama Thunders’s house was typical of New York’s Italian suburbs: thick carpeting, clear plastic covers on velvet sofas lined with little pom-poms all around. You could easily imagine Al Pacino coming out of the bathroom at any moment. I discreetly took a little peek at her bedroom and admired the ultra-kitsch ornate Roma furniture. My favorite part was the gold frame above the bed, which held a picture of Johnny onstage circa ’73 or ’74, with his skin-tight Frederick’s of Hollywood Toreador stretch pants, tons of makeup and hair teased two feet high. Hahaha!
We ate in a basement that looked like it had once been a kids’ playroom. At the bottom of the stairs, you were greeted by a painting of Johnny when he was about twelve or thirteen, dressed as an altar boy and reading the Bible. The album cover, I told myself! We all sat around a big table, with Johnny’s statuesque sister, Marianne, and her tattooed husband, Rusty, as well as his mom and an uncle. There was so much food: a huge turkey, tons of stuffing, mountains of mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce forever! So delicious. His mom and sister were especially nice. They went to every possible effort to make me and Risé comfortable. Everybody was chatting and the atmosphere was jovial. I was sitting next to Jerry, who kept nodding off. I figured maybe he had taken a bit too much dope before coming; he looked like he could use a nap! More than once, I had to discreetly pull him back up from falling headfirst into his mashed potatoes. He would look at me and say. “Eh?” before eating a little more and starting to nod off again. Everyone was looking at him. Oh no! After we finished eating, he fell asleep right away in an armchair in the living room. Johnny found an acoustic guitar somewhere and started playing a new song he was very proud of: “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” It was a gorgeous slow song, with a hypnotic melody and the lyrics were absolutely perfect. It blew me away.
I asked him, “Where did you get that phrase, ‘You can’t put your arms around a memory’? I’ve never heard that before—it’s great!”
“I got that from The Honeymooners,” he laughed. He was talking about the fifties comedy series with Jackie Gleason and Art Carney. I actually saw that episode a few months later. In it, Ralph tells his wife Alice, “If you don’t give me the money I’m going to walk out this door, and once I’ve walked out this door it’s for good. I will never set foot in this house again. You’re gonna be awful lonely all by yourself, Alice. And remember: You can’t put your arms around a memory.”
To which she snaps right back to her fat husband: “I can’t even put my arms around you, anyway!”
They still show reruns of The Honeymooners every now and then, and I saw that episode again last month. Although I’d seen it at least thirty times already, I still got goosebumps.
Risé, 1978
Steve, Phil, and Bill, 1979
RETURN TO SENDER
New York, October 1978
WE BECAME WELL ENOUGH KNOWN TO have a drink named after us at Max’s. The ultimate honor! You could go to the bar and order a Heartbreaker, a Blondie, and now a Sender—which was vodka and I forget what else. If you wanted to die, you could always order a Suicide—an effective mixture of gin, whiskey, vodka, cognac, and anything else the bartender had on hand.
Once or twice a month, Max’s would organize a jam night, where all the bands would get together onstage and play covers by a specific artist. Each jam night had a chosen theme. That night, it must have been the Rolling Stones or maybe Chuck Berry, and I went onstage to sing “Little Queenie” with Walter Lure and Lenny Kaye, after which Johnny joined them to sing “Too Much Junkie Business.” With Jerry now on drums, the Heartbreakers were almost all onstage when James Chance, the Contortions’ great little singer—and not one of Johnny’s favorite people—climbed up. As always, he was perfectly dressed in his jazzy style, with an immaculate white shirt and thin black tie. He walked shyly up to the microphone and asked, “Do you wanna play ‘Route 66’?”
Johnny was badly fucked up and replied, “That’s right, go fuck yourself! No girls onstage, please! Come on, get off the stage, faggot!”
James looked bewildered and just stood there, not really knowing what to do. Johnny added, “Next! Yo, you can go home and suck your mother’s dick!” Everybody in the audience laughed. No one was thinking this typical punk confrontation would go any further than that, when suddenly this guy no one knew—a real sleazy junkie in tennis shorts, with white socks pulled up to his knees—climbed onstage and jumped on James Chance, shouting, “You deaf or what? Move!” This guy punched James right in the face, a few times in a row. James Chance fell to the floor and that guy got off the stage to a hail of boos and whistles and was instantly thrown out by Max’s bouncers.
James Chance slowly got back up, his face completely covered in blood, and he screamed into the microphone, “Do you wanna hear me sing fucking ‘Route 66’ or what?!” He was shaking like a leaf, blood pissing all over his white shirt. He started the first verse and the Heartbreakers continued to snub him, refusing to play a note. But they stayed onstage anyway, confused, letting him sing all of “Route 66” a cappella, to total silence. It was incredible. “Route 66” is a really long song, with I don’t know how many verses, and he was bleeding profusely: from his forehead, his nose, his mouth. But he just kept going, without moving at all, until the very last note, when the room exploded. It was spectacular. I’d never witnessed such an ovation for anyone else at Max’s, but he deserved it. What he did was downright extraordinary—a pure rock ’n’ roll moment. The Heartbreakers didn’t know where to throw themselves.
We put out our first record in the fall of ’78. This was a 45 that we financed ourselves with the money we were starting to make. “The Living End” backed with “No More Foolin’ Me”—two original numbers we’d recorded a few months earlier. We had a thousand pressed, which we sold quickly by mail—two dollars a record—with a little ad in Trouser Press, a national publication. We got orders from practically every state in America—except New York. We concluded that we were more loved in places we hadn’t played yet!
One night, after a rehearsal in Steve’s loft, we were hanging around the kitchen when someone—I can’t recall who—called us on the phone.
“Quick, put the TV on!” they yelled. “Nancy is dead. They’re talking about it.”
We all ran to the TV and stared, open-mouthed, as the news anchors announced, “Punk-rock star arrested for the murder of his girlfriend.” We saw the cops leading Sid Vicious out of the Chelsea Hotel—he was in a black suit and handcuffed behind his back. Then two paramedics dragged a body bag on a gurney. What had happened? She’d been stabbed?! Found dead in the bathroom, they were saying, rolled up in a ball beneath the sink, a knife in her stomach, Sid in bed sleeping. Each channel contradicted the other. Sid had confessed it all. … Sid swore he was innocent. …
We’ll never know who killed Nancy, in the end. Maybe Sid did it. Maybe she did it herself. Sid could be violent, it’s true. The last time I saw Nancy, she had a big red mark over half her face, and she told me Sid had thrown his burning-hot coffee at her. But she was capable of cutting herself, too, as I had witnessed before she went to England.
Of course, it could have been someone else altogether. But who? And why? And if it was Sid, what could have motivated him to do it? Nancy, on the other hand, could’ve easily had reasons to kill herself. Maybe things weren’t going well between them. It seemed to me that if she thought she was going to lose Sid, she would never willingly go back to the way her life had been before. She would never let those other bitches—who had spat in her face for so long and who were now green with envy—have the pleasure of enjoying their “revenge.” I knew she would rather die than let that happen.
No matter what actually happened, it was sad. Nancy was nice. I don’t know … everybody put her down, but I thought she was nice
. She was a little like the punk Cinderella, the one who never got invited to the ball, but who ended up with the prince. Would she have ever imagined that she would become such a legend of punk rock, with books still written about her thirty years later, her own biopic, and her name known the world over?
Nancy’s mother wrote a book in which she claims her daughter gave away her cat and trusted me and Babette with her “treasured” record collection, but that she could never reclaim them because we “disappeared” shortly before she returned to New York.
I found that funny, because we never went anywhere, and with upcoming Senders gigs a constant feature in the Village Voice, it wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to find me! But what I found most ironic was that I actually tried several times to give Nancy her records back, but she wouldn’t even hear me out
“Hey, Nancy, want your records?”
“Shut up!” she’d give me a dirty look.
I would tease her about them, because they were mostly Rod Stewart albums and stuff like that and, of course, she didn’t want Sid to see her with those. Haha! I remember a Cream album and Cat Stevens.
Those records ended up scattered here and there over the years. Babette may still have a few. I only have a copy of Traffic’s The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys with a very girlish “Nancy Spungen” written on the back cover in light blue marker. There’s also blood splattered on it, probably from when she shot up.
I don’t know how I ended up in the subway at rush hour—probably I was headed to meet the others at a sound check at the Rocker Room uptown. But there I was, rolling toward 86th Street, crushed by a mob of New Yorkers leaving work, while I had only just woken up. When the door closed, this huge creep in a suit pressed against me, looked at me sideways, then elbowed me hard in the stomach. It hurt pretty bad. I was wondering if he’d done it on purpose, when—still staring at me with the same expression—he did it again. That time with full force. He then gave me a defiant look as if to say: You wanna do something about it? I guess he didn’t like my look. It was the only thing I could think of, because I hadn’t done anything to that idiot. I couldn’t breathe, and he was starting to scare the shit out of me. He was this big, red, sweaty, macho asshole in a suit, who probably went to the gym every day with his stupid crew cut and his big aggressive shithead face. He must have had a bad day at the office. Maybe his secretary didn’t want to blow him anymore. In the crowded subway, nobody saw anything, and even if they had, they would probably have turned away anyway. That guy was enormous and this was New York. I wanted to cry out for help but it would’ve have only pissed him off more. And besides, after they got a good look at me, the others which probably tell him to hit me harder! And then he’d invite them all to join in the fun! I could only hope that he wouldn’t have time to kill me before we reached 86th Street—which fortunately was the next stop.