Crasses et Voluptés

Wayne Kramer - MC5

I was fresh out of prison in 1979 when I met Johnny Thunders. Of course, I knew about him and his first band the New York Dolls back in '73, or maybe it was '74. Anyway, a mutual friend told me that Johnny wanted to meet me and requested that I come down to Bookies Club in Detroit where he was playing with his new band The Heartbreakers. I was back on the streets after a couple of years of forced retirement courtesy of the federal government and itching to get back into the world of music. I got to the club and got word they wanted me to join them on the encore. Cool by me. I settled in to check them out. See what had been going on while I was gone.

They were a fun band in a loosey-goosey way. All short tunes and sloppy guitars, Johnny had a great snarly attitude, and I soon realized that Jerry Nolan was the real secret weapon of the band and clearly the best all around musician of the bunch. His tempos were solid and he rocked with an authentic rock & roll feel on the drums. Their show featured a steady stream of between show bickering from Johnny and Walter Lure. They were the punk rock Lucy and Ricky playing the dozens.

They all showed a sense of style in their clothes with Johnny having the most flair and the others affecting a Lower East Side "trash and vaudeville" look. The audience reacted to them with great enthusiasm and they were having a ball. I sat in with them on their encore song. "Do You Love Me?" by the Contours. The band seemed impressed that I knew the correct notes on the mandolin-sounding guitar intro, "You broke my heart..."

After the show, I went to the dressing room to meet Johnny and the fellows and stepped into a black hole. Johnny and Jerry were in a bathroom stall shooting up. This was disconcerting to me because this was the same scene that I had lived through years earlier in the MCS. I had starred in this movie myself, and now, just out of the penitentiary for activities related to this kind of behavior, this didn't bode well. Déja vu all over again. Johnny emerged from the stall high as a kite, blood dripping from his abscessed arm and in a great mood. Mr. Charming. He invited me to join him and his drug dealer/manager to a party with "ounces of cocaine." I passed, for now.

Rock and roll, or if you prefer, punk rock, is only the surface of the story, the tip of this iceberg. The real story is deeper and, at its core, it's a story of addiction. Addiction to the myth of fame. Addiction to the myth of power. And mostly, addiction to drugs. There is no other way to talk about what happened without framing it in these terms. As much as I'd like to tell a glorious punk rock tale replete with romantic heroes and brave individuals fighting for their art, that ain't the deal here. So if you're looking for electric guitars, leather jackets and groupie sex, then forget it.

Back in the dressing room, I was reeling. With hindsight, I know now, the whole dynamic of our relationship was summarized right there. I was confronted with a version of myself in Johnny and I was invited to dive head first, straight into the deep end of Hell, and I did. Not that I made an actual choice to do that, because I had no choice. I thought I had the power to say no, but I didn't. I sat in the Federal Correctional Institution at Lexington, Kentucky, for a long time thinking about how I was going to straighten up. I was going to get my career back on track. I was gonna get my shit together. Get serious. Yeah right.

I believed I actually had the power to change Johnny Thunders. And this was the subtext for Gang War and a great deal of my own life. I really believed back then that success in the music business was more powerful than drug addiction or alcoholism. I also believed that there was something in this for me. I was going to return back to the world of music a conquering hero. Yeah, Johnny Thunders and me. Well, at least it looked good on paper. It had a nice ring to it. Both of us bringing a little cache to the table. Next stop: The Big Time.

But the reality of the situation was way different. It was such a disaster, trying to compete with the disease that plagued us both that neither one of us knew we even had. I completely disregarded everything I knew to be the truth and swallowed the lie completely. I really thought I was wiser, smarter and knew all the tricks. I was going to be the one to beat the odds.

Our misadventures were, naturally, mind-numbingly predictable and about as glamorous as sticking a needle into the ball of your eye. While Johnny lived in Detroit we would drink and take pills, cocaine, whatever was around. We played shows around the Midwest for a while then we relocated to New York City and tried to work up and down the East Coast. Of course, right away, every gig we attempted to play degenerated into a dope-fiend hustle. Living on the Lower East Side in the early '80s was like living in a heroin supermarket 24/7.

I knew the heroin boys and was trying to stay away from them. But when we both moved back to New York City, Johnny's neighborhood. it was all over. Johnny reverted into a true street rat junkie and I was right there with him. We never had a chance. Because of that, the band never had a chance either. We changed bass players and drummers all the time. Sensible cats just wouldn't put up with the shenanigans. Any thoughts of actually working on music were absurd.

After a few months he tried to pull a scam on me and I cut him loose, It ended that quickly. I would see him around town sometimes or run into him copping down on Avenue D. By the mid-80s entered the Beth Israel Methadone treatment program and began my long road to recovery. Johnny found new collaborators and continued to get sicker and sicker.

He didn't die young, nor did he leave a good-looking corpse. He died slowly, getting worse and worse as his body lost its fight against the disease, bit-by-bit, day by day. In the end, it just killed him, as it must He was resilient; he lived longer than I thought he would. He died curled up in a fetal position, under the sink in a hotel room in New Orleans. It wasn't a good death, it's not sexy or heroic. I tell the tale not because I'm smart or tough or a survivor or any of that cliched crap.

There was a time when Johnny and I were the same guy, just like all alkies and junkies are the same. I was as sick as Johnny, but I changed. Only difference was, at a certain point, I asked for help and found it. Simple as that. Not easy, but simple. I do know that Johnny brought joy into this world with his music. I know every life has value. But contributing to the mythology can be dangerous. Just take a look around at the attrition rate in this game.

In the first century B.C., the Roman Statesman Cicero remarked,  "Although physicians frequently know their patients will die of a given disease, they never tell them so. To warn of an evil is justified only if, along with the warning, there is a way of escape." If there is a crime in all this it's that it didn't have to be this way. 

Bye bye Johnny.